Galina Lipatova, Alexander Vorobyov, Maria Gutorova, Maria Orlova
Last week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin talked live on the air with the staff of his regional public reception offices and the people who address them. On the eve of the "live phone-in", Vlast correspondents were working to find out how the best of Putin's reception offices work and what complaints Russian people bring there.
Vladimir Putin held his first "live phone-in" in December 2001, and these sessions have since become a tradition. This year, however, he went on the air not as the country's President, but as Chairman of the United Russia party. Thus, it was decided that this time, his conversation with the people should be arranged by the Party, and the main participants should be the staff and visitors of Putin's regional public reception offices.
These offices were first created in August 2008, and in late October, the Presidium of the United Russia General Council summed up the tentative results of the competition for best reception office. A special party commission selected a short list of seven such offices, one in every Federal District. To find out what distinguishes the best Putin reception offices from all the others, Vlast correspondents visited four of them.
Omsk: "We are not magicians; we are working according to the rules"
There is nothing in the look of the Omsk reception office to suggest that it is among the best: an ordinary government office with long corridors, lined with chairs for visitors, the reception desk and a lot of paperwork that needed to be filled in. On the walls are photographs showing party life: "Vladimir Putin and Children", "Omsk Governor Leonid Polezhayev and the People".
"And you are asking in what way we differ from an ordinary bureaucratic reception office? There is no comparison. They do administrative work, while here it is party work," the head of the Omsk reception office Anatoly Parygin explained, sounding upset by my first question.
He tells me proudly that the Omsk reception office has been named the best in Siberia based on its strength in many criteria: how the office was inaugurated, how the premises are equipped, and how the reporting is organised. He produces a form with statistics: 913 people have come to the office since September.
"Almost half of the complaints are about the maintenance and repair of housing, the payment of utilities rates, and getting subsidised flats. 11% of the complaints are about social protection and another 10% about healthcare."
"Are there complaints about the crisis in the country?"
"People come here with their daily problems and concrete complaints. Nobody speaks about the crisis in general," the party man says. "But of late, there have been more complaints about layoffs and staff cuts; employers do not hesitate to do that when hard times come."
The women who are at the complaints registration department admit that people try to "solve all kinds of problems" by appealing directly to Mr Putin.
"People complain about lack of medicines, small pensions, and so on. They come here even with problems that they can solve themselves. They just understand that Putin can do everything," says Tatyana Davydova, a lawyer. "But we are not magicians; we work according to the rules."
However, after talking with the visitors, I realized that even if they do not think of the staff as magicians, they certainly see them as "Putin's deputies". Many people said that "Vladimir Putin is our last hope" and that "of all people, Putin will sort everything out." Some have visited several reception offices.
For example, Sergei Mikhailovich, an elderly pensioner, has for many years tried to convince various government officers that soldiers who served at the secret Mayak enterprise should be granted the same benefits as the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.
"I called Varnavsky (Vladimir Varnavsky is the speaker of the Omsk Region Assembly - Vlast)," he says. "They treated me well there, like they do here. But so far there has been no result. A lawyer told me I could write to the Strasbourg Court and claim huge damages. I'll wait and think a bit, and maybe I'll write to them."
Some people seem to get a kick out of the very process of filing complaints.
"I wrote to Putin in Moscow," says a woman who lives in the Omsk Region, showing me a pile of papers complaining about the work of the healthcare system. "This is the paper that attests that my case has been put under review at the Ministry. Here are my letters to Zhirinovsky, whom I asked to find a sponsor for me. And here is a letter to Gryzlov asking him to pass a law that would make it a crime to conceal the diagnosis from a patient..."
Rostov-on-Don: Freshmen for hire
Putin's reception office in Rostov is located one block away from Bolshaya Sadovaya, the city's main street. The head of the office, State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Kushchev, says the regional Governor, Vladimir Chub, was "very instrumental" in getting these premises, but United Russia probably has the Russian Foreign Ministry to thank, since they shut down regional branches of the British Council this year. The Council previously rented one of the buildings of Rostov State Construction University (RGSU) for its office, but it is now occupied by the governing party's office.
