Translated material
The results of the week. Russia in Davos
In the Kremlin
The results of the week. Russia in Davos
January 25, 2013 Maxim Blot
Russia brought to Davos the largest delegation for the entire time of the country's participation in the World Economic Forum, which officials spoke not without pride, packing suitcases for a trip to Switzerland. Interest in Russia will be heated by its upcoming chairmanship in the "big twenty", the same officials predicted. President Putin, however, did not go to the forum, sending the head of government to Davos. Which made the duty-optimistic speech about the upcoming institutional reforms aimed at improving the business climate, about interest in foreign investors, for which the state has prepared a number of very attractive projects, about the upcoming large-scale privatization and a bet on a private initiative that the government is ready to make.
In some other circumstances, this speech might have passed “with a bang”, now all the words said by Medvedev sounded, to put it mildly, wildly. Firstly, a couple of days before the opening of the event, a report written by experts of the Davos forum (including ex-ministers of liberals Alexei Kudrin and German Gref), which examines three scenarios of Russia's development, and all are negative, was released. The degree of negativity is determined in them mainly by world prices for raw materials, and the option of serious institutional reforms is not considered at all. The conclusions of the VEF experts are confirmed by the IMF mission, which reduced the forecast of economic growth in Russia, at the same time concluding that the economy is developing at the highest possible speed in the current circumstances. Medvedev, having familiarized himself with all the negative scenarios, tried to convince everyone of the possibility of the fourth, positive script, but he did not go further than a beautiful wishes.
Secondly, even if the “tandem” still somehow exists, everyone understands who is the main one in it. And this “main” not only did not go to the forum, shortly before its opening, he appointed his adviser Sergei Glazyev, who instructed Marta to prepare a report “On a set of measures to ensure sustainable development of Russia in conditions of global instability”. In the report, if anyone does not know, we will talk about how America frantically prints dollars to buy “our everything”, and at the same time everything else, and how we resist this and fight this. And here the situation becomes completely absurd, painfully reminiscent of an old joke about a lady who, from the balcony of the second floor, stops a passerby with a scream: “Mutishchina, I'm afraid of you!”.
The attitude towards Medvedev and his speeches illustrates the following episode. Some of those present noted that one of the authors of negative scripts for Russia, Alexei Kudrin, was sitting in the headphones during the performance of Prime Minister Medvedev. Of course, we can assume that Dmitry Anatolyevich asked Alexei Leonidovich to follow the old friendship with the accuracy of the translation, but something makes him doubt this version. Rather, Kudrin simply turned off the sound in the headphones, because he wanted to get rid of an unpleasant feeling of awkwardness, more and more often arising from completely different people at the sight of the Russian prime minister’s speaking speech.
Foreigners, however, gave Medvedev a chance, at the same time holding a kind of test. Bloomberg TV correspondent, to whom the Russian prime minister gave an interview, asked the question of the Magnitsky case. “He was a corporate lawyer or accountant, defended the interests of the people who hired him. He is not a fighter for the truth, ”Medvedev said, nevertheless, he, of course, sorry, because he died in prison.” The causes of death must be sorted out. “Everything else is a politicized fiction of individual citizens, some of which, including spinning in Davos in order to justify its own commercial operations in Russia. These people earned billions of dollars, trading in Russian assets, and at the moment when fraudulent actions were discovered, they took political positions, ”the prime minister added. Russian politicians in Davos repeatedly had to answer questions about the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, and Dmitry Medvedev’s answer was practically no different from the answer of Igor Sechin, who in 2011, the founder of Hermitage Capital, William Brauder earned in Russian billions. And after Medvedev’s answer, the question of investments in Russia, as well as about actively advertised reforms, was closed to many potential investors. The test has not passed, nothing has changed in the country, and behind the liberal rhetoric there is all the same risk of losing everything, including life.
So the “captains of the world business”, no matter what the freshly baked adviser to President Putin is invented, did not arrange any violent excitement around the investment projects brought to Davos and did not line up with freshly printed dollars for Russian assets. They politely listened and took up the discussion of more important and pressing issues - the prospects for the development of a debt crisis in Europe, a “budget cliff” in the United States, and slowdown in China.