No more beating around the bush? Far from the traditional Soviet speeches where regime leaders would mutually congratulate each other, the address by President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday, November 12, 2009 ([https://www.president.kremlin.ru/transcripts/5979](https://www.president.kremlin.ru/transcripts/5979)) unfolded on an exclusively Gorbachevian tone—the same tone as his 1997 memoirs and his recent comments in Berlin on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall—a long litany of the ailments plaguing contemporary Russia. A Russia he is “responsible for.” An intervention all the more surprising as it systematically took positions contrary to the ideas, even attitudes defended by Vladimir Putin, reputed as the true master of the Kremlin.
In a long introduction, Dmitry Medvedev distanced himself from the Soviet era, proudly embodied by the former president of the Federation. Without adopting the tone of the famous speech of the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, he soberly denounced a “closed” and “archaic” society, a “totalitarian political regime,” and “chaotic actions dictated by nostalgia.” Vladimir Putin, who still publicly talked about his nostalgia regarding the USSR, would appreciate this. Instead of the “uncompetitive” past Russia, Dmitry Medvedev proposes to build the “present” Russia by ensuring it “takes its place in the global economy.”
During the financial crisis, Vladimir Putin had promised Russians to protect them from this “infection” coming straight from the United States: in a typically Soviet reflex, and while the Moscow stock exchange had already fallen by 60%, the former KGB officer instructed the media not to mention the words “financial crisis” and “stock market crash” to reassure the population. In contrast, the young Russian president acknowledged last Thursday that the crisis had “hit his country harder than others,” contributing, it should be noted in passing, to question the concept of “BRIC countries” invented by Goldman Sachs bank in 2003. A concept quite incoherent in light of different growth forecasts for 2010 (Brazil 5%, Russia 1.5%, India 6.5%, and China 8.5%).
Among this relentless enumeration of the challenges faced by Russia, Putin’s successor at the Kremlin cited these “mono-industry cities,” of which the great number, “several hundred” according to him, pose the risk of social unrest sometimes on the federation’s peripheral borders. Dmitry Medvedev also advanced several priorities. First, the “medical sector,” where Moscow recognizes deficiencies as one of the main causes of male overmortality: the life expectancy of Russian men is 61.3 years against 75 in developed countries while sustained negative demographics—the Russian statistical institute predicts a population loss of 11 million souls between 2008 and 2025—heavily burden the country’s economic potential. Secondly, he pointed out the “deficiencies in energy exploitation conditions”: gas leaks in Siberia due to aging infrastructure are estimated at 10% of the total Russian production, equivalent to France’s annual consumption. Lastly, he lamented that in terms of “space and telecommunications technology,” Russia is now ranked 63rd worldwide for the level of its infrastructure development. While during his two presidential terms and then as Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, capitalizing on the crisis’s impact on some oligarchs’ wealth, endeavored to strengthen state control over entire sectors of Russian industry, Medvedev curiously developed a liberal conception: emphasizing “personal success and encouraging initiative,” he rejected the long-term “idea of overly high state participation in industrial companies,” a “trend indeed observed worldwide” during the crisis but which, he added, “has no future.” However, he did not specify if this would apply to the archetype of such nationalized management, the giant “Gazprom,” which controls 95% of natural gas production and holds monopoly over infrastructure in the country.
Advocating for better “political representativeness,” both at the regional level and within the Duma—a nod to Putin who imposed restrictions on competing parties to his “United Russia” party—Dmitry Medvedev also intends to use 2010—deemed the “Year of the Teacher”—to renovate the education system aimed, among other things, at forming “individualities”: how then to interpret the setup of a new “teacher’s manual” promoted by two Kremlin affiliates to “educate patriotic citizens” and which presents Stalinist terror as a “rational tool for solving economic tasks”? As for foreign policy mentioned at the end of his address, Dmitry Medvedev wants it now to be “pragmatic,” rid of ideologies, and “judged by a single criterion”: “improving the country’s standard of living.”
Reactions, caught between incredulity and criticism, converge on one point: Dmitry Medvedev’s speech is strikingly realistic, but they remain just empty words. Former minister of Yeltsin and founder of a Democratic Party, Boris Nemtsov, acknowledges on his blog ([https://b-nemtsov.livejournal.com/53782.html](https://b-nemtsov.livejournal.com/53782.html)) the “quality of the diagnosis” made by the Russian president. But he believes that “modernization should start with changes to the political system and dismantling Putin’s vertical of corruption.” On “Echos of Moscow” radio, renowned political analyst Leonid Radzirovsky ironically compared the young president’s performance to that of a “good swimmer who repeats excellent swimming movements on the beach without ever entering the water!” A “division of tasks between the good and bad cop like Hollywood movies,” adds a Saint Petersburg city hall official. Only Mikhail Vinogradov and Vladimir Roudakov, two journalists from “Profil” magazine deemed close to the Kremlin, dare suggest the idea of future nominative changes in the Presidential Administration (Courrier International).
Awaiting a “patricide” that for now remains very hypothetical, it is hard not to notice the risks of a speech not followed by actions that could jeopardize the positive image the current Kremlin tenant enjoys abroad. An ambivalence that Russia harbors regarding its desire for European belonging and its tendency to adopt Western democratic norms, as testified by the interesting work of the President of the Academy of Sciences, Alexandre Tchubarov (“Russia and the European Idea,” Syrtes Editions, 2009).
If no actions back up the presidential words, Russia’s ambitions will again be relegated to the realm of propaganda and manipulation. At the risk of proving filmmaker Pavel Lungin right in his interview in “Novoye Vremya”: “Russia lives in the myth that tyrannical leaders are a necessity for the country.”
