Igor Naumov
The White House is not in a hurry to react to the President's criticism. It has been three days since Dmitry Medvedev took the Government to task for being slow in fulfilling his anti-crisis directives, but not a single Cabinet member has yet reacted to the criticism. Experts note the striking difference in the degree of readiness with which Kremlin directives are fulfilled compared with the times when Vladimir Putin was President.
The Government took note of the President's criticism by stepping up work to implement anti-crisis measures, government spokesman Alexander Smirnov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta yesterday. "Maximum effort is being exerted to fulfill the directives of the Head of State," the official stressed.
However, he had difficulty in naming any specific measures that the White House was taking or preparing to take in this area. No high-ranking officials have yet publicly reacted to Dmitry Medvedev's statement.
It will be recalled that during a visit to the Salyut plant on January 11, Dmitry Medvedev said that the Government was too slow in tackling the economic crisis. Only 30% of the instructions he had issued in the fall had been fulfilled, and this despite the fact that the Government was officially put in a special operational mode. "I have no grounds for thinking that we are desperately lagging behind in any area. At the same time, it is evident that we are working slowly in accordance with standard bureaucratic technologies. We exchange correspondence, send fax messages, and take a long time to secure approvals," the President said, adding as a parting shot that "all this should be looked into".
The President's recommendation to look into the workings of the cumbersome bureaucratic machine could have been fulfilled the following day, at the first meeting of the Government Presidium held in 2009. However, the topic was not even raised, and independent experts are reading political meaning into that. Sergei Markov, Director of the Political Studies Institute, believes that under the former "technical" premiers - Mikhail Fradkov and Viktor Zubkov - the Government meeting was sure to have started with a serious discussion of the President's critical remarks. Not so today. The situation has given grounds to Russia's foes in the West to conclude that cracks are appearing in the Medvedev-Putin tandem. "It would be lamentable if that were really the case," the expert said, "so Medvedev should be extremely careful in criticising the Government, and Putin should be as careful in translating the criticism."
Mikhail Delyagin, the Director of the Globalisation Studies Institute, is sure that the Government's failure to react to Medvedev's criticism is symptomatic. This is Putin's approach, and he thinks it is improper to openly admit the drawbacks of his Government. The President of the Effective Policy Fund, Gleb Pavlovsky, says that the Government has discussed the implementation of anti-crisis measures, but behind closed doors. In addition, the gas dispute with Ukraine overshadowed all other problems.
Experienced apparatchiks believe that it is physically impossible to dramatically improve the decision-making process, as documents are processed in accordance with Government regulations. Instructions are to be communicated to the executors and their fulfillment monitored within two days, and if the instructions are urgent, within 12 hours of signing. If marked "urgent" or "without delay", the instruction is to be carried out within three days, and if marked "operationally", within ten days. If there is no deadline, the task is to be fulfilled within a month. However, the deadline - between three days and a month - is cut in half for collaborating ministries, which must submit their amendments to the document to the main agency in charge of fulfilling the task.
Documents are circulated only in hard copy, no e-mails or fax messages, let alone approvals by telephone. No matter how computer-savvy an official is, he (or she) must affix his/her signature to a sheet of paper that is "laced" into the case file, the file being the material indicator of his/her performance. Every day tens of kilos of bureaucratic mail are delivered to various places in Moscow. The envelopes land at the Ministries' dispatch offices, are sorted out and then forwarded to the ministers and their deputies, who send the papers to the corresponding departments which in turn send them to the concrete executors. A typical Russian bureaucrat prepares up to 50 documents a month.
A ministry official admitted to Nezavisimaya Gazeta that he and his colleagues are chronically short on time to process the documents properly. "The compulsion to meet the deadline leads to illiterate decisions, especially when an important task that requires serious work has to be fulfilled within a day or two. No wonder the overall result is a mess," our interlocutor complained.