Rossiyskaya Gazeta: "Vladimir Putin breaks tradition"
The new government's first meeting on May 15 sprang its first surprise. Vladimir Putin decided that the government should turn a page.
It had taken the former president just a week to see how deeply his cabinet was mired in red tape. And the new prime minister decided to change its style of work. Now only an inner cabinet will meet weekly at the Government House on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, while full cabinet meetings will be held once a month.
The inner cabinet will provide a quorum for decision-making, said Dmitry Peskov, the prime minister's press secretary. "A simple arithmetical calculation shows that it will consist of 15 ministers, or three-fifths of the full cabinet," he said. They will be: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, First Deputy Prime Mministers Viktor Zubkov and Igor Shuvalov, and Deputy Prime Ministers Alexander Zhukov, Sergei Ivanov, Igor Sechin, Alexei Kudrin and Sergei Sobyanin, who is also Chief of the Presidential Staff. The inner cabinet will also include: Health and Social Development Minister Tatiana Golikova, Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev, Minister of Regional Development Dmitry Kozak, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. Peskov said "the inner cabinet, as the prime minister said, will be a kind of headquarters to coordinate efforts in accordance with plans and forecasts coming from individual ministries".
He stressed this did not mean "substituting for their roles, only coordinating what they proposed or suggested".
Even when Mr Putin made his first appearance as prime minister, his cabinet traditionally continued to meet on Thursdays. During these meetings, ministers gathered to present and defend their positions. Later, all the issues discussed by the cabinet were turned over to commissions, and the ministers were only given a consolidated opinion as they met on Thursdays.
Mr Putin proposed forming an inner cabinet consisting of his deputies and some ministers to speed up government work and tackle everyday matters more quickly.
"Full cabinet meetings will continue," Putin said, and added after a weighty pause: "But once a month".
That is, all questions will now be examined weekly by the inner cabinet, in the presence of invited ministers. In effect, this is the Kremlin style, which Mr Putin has decided to cultivate at the Government House, too. In the past, ministers led by the prime minister would come to the Kremlin every Monday to report to the president on progress made and on future objectives.
The president would ask for details, but make no decision, this being done later by the government.
Now the new cabinet has a new life. Putin's style has been introduced to the Government House as well. And that, as the prime minister said, "calls for efficient and energetic work". He had already set forth his programme. But for this "cumbrous mechanism" to start functioning, Mr Putin keeps repeating that the government should have macro-economic priorities.
And on May 15, when the new prime minister was presented with an inflation-ridden economic forecast to 2011 by Elvira Nabiullina's ministry, he could not keep from commenting. The economists, it will be recalled, had been recommended to draw up their forecast with an eye to the innovative path of development, because "there is no alternative to it".
"Any other scenario means marking time," Putin said. "But the one I saw provides for very little growth and has nothing to do with innovation."
And that was even before Ms Nabiullina fleshed out her details. However, few in the ministry believed that the forecast would be accepted at first go. That was perhaps why practically no effort was made to revise the document for the meeting.
"Has anyone seen the estimates?" Putin asked his audience. No minister responded, although they had already criticised the economists.
"They are very low," Putin commented. "We should take these figures as the starting level. We cannot go below them."
To reinforce his arguments he had to repeat, not only for the benefit of Ms Nabiullina's experts but also for all members of his cabinet, that the government must reduce inflation to a single-digit. According to him, real wages in Russia would grow by 10% a year. "Forecasts say the average wage in 2011 will be 29,000 roubles, compared with the current 13,500 roubles," Putin said. He added public sector workers' pay will also rise markedly. "The proportion of the population with incomes below the subsistence level must be reduced to 10% by 2011, and the unemployment level, to 4.5% from the current 6.3%," he said, setting the priorities.
Despite the economists' pessimism, Putin is not going to abandon the objective he set two years previously. Nor does he recommend it to others, although for several years the government has been trying to reign in prices. Still, he seems to believe that the government efforts focused on curbing inflation will help to achieve a single-digit rate in the next few years.
Incidentally, over the past eight years inflation only once dipped to a single-digit level (9% in 2006). But on May 15 the economists did not have anything reassuring to tell him. In 2008, the Ministry of Economic Development again raised the bar to 10.5% from 9% or 10%. Yet even this figure, according to experts, is too optimistic.
"Inflation is not something to be sneezed," said Ms Nabiullina, trying to bolster her case.
The discussion was not easy. Speakers now and again mentioned external and internal factors driving prices up. But the minister was certain that "we have chances to fit inflation into a new bracket". Her arguments were simple: prices on the world food market had stabilised.
"But lowing the rate of inflation to 7% by 2010 is a challenging task and cannot be achieved automatically, because the Russian economy also depends on imports," she explained.
However, an anti-inflationary plan is soon to be adopted, which must push prices down.
Ms Nabiullina promised to think over Putin's criticisms. "But pencilling in new and more attractive figures is not enough; we must propose other measures to stimulate innovation," she said, although, in her opinion, innovation is "not so much a state institution as mass innovation behaviour". And such measures must be matched by tax and competitive conditions.
That was why Mr Putin's first proposals were concerned with taxes. Very soon the Finance Ministry will table its suggestions to the government to boost oil production by reducing the mineral resource extraction tax. The bill provides for raising the taxable minimum from $9 to $15 per barrel. According to the Finance Ministry, this will mean a budget deficit of 104 billion roubles and 112 billion roubles in 2009 and 2010, respectively. But, as Ms Nabiullina noted, the basic decision has been taken and is final.
As for the concept for long-term development, which incidentally ignores President Dmitry Medvedev's proposal to cut value-added tax, it will be updated and submitted to the government in August.
Byline: E. Lashkina
