Kommersant: "No one is asking Vladimir Putin about the crisis"
Irina Nagornykh
People submitting requests to his public reception offices complain about housing and utilities, the police and the law courts.
According to Kommersant's information, the most frequent complaints people file with Vladimir Putin's public reception offices are connected with housing and utilities, social problems and poor performance of judiciary and law enforcement bodies. No significant numbers of complaints about the crisis and its consequences have yet been registered.
The head of the commission in charge of Putin's public reception offices, Mikhail Babich, told Kommersant that 30% of petitioners complain about the state of housing and utilities, 20% about social problems and 10-15% want to see the work of law enforcement and the judiciary system improved. Some regions deviate from the trend, but in the majority of regions, this is the ratio, Mr Babich said.
In Moscow, for example, 50% of the complaints filed have to do with housing and utilities, followed by complaints about police and the law courts (15%), according to Nikolai Gonchar, the head of the Moscow public reception office. The Moscow reception office has received 724,505 letters and 219 visitors within a month and a half.
As the office manager, Leonid Mikhailenko, told Kommersant, reception hours at the Moscow office will soon be shortened from 4 days a week to three (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). "We are acting pursuant to the recommendation of the United Russia Executive Committee," Mr Mikhailenko explained. The head of the Party Executive Committee's department for public reception offices, Alexei Anisimov, said similar recommendations have been issued to all the Prime Minister's reception offices in the regions. "There are so many complaints that the offices cannot process them all," he said. Both he and Mr Mikhailenko assured Kommersant that the number of complaints is not due to any worsening in the country's economic situation. "So far, we have had no complaints about the crisis," says Leonid Mikhailenko.
But Mr Babich told Kommersant that public reception offices have registered a certain number of complaints connected with the work of banks, credits and loss of jobs, but "they do not have a mass character". Mr Babich pointed out that last week Vladimir Putin visited the reception office in Novosibirsk, where he met with a representative of small business seeking Putin's help in obtaining a loan since the banks have set impossible requirements to those seeking a loan.
One may recall that nearly six months ago, when the decision was made to open the reception offices, Vladimir Putin said he would be ready to take part in video links with their visitors. A live video link was planned for early December, according to several Kommersant sources. In late September, the Prime Minister's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed to Kommersant that a video link will take place, but the date has not yet been fixed. Yesterday, Mikhail Babich told Kommersant that not only the date, but also the format of the video link are still in question.
"I think the statistics are very sound. It is the standard set of issues citizens have always raised with various public reception offices. The crisis is a global problem that is not tackled at the level of local deputies. For example, production is curtailed, people are sent on leave, some people lose money due to currency fluctuations, banks change the mortgage terms. The public reception offices are ‘peace-time' instruments set up for a different purpose," says Yevgeny Minchenko, the head of the International Political Expert Examination Institute. By contrast, television appearances, he thinks, could have a beneficial effect on social sentiment, because "the crisis is not only an economic, but also a psychological phenomenon."
