Translated material
Two mirrors
A session of the answers of President Putin to questions of citizens, the first after his re -election for a second term, was late for almost a year. The Kremlin referred to some technological considerations: they say, in winter it is better to arrange meetings with journalists in the room, and not to take ordinary people in the cold.
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In time, the current “direct line” with the president practically coincided with the “folk referendum” of the Communist Party. In both of these attempts by the dialogue of the authorities and society, not only time, but also a place plays an important role. In the “People’s Referendum”, as you know, each region adds one or two of its own to seven all-Russian issues. The count was even left there for the most acute question of the district scale, which the party’s district committees can add. Of great importance was the regional component when selecting those six dozen “main” representative questions that the president answered.
Vladimir Putin is generally the most “geographical” of the recent domestic leaders: he spends a lot of time traveling around the country and monthly only officially and individually meets 5-10 regional leaders. The principles of geographical political correctness are carefully observed in the organization of “direct lines”. This time, for example, the president answered questions from 27 regions of the country (this is not counting 4 cases when the name of the region remains behind brackets, and 6 questions from abroad). At the same time, special inclusions were organized in the ten regions, and out of two dozen, separate issues came. The inclusions were organized in such a way as to cover all federal districts. At the same time, increased attention for both inclusions and on individual issues was given to the South and Volga districts; Siberia and the Urals sounded weaker than others.
This time there were much less questions than "for understanding and clarification." Nevertheless, the share of regions with the chapters recently appointed by the President - and there are more than a third of the total number - significantly less statistical. In all regions where there were inclusions, the governors elected “in the old” rule. By the way, it was precisely the governors that were most often mentioned in the presidential answers. Two questions were devoted directly to the replacement of the head of the region - from the Irkutsk and Nizhny Novgorod regions; The attention of the recently appointed Saratov governor was drawn to the disorder in the region entrusted to him, and the shortcomings marked on the farm of the Ivanovo governor, the next day, resulted in an orgent - the president offered the candidacy to him to replace.
The object of indicative flogging was the Stavropol governor, now passing through the reassignment procedure. In response to the complaint of a pensioner who had already written Putin that had already written about the absence of water in the village, the president strictly noted that “just these days, the issue of submitting candidates for the post of governor of the Stavropol Territory is being decided. Documents in relation to the current governor have been prepared by me, but so far they are not sent to Stavropol and will not be sent until he solves this problem. ” The bizarre mixture of Saltykov-Shchedrin with "Comrade Putin thinks of us."
It remains to compare two pictures: what excites the people from the point of view of opposition-organizers of the “folk referendum” and that it should worry from the point of view of the Kremlin. The contrast is striking. Folk dusks in the place of the Communist Party of the Communist Party are as follows: in a number of regions there is a great dissatisfaction with the heads and the question of distrust them (such as Murtase Rakhimov in Bashkortostan and Vladimir Kulakov in the Voronezh region) is raised, in the Chelyabinsk region of people is worried about ecology, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory - the reproduction of industrial giants, in Khabarovsk the region - the transfer of the Amur Islands to China, and in the Volgograd region - the reverse renaming of the regional center to Stalingrad; In many agrarian regions - Chuvashia, Altai Territory, Omsk Region, etc. - state support for agriculture.
In the good half of the regions, where there were no regional issues of regional issues or was not enough, people are interviewed about the creation of a union state with Belarus. In the capitals and problems of the capital: in Moscow, this is the account of the opinions of residents in commercial development, in St. Petersburg - the ban on the transfer of architectural monuments for private use. It cannot be said that the “folk” picture is impeccable: an example of its separation from reality and/or avoiding acute conflict problems is the issue of introducing a single school uniform in Kabardino-Balkaria, which is in a deep socio-economic and political crisis.
However, the “presidential” picture, absolutely not coinciding with the “people's”, from the regional communities that really exciting the regional communities further further. True, the task was a slightly different - not so much to make a review of regional problems as to voice the problems in the “right” places, the position on which the Kremlin decided to present. In the Far East, these are the Kuril Islands and the right -hand drive, in Tomsk - the reform of higher education, in Izhevsk - the VPK, in Volgograd - veterans, in Vorkuta - “north” and coal mining, in the Kuban resorts, in Chechnya, oddly enough, Chechnya.
So, both mirrors are in the hands of the president and the left opposition - crooked, but crookedly in different ways. None of them gives a complete idea of the pain points of Russian society. But they taken together are much more informative than each separately.
Nikolai Petrov,
Brani.ru.