Medvedev has grown up

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So far, however, only in the eyes of sociologists: the results of the latest trust rating of top officials of the state show that the president, although inferior in popularity to the prime minister, almost doubled his political weight over the summer, raising his authority - from 10.9 to 20.6%.

“The fact that Medvedev’s trust rating has doubled is not something dazzling. The indicators are within the normal process of becoming a politician,” Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Center for the Study of Elites at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, brought the figures down to earth. Her colleague from the scientific council of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Alexei Malashenko, explains the president’s main trump cards: “He often appears with his wife, he is a fairly cheerful person, he behaves more simply, he looks like one of his own.” Recently, the main doping for raising political weight for Medvedev has also become the fight for justice. Yesterday, for example, he decided to appoint a new head of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate to replace Police Colonel General Vladimir Pronin, who was fired by him after the sensational “safari” of the head of the Tsaritsyno Department of Internal Affairs, Denis Evsyukov.

On Monday, the FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg resumed the investigation into the murder of Galina Starovoitova, which had been hanging like a dead weight on the conscience of the Russian authorities for 11 years. In fact, according to some sources, the investigation was resumed on August 25, but it was announced only on September 7. Why is it so late?

Apparently, the news (both with the rating and with the Ministry of Internal Affairs-FSB) was simply timed to coincide with another underground interview of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (this time to the Germans). In it, the ex-head of YUKOS complained that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars and did not believe in the fairness of the Russian court or in Dmitry Medvedev’s promises to strengthen the legal system in the country. So there was a prompt response from Moscow, from which we can conclude that one does not exclude the other. Although Khodorkovsky most likely could get a life sentence (to be honest, there is a reason for this), he will not be the only one who will have to serve time. For all his outward liberalism, Medvedev also began to lay claim to Putin’s laurels as “the restorer of order in the country.” Our people like this.

And Khodorkovsky is right, perhaps, only in one thing - that he does not make much of a difference between Putin and Medvedev. In essence, both of them, like “a good and a bad investigator,” personify, although different, but still sides of the same power. This means that nothing can radically change either in the situation of Khodorkovsky himself or in the situation in the country. Russian officials, especially those of the highest rank, are not at all alien to conservatism. There has never been another government in Russia. And if there was, then it was no longer power.