Vladimir Putin’s annual message, which he delivered at the Great Kremlin Palace, drew mixed response on the Internet and in mass media. It was Putin’s 9th speech, and it lasted about an hour and a half. It was viewed as a summary of this year’s activity and shaping government strategy for the next one. “There can be no other political choice for Russia except for democracy,” Putin said in front of the audience. “I want to emphasize: we share only universal democratic principles, which are accepted in the whole world. However, Russian democracy is a rule of the Russian nation with its own tradition of self-government, rather than realizing standards that were thrust on us from the outside.” According to Gleb Pavlovsky, president of the Foundation for Effective Politics, Putin’s rhetoric brings the country back to “very remote past.” “The message shows that the existing government crisis has not disappeared, and it will last for some more time,” noted Pavlovsky, quoted by RBC TV.
In general, Putin tried to cover a wide range of various social and economic issues without looking deeper into any of them. He also talked about politics, noting that Russia needed to “form a set of rules of fair political competition.”
The Day addressed the independent journalist Semen NOVOPRUDSKY (Moscow) with a request to comment on Putin’s speech and the hidden messages in it.
“This looks like an obvious attempt for a message, as if Putin just started ruling the country. This is a message for the first presidential term, not the third one, an attempt to define the social groups Putin relies on (first of all, employees of the government-financed organizations), and an attempt to perceive the growing discontent with the government in Russian society. Putin tried to implicitly say that he would reform the political system, though he made a reservation and said that it would be carried out in a way that would prevent destruction of state.
“It leaps to the eye that this speech sets a record by the number of issues that were brought up. Though officially the speech is composed to look like an annual message, formally it is designed for the six years of presidency that Putin has according to the new constitution.
“Judging by the speech, it is absolutely unclear what the real policy of Russia will be like, and which direction it will choose. It is also unclear whether it will be an attempt to build a new quasi-empire or create sovereign democracy. The fact that this is not clear tells us that the Russian government realizes that the tacit public agreement that existed in Russia, and according to which people were removed from ruling the country in exchange for non-interference with their private lives, has been exhausted. The program of the new ‘agreement’ has not been completed in the government’s consciousness. This is an indicator that there is no sensible message at the moment.
“Putin’s message contained plenty of references to the past, not all of them being proper. There was very little specifics in relation to the future. And all of this was spoken by a person who has been ruling the country for 12 years. When somebody rules this long, their words undergo political inflation: if the person carried out certain policy during their rule, it is very hard to expect innovations from them.”
Putin also talked about the implementation of the mixed election system. Some experts view this as a step towards democratization. What is your opinion on it, and what other messages have you found in Putin’s speech?
“Concerning democracy, the way Putin built that part of speech is rather revealing. At first, he said that ‘Russia’s path is democracy,’ then he said an absolutely seditious thing: ‘Not just democracy, but one based on universal values.’ But he made a slip right away, saying that in Russia this democracy would be built on national traditions without any external influences. There he clearly defined his conflicted position. If democracy were universal, a question arises: what do the ‘national traditions’ mean? There are no national traditions of democracy in the Russian Federation, and Russia had definitely not been a democratic country during tsarist rule.
“Concerning the mixed system of elections, it existed before. Russia’s problem is not the system, according to which the elections are carried out. The very process of elections is the problem. If we take into consideration the fact that the practice of buying single-seat electoral district MPs is common in Russia (it is widespread in Ukraine as well), which helps the government find ways to gain the majority of votes, it is absolutely unclear what the political system is going to look like in 2016, when the elections to the State Duma are slated. Judging by the way the elections went this year, we see that the government holds them according to the old technology, with the application of fraud. That is why this measure does not seem democratic to me. Permission to create democratic blocs would be a more democratic element. But the president called this a ‘debatable question.’ At the moment, there are 48 political parties in Russia, and this number is expected to increase to somewhere around 200. If people are going to vote, they will vote for parties that are well-known to them. And a ban on election blocs is basically a prohibition on the opposition’s creating wide coalitions and uniting forces around a single core. Judging by Russian practice, this statement means that the government is ready to hold the elections to the State Duma in a way that would allow it to preserve the majority of votes.
“It is important that Putin at least started talking about attempts to unite the nation. One of Russia’s main problems after the breakup of the Soviet Union is that it cannot create a single national identity. Russia cannot understand and find its place in the modern world. The president said a rather indisputable thing, that every display of the national strife will be suppressed. On the other hand, talks that all nations should consider themselves a part of one big Russian nation are not correct. For example, in the Russian Empire, the nationality issue was settled in a rather appropriate manner (with the exception of few side effects), when compared with the way it was settled by the Soviet government. And the fact that it is impossible to build national identity on the thesis that Russia is a country of the Russian people is obvious to any international relations expert.
“The president’s speech is an attempt at finding identity in the consciousness of the country that has gone through a tough period of state restoration in terms of government. But unfortunately, Russian rulers do not understand how to build a new life, and therefore, they cannot explain it to the people.”
