The revival of non-paranoid self-examination in Moscow

What ails Russia? In large part it is Russians themselves, says President Dmitry Medvedev. In a penetrating interview with the Financial Times, the best I’ve seen with the 45-year-old leader (abbreviated video here), Medvedev describes his economic program for transforming the world’s largest country, but says that, ultimately, Russians need to look in the mirror. "Our main enemy is inside us — in our perceptions, our habits and cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus," Medvedev told the newspaper. "Indeed, if we manage to overcome these habits, reform will be more successful. I mean, one has to admit that we have a strong paternalist thinking. It goes for many people and even statesmen." He said:

For a variety of reasons, people in this country invested all their hopes in the kind Tsar, in the state, in Stalin, in their leaders, and not in themselves. We know that any competitive economy means reliance on oneself in the first place, on one’s own ability to do something. This is the challenge every person has to deal with. Certainly, this is not done by a decree or with a stroke of the pen, but this is the problem anyway.

One cannot get carried away with the significance of Medvedev’s remarks, since unlike prior Russian leaders who thought critically and fundamentally — Mikhail Gorbachev; Yuri Andropov; and, reaching far back, Peter the Great — Medvedev isn’t actually in charge of either the nation’s or even his own destiny. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin occupies that role.

Yet that is precisely the point. If one presumes that Medvedev relies on Putin’s good will for his position, then one also must assume that such remarks do not come from left field — Medvedev has first market-tested them in rough or polished form with Putin. This does not mean that Putin agrees with all of Medvedev’s thinking. But he does not object to Medvedev so expressing himself if he wishes. My colleague Josh Keating suggests that at least some of the photographs of these fellows demonstrating camaraderie are so much empty staging. But it seems to me that you get what you see — Putin and Medvedev actually do collaborate in a respectful manner; they agree on a ruling strategy, with Putin holding the deciding vote; and they genuinely are fond of each other. While the photos are not all spontaneous and must be opportunistic, I think the men themselves are not faking. Read on to the jump.

Putin himself is a blunt instrument projecting the traditional Russian fear of encirclement and resentment of disrespectful treatment abroad, and is not prone to such self-examination. Medvedev probably harbors the same sentiment, but would never be a convincing bad cop. What we get in this interview is him at his best, which is in expressing where Russia might rise above itself, and at last produce an inventive, ultra-productive and not-paranoid economic and political system.

Medvedev is worried about the young generation. When he was a boy, one aspired to go into law or banking in order to be successful professionally and financially, he says. Youth today, he says, wish to become bureaucrats — it is there that they see achievement of the same goals, in particular bribery-derived wealth. "A civil servant’s salary is far higher now than it used to be, but still it is no match for the income of a lawyer or a businessman," Medvedev says. "Hence, young people see some other sources of income in this line of work, and that is a very dangerous trend." The young seem prepared to perpetuate what Medvedev would discredit.

The most dramatic signal that Medvedev could convey to prove the arrival of a different Kremlin would be to release Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch. Medvedev interestingly hints at a behind-the-scenes acceptance of his early release through parole or an official pardon. But Medvedev makes clear that he is no revolutionary — he will not overrule the process to release Khodorkovsky. In part, that may be his application of the lessons of Gorbachev, who lost control of events, as Leon Aron writes in the new issue of Foreign Policy. It may also be that Khodorkovsky is Putin’s red line — Medvedev can denounce Stalinism, but not tread on this visceral Putin sensitivity. In the end, Medvedev respects and defers to Russia’s institutions of law — the courts, and Putin:

I was taught at university to respect a verdict. I may have personal ideas of what is important and what is not, what is politically justified, and what is politically senseless. But there is the law and there are rulings. The president has got no right to override a verdict, except in cases of pardon.