Putin said last Thursday, speaking to the great and good of the Valdai conference, that there was no competition between him and Medvedev, in response to a question about whether he would run for President in 2012. It's probably worth seeing the whole account of the statement, given about halfway down the page in a RussiaToday interview here. I couldn't find any mention of it on Putin's own website's account of the meeting. The basic gist is that, in deciding whether or not he would run for President in 2012, Putin would sit down with Medvedev and discuss the situation in the country and in the United Russia Party, and he and Medvedev would agree which of them would stand for the Presidency.
This has been intepreted as a sign of Russia's political stagnation and lack of political pluralism - the two leaders agreeing on who runs for President, giving the population little choice in the matter. It's reminiscent of ancient Rome, when the leading families would agree amongst themselves who would be consul that year. But to my mind this is a sign of some real fracturing in the leadership, and signs of a rift between Medvedev and Putin. My interpretation of Putin's statements is that they are an answer to Medvedev's programmatic interview, available here on his website. Interestingly, it's described as a speech rather than an article.
It's not a great document, and is in my opinion less impressive than Putin's own efforts early in his presidency. But it does seem to be an attempt to establish some individual ideas and directions for Russia. For instance, it's more critical of the Soviet legacy than Putin has been recently (although it still preserves the narrative that the nineties were a time of chaos). By implying new energy to some fairly well established goals (like lower reliance on raw materials exports) there is an implied criticism of the previous administration, although he can't do this too much, as he was part of that administration, and also because it's too soon to break decisively with Putin. Again, this has been criticised as a rather empty document, and a wishy-washy one, but the key is not the content but that it exists at all. We can now start to talk about a Medvedev plan, in opposition to the Putin plan.
As Vladimir Ryzhkov points out in the Moscow Times, there is not much different between the problems and solutions identified by Putin, and those put forward by Medvedev. And he (and many other commentators) are probably right to suggest that there is little chance of success. But for me, the main thing is that it's being put forward as an alternative to Putin, and is being widely discussed in the press as such. For instance, there was a whole televised debate on NTV (the Gazprom-owned, no. 3 state channel) last night, devoted entirely to Medvedev's article, which to my mind suggests that the instructions have gone out from the Presidential Administration that this was a programmatic article that needs to be widely disseminated. In the old days this was done via the Communist Party, but the Russian mass media is just about as effective.
Speaking of the mass media, the other thing that I wanted to point out is that political satire is making a return to TV. Putin pretty much banned this - like all totalitarians, he realised that his lack of legitimacy made him vulnerable to humour, and he was probably very unhappy with his tiny doll on Kukly. For the last seven years ago, it's been amazing how toothless political humour was in Russia. They can be very sharp and incisive when commenting on Western politicians, of course, but Russians are off limits. Or they were. This last weekend, some prime time, very popular shows have attacked over-privileged Duma deputies (ProektorPerezHilton), Gennady Onishchenko (chief sanitary doctor), and corrupt local officials (KVN).
The attack on Onishchenko was interesting because his main activities have been the banning of Georgian wine, Belarussian milk, and Latvian sprats. Everyone knows that these bannings were mainly political, and more associated with Putin, and the program made it all look ridiculous, with Russia's chief sanitary doctor singing a parody of a song by Dima Bilan, a teen heartthrob. I would be spitting mad if I were him - senior Russians really don't have a sense of humour about this sort of thing. The commentary about over-privileged deputies was fairly old hat, but the commentary about corrupt local officials was interesting, because it was done at a special concert where Medvedev was present, and he was shown laughing loud at this particular joke.
Now, maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but in the Soviet Union, this would have all been very significant. These sorts of jokes are unimportant in the West, but they are very important in the Soviet context. I've never forgotten the press conference given by the Emergency Committee in 1991, where state TV showed the journalists laughing at the Committee's attempts to defend their actions. Kundera never forgot the importance of laughter as a weapon against totalitarianism, and neither should we.
Do I think that this marks the start of the Moscow Spring? Not really - Medvedev doesn't really seem to be a liberal, since he thinks that he can create a modern economy via the state, instead of by destroying the state. In that, he follows a long line of Gorbachev-style reformers. But, like Gorbachev, he might open the way for a more interesting reformer, so perhaps we should start looking for the person who will be Yeltsin to Medvedev's Gorbachev.
0 comments:
Post a Comment