Andrei Kolesnikov
Talking to the public, the Prime Minister tried to look different than the President
Yesterday Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held a live question-and-answer session with the public. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov, who hasn't missed a single live session of President Putin, believes that yesterday Mr Putin tried his best to show that the things which are the Prime Minister's should be rendered to the Prime Minister. Mr Putin was almost always in control.
The "Conversation with Vladimir Putin" lasted over three hours, which is a record any way you look at it, since a Prime Minister has never held that kind of meeting before. The President did. His name was Vladimir Putin too.
There is no denying that the organisers of the meeting managed to find a new approach to the question and answer session and a new side street for journalists. Gostiny Dvor as a place of Mr Putin's meeting with the public has been well accommodated, as the Kremlin was in its time.
Journalists, who had waited for the session to start and then to end, before asking Mr Putin a few sympathetic questions in the aftermath (which was another tradition with the President), found themselves in a more relaxed atmosphere than previously in Kremlin Room 240, where they whiled away the time.
Entering Gostiny Dvor from Rybny Lane yesterday, through an entrance we had never used before, we found ourselves in the nightclub El Paradise. The club offered an inviting atmosphere, and if anyone says otherwise, don't believe it.
You couldn't see what was going on in Gostiny Dvor from there, but there were a number of plasma screens, which played an unaccustomed role that morning: they broadcast a man in a suit - Vladimir Putin. All the other traditional signs of a nightclub remained. El Paradise had been there, in the very heart of Moscow, so long that it looked like a provincial strip bar: heavy dark red curtains, trees in pots, worn wooden chairs (which actually didn't look surprising at all). But it was much more cozy and comfortable there than 100 metres away, where the main events of the day were unfolding.
Small stands were erected in Gostiny Dvor to seat the audience. They were filled to capacity with United Russia public reception office chiefs, their subordinates and others.
I guess on that morning many people came to Gostiny Dvor in the hope of getting a ticket to the "match." Mr Putin positioned himself at the gate - he would take on all comers. However, no one shot for goal yesterday. More likely, his teammates would pass him the ball. Also, there was no opposing team on the field. No one was defeated that day.
They asked the Prime Minister whether we will survive the crisis ("We have a good chance of getting through this difficult time"), when we will have snow ("That's up to God") and whether mass callisthenics in offices and factories will be broadcast on major television channels again (National State Television and Radio Broadcasting Corporation head Oleg Dobrodeyev was clearly distraught to think of the effort necessary for the broadcast only to forward questions like that. It may have occurred to him that, if the crisis continues at its present rate, there will be no clerks or workers left to broadcast while they exercise in the morning).
A desperate anonymous question "When will this crisis end?" was a real cry from the heart; one could imagine a questioner who had until recently been on the Forbes top 20.
There were questions that the Prime Minister answered in detail. He said he will cut the number of guest workers by half, that is, from 3 million to 1.5 million. Also, he warned Ukraine that gas supplies will be terminated again if Kiev doesn't pay its bills.
Mr Putin did not answer the question regarding the closing of casinos in Moscow and other cities, as the law dictates. (Four special, isolated zones are supposed to be set up in Russia for them.) That puzzled me because just the day before I happened to be in a casino on New Arbat Street, where they assured me that no one had any intention of closing anything. And it didn't look like they would.
Finally, Mr Putin had fun when he was asked whether he really said he would hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili by a certain body part.
"And why not?" he answered back.
The exchange attracted little attention in El Paradise, even though it sounded more natural in that setting than in any other.
Mr Putin warned that the nationalisation of large enterprises will continue, even though it will be called fare rehabilitation rather than nationalisation. "Fare" because it will be carried out only at the request of the enterprise itself (most likely, companies will have no other choice).
"We will not allow enterprises to be bought cheaply and sold expensively," Mr Putin added later, when journalists finally made their way into Gostiny Dvor shortly after 4 p.m.
No one can say whether the second part of that promise will be kept; one can only say for sure that the first part is being effectively fulfilled.
A foreign journalist couldn't help asking Mr Putin whether he would run for President again in 2012. (That question will undoubtedly follow Putin for the rest of his life unless he is elected President again.) At that moment, the crowd of journalists standing around him literally closed in so as not to miss a word. The Prime Minister did not disappoint them. He did not spoil the intrigue, did not say no, but said that everyone has to work in their own place now without fussing over the future.
As we were leaving, I asked Mr Putin about the casinos, saying that I had the impression that they were given a reprieve. He answered that there was no reprieve and they would have to close down by the deadline of January 1, 2009. That statement will undoubtedly draw new attention to the situation.
It was clear that Mr Putin was trying not to step too far beyond his bounds during the broadcast. He did not refuse to answer questions about foreign policy (the U.S. missile defence, Barack Obama), but he did it with no particular enthusiasm.
It seemed much more important to him to ascertain whether Russians will have enough Christmas trees for the holiday.
At least that was the impression he was trying to make.