Medvedev makes his mark

The Guardian

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A year after his arrival, measures from the Russian president suggest a power shift in the Kremlin, and an era of glasnost-lite


By Jason Corcoran

Comments (31) Tuesday 12 May 2009 20.30 BST

A new era of glasnost sponsored by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, is casting light into some of the darkened corridors of the Kremlin. Medvedev has recently made a string of striking public outreach gestures and this week signalled he could ease political restrictions imposed by his predecessor Vladimir Putin.

Some of the measures hark back to the late 1980s when then USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev first announced a policy of glasnost, which translates as openness or transparency. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, along with his restructuring of the economy and the political system, ushered in a momentous period of change and turmoil, which ultimately led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Many of the post-Soviet freedoms were subsequently rolled back during Putin's eight-year reign.

A year on from his inauguration, the substance of Medvedev's presidency is beginning to synch with the mood music.

Earlier this week, Medvedev said the 7% threshold for political parties to win seats in the State Duma may be lowered.

Putin had introduced the threshold in the wake of the 2004 Beslan hostage massacre arguing the need to preserve the integrity of the state. The ruling meant that only four political parties – none of them opposed to Putin – surpassed the 7% threshold in the parliamentary elections of December 2007.

Like Gorbachev, Medvedev is a trained lawyer and his pledge last May to eradicate "legal nihilism" no longer seems utterly hollow.

Federal and regional politicians, along with and security figures embroiled in scandals over the last few months, are actually being held to account. Under Putin's reign, many scandals were raked over and the figures would be allowed to carry on as if nothing happened, as long as the party line was toed.

For example, when photos surfaced of a January helicopter crash in Siberia that appeared to involve government officials on an illegal hunt, wildlife campaigners assumed the Kremlin would hush up the incident. Yet state-run media covered the story, a senior official in the region resigned and federal prosecutors investigated.

Another example last month was a decree by Medvedev dismissing Police Colonel General Vladimir Pronin, head of the Moscow directorate of the interior ministry. Pronin had described a police major guilty of a drunken killing spree in a supermarket as "a good professional".

In politics, there is a mountain to climb before Russia's centralised and authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy" breaks down like its Communist forerunner.

Opposition candidates suggested that local officials had fixed the recent mayoral elections in Sochi, the venue of the 2014 Winter Olympics. The Kremlin-backed candidate Anatoly Pakhomov won a landslide victory. Challengers had little space to campaign; local television blacked out news coverage and advertising of opposition candidates. Seven candidates were disqualified due to clerical errors, but at least liberal leader Boris Nemtsov was allowed on the ballot. Opposition figures couldn't get on the ballot during last year's presidential elections.

In the courts, the former head counsel of Yukos, Svetlana Bakhmina, was released on parole in April after being locked up as a young mother years earlier. In the trial of her former boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spectators were surprised when Kremlin opponent Gary Kasparov appeared and publicly blasted the prosecutors. Khodorkovsky's fate, however, is likely to be another stretch for the same tax evasion and fraud charges that he was charged with in 2004.

Gorbachev allowed human rights dissident Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow in 1986 from his forced internal exile in a move that showed the world that the regime had changed. It would be unthinkable for Medvedev to make such a move as long as Putin remains sitting on his shoulder as the all-powerful prime minister.

There are signs though in the Kremlin that the balance of power could be tipping more to the liberal faction and away from the statists and secret service henchmen. Charges against deputy finance minister Sergei Storchak of embezzling $44m in state funds have been dropped in a case widely perceived to be politically motivated and part of a power struggle between finance minister Alexei Kudrin and Igor Sechin, deputy prime minister and chairman of oil giant Rosneft.

Kudrin, the leader of the liberals, triumphed in the battle over the country's purse strings having argued for steep budget cuts as Russia readjusts its spending plans amid falling oil revenues, which is at odds with the security services' desire for increased funding for defence-related industries.

Russia's small liberal press and its NGOs are enjoying something of a revival under the new regime. Medvedev recently gave a full press interview to liberal paper Novaya Gazeta, his first one-on-one interview to any Russian newspaper. Another departure has been regular meetings with the leaders of Russian NGOs and human rights activists, with the full transcript of meetings and occasional critiques of Kremlin's policies published on the president's site.

Nobody knows how far this glasnost-lite will go. It may just be for the timeline of the crisis or until his mentor Putin decides Medvedev's usefulness has expired.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/12/medvedev-russia-glasnost