Turning the premises into a Putin reception office took almost two months. The RGSU experts, personally supervised by Rector Viktor Shumeiko, worked on the design. As a result, the walls were painted a pleasant light-blue, which provides a good background for photographs of the party's leader: standing alone, with the Governor, or with the former presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District, Dmitry Kozak. The spacious office is divided by opaque glass partitions into five sections: the hall and four reception rooms. The one intended personally for Mr Putin is larger than the others and has an emergency exit.
The RGSU provided not only the premises and design ideas, but also books from its library to fill the empty shelves. The university even sent its first-year female students over to provide the background for the television picture during the Premier's video link with the people on December 4.
Some of the things United Russia did without outside help. As the competition review board stressed, the United Russia party in Rostov had ordered and installed an automatic system for the registration of complaints in the reception room and coached the staff to operate it, whereas in most other reception rooms they were still waiting for such systems to be brought to them from Moscow.
True, our cameraman failed to take "historical" pictures of the reception room. The local staff explained, somewhat apologetically, that because of the preparation for the "Putin phone-in" access to the building for cameramen had to be authorised by the officials who came from Moscow, who in turn need authorisation from the Government. At the United Russia central office, where Vlast then referred, they promised to sort it out and call us back but they never did.
Samara: "In general, I talk with aliens from outer space"
United Russia's Samara branch is proud of its reception office. They designed it themselves, chose premises in the regional branch building, and even put some of the office staff on the payroll of the regional deputy staffs. Most of the people who staff the reception office have been here since the presidential election, when it was still the "Dmitry Medvedev reception office", which then seamlessly turned into the "Vladimir Putin's Reception Office" project.
"Every member of the staff must process 10-15 complaints a day," explains German Stupak, assistant to the chief of the reception office. "We estimated that handling one complaint costs 100-200 roubles: envelopes, paper, staff salaries. One third of the complaints are granted".
"You said that when the office first opened, you had 100 visitors every day," I recall, glancing around the small waiting area. "People had to queue outside, I imagine?"
"Frankly speaking," the party man sighs, "have you seen the storm of the Winter Palace on film? Well, it was the same thing."
United Russia calculates that about 40% of complaints have to do with utilities and with moving people out of decrepit and unsafe housing. After that come the issues of social security, followed by complaints about the work of the law courts.
"If there are problems that we do not solve, you can be sure that they are impossible to solve," Vasily Shatrov, another member of the reception office staff says. "People feel hurt and tell us we simply don't want to tackle their problems..."
"It is very hard work, because you work with negative things", German Stupak adds. "We understand the people and we know that they come here because they are desperate. They think we have levers and the magic word ‘Putin'. However, some seem to have become professional troublemakers who try to wear us out and enjoy tormenting us..."
"Each of us has his permanent clients," one United Russia member admitted. "He sits in front of you and he looks pretty normal. Then suddenly he says, ‘In general, I talk to aliens from outer space.' Ooops! Try to get rid of him. He pours it all out for an hour or two and then leaves. He got what he wanted..."
Chelyabinsk: "I want to fly to outer space"
When the Chelyabinsk reception office opened in August, there were plush polar bears and Russian beauties in kokoshniks. Governor Pyotr Sumin gave a short pep talk: the gist of it was that people shouldn't bother Mr Putin over trifles and should first try to solve their problems at the local level.
But the people were not listening; they pushed their way into the building, shoving aside the polar bears. "They won't tell you about it inside Putin's reception office," the callers at the Governor's reception room complain, "but people first come here and ask us: ‘Does Putin himself receive people here?' ‘No,' we reply, ‘Putin receives people in Moscow'. ‘What's the point of having a reception office at all, then?'"
"Here everything begins with the entrance, just like a theatre begins with the coat-check," says Anastasia Ivanova, a member of the Putin reception office. "We are the only reception office in the country where the entrance has a ramp. We have a coat-check and offer coffee and tea to our visitors. We even have a couple of first-aid kits. True, the most frequently used medicine is valerian and cardiac motherwort. On one occasion, we even had to call in an ambulance: a guy came and asked to be sent to outer space. He says, ‘I want to go to outer space and you must help me.' We summoned medics to take him to a mental hospital. Only, don't write about it, otherwise people might get the idea that if you visit Putin's reception office, you end up in a loony bin....."
After talking with me, the staff turned their attention to the visitors. A man demands from the member of the reception office staff, Ivan Yakushev, and from Vladimir Putin personally, that his service at the Semipalatinsk test range be included in his seniority record. Ivan Yakushev replies that nobody, not even Mr Putin, can do anything if there is no documented proof. ‘This is just drivel," the man says, clearly furious. "Can you put me through to Putin?" "You see, we have visitors who seek benefits or subsidies to which they are not entitled under the law," Anastasia Ivanova explains after the man leaves. "But they tell us: ‘We have worked, we have suffered'".
"According to our instructions, we can say ‘no' to these people," adds Yakushev. "But we have all been selected for this work because we have ‘bleeding hearts'. We have to hear all of them out."
If the complaints are reasonable, they try to solve the problem quickly by making calls to the relevant organisations. As the members of the staff say, in 90% of the cases, the people at the other end promptly react to the phrase, "this is Vladimir Putin's reception office" and immediately offer help. "Thanks to such calls, we managed to provide a woman with an invalid's certificate within two hours after she had tried, in vain, to get one from other places for several months. And we sent a sick old woman who was so frail she was unable to light her fireplace to an old people's home."
Asked whether ordinary human problems could be solved without Mr Putin's help, the members of the staff shrugged. The people at the Governor's reception office, however, seem to know the answer.
"Once these offices were opened, everybody got a chance to complain," says the head of one of the Governor's reception offices in Chelyabinsk, Vera Lavrentyeva. "Many of the issues that people bring here should be solved in a law court, like elsewhere in the civilised world. But people get angry: ‘Take it to a law court? And what is the Governor for, and what is Putin for?'"
* * *
The Prime Minister's Q&A session in party format
Putin the Prime Minister talked to the Russians almost like Putin the President.
During eight years as President, Vladimir Putin had six live video links with the people. The studio was set up in the Kremlin's Building One, where questions were fed from the telephone centre, the Internet and the people who addressed the President directly during video links with the regions. The format of the seventh "phone-in" on December 4 was different in many ways, because Mr Putin has moved from the Kremlin to the Government House and has been elected Chairman of United Russia.
The studio was set up on "neutral ground", at the Gostiny Dvor building, the venue of a recent United Russia congress. For the first time, invited guests - more than 400 people, including United Russia members, the heads and staff of the Prime Minister's regional reception offices, and visitors to these offices - were able to ask their questions. Direct links were organised with two reception offices, in Saratov and Rostov-on-Don. By the way, there were fewer of these direct linkups than before: 6 instead of 10-12.
The phone-in was broadcast live only by TV channels and radio stations that are part of the government holding VGTRK, whereas previously, Russia TV channel was always joined by Channel 1.
The questions asked were not anything new: in spite of his change of status, Mr Putin was asked about economics, domestic and even foreign policy, which would seem to be less within his scope of authority than before. However, the way telephone calls were processed had changed somewhat. While during the previous phone-ins practically all the questions aired gave the impression of having been prerecorded, last Thursday one could occasionally hear a real dialogue between the caller and Vladimir Putin.
However, the "whackiest" call did seem as if it had been recorded in advance: the Prime Minister was asked whether it was true that he had "promised to hang Saakashvili by the balls". "Why not?" Mr Putin replied with obvious relish.