Russian President Vladimir Putin redirected a question to a Chechen journalist with the same determination he will use to redirect Russian missiles toward Ukraine.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Vladimir Putin Talks Four Years Ahead
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared before journalists yesterday and received five rounds of applause in the course of the press conference, which lasted in excess of four hours. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov noticed something no one else paid attention to that will continue to be of interest for the next four years.
The scene at the beginning of the press conference was right out of Hollywood, and every few minutes, even seconds, the backdrop and genre changed before our eyes. We almost had human drama when Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent Alexander Gamov asked the president about his main failure in that post. Then the drama almost turned to comedy as the president answered that he had had no failures .
“All eight years I labored like a galley slave from morning to night,” he said, “with all the strength I had,” as if you could do it any other way.
Then he received another question of the same type and gave the same answer, already as a farce.
A question from the correspondent for the American Fox News network about the possible redirection of Russian missiles made the president suffer. Putin didn't want to redirect them, but it seemed there was no other choice. He really didn't want to do. But he had no choice.
“We don't intend to redirect them at anybody… unless absolutely necessary,” the president concluded after a theatrical pause.
We saw before us a person who knew how to help people, but was a slave of circumstance on a galley.
A journalist from the city of Grozny gave our press conference even more drama. Putin said he was meeting today with President of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (and he did meet with him, almost immediately after the press conference, and spent as much time talking to him as he did talking to the press) and promised to visit Grozny. Now we were in the suspense genre.
The next question came from the TVTs correspondent, who gave the president the chance to talk about Dmitry Medvedev's most prominent personal and professional traits.
“And there is personal chemistry. I trust him,” the president said quietly, and we had not the worst scene from a Bollywood melodrama.
I thought the president was in very good form as he took questions, even better than at the last six such press conferences. He was sentimental and categorical, cruel and magnanimous. In the first half hour, we seemed to receive a full image of Vladimir Putin today. He answers were exhaustive, when he wanted them to be, and exhausting, when he wanted them to be.
He changes the tome of his answers at will, as someone watching TV can adjust the brightness and contrast. Putin added what he wanted to his images in a live broadcast. Sometimes he felt the need to turn the volume up, and that was enough to have an effect as well.
I was entranced at these technical effects.
Questions harmonized with answers, and answers elicited new questions. In the first half hour, everything I heard in Building 14 of the Kremlin reminded me of a symphony orchestra.
Later it became simpler. The main notes had been played in that half hour. Then it turned into something like a jazz improvisation, a memorable one that may become a classic of its kind. There were old familiar rifts in it too.
“That's what they all want. Let them teach their own wives to make soup.”
I am sure the president didn't memorize those folksy sayings. They are and always have been with him in his head. How many are there? It's hard to say. Impossible even. I don't think he knows himself. But he obviously hasn't used them all yet, not even after eight years. His supply is great and merciless.
I asked the president if he was tired of power, or if he liked it. I thought it was a rhetorical question. He's been saying for eight years, “That pleasant feeling of responsibility…”
But it seems something has changed in him. I think he was speaking sincerely. After having said what he had to, he could now allow himself to say what he thought he couldn't before. It was, after all, his last press conference.
“You spoke of the feeling of responsibility yourself,” he said, “you remembered it… And that responsibility is sometimes a rather heavy burden, because you have to make decisions that no one else but you can make. And they are not always pleasant. Of course, like anybody, I worry about that. Those decisions are linked to the condition, the prosperity of millions of people, and sometimes with the lives of specific citizens of the Russian Federation. No one can make the decision. There are lots of bosses, but the head of state has the last word. That, of course, is a moral load, and not alight one.”
Putin chose his words carefully. It clearly was not a rhetorical question for him.
But that applies not only to the president of the Russian Federation. That applies to the head of any state, large or small. Do you think Bush has it easy? You laugh,” and indeed it was hard not to at that moment, and not only for me. All it took was imagining Bush, for whom it was ever so hard, and Putin feeling sorry for him in the depths of his heart. “It's a huge country, by the way, with huge responsibility in the world. We have to speak directly. With more than Russia has, because that country has more opportunities. And when he has to make a decision, and another, inside the country, overseas, no matter what anyone advises him to do, the decision is his alone.”
Putin really was speaking openly. He wouldn't make such admissions otherwise. No one was laughing any more. The auditorium was silent.
Another question of mine was about the Putin plan and the Medvedev plan. The Putin plan stretches through 2020. Medvedev will reveal the Medvedev plan in Krasnoyarsk today. It was interesting if there might be contradictions in the two plans.
“Dmitry Anatolyevich and I understand very well,” the president said, “that one of the lines of attack will be in the interpersonal plan, and in the political and in the economical. There will be attempts all the time to find differences in out approaches. I have to say that there are always differences, but, after more than 15 years of working together, we are used to hearing each other and listening to each other. Moreover, as president, I have never considered it beneath me to pay heed to the opinion of specialists.”
That is, when he is prime minister, he will, obviously, not consider it beneath him to pay heed to the opinion of the president.
Then the president added, “We don't need to cry now because the time has passed for working in that capacity, but to be happy because there is an opportunity to work in a different capacity.” And very interesting things came out. For the first time, Putin publicly listed the rights and duties of the head of government, according to the Constitution, and compared them with those of president. The trick was that suddenly the former sounded much nicer.
“It's the formation of the budget,” the president said, “presentation of the budget in parliament, formation of the basic monetary and credit policy… It's issues in the social sphere, healthcare, education, ecology. It's the creation of conditions to guarantee defense-readiness and national security, setting the foreign economic course…”
Not a lot was left for the president in that configuration. It was an amazing confession.
“The president is the guarantor of the Constitution,” the president said, moving right along. “He determines the basic direction of domestic and foreign policy. But the highest executive power in the country is the government of the Russian Federation, headed by its chairman.”
The problem with current Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, obviously, is that he didn't read the Constitution. Or he didn't read into it what Putin did before making his historic decision that the leaders of four parties would nominate Dmitry Medvedev for president.
“There is enough authority, and Dmitry Anatolyevich and I have determined, if the voters allow us to,” Putin never forgot to say that part, “we will establish our personal relations. I assure there will be nor problems here.”
And there really won't be any problems. Putin is used to trusting Medvedev, and the other way around. It's even more important the other way around.
Few people, if any paid attention to those important words. But they will allow Putin to say, “I talked about it all in February 2008. And your eyes only opened now?”
Putin entertained television viewers with his homey expressions a lot more before Channel One and Rossiya ended the live broadcast after almost two hours. “Do you want me to eat dirt from a flowerpot?” he responded when asked to promise that the ruble would not be denominated. “So who asked France? Shish!” about the placement of missile defense in Europe. “It's an idiotic construction site that has to be closed where they slip though” about an idiotic construction site. And the best of all:
“They pulled it out of their noses and rubbed it on paper.”
He was talking about Western journalists, of course.
He was not caught off guard when a French journalist from Le Figaro reminded him that 99 percent of voters in Chechnya supported and asked if Medvedev could expect the same support there.
That question was addressed to him live, and he thought up what he must have thought was an effective response. He asked a Chechen journalist present to answer, and he explained what the will of the Chechen people is.
Now the sincerity of the first part of the press conference seemed absurd as the president so easily disavowed it. Clearly, there could not be a result like that and they had overreached there. But to defend that was even more excessive. They wanted what was best, the president talked as usual.
But he was defending his own and that was all that mattered to him. The Figaro journalist wasn't one of his.
The president said two more things of substance. When asked by a BBC correspondent about whether there is a schism in the country's political leadership, noting that Anatoly Chubais and Alexey Kudrin have stated that the country's aggressive foreign policy is hindering its economic development, Putin responded that “I didn't notice anyone who could be in considered the political leadership of the country among those you mentioned.”
Finally, the president answered Izvestia newspaper correspondent Ekaterina Grigoryeva's question that he planned to remain prime minister “as long as Dmitry Medvedev is in the post of president of Russia, without even the usual stipulation about if elected… Nor did he add that he doesn't want to be president in 2012 either.
He told a young man from Omsk that he could put the new president's portrait on his office wall, but “I don't have to put up Dmitry Medvedev's portrait to have a personal relationship with him.”
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 15, 2008
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