Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to dismiss the government did not make First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev very happy.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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A Hidden Lesson
// Putin preferred the Education national project to the government
Russian President Vladimir Putin flew to Cheboksary yesterday to draw public attention to the Education national project. He did not mention the resignation of the government that took place just before he left, nor did he answer Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov's question about it.
In the center of Cheboksary is the monument to the Mother Patroness of the Chuvash. Residents of the city including those who determine its local policy and external relations, are at odds to say why, if the Chuvash have a mother, they have no father. (There was no sight of him anywhere, not even off on a hill in the distance.)
It doesn't bother the Chuvash to grow up without a father. They told me that they have a cult of motherhood, but not fatherhood, although, if you used a little imagination, the monument could look like father too.
The Chuvash were also sincerely apprehensive about the fate of the prime minister (the father of two children).
“What's going on in Moscow? Did something happen there?” a cafeteria asked a photographer from a national newspaper. She works in the school where an Internet conference with Vladimir Putin and Acting First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is to start in an hour.
“Yeah,” said the photographer. “Fradkov resigned.”
I was sure the cafeteria lady was going to ask who that is.
“Do you really think Mikhail Efimovich left on his own?” she asked. “They say Putin fired him.”
Here, 40 km. from Cheboksary and 650 km. from Moscow, they had been talking about it since they found out this morning. It was obvious even to the cafeteria lady.
“Maybe they fired him,” the photographer agreed easily. “It's not for us to understand.”
“And why is that?” the cafeteria lady sounded offended. She looked at the photographer suspiciously, probably thinking that he was patronizing her.
We waited a long time at the school for the president. I sat in a classroom with the leading figures of the Chuvash press. Suddenly, a woman of a certain age burst into the room with a notebook in her hand. She was scribbling furiously as she ran.
“Zubkov!” she exclaimed.
“Zubkov what?” her colleagues asked gamely.
“Viktor Zubkov!” she explained with a grimace.
“Do you know if Putin has arrived from Moscow yet?” and elderly journalist asked.
He apparently felt it was best not to pay too much attention to the newcomer. Being in the proximity of the president did things to people, even fleeting proximity, even when it hadn't happened yet.
“He's the new prime minister. I overheard it. I overheard people speaking on walkie-talkies in the corridor!”
I explained to here that she had simply misheard. “Fradkov, not Zubkov. There was a report that Mikhail Efimovich Fradkov will still remain as acting prime minister.”
“Zubkov, I tell you!” she repeatedly insistently. “I heard right.”
Her colleagues turned away indignantly. I think they were embarrassed that I saw her behavior.
Several minutes later, it showed up in the new agency headlines that the president had appointed had proposed Viktor Zubkov to the State Duma as a candidate for prime minister.
There was a long silence in the classroom.
“Is he from St. Petersburg?” a local journalist asked the same woman. She had been instantly transformed from the village idiot to the bearer of all truth. She felt it too, and stood up in front of the blackboard mechanically. All she had to do nor was pick up the pointer.
“Well, I have to think…” she nodded.
“Young?” someone else enquired.
“Yes, an up-and-comer,” she said approvingly. (It soon became known that he is 66.)
“Zubkova's brother, probably,” someone suggested.
The journalists laughed unsteadily. Marina Zubkova is the general director of the Chuvash Local Television (Russian abbreviation MTV). The laughter was without cause. Anyone could have been suggested at that point and it could have been true. Putin was detained briefly between Moscow and Cheboksary and arrived in the village of Trenkasy just an hour and a half late. Considering the events in Moscow that kept him, that lateness could be considered a trifle.
It all showed the change of government was carefully planned and therefore required a minimum of time. The technology of the conspiracy was obviously was the same as when the government of Mikhail Kasyanov was ousted. That technology had, after all, shown its effectiveness in the president's eyes.
We waited for the president in the school's computer room. There were several boys and girls sitting in front of computers looking at the school's site. The journalists talked one free-spirited girl into opening the RIA Novosti site with reports about the strange fates of Mikhail Fradkov and Viktor Zubkov. She stared at the screen with a bored look on her face. But she probably would have looked livelier if the president had been there. The hope was that Putin would look livelier.
A few minutes before the president appeared, order was restored. One of the organizers of the event looked at the screen, clucked indignantly (“Is this a joke? Open the school site right now!”) and restored the atmosphere of prosperity and constitutional order in the room.
Putin was lively and cheerful when he entered. (“We had you to make him happy today,” someone traveling with the president said.)
In the meantime, a discussion was underway in the room. One of the teachers was saying that, with the help of the computer, they could find out what the Chuvash word khasy means. He thought it meant “street.”
“What? Street?” Chuvash President Nikolay Federov was taken aback.
“I think they know something you don't,” the Russian president told the Chuvash president.
Federov turned pale, but stood his ground.
“Will you accept a small correction from the president of Russia?” Putin asked.
“We'll look in the archives,” he answered shortly.
“Country people don't take these things on faith,” the president observed.
They seemed to be talking about nothing. Therefore, as they were leaving, I asked the president, “Why did you change Fradkov for Fradkov?”
He obviously understood me immediately (that the country would have a hard time telling the new prime minister from the old) and quickly responded, “Where are you?”
He clearly wanted to be a teacher too.
“At school,” I answered. I wanted to add that that was why I asked and I was ready to analyze the answer as my homework. But I didn't have the chance.
“Then stick to business!” the president said.
I wasn't asking out of boredom.
But no, the president said everything he wanted to Fradkov himself at their morning session. Now he clearly had nothing to add.
Everything that happened at the school was intended to show that life goes on, that nothing special happened, it happens nearly every day in Russian political life and still nothing can disturb its stability.
But Putin was still annoyed by the question. Otherwise he would not have commented, seeing photographer bump into some school exhibit, “Moscow journalists. They'll knock everything down.”
In another classroom, Putin passed a plate full of ripe apples. They were small but very pretty, with delicate red streaks on them. The Chuvash president couldn't pass them up.
“Yes, we have to try them,” he urged Medvedev, as Putin spoke with teachers. The acting first deputy prime minister tried one. He liked it. I knew that because, a few minutes later, he shrugged, took three and put them in the pocket of his jacket with a guilty look.
In another classroom, the teacher was shocked to hear that neither Putin nor Medvedev knew the great Chuvash Orientalist Nikita Bichurin. “You come from St. Petersburg. You should know,” she sniffed. It turns out that his grateful homeland buried him there.
In one office there was alive video link with several schools taking part in the national project. The directors of the school thanked the president for their chance to take part in the national project more profusely than I think he has ever been thanked for anything ever. And they thanked him for the unified state examination, for computers, for salary reforms…
But nobody thanked him for appointing Viktor Zubkov prime minister.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 13, 2007
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