A week has elapsed since Vladimir Putin's latest Q&A session. Though he has changed office from President to Prime Minister since the previous session of December 2007, the number of addresses has actually risen, according to the calculations of meticulous experts. Mr Putin set another record-the session lasted three hours and eight minutes, three minutes longer than in 2007, with 80 questions answered, as opposed to 72 in 2007. All told, there were 1,636,800 telephone calls and 642,000 SMS messages.
What did the record-breaking three minutes and eight questions add to the content of the session? The crisis provided new themes. The Prime Minister referred to some with ostentatious optimism to take the edge off impending social unrest, and to others with calls to both the elite and the man-on-the-street to brave the challenges. He competently answered questions from the public, with the exception of several figures that he got wrong, excusable in a long spontaneous talk. He wisely maintained the balance between trite incantations of "Everything will be OK" and apocalyptic expert forecasts.
Mr Putin's performance was not disappointing at all-unlike his audience, which sat for a self-portrait in a paternalist interior.
The dialogue started with a tearful appeal from an anonymous woman of the Ulyanovsk Region: "Mr Vladimir Putin, please save the Fatherland! When will you close all gambling houses nationwide? I want my husband to bring his money home, not waste it at a casino."
Doesn't she realise that it is not the Prime Minister's job to dash from end to end of a vast country, closing gambling dens? It is up to Parliament, which has passed a relevant bill, for that matter. A woman sophisticated enough to get on the hot line should see that a Prime Minister, even if he is Vladimir Putin, is no substitute for the late unlamented Communist Party committees with which good-for-nothing men's wives filed complaints in the Soviet years-it is not his duty to restore conjugal peace countrywide.
I was under the impression that Russians thirsty for a talk with Mr Putin mistook him for an extrasensory on par with Kashpirovsky or Chumak, whose mere gaze or word was enough to eliminate all family and national problems.
One Dmitry Salnikov from the village of Tirlyansky asked, "What are we supposed to do?", as the global crisis had struck his village. Judging by his tone, he might have meant "damned Yankees" by the "crisis".
"How can we survive in such conditions?" cried Lyusana Zakhvatova, a greenhouse agronomist from the village of Osinovo in Tatarstan, who accused foreign farmers of unfair competition and demanded tougher food import standards.
Her question amazed even the steeled Mr Putin, who answered, "Judging by your working conditions, namely, the micro-climate and white gowns, it appears that the situation at your company is not very bad, and even good."
But fair transnational competition is the last thing Lyusana wants. She thinks the Prime Minister should shoo away her company's rivals with a mere order. Her question revealed many Russians' concealed love of undeserved privileges. Everyone says they hate them but, in their heart of hearts, are anxious to have them.
Olga, an exasperated young mother from Nizhny Novgorod, said milk kitchens were shut down in the city, so there were problems with baby food. "What are we to do? Please, help us," she appealed to the Prime Minister. What should he do? He naturally said it was up to the mayor and the governor to troubleshoot. Surprisingly, the simplest way to deal with inadequate local and higher administrations never occurs either to Olga or to any other supplicant-to vote for another candidate at the nearest poll if the incumbent dissatisfies them. Baby food, for one, could have a large influence in an election campaign.
Indicatively, Mr Putin met plaintiffs halfway to settle petty local problems-mostly social-but came up toughly for free-market and even liberal stances on many occasions during the session. He insistently called on employers and employees to cope with their own problems instead of begging the charitable grand lord to take look at their plight. To help the weak is the state's duty, which it can do, but the able-bodied should not expect undeserved boons from it, was his message.
Still, there was no end to the requests. "We have no art or knitting school or classes near our home. The children hope you will help," one said. "Why should children go to school on Saturdays?" another cut in.
Dasha Varfolomeyeva, a 9-year-old village girl from Buryatia, said: "Hello, Uncle Volodya. We'll be celebrating the New Year soon. We live on our grandmother's pension. There is no work in our village. My sister and I are dreaming of new dresses. May I ask you to give me a Cinderella-style dress? You would be our ‘fairy godmother' if you fulfilled our wish."
Overcome with feeling, "Uncle Volodya" invited the poor child and her sister and granny to Moscow for New Year. Eager to please, local bosses showered benefits on the Varfolomeyev household the very next day to arrange their trip to Moscow-which implied local budget expenses, however small. Most likely, Dasha will have her pleasure trip at the expense of another underprivileged child, who was not persevering enough to get the Prime Minister on the phone. Mr Putin is well aware that even the head of Government cannot meet everyone's needs. So, after he answered the little girl, he justly remarked: "I think that you and other children, not only in Buryatia but all across the nation, should have a wonderful time celebrating the New Year. Grown-ups must do everything in order to fulfil their wishes."
A man who asked where to buy a Christmas tree could surely do it with no prompting from the Prime Minister. What was the point of asking, then? As for VIPs, it fell on Mr Putin to explain to the chairman of St Petersburg's and the Leningrad Region's trade unions that trade unions "have stopped being a political appendage of some party, but have begun fulfilling an independent function", and to the Volgograd mayor that building a bypass motorway "should not entirely rest on a political party".
The paternalist public mood reached its peak in the question: "When will we have snow?" to which Mr Putin replied with a smile, "That's up to God."
The question might have reminded him of a ukase that Peter the Great issued 299 years ago, advising his subjects, "Look dashing and stupid while addressing your superiors to conceal your intellect lest it disconcert them." It would be far better for us to remember a line from The Internationale: "For though they offer us concessions/Change will not come from above."
The Strugatsky brothers were wise to title one of their books Hard to Be a God-but it might be no less gratifying than hard.
Vitaly Dymarsky