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Putin and Medvedev Exchange Vows
// National projects grow into state programs
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Federation Council leaders in the Kremlin yesterday. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov that Putin fought Federation Council speaker Sergey Mironov for the right of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to be heard.
Across from chairman of the committee on youth and sport Vitaly Mutko sat chairman of the committee on supervision over backing up the activities of the Federation Council Vladimir Kulakov. Since the Federation Council, under the leadership of Sergey Mironov, sitting in the center, had been inactive for more than an hour as it waited for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kulakov was backing up not the activities of the council, but the appearance of activity as he bothered Mutko with endless questions. It was Mutko, if I am not mistaken, who complained out loud that all the cameras were focused on the empty place at the center of the table, leaving the sides, where he and Kulakov sat, unattended.
“Cameras?” echoed Kulakov. “What do I need cameras for? I have enough cameras in Magadan. They have good cameras there.”
We can guess whom Kulakov represents.
“You don't believe me?” he continued to pester Mutko. “Come and see.”
Mutko, head of the Russian Soccer Union, firmly refused to visit Magadan, where there is not soccer team, not just no champion league soccer team – no soccer team whatsoever.
“Come on!” Kulakov nagged. “I'll buy you a ticket. Round trip even. I repeat. Round trip.”
A few cameras were already turning on their direction and Mutko fell silent, although not because he had nothing to say. He didn't want to say the wrong thing, and anything that would have escaped his lips at that moment would have been the wrong thing. Kulakov cheerfully continued to harangue those around him about the underappreciated cameras of Magadan.
People who sat without haranguing also attracted attention to themselves. For example, the female journalists couldn't leave chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Social Policy Valentina Petrenko in peace. And the way Petrenko looked gave no one around her any peace either.
It wasn't her tight, bright blue blouse that left a glowing impression in your eyes after you looked at her, exactly like the Northern Lights, except with little yellow bunnies frolicking through it, which was all you could see for several minutes. Nor was it the necklace of pearls, each of which was the size of my five-year-old son Vanya's fist. (They recently learned to make pearls like that in China out of nothing – literally nothing.)
No, it was Petrenko's hairdo. It was fabulous. Maybe she goes to work every day with her hair done like that. I don't know. But I don't think it is possible to do your hair like that every day. You could spend your whole life fixing a hairdo like that. What was it like? Like a pastry that had fallen off the shelf and been kicked aside by an ill-tempered customer? Like a stale Napoleon cake? Like the foam they seal the windows of new buildings with that lets the bugs through any way? No. More like a ball of papier-mache with the top cut off. You wanted to touch it to make sure it was secured tightly. And you wanted to get up and jump around.
The president of Russia sat between First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Vladislav Surkov and said that it is more important than ever to ensure a policy of continuation. (Eight years ago, it was not so important.) He called on the Federation Council members to refrain from using unsecured resources and devastating populist measures. (For some reason, I immediately thought of Valentina Petrenko's hair.) The people at the table wrote that phrase down. And they kept writing, as if they had to write it 100 times for the teacher.
They was before they knew they had to “get rid of the stereotype that social issues are a drain on other business” and “remove the unprofitable state regulation from the social sphere.”
Putin, who is now rarely seen in public without Medvedev by his side, made it clear once again that the informal national projects that the first deputy prime minister is responsible for will soon be made government programs. That, obviously, will happen after the first deputy prime minister is made president and the president prime minister.
Putin said he wanted Medvedev to say a few words about the current state of the national projects, the gave the floor to Mironov.
Mironov, as far as I could tell, did not want Medvedev to say a few words to the Federation Council members. Not at all. Speaking to the president, he said that now “as we agreed, the Federation Council members on the list will speak” and then, after the press leaves, “there are a couple more questions to be asked.”
“You have intrigued us all, especially me,” the president replied.
And the press, of course.
Then the president let Medvedev speak any way. He spoke about the national projects so incisively and concisely that even I seemed for a second to understand what they are about. And he did it without even glancing at his notes.
Now I know that the state will not leave me unattended to. I am one of the 52 million Russian families for whose benefit Medvedev promised Putin to work “so they can feel it during the coming Year of the Family.” And Putin promised the same.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 16, 2008
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