Frankfurt-am-Main (Germany)
‘Orthodox logic'
Russia is full of surprises. Nowhere else have well-educated members of the Young Communist League grown rich as quickly by consistently applying capitalist methods of robbery. And nowhere else have these new capitalists grown poor again because of capitalism.
One may have reservations about the last sentence. Oleg Deripaska is still rich, not everyone has $5 billion in his account. True, he has debt: poor Oleg Deripaska can no longer afford to buy Opel. Perhaps he simply lost his fortune playing poker, but gambling is banned in Russia. They have no blessing. And Lenin has no blessing.
To the contrary, Father Dmitry Smirnov believes that Lenin should have been burned on April 22, 1870 upon his birth. Although as a priest, Father Smirnov is against cremation, he suggests that Lenin's mummy be removed from the Mausoleum in Moscow and burned in the Arctic and the ashes be thrown to the wind in a Western direction. This Orthodox Christian heads up the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for Relations with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Institutions, which makes one wonder whether he has links with law enforcement. That is not beyond the bounds of possibility because the church strongly supports the state in everything, as in the Stalin times. However, law enforcement bodies and the leaders they produced, such as Putin, believe that such support is welcome.
But Stalin was Lenin's best disciple, wasn't he? This - Orthodox - logic belongs to the same set of oddities as the fact that Putin, on the one hand, considers the collapse of the USSR to be the greatest catastrophe of the last century, and on the other hand, is a pure democrat. Besides, like the church, he considers the last Tsar to be a saint. Finally, he rules as a President although his name is not Medvedev.
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London, UK
Medvedev is a pseudo-reformer
It is a year since Dmitry Medvedev, 43, former St Petersburg lawyer and a fan of ageing rock-musicians from Deep Purple, became the President of Russia. Optimists believe that Medvedev, who belongs to a younger generation than Putin and who has no KGB background, is a genuine reformer. Over time, they say, he will do away with the most odious features of Putinism and steer Russia on a less authoritarian course. Moreover, they add, the President's progressive statements represent attempts to make over the failed social contract of the Putin era: "more money, but less freedom".
However, sceptics see what Medvedev has actually done. The list is not long. The most significant reform was to prolong the presidential term from four to six years, which may enable Putin to be back in power in 2012 (under that scenario Putin will then remain in office for two terms, until 2024 and eventually would be carried out like Brezhnev).
In August of last year Medvedev signed an agreement with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on ending the war in Georgia and the withdrawal of Russian troops. The troops, however, have not left and are now based on the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
In the international arena Medvedev is a fairly lonely figure mainly because his Western partners know that the real arbiter of Russian policy is Putin. In his own country Medvedev is under the growing risk of becoming a clown because most of his statements have nothing to do with reality.
In an interview with Novaya Gazeta he praised the recent mayoral campaign in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as a "full-fledged political struggle." The local pro-Kremlin administration rigged the vote in order to secure the victory of its candidate by bringing in thousands of soldiers, teachers and sanatoria staff for early voting. Such political methods have often been used during Putin's rule.
By Nikolai Zubov