Medvedev: No Puppet

For those who know Sanskrit, Medvedev is a word that is close to their heart. In Sanskrit as well as Russian it is related to ‘honey’. For the rest of the world the new Russian President is an unknown commodity. However, those who know him also know that he is not just a puppet of Vladimir Putin. His world view is clear and he will pursue his agenda diligently and sincerely.

by NICOLAI N PETRO

Those seeking to categorize Dmitry Medvedev, the presumptive next president of Russia, have quickly settled into two camps: pessimists, who dismiss him as a Vladimir Putin puppet, and optimists, who cling to the slim hope that he might some day develop his own agenda.

A careful reading of his more than 2,000 public pronouncements over the past seven years, however, suggests that neither of these descriptions is accurate. His record indicates that Medvedev will indeed pursue a concerted liberalization of Russian politics, not as an alternative to the Putin Plan, but as the next logical stage in its evolution.

A law professor by training, Medvedev (43) was initially put in charge of judicial reform. In just four years he managed to eliminate most of the local laws that contradicted the Russian constitution and spearhead the introduction of a new criminal code, a juvenile justice system, trial by jury, habeus corpus and a nation-wide system of bailiffs.

Later, despite supervising four new Priority National Projects (PNPs) in healthcare, education, housing and agriculture, he continued to take an active interest in legal reforms, promoting a new nationwide network of free legal support centers and supervising the liberalization of governmental policy on immigration.

By some accounts, it was this experience with trying to reform the cumbersome Soviet legal system that led him to formulate a simple economic credo: “If government participation is not essential, then the government should not be involved.”

According to Medvedev, the state has only two positive economic obligations. First, to assist Russian companies to become more globally competitive. Second, to combat poverty. Beyond that he says, sounding at times like a supply-side economist, the only taxes that the government may legitimately collect are those needed for the functioning of the state, and those that will make business in Russia the most profitable in the world.

Time and again, the solutions Medvedev has proposed for Russia’s social problems reflect a clear preference for market-based answers. He has forced regions to compete with each other for federal funding. In education, healthcare and pension reform he has championed the idea that government funding ought to follow individuals rather than institutions. He lobbied hard for, and finally won, changes in the law to allow universities to set up their own small businesses and create endowments to ensure funding independent from the state.

Even when the state retains control of a corporation, Medvedev has insisted that it be reconstituted as a public company and forced to compete globally for private investment. His model is Gazprom, where he has served as chairman of the board for the past seven years and whose capitalization has increased 50-fold in that period. He now proposes changes at other state corporations to attract US$1 trillion of new investment into Russia’s decaying infrastructure.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) must play a key role in any truly vibrant civil society, which is why he insists that every level of government in Russia must “absolutely use the experience of NGOS and public organizations which, among other things, have learned to control their expenses better than government”. Government officials need to set up a stable system of “direct and permanent contacts with NGOs”. Without such feedback, he says, “The government is blind and winds up working only for itself.”

Other notable Medvedev initiatives include: independent public television, an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight of the executive branch. In contrast to Putin, he has said that future presidents of Russia ought to be members of a political party, and that strong political parties are “the only way of making politicians accountable for their ideas”.

Reaching out to Russia’s business community, which he would like to see more involved in policymaking, Medvedev has created a Council of Experts to help generate new ideas for the Priority National Projects. His policy of “mutual interpenetration” of business and government is a striking contrast to Putin’s “equidistant removal” of major business interests from government.

Nowhere, however, is Medvedev’s emphasis on pragmatism more evident than in foreign policy, where he invariably stresses areas where the West and Russia should be cooperating.

Russia will eventually obtain the world’s respect “not through strength, but through responsible behavior and success” says Medvedev; until then, he proposes that Europeans take a page out the history of the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (a forerunner to the European Union) and consider an “asset swap” with Russia that will guarantee energy security for the entire continent and promote “the best form of partnership”.

The view of Medvedev as a lackey blindly carrying out Putin’s bidding is therefore clearly unrealistic, as is the view that Medvedev will develop policies at odds with those that he has been carrying out over the past seven years.

Rather, it appears that most observers simply underestimated the Russian government’s ability to conceive of and carry out its own strategy of democratic modernization, now commonly referred to as the Putin Plan, and also completely missed its purpose, which Medvedev sums up as “an effective civil society ... composed of mature individuals ready for democracy”. As a result, according to Medvedev’s long-time political advisor, Gleb Pavlovsky, the West essentially “slept through Russia’s rebirth”.

Medvedev’s rise is thus a portent of the historic challenge that Russia’s first truly post-Soviet generation is about to face - the creation of Russia’s first truly liberal society.

For the West, this young, dynamic, liberal and patriotic leader offers a singular opportunity to re-engage with Russia, an opportunity that can be realized, however, only if we awake from our long, post-Soviet slumber.