Profil: “Putin Prospekt”
Vladimir Rudakov
President of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov renamed Victory Prospekt in Grozny into Putin Prospekt in time for the Russian Prime Minister's birthday. Putin admitted that he "does not particularly like" such renaming.
To be quite precise, Victory Prospekt was renamed Putin Prospekt not so much in time for the Russian Prime Minister's birthday as for the Chechen President's birthday. In a way, it was a triple gift on Ramzan Kadyrov's part: a gift to himself for his own 32nd birthday, to the people of Chechnya on the occasion of the 420th anniversary of the good-neighbourly relations between Russia and Chechnya, and, finally, a gift to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who last week marked his 56th birthday.
It is known that the President and people of Chechnya liked the gift. "I can safely say that 99% of the population of the Chechen Republic trust Putin and support the Russian leadership," Kadyrov said announcing the new name. As a token of the gratitude of the Chechen people Victory Prospekt will now bear the name of the nation's leader, Vladimir Putin."
Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on the topic last Monday. Putin "himself has no right or mechanism to pressure anyone one way or the other, but he would rather such things didn't happen in the future," he told journalists. And he added that this applied not only to the renaming of streets but also to monuments, photographs on school notebooks and the like.
On Tuesday the Prime Minister himself commented on the renaming of the prospekt. "You know, it took me some time to realise what it was all about," he confessed in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets. "I rang up Ramzan from my car to wish him a happy birthday and he was saying something to me. The connection was very poor and I only heard the words ‘Victory Prospekt' and ‘Putin'. It is only this morning (the interview was given on Tuesday - Profil) that I opened a newspaper on the plane and I understood." Putin said that he had "mixed feelings" about it.
While Putin has "mixed feelings" about Putin Prospekt, the Communist Party has similar mixed feelings about Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. Never admirers of the Minister, the Communists said that "the people's patience" was about to run out after Kudrin ignored the opinion of deputies twice during the course of several weeks.
On September 17 the Duma invited Kudrin to brief them on the status of the Russian Stabilisation Fund. Kudrin failed to show up citing other commitments. The meeting was then postponed to October 1, and Kudrin again dodged it. The Russian Government representative to the Duma, Andrei Loginov told the deputies that the Finance Minister could not attend the debates because some important documents were to be discussed by the Cabinet on that very day.
The Communist deputies led by Gennady Zyuganov were outraged when they learned that the Finance Minister was addressing a conference organised by the newspaper Vedomosti. The conference, the Communists claim, began at 11 am, exactly when the "government hour", which he had ignored, was to be held."
"The Duma had never before faced such open contempt on the part of the Government," the Communist Internet newspaper Pravda.ru stated. The Communists even accused the Minister of breaking the law on the status of the Duma deputy, hinting that his actions could also be proved to violate the Criminal Code, which envisages punishment for failure to inform Parliament.
It is unlikely that these threats will be followed up on. As Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee Oleg Kulikov put it on the eve of the meeting with Putin, "in August after the euphoria over Abkhazia and South Ossetia," the Communist Party "temporarily found itself in the same boat" with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin. "We didn't want to rock the boat," Mr Kulikov said. The Communist Party appears to have reasoned that it was impossible to throw Mr Kudrin overboard without rocking the boat. So Kudrin will continue to be the Finance Minister and will continue to ignore the interest of the deputies in the Stabilisation Fund.
There is a motive for his behaviour of course. The Duma is itself to blame for being treated as it is. The bottom line is that even the representatives of "Putin's party" had to admit that the most they can do is engage the Finance Minister in an "academic argument".
"We are in a state of economic discussion with him, we argue how to form the Stabilisation Fund, how to spend it, in what amounts, and this is all academic," First Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Oleg Morozov told a recent meeting of the heads of economics committees of Russia's regional legislatures. They omitted however, that Kudrin's "academic dispute" with the party in power is actually conducted by correspondence.
Meanwhile everybody knows that financial issues are best solved when looking each other in the eye. As a popular advertising clip pointed out, "it facilitates understanding". That is how financial problems are solved by the Central Electoral Commission of Russia - honestly and openly. However, one must give due to Vladimir Churov's agency: these are the financial problems not of the Central Election Commission but of the political parties.
Last week CEC Secretary Nikolai Konkin made a political statement to the effect that the political parties which merge would still have to pay back all their debts (above all the debts of the parties to the government media outlets for carrying their campaign advertisements).
Konkin's clarifications take on added relevance today when there is a scramble among the small parties to merge with the "big boys": the Agrarian Party with United Russia, PPS and the Greens with Just Russia, and even the SPS with the Democratic Party of Russia and Civil Force. Many members of the "small parties" seriously hoped that the mergers "would write off all their debts". Things didn't turn out to be that simple.
"There can be no question of an automatic debt write-off, Konkin stressed, Russian law has no mechanism of debt write-off in such cases." And he explained that under the law any party can decide to disband, which does not prevent its members from joining another party. However, a liquidated party remains a legal entity, Mr Konkin noted, and it must fulfil its obligations under the law. "This situation, he stressed, is regulated by the Civil Code and the Law on Bankruptcy."
In practice it would probably mean that all the party activists would be able to join whichever party they choose. But the liquidated party brand, which survives as a legal entity, will first be subjected to the humiliating procedure of bankruptcy. What is worse, it will not be political but financial bankruptcy.
One need hardly add that the money from such procedures could help reduce the harm done to Russia by the world financial crisis.
