Putin created the Prime Minister position after he couldnt serve as president any longer.
“Due to constitutionally mandated term limits, Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive Presidential term. After the victory of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in the 2008 presidential elections, he was then nominated by the latter to be Russia’s Prime Minister; Putin took the post on 8 May 2008.
In his last days in office he was reported to have taken a series of steps to re-align the regional bureaucracy to make the governors report to the prime minister rather than the president.[141][142] The presidential site explained that “the changes… bear a refining nature and do not affect the essential positions of the system. The key role in estimating the effectiveness of activity of regional authority still belongs to President of the Russian Federation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
The mullahs run Iran ; Imanutjob is just a figurehead.