Between words

What signals did the officials catch in the presidential message

On November 12, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev delivered a Address to the Federal Assembly. The officials and parliamentarians gathered in St. George's Hall prepared to catch the signals. In a situation where there are no clear rules of the game, well-tuned receptors are an indispensable condition for survival: they signal the danger, the location of the feeding ground and the time when it is necessary to start reproductive procedures. The signals were not long in coming. What are they - understood The New Times
In fact, the first signal was leaked from the Kremlin information about the alignment of higher forces that determined the content of the message. The President did not dare, as he did last year, to entrust this matter to his assistant Arkady Dvorkovich. By all appearances, Dmitry Medvedev is holding firmly in his memory the cruel lesson he learned from his mentor while working on last year's document. Two weeks before the announcement of the previous message, Vladimir Putin categorically refused to approve the inspired anti-crisis manifesto that came out from the pen of Dvorkovich. According to rumors, it was then that the disgraced student learned that he would have to tell the Federal Assembly not about the fight against the crisis, but about constitutional reform.

Filtering the market
According to government officials familiar with the situation, the duumvirs, in order not to repeat the embarrassment, ran in the main positions of the message as early as October 30, during a two-hour meeting face to face. According to insiders, Putin in no way wanted Medvedev to talk about the main things - systemic corruption, low-stakes budget and tax policies, mass impoverishment and alcoholism of the population, a wild increase in crime and the total decomposition of law enforcement agencies, de-industrialization of the country and the actual sabotage by departments of invented in the Kremlin modernization measures. As a result, the White House assures, the president and the prime minister agreed that Putin would speak about the stable and promising present of their beloved country on November 21, at the next congress of United Russia, where Medvedev would come only as a guest. And the subject of the presidential address will be, first of all, "beautiful far away."

Failure of the referrer
It turned out to be so beautiful that some grateful listeners were afraid for the state of mind of the speech writers. The document is defiantly inadequate to the real problems of the state, economy and society. Obscenely direct borrowings from the presidential speeches of a distant black American friend, futuristic dreams of the Institute of Contemporary Development, measured concessions to parties and humanitarian initiatives