This is the main problem, in the eyes of Western observers, when they look at Russia. Especially since Dmitriy Medvedev has formed a liberal image which is based on the fact that he is not an emigrant from the KGB, as are a large number of the members of Putin's team, including Sergey Ivanov and Vladimir Yakunin, who were earlier considered as candidates for president. Moreover, Medvedev repeatedly came forth with liberal speeches even before -- in 2007 in Davos, and -- now as a candidate for president -- at the Civil Forum in Moscow, and the Economic Forum in Krasnoyarsk, where he focused attention on liberal values, freedom and democracy. These hopes for a liberal turning are quite natural.
Many Western politicians would like Russia to develop institutions of the Western type and become more one of "their own" and more comprehensible. Other people would like Russia to "go back" to the 1990's and become less consolidated and more dependent. Still others would like to drive a wedge between Vladimir Putin and Dmitriy Medvedev, and stop Putin's strengthening of Russia. How justified are these expectations? Yes, Dmitriy Medvedev will develop Russia's political system in the direction of liberal democracy. But this intention of Medvedev's fully coincides with Putin's intention. In general, Medvedev and Putin are part of a team which has been working together for 10 years, and Putin and Medvedev personally -- for more than 10 years.
There is no separate Putin team and Medvedev team -- this common team can be called the Putin-Medvedev team, within the framework of which Medvedev will occupy the higher state position, and Putin will remain the national leader and will symbolize this course. Russia would like to form institutions of the type of those created in the EU, including political competition, and the active role of the party and the mass information media. But the Putin-Medvedev team will do this gradually, without putting political stability in question.
Through our own experience in the 1990's, we have become convinced that a sprint to freedom and democracy is impossible without stable economic growth, and the 1990's can therefore be described, not as a democracy, but as chaos and anarchy, a "cold civil social war," which had, in the estimation of economists, up to 12 million people as victims. Medvedev, of course, does not want to repeat this catastrophic experiment.
Yes, for Dmitriy Medvedev, the integration of Russia into the global economic and political system is important. But Putin never concealed the fact that this was his goal. Putin's and Medvedev's team have the goal, not of integration at any price, but the sort of integration in which Russia would retain its sovereignty, and retain control over its own political system, over its own natural resources and other sources of development. Those who dream that Medvedev will depart from Putin's course toward strengthening sovereignty can therefore relax, and abandon their "foolish dreams."
Yes, Medvedev is paying a great deal of attention to the values of freedom in Russia, but Putin too never put them in question, and never abandoned them. Moreover, his team, including Medvedev, thinks that during the time of Putin's rule, freedom increased, not decreased. Freedom consists, not of the right to choose between two "strange" puppets, not of the right to choose between two robbers, but the right to determine one's own fate. Under Putin, Russia has become freer as a country -- in the last eight years, millions of citizens have breathed a bit of economic freedom.
Yes, as before, millions of people are enslaved by indigence, and that is precisely why the most important direction of Medvedev's policy will be increasing freedom and strengthening the right-wing state. In this sense, Medvedev will continue Putin's policy of economic growth -- elimination of poverty as a policy of fighting for the social and economic freedom of the
individual. Yes, Medvedev firmly expressed a will to strengthen the right-wing state, but Vladimir Putin has been talking about the same thing all these years. The unresolved state of the problems of corruption and administrative reform, just as the reform of the bureaucracy, remain, as before, important for both the policy of the politician-legal expert Putin, and for the politician-legal expert Medvedev. They will resolve it together.
Yes, Dmitriy Medvedev, in answering the question about sovereign democracy, answered that democracy does not need any adjectives, but Vladimir Putin also noted that the concept of sovereign democracy is one of the concepts widely
discussed in modern Russian society, in the intellectual and political elite. At the same time, both Putin and Medvedev did not make questionable the key ideas of sovereign democracy: in Russia there should be both democracy and sovereignty; democracy should be based on the special features of Russian political culture and its historical experience, but not contradict them and not break them. It is not unjust foreign politicians, who often mix up democracy with loyalty to Washington, but the Russians, our Russian people, on behalf of whom the democracy is being built, who will come forth for us as arbiters of the democratization of the Russian political system. It is not cries from Washington and Brussels that are important for us, but the opinion of our Russian people. It is therefore not the recognition of Kosovo's independence, and not the freedom of oligarchic control over the political system and the mass information media that are more important for the development of democracy, but the creation of the foundation of democracy: a developed economy, political stability, and a strong civil society.
We need democracy, not in order to report back to the OSCE and PACE, but in order to protect human rights, develop competition, and have bureaucracy under control. Medvedev is continuing Putin's policy for the development of democracy through creating a sound basis for it.
Dmitriy Medvedev will preserve the main feature of Vladimir Putin's ideology -- a combination of liberalism and patriotism, and will also preserve the main goal -- the building of an efficient democracy and sovereignty. If the nucleus of Putin's policy is preserved, there will be changes, but these changes will take place not because Medvedev will be the president instead of Putin, but because Russia is making the transition to a different stage of development. At the new stage, the main goal will be not stability, but development. Just as the strengthening of the state was important in the preceding stage, an increase in its efficiency and controllability will now be important to the same extent. Moreover, at the preceding stage, it was important to establish national control over natural resources -- just as over the main sources of budget financing. At the new stage, however, the need will arise to create a new source for financing the budget -- high-tech production, and medium-sized and small-scale business, and this requires not greater, but less state control. The team of Putin and Medvedev will fulfill this political mission, and in this case, it is for the people of Russia to decide which one of them will be the national leader.
