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Putin Speech Signals Beginning of the End

Created: 26.04.2005 19:01 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 19:01 MSK > document.write(get_ago(1114527668)); </SCRIPT>

MosNews

As President <NOBR>Vladimir Putin</NOBR> was finishing his curt state of the nation address before parliament on Monday, besides the loud applause from deputies over what appeared to be a reaffirmed course towards democracy and pro-business reforms, observers picked up on a signal of uncertainly, heralding an end of the Putin regime as it has been styled to this day.

In his sixth speech since becoming president in 2000, Putin did something which he failed to do last year: specifically address the concerns of the West and of Russian experts both from the right and the left that Russia was increasingly spiraling away from a democratic course and towards capitalist authoritarianism.

“In the former addresses there were no clear answers as to how the country’s political system was to develop,” presidential aide Igor Shuvalov told the liberal Nezavisimaya Gazeta following the speech. He called Putin’s suggestion to appoint governors from the party that wins in regional parliamentary elections as “a real answer to those arguments… when it was announced that procedures for the formation of regional executive power would be changed.”

Putin also lashed out at a corrupt bureaucratic “caste” and even pledged to rein in tax authorities and keep them from “terrorizing” business — a statement that economic advisor Andrei Illarionov interpreted as a signal of leniency towards the embattled oil major <NOBR>Yukos</NOBR> and its jailed founder, <NOBR>Mikhail Khodorkovsky</NOBR>, since Khodorkovsky has been the main target of such “terrorism”.

But several observers saw this concession as a sign of weakness and indecisiveness on the part of the president, and not as evidence that Putin’s aims towards democratic reforms would actually be carried out.

“…Putin, in his sixth presidential address, knowingly or unknowingly, announced the beginning of the end of his political epoch,” wrote Stanislav Belkovsky, a political strategist who had predicted the onslaught on Yukos shareholders. What are seen as concessions to Yukos and other businesses he called “a new pact with the elite of the 1990’s: you don’t shake the throne under me, while I… provide for the legalization of your capital… and guarantee illusory freedom of speech.”

“In other words,” Belkovsky wrote in the Vedomosti business daily, “now everything will be like it was under Grandfather Yeltsin.”
Indeed, just a week earlier, Andrei Kolesnikov, a journalist of the Kremlin press pool, told the Knizhnoye Obozreniye literary weekly that he had sensed a change in the Kremlin, and that those close to him suspected that the president’s outward uncertainty — which had become visible following the Bush-Putin summit in Bratislava earlier this month — meant that the leader was contemplating a “thaw”.

Political expert Mikhail Leontiev, however, saw this embrace of leniency as an admittance of failure that in reality is little more than lip service.

“The address reminds me of Stalin’s famous article admitting that he ’overdid it’ with collectivization. But back then, there really was collectivization going on, and now there is nothing of the sort,” said Leontiev, implying that today’s iron grip cannot be compared to Stalin’s methods.

“The character of today’s bureaucracy, which the president described as a caste of officials who do their business at the expense of the government, the character of the current [government] apparatus does not allow him to make new goals.”

Leontiev, a commentator with a weekly political talk show on state television and a man who has been characterized as conservative and “pro-government”, saw Putin admitting that corruption would only grow, and the country would continue to spiral towards “economic and intellectual degradation”.

“We cannot return to a path [towards degradation] that we are already on,” he said. “And the president is saying now that he is not prepared to step away from this path.”

These doubts were echoed by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who doubted that any of the challenges posed by the president could be met when so much of the government staff was not qualified or able enough to tackle them.

“The president has sharply defined a course that I support, but the questions: ’Who will do it and what needs to be done?’ remain,”
But while Leontiev took Putin’s criticism of the government as a concession of failure, others saw the president staking his hopes on the people as opposed to the government.

“The president clearly determined his ideology, according to which he is prepared to build a thriving Russia,” the state-owned daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta wrote. “And as his allies, Putin intends to lean on the people, and not on the bureaucracy.”

Despite Belkovsky’s statements that Putin was staking on stability and thus turning from a “president of hope” into a “president of patience,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst who heads the Foundation for Effective Politics, said that that Putin was abandoning the policy of “stability” with the challenges he had made to his government.

“He cast a real political challenge to the bureaucratic clan ahead of the parliamentary and presidential elections,” Pavlovsky said.

Still, much of the commentary Tuesday as experts tried to make sense of the somewhat unusual address revolved around concerns of an imminent collapse.

“We can conclude from the sixth address that the Kremlin has finally abandoned forming a national strategy for the future,” Belkovsky wrote. “The main question in this context is what should be done so that the period of Vladimir Putin’s decline does not end in Russia’s collapse.”

Exiled business tycoon <NOBR>Boris Berezovsky</NOBR>, meanwhile, had his own take on what might follow such a collapse.

“The joining of Russia to <NOBR>Ukraine</NOBR>, or, more precisely, to Europe, is a question of time,” he said, explaining how the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine which brought western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko to power, was the most important event of the year for Russia — despite the fact that Putin had failed to mention it during his address. “And a very short time,” he added.
http://www.mosnews.com/commentary/2005/04/26/putinspeech.shtml