He was First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011, during which time he was often viewed as the main ideologist of the Kremlin who proposed and implemented the concept of sovereign democracy in Russia.

[2][3] After his resignation, Surkov returned to the Presidential Executive Office and became a personal adviser of Vladimir Putin on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine.

[24] In an interview published in June 2005 in the German magazine Der Spiegel, Surkov stated that his father was ethnic Chechen and that he spent the first five years of his life in Chechnya,[25] in Duba-yurt and Grozny.

[28] However, former defence minister Sergei Ivanov stated in a 2006 TV interview that Surkov served in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) during the same time period.

[30][31] At Alfa-Bank, he worked closely with Oleg Markovich Govorun (Russian: Олег Маркович Говорун; born 15 January 1969 Bratsk, USSR).

[32][33] In September 2004, Surkov was elected president of the board of directors of the oil products transportation company Transnefteproduct, but was instructed by Russia's prime minister Mikhail Fradkov to give up the position in February 2006.

In August 2000, he confirmed that Gazprom would buy Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-Most, which at the time owned the only independent, nationwide Russian television channel, NTV.

[36] In September 2002, he stated on behalf of the Kremlin that they had decided not to return the statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky that had been torn down during the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

[43] On 8 February 2007, Moscow State University marked the 125th anniversary of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth with a high-level conference "Lessons of the New Deal for Modern Russia and the World" attended, among others, by Surkov and Gleb Pavlovsky.

[7] On 28 December 2011, Medvedev reassigned Surkov to the role of Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation" in a move interpreted by many to be fallout from the controversial Russian parliamentary elections of 2011.

[57][58] On 20 September 2013, Putin appointed Surkov as his Aide in the Presidential Executive Office,[17] focused on Russian aggrandizement in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine.

[60] It came out in March 2014 that during Putin's first two terms as president, Surkov was regarded as the Kremlin's "Éminence grise" (or "Grey Cardinal"[61]) due to crafting Russia's system of "sovereign democracy" and directing its propaganda principally through control of state run television.

[62] On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Surkov became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by President Barack Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States.

[59] Despite being barred from entering the EU, Surkov visited Greece's Mount Athos as a part of Putin's delegation to the holy site in May 2016.

[80] Jon Roozenbeek's doctoral work is based on the failure of Russian propaganda to implant a "Novorossiyan" identity in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

[83] It also included a 22-page outline of "a plan to support nationalist and separatist politicians and to encourage early parliamentary elections in Ukraine, all with the aim of undermining the government in Kiev.

[5] On 26 February 2020, he gave an interview to Aktualnyie kommentarii where he stated that he actually resigned from the post on his own initiative and the reasons were correctly disclosed by Russian journalists Vladimir Solovyev[91] and Alexei Venediktov.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Ros-Lehtinen explained that she objected to Surkov's attendance as she views him as "one of the main propagators of limiting freedom of speech in Russia, intimidating Russian journalists and representatives of opposition political parties".

[97] A 2007 Open Source Center "Media Aid" document identifies the Russian ura.ru information website as reportedly having links to Surkov.

[98] Inside Russia, Surkov has drawn criticism from activists and opposition groups: In September 2010, Lyudmila Alexeyeva appealed to then-president Dmitry Medvedev to dismiss him.

[100] In May 2013 after his dismissal as Deputy Prime Minister, Surkov was characterized by The Economist as the engineer of "a system of make-believe", "a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements".

He then bribes a newspaper reporter to "correct" stories that portray the governor negatively, such as allegations that a factory of a relative of his is releasing chemicals into the air that harm local children.

[108] Other works authored under the name Natan Dubovitsky, all published in Russian Pioneer, that are rumored to be the work of Surkov are: Some outside Russia, such as Ned Resnikoff of ThinkProgress,[111] and Adam Curtis in the BBC documentary HyperNormalisation,[11] have claimed that Surkov's unique blend of politics and theatre have begun to affect countries outside of Russia,[112] most notably the United States with the selection of Donald Trump for the 2016 US Republican nomination and Trump's subsequent campaign and election victory.

In an editorial for the London Review of Books quoted by Curtis, Peter Pomerantsev describes Putin's Russia thus: In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.

Everyone takes advantage of such people all over the world.Surkov is depicted as the main character Vadim Baranov in the 2022 French novel The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli.

His first marriage, to Yulia Petrovna Vishnevskaya (Russian: Юлия Петровна Вишневская, née Lukoyanova, Лукоянова) in 1987, ended in divorce in 1996.

[120] In his second marriage, Surkov married Natalya Dubovitskaya (Russian: Наталия Дубовицкая), his secretary when he was an executive at the Menatep bank, in a civil ceremony in 2004.