Vladimir Putin looked the way he wanted when he appeared on live television - like a prime minister.
Photo: Vasily Shaposhnikov
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A Prime Minister Talks to the Public
// He tries to be different from the president he was
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held a live question-and-answer session with the public, broadcast yesterday. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov, who watched all of Putin’s live sessions as president, thinks Putin did everything he could yesterday to create the impression of the ministerial of prime ministers. And it worked almost all of the time.
“A Conversation with Vladimir Putin” lasted over three hours. That is a record any way you look at it, since the head of government never held that type of meeting before. The president did. His name was Vladimir Putin too.
The producers of the meeting were unable to refuse a new approach. The Gostiny Dvor exhibition complex was chosen for Putin’s meeting with the public, and it served as well as the nearby Kremlin did in its time.
Moreover, conditions were much more comfortable for journalists as they waited for the event to begin and end (after which they would ask a few soft questions, as was traditional with the president) than Room 240 was in the Kremlin.
Entering Gostiny Dvor from Rybny Lane yesterday, along an alleyway I had never been on before in my life, we found ourselves in the nightclub El Paradise, and if anyone says we didn’t like it there, don’t believe it.
You couldn’t see what was going on in Gostiny Dvor from there, but there was a huge number of plasma screens which, unaccustomedly for TV screens in a nightclub, were all covered with a man in a suit: Vladimir Putin. All the other formal signs of a nightclub remained intact. El Paradise had been there, in the very center of Moscow, so long that it looked like a provincial strip bar: heavy red curtains, trees in pots, worn wooden chairs. And it was much more cozy and comfortable there than 100 meters away, where the main events of the day were unfolding.
Small stadiums were built in Gostiny Dvor for the live audience. They were filled to capacity with United Russia Party functionaries, their subordinates and others.
I suspect many of them came to Gostiny Dvor that morning in hopes of a personal meeting. Putin positioned himself at the gates and withstood the onslaught. It was all quite friendly.
They asked the prime minister if we will survive the crisis (“Chances are we will.”), when it will snow finally (“When God says.”) and will they show workers doing morning calisthenics on major television channels again (National State Television and Radio Broadcasting Corp. head Oleg Dobrodeev was clearly distraught to think that he had made such superhuman efforts on the broadcast for the sake of questions like that; it may have occurred to him that, if the crisis continues at its present rate, there will be no workers left to line up and be broadcast exercising).
The desperate tone of the anonymous question “When will this crisis end?” made one think that it was asked by someone who had until recently been on the Forbes top 20.
There were questions that the prime minister answered in detail. He will cut the number of foreign workers in half, that is, from 3 million to 1.5 million. And he warned Ukraine that its gas will be turned off again if it doesn’t pay its bill.
Putin did not answer the question the casinos that are still operating in Moscow and other cities will be closed down, as the law dictates. (Four special, isolated zones are supposed to be set up in the Russian Federation for them and their clients.) That was of interest to me personally because just the day before I happened to be in a casino on New Arbat St., where they assured me that no one has any intention of closing anything. And it didn’t look like they would.
Finally, Putin had fun when he was asked whether he really said he would drag Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili away by a certain body part.
“What part was that?” he asked back. They are actually two parts.
The exchange attracted little attention in El Paradise, even though it sounded more natural in that setting than in any other.
Putin warned that the nationalization of large enterprises would continue, even though it would be called justified recovery rather than nationalization. Justified because it would take place only at the request of the enterprise itself (when it had no other choice).
“And not to buy them cheaply and sell them expensively,” Putin added later, when the journalists finally made their way into the made area of Gostiny Dvor shortly after 4:00.
The first half of the show had gone well.
A foreign journalist couldn’t resist asking Putin if he would run for president again in 2012. (That question will undoubtedly follow Putin for the rest of his life, unless he does so.) At that moment, the crowd of journalists standing around him literally closed in on him. And the prime minister did not disappoint them. He did not spoil the intrigue, did not say no, but said that everyone has to work in their own places now and not fuss over future decisions.
As we were leaving, I asked Putin about the casinos, saying that I had the impression that they had been given a reprieve. He answered that there had been no reprieve and they had to close down by the deadline of January 1, 2009. That statement will undoubtedly draw new attention to the situation.
It was clear that Putin was trying to avoid the personal during the broadcast. He answered questions about foreign policy (American missile defense, Barack Obama), but without particular enthusiasm.
It seemed much more important to him to determine whether Russians would have enough New Year’s trees for the holiday.
At least that was the impression he was trying to make.
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76 Questions in 3 Hours, 8 Minutes
Vladimir Putin’s first live broadcast as prime minister lasted 3 hours and 8 minutes. The head of government’s answers took 787 sentences of 13,171 words, of 74,402 letters. In 2007, when he answered the public’s questions as president, he was somewhat more loquacious, uttering 14,433 words of 82,564 letters in 3 hours and 5 minutes.
The prime minister answered a total of 76 questions, more than in any of his earlier broadcasts. The previous record had been in 2003, when he answered 69 questions.
There were 1,636,800 calls and 642,000 SMS messages to the prime minister. For the first time, the studio audience was also allowed to ask questions. They asked 14 questions and applauded his answers 17 times. Another 12 questions came from audiences in the regions connected with the prime minister directly. (There were 32 such questions last year.) Eleven questions came by telephone, four by Internet, four by SMS and five were asked by the host. Putin answered 26 questions in the final stretch. There was an unusually large number of requests made of Putin this year (seven). Last year, he was asked for assistance only once. People were most interested in social policy (14 questions, 21 last year). The economy was in second place (12 questions) and personal questions about the prime minister came in third (9 questions). In 2007, only eight questions were asked about the economy and only four personal questions were asked.
As usual, the most frequently heard word was the pronoun “we.” The prime minister used it 215 times. It was followed by “I,” used 122 times and “everyone,” used 78 times (last year 183, 118 and 67 times, respectively). The changing economic situation can be seen from the fact that Putin used the work “crisis” 20 times this year, as opposed to just once last year.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 05, 2008
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