"Novaya Gazeta": "PUTINS’ SPEECH GETS HIM FEW KUDOS"
Vladimir Putin acted as a "technical premier" for the first time in his career.
Prime Minister Putin devoted so much time to speaking about social justice as if he had a mind to become the leader of Sergei Mironov's Just Russia party. Perversely, justice each time turned out to be an antipode of economic expediency.
When the amendments to the Constitution last year included the provision making it mandatory for the Government to report to Parliament, I was sure that it was meant to preserve Vladimir Putin's tradition of delivering set-piece speeches to the Duma. As President, he had done it eight times. Each time Mr Putin projected a new image: a liberal, a socially oriented president, or a dedicated patriot. Each time his speech was a triumph, if only in style. By definition, the style of his speech on Monday could not be triumphant: Vladimir Putin, perhaps for the first time in his career, spoke as a "technical premier."
Procedure is what lies at the surface. Previously the deputies were only allowed to applaud - now they were asking questions. Everybody knew the questions had been agreed beforehand. They had been submitted in advance and the speechwriters - and Mr Putin himself if he cared to - had a lot of time to find the most winsome answers. Brazenly inappropriate questions could have been rejected. However, as the answers have shown, both weapons of Mr Putin's public addresses - aphorisms and statistics - had misfired.
During his long speech Mr Putin did not say anything that his sycophantic intellectual courtiers could take up. The most remarkable sentence was reminiscent of Viktor Chernomyrdin: "A surrealist nightmare would occur if we upset the balance between social justice and economic expediency."
Incidentally, Vladimir Putin devoted so much time to speaking about social justice as if he had a mind to become the leader of Sergei Mironov's Just Russia party. Perversely, justice invariably turned out to be an antipode of economic expediency. Justice required either the distribution of money, or, still worse, a revision of the achievements of Mr Putin's eight years, such as the flat income tax rate. The Prime Minister rightly said that the whole world envied that scale. What Mr Putin explained about the prospects of income tax reform was generally true: "What may happen if we revert to the differentiated rate? Unfortunately - and one feels ashamed to say it because we should not administer the country in this way - but most probably, no social justice will result. In reality, those who were paid less will continue to be paid less. Those who now have big salaries will receive part of it in envelopes." I hold that this quotation proves the deficiency not of the differentiated tax rate, but of the current practice of governance. There are many countries which successfully collect taxes at rates much higher than in Russia.
And here is an even more telling example. Asked why domestic aircraft manufacturing was not developing, the Prime Minister replied: "You know, I myself urge our carriers to use domestically produced aircraft. They say, use them yourself, because they are not competitive."
So that was why Mr Putin recently bought himself a Russian-made Niva car...
As regards figures, they sometimes did not add up even within a single paragraph. Let's read this segment carefully: "An unprecedented sum, 440 billion roubles, will be spent in 2009 out of the federal and regional budgets, the budgets of the Housing and Utilities Fund and the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending to stimulate construction and other housing programmes. The money is equivalent, and I stress, to the value of one third of the country's housing market." So, by capitalizing the market by a third we do not expect a comparable - indeed any - growth from it. On the contrary, all the forecasts say that less new housing will be built. So what about expediency?
Some of the "accomplishments" the Prime Minister boasted about come across like a vicious parody of the obsession with gross indicators: "The number of Russian families that adopt children from orphanages is today twice the number of foreigners who do the same." And I am not speaking about Gleb Ageyev's story. I simply don't see any logic there.
One can pick at details endlessly. What is symptomatic is that Vladimir Putin's previous speeches delivered to Parliament left little room for this. They proceeded from thoroughly verified figures and ideological premises, each of which had its merits.
My impression was that Mr Putin didn't need that speech. What is more, it was extremely untimely and troublesome for him. But then again, one cannot amend the Constitution yet another time.
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P.S.
I deliberately do not touch upon Mr Putin's anti-crisis programme because on Monday he did not articulate any coherent programme. If you are interested in the analysis of the anti-crisis measures the Government has already taken, as well as the forecast of their impact on the situation in the country, you can read on page 7 the speech by economist Sergei Aleksashenko made at a meeting of the Public Anti-Crisis Initiative.
Alexei Polukhin
