Putin protégé reveals his moderate side
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MOSCOW: The presumptive successor to President Vladimir Putin on Friday presented his platform for seeking Russia's highest office, giving a speech before business leaders in Siberia in which he vowed to continue Russia's economic revival but also struck markedly liberal notes.
The speech by the candidate, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, was a contrast to the confrontational and sometimes caustic public appearance of his sponsor, Putin, only a day before. Putin had sharply criticized the West, threatened to aim strategic missiles at Europe and said that Russia would develop its own, state-centered brand of democracy without instruction from outside.
Medvedev, speaking in Krasnoyarsk, a city near Russia's geographic center, spoke in softer tones, addressing Russia's middle class and small-business owners and embracing Western themes.
"Freedom is better than nonfreedom," he said in his opening remarks, according to a transcript provided by his campaign. "These words are the quintessence of human experience."
Medvedev, a young protégé of Putin, then expressed the notion more fully.
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"The talk here is about freedom in all of its manifestations: about personal freedom, about economic freedom and at last about freedom of self-expression," he said, adding, "Freedom is inseparable from the actual recognition of the power of law by citizens."
Medvedev is the all-but-unchallenged front-runner in the election and seems certain to inherit the formal reins of power from a president whose critics say has extinguished many elements of personal and political freedom, and rolled others back.
He faces three weak candidates who critics of the Kremlin say have been allowed to run by Putin only to create the appearance of a contest. A poll released Friday predicted that Medvedev, who has been endorsed by Putin and is receiving lavish official support, will win 80 percent of the vote.
His declarations - about the universal values of freedom in an election that is being stage-managed and before state journalists who are largely under the Kremlin's sway - immediately raised eyebrows in the West. But Medvedev pressed on, issuing an implicit and broad indictment of Russia's current state of civic affairs in which he moved past the economic and political successes of Putin's eight years in power and focused on the country's deep and enduring problems.
The courts, he said, are riddled with corruption. The state bureaucracy is weighted by indifference, predatory officials and bloat. And the Russia's business climate has been smothered.
"It is necessary to change radically the ideology of administrative procedures dealing with starting and holding a business," he said. An overhaul is required, he added, "to give realistic chances for the development of small businesses, which are drowning today in a swamp of official indifference and bribes."
Medvedev's picture of Russian society and its government veered from the rosier account provided by Putin at his final news conference before the country's presidential election, which is set for March 2.
Putin had said, coolly and directly, that his administration had had no major failures during his two terms. Analysts suggested that the speech should not be taken at face value.
Medvedev is Putin's personally selected successor, and Putin has said that he will serve as Medvedev's prime minister and plans to wield power and influence Russia's course for years to come.
"Medvedev in this speech and in previous speeches has been enunciating liberal themes, and that's encouraging," said Cliff Kupchan, a director at the Eurasia Group, a global risk consulting firm based in Washington and New York. "But we have to remember that this entire campaign is being run by Putin, and Putinism - broadly meaning a large state role in the economy and an assertive foreign policy - is not going to change soon, because Putin is not going to leave the scene."
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