From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 5/16/2006 3:25 AM
This article appears in the May 19, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

PRESIDENT PUTIN IN ANNUAL MESSAGE
Russia Will Survive and Be A Weighty Factor
in the World
by Rachel Douglas

Russian President Vladimir Putin's 2006 State of the Federation message, delivered to the Federation Council on May 10, underscored the folly of trying to treat Russia as a misbehaving state or merely a source of "energy security," as Dick Cheney and others have recently done. Putin communicated tremendous determination to enhance Russia's status as a great power, moving in the direction of an economic policy shift in a way that won statements of hope from even some of his fiercest critics within Russia.

The three main areas of Putin's address—the demographic crisis, national defense, and an array of economic policy measures—were familiar to his audience from previous years' messages. In his very first State of the Federation message, in 2000, Putin identified the demographic crisis as the gravest national security problem for Russia. In 2004, he vowed to combat poverty, overcome the population decline, and upgrade Russia's infrastructure. Last year, Putin attacked the consequences of the economic collapse of Russia during the 1990s, targetting the bloated and ineffective bureaucracy, as well as "mass poverty," as the main problems Russia must deal with. All of these themes he developed further in the May 10, 2006 address, but with a sharper focus and hints of further changes to come.

Economist Sergei Glazyev, who as a leader of the Rodina (Homeland) movement has been extremely critical of Kremlin policies during the past two years, today issued an assessment of Putin's latest message, beginning this way: "Today's Presidential message essentially means a fundamental review of the social and economic policies, carried out hitherto. In effect, the head of state has recognized the programmatic demands, repeatedly put forward by the national-patriotic forces. We have spoken a lot about support for children and families, promoting scientific and technological progress, shifting the economy to an innovational pathway of development, the need to shift to use of the ruble in international transactions, and the modernization of the Armed Forces. Practically all of these opposition proposals have now been declared key directions of national economic policy. I am very glad about this."

Another pro-technology commentator observed, "This is the first time the tasks have been posed in the right way." Glazyev went on to ask if the current government would measure up to implementing the goals outlined by Putin. He noted that the government has failed to adopt the proposal from Academy of Sciences and related political circles, for a Development Budget and a fully-funded Development Bank. Putin said nothing about the now more than $60 billion Stabilization Fund, the oil-export windfall that monetarist dogmas will not allow to be invested inside Russia, not even for long-term, non-inflationary infrastructure projects. (The Russian government is on record as intending to invest the Stabilization Fund in foreign government bonds and global stock markets.)

Nonetheless, it was noteworthy that Putin did not repeat the kind of presentation he made in the opening remarks of his year-end 2005 press briefing, in which he pointed to the Stabilization Fund, to Russia's budget surplus, to the early repayment of foreign debts, and to the build-up of foreign currency reserves as tokens of economic success, in and of themselves. This time, Putin insisted starkly that if Russia does not reverse the demographic collapse, nothing else matters. This time, he spelled out the needed policies—down to the ruble amounts of monthly cash supplements that families should be granted upon the birth of a second or third child.

According to reports from Moscow, Putin twice put back the delivery of this speech because he was dissatisfied with the drafts prepared for him by aides. Sources indicate that Economics Minister German Gref came in for special Presidential wrath, along with several Kremlin staffers. In the interim, two senior Russian figures, former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published stark assessments of Russia's possible loss of territory and disintegration, due to population shrinkage.

Primakov wrote in the issue of Biznes zhurnal, "Among the multitude of other negative factors, the most serious danger for Russia arises, if you will, from the emerging demographic situation." Primakov, who currently heads the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that Russia's labor shortages are already obvious to everybody. But, he went on, if an array of measures—such as tax incentives for resettlement—is not adopted, the depopulation of Russia's Far East and Eastern Siberia could lead to the loss of those areas altogether. Such measures must be integral to any program for a "national idea," such as has been debated in recent years, wrote Primakov.

[Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the Stalin-era prison camps, late-Soviet-era blacklisting, and a host of other troubles, took up the same subject in a May 5 interview with Moscow News. Answering questions from noted journalist Vitali Treyakov, Solzhenitsyn said, "Indeed, 'saving the nation'—numerically, physically, and morally—is the utmost task for the state.... All measures to raise living standards—housing, diet, health care, education, morality, etc.—are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority." Putin quoted Solzhenitsyn in his speech.

Right at the outset, Putin invoked Franklin Roosevelt on the need for the government to step on the toes of selfish financial operators, in the name of the general welfare. The allusion to America's struggle out of the Great Depression is essential in two respects. First, FDR and the New Deal have been a reference point for opponents of the neo-liberal looting that drove Russia into deep depression in the 1990s, ever since the late Prof. Taras Muranivsky—reflecting his collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche—published an article in the early 1990s, titled "A New Deal for Russia," in which he ripped apart the notion that there were only two choices for post-Soviet Russia: the old command economy or radical deregulation of everything. Second, the Russian government has evidently been given instructions on FDR-style schedules for getting things done. At the May 11 session of the cabinet, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov ordered federal ministers to draft and submit to the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade, within three days, proposals for implementation of the Presidential message. Within 10 days, this Ministry must give the government an integrated plan for their implementation.

The United States figured twice in Putin's speech: once, as a potential adversary that has chosen a "fortress" mentality, and then in a list of "other countries" with which Russia has important relations—along with China, India, Asia as a whole, South America and Africa. The Russian President said that relations with close neighbors were Russia's top foreign policy priority, and devoted one whole paragraph to Europe. The tense global situation, however, was the implicit subject of his lengthy discussion of Russian military requirements.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3320putin_fdr_spch.html