By GREGORY L. WHITE
A top Russian official rejected calls to ease tight control over politics, moving to squelch growing speculation that the deepening economic crisis could lead the Kremlin to loosen its grip.
After nearly a decade of growth, Russia's oil-fired economy is facing a deepening recession, with unemployment rising and living standards slumping. Scattered protests have broken out, although support for President Dmitry Medvedev and his patron and predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, remains strong. The crisis has set off debate among Russia's political and business elite, much of which came to power in the previous era of relative plenty.
Some liberal advisers to President Medvedev have argued in recent months that the crisis challenges what they describe as the «social contract» of the Putin era, under which ordinary Russians consented to a rollback of political and other democratic freedoms in return for long-awaited economic prosperity. These advisers, most notably Igor Yurgens, who runs a research institute where Mr. Medvedev is chairman of the board, contend the Kremlin needs to loosen the screws now that the economy is slumping.
But in unusually strong, public comments, Vladislav Surkov, first deputy chief of staff in the Kremlin, denounced that argument as «dangerous.»
«The system is working, it will cope with the crisis and get through it,» he told a forum of the ruling United Russia party held Monday and later shown on video on a local Web site. «If we had entered this zone of turbulence in a more-loosened condition, I assure you, the damage the state and society would have suffered would have been much greater,» he said.
Since he was elected a year ago, President Medvedev's liberal rhetoric has fueled hopes that he might restore some media freedoms and other democratic rights that the Kremlin steadily rolled back under his predecessor, Mr. Putin. Mr. Medvedev has proposed some relatively modest reforms of the electoral system and called for strengthening judicial independence, but generally he has followed very closely the line of Mr. Putin, who retains huge power as prime minister.
The unusual «tandem of power» arrangement, as the Kremlin calls it, has led some analysts to predict an eventual split between Messrs. Putin and Medvedev. So far at least, the main differences appear to be in style and tone, not substance, and both the Kremlin and government are dominated by Putin-era appointees. Mr. Surkov, for example, is the Kremlin's domestic-politics chief, a job he also held when Mr. Putin was president.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, left, meets with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin near Moscow Friday. Some liberal advisers to Mr. Medvedev argue that the economic crisis challenges the «social contract»' of the Putin era.
But in a sign of how the worsening economic situation has shaken the political elite, a prominent political consultant who has worked regularly for the Kremlin suggested this week that Mr. Medvedev's liberal advisers could be conspiring to use growing public discontent as an excuse to depose Mr. Putin as prime minister.
«There is a multiparty system with the authorities,» Gleb Pavolovsky told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. «One of those is the pro-crisis party, those who want a new little coup.»
Yevgeny Gontmakher, a senior staffer at Mr. Yurgens's Institute for Contemporary Development, dismissed those comments as nonsense. But he said Mr. Surkov's statement suggests growing concern within the Kremlin about the stability of the political system. «Surkov sees the situation he created over the last few years has started to come apart,» Mr. Gontmakher said. «We need to introduce real politics, not this imitation.»