Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) presented foreign diplomats with a difficult choice: salad with bresaolo or caviar tartlets.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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President Putin and the Diplomats
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a reception yesterday for members of the foreign diplomatic community in Moscow and gave them a signal to take back to their own capitals. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov thought it was an emergency signal.
Besides the diplomats, its seemed as though half of the senior members of the Russian Foreign Ministry had come as well. They don't come in such numbers when Putin meets with Russian diplomats. Yesterday's event was the first of its kind. It was intended as a supplement to the meetings that are held in the Foreign Ministry once a year. Now they will alternate.
The meeting was scheduled for the president long ago and it has no formal relation to the elections to the State Duma. But any meeting with the top man on the United Russia party list four days before the elections is doomed to take on a campaign tinge. The journalists never doubted the presence of the campaign element and only wondered what Putin would say to the voters. And not the voters abroad, who, alas, vote more often with their harts than with their ballots, but the voter at home who may still doubt that United Russia can gather its 70 percent of the votes without him.
Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and nearly all the members of the government were there as well. When First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked what he was doing there, since ambassadors were invited, responded, “I'm an ambassador too.” While I was still reeling from the possible meanings of this statement, he added, “An ambassador of good will.”
There was Yury Dolgoruky vodka and reasonably good French wine on the tables and salad with bresaolo. But that was far outweighed by the traditional Kremlin favorites of red fish, white fish, caviar tartlets and assorted sausage. The main course consisted of smoked artichoke with filets of chicken and duck smoked with bacon. Desert was chocolate mousse.
Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin looked lighthearted. That was strange, since the news of the day was full of the fact that he had requested a meeting with his arrested deputy minister Sergey Storchak. I asked him about the progress of the meeting. “The procedure is not easy, but there is no reason I should not see him,” he explained.
In other words, they didn't let him see him when he wanted. I imagine Kudrin looking Storchak in the eyes and saying, “You didn't do it, did you?” That is, he needs the moral support, not Storchak.
After being delayed for 15 minutes, the president delayed the eating of the salad further by giving a long speech. “Our course is that of democratic development,” he reported.
The diplomats listened extremely attentively. But there eyes darted to that smoked meat.
“We know the value of real democracy,” Putin continued confidently, “and we want to hold honest elections that are as transparent and open as possible, without organizational failures and problems. I am confident that this upcoming election will be of precisely this kind.”
The weakness of his position was seen in the fact that he felt the need to explain that.
The president spoke of the need for single rules for everyone in international affairs, adding that “We do not see [the CIS] as a chess board upon which geopolitical games are being played out.”
Maybe the arrest of opposition leader Garri Kasparov made the president think of chess. Public Chamber member Anatoly Karpov's attempt to visit him in jail with a copy of 64 Chess Review magazine under his arm two days ago may not go down in the annals of chess, but it earned a place in the modern political history of Russia.
“We first need honest debate and direct dialogue,” Putin informed his diplomatic audience. He didn't mean the United Russia Party, of course, which refused to participate in election debates. “Without this we will not succeed in developing meaningful and realistic solutions to the urgent issues facing the world in this era of globalization. It was precisely this kind of discussion that I called for when I spoke at the Munich conference in February.”
Analysts have found many things in the famous Munich speech, but not that. They must have done a bad job looking. Or maybe they looked in the wrong place.
“We have long since made our choice,” Putin continued. “We believe that it is only by working together that we can come up with suitable responses to the challenges of today, chief among which remains international terrorism… I am convinced that there is not a single regional problem in the world today that can be resolved using force, using the sword, to speak figuratively, whether it be Kosovo, Iran, Sudan or any of the other problems we see in the world around us.”
Magnanimity prevented him from mentioning Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdniestria.
“Our contribution to relieving the debt burden of developing countries now comes to around $12 billion,” he noted.
There was one table where mainly ambassadors from the countries under discussion were sitting. Not one of them batted an eye. But one swung his leg nervously back and forth under the table. One country had more debt forgiven than the rest, I thought.
“The European Union is an important partner for Russia. We understand the difficulties the EU is going through and we are confident that life will put everything in its place,” the president said. What he meant was that he sympathized with the EU because Poland is still blocking the signing of the partnership agreement between Russia and the EU and he hopes it survives that hardship that has nothing to do with Russia.
He explained that Russia could “play a constructive role in ensuring compatibility between civilizations in Europe. Russian non-governmental organizations are also showing increased interest in this work. We hope that our NGOs will be able to work in North America, in the United States and in other countries in as comfortable an environment as that which we provide for their counterparts working in Russia.”
There's that magnanimity again.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the president looked up from his text for a moment and glanced around. “I would like to conclude by saying that we have done everything we can to free Russia from internal upheaval and place it firmly on the road of evolutionary development. And, I am forced to repeat, we will not allow any external interference in this process. Our country will work consistently to promote a positive and unifying agenda for modern international relations. This is the main signal that I would ask you to send back to your capitals.”
The ambassadors got the signal. Some of them started with the bresaolo, and others with the tartlets. They had the choice.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 29, 2007
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