The Washington Post reports that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has delivered a televised state-of-the-nation address that is open to interpretation as a “subtle rebuke” of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin.
“Medvedev avoided directly criticizing his patron and predecessor … who sat without smiling in the audience of lawmakers and other officials at the Kremlin. But the speech represented a subtle rebuke of Putin’s legacy. In his most stinging remarks, Medvedev said the country had been ‘kept afloat’ by Soviet-era achievements, without mentioning Putin’s eight years as president.”
Medvedev: “We have to admit that in previous years we failed to do enough to solve problems inherited from the past…. We have failed so far to dismiss the economy’s primitive structure, the humiliating dependence on raw materials, and to reorient production to people’s real needs.”
“There will be the usual stuff this week, I expect, about how Ronald Reagan and his faithful ally Margaret Thatcher brought down the wall with their intransigent anti-communism. The most recently opened archives aren’t so kind to this view, either.” So observes Christopher Hitchens in an article posted to online magazine Slate on Monday.
Hitchens refers to this article by Michael Binyon in the London Times a few weeks back. “Mrs Thatcher knew full well that her remarks would cause a row if revealed….”
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has spoken to Der Spiegel, in an interview occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His views sound less illiberal than those of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. On Putin’s description of the collapse of the USSR as a “catastrophe”: “… And it was really very dramatic: A people who had been united for decades — and in some cases for centuries — suddenly found itself in different countries again. Contacts with family and relatives were cut off…. [But] World War II was no less of a catastrophe. Tens of millions of people were killed. And wasn’t the Russian Revolution of 1917 also a catastrophe? It sparked a civil war where friends and relatives shot at each other. The collapse of the Soviet Union certainly ranks among the most dramatic events of the 20th century, but it didn’t have such bloody consequences.”
Nevertheless. Medvedev betrays annoyance in response to questions about NATO expansion, relations with Ukraine and Belarus, conflict with the former Soviet republic of Georgia, murders of human rights activists and investigative journalists, and the conduct of elections in his country.
Regarding Russian arms shipments, here is a statement that will calm and reassure everyone: “We will only deliver arms that serve defensive purposes, no offensive weapons.” (!)
Clifford J. Levy reports in the New York Times that Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party seeks to emulate the Chinese Communists. The Russians admire the ability of the Chinese to deliver economic growth within a one-party framework. “It is a historical turnabout that resonates, given that the Chinese Communists were inspired by the Soviets, before the two sides had a lengthy rift.”
Those who believe that there is such a thing as national character or temperament — which is likely to be regarded as something like racial or ethnic stereotyping these days, I suppose — would say that the problem may be that the Russians lack the Chinese aptitude for business….
A pipeline running along the Baltic seabed is to bring Russian natural gas directly to Germany and Western Europe. Governments in the former Warsaw Pact countries fear they will be subjected to energy blackmail, reports Andrew E. Kramer for the New York Times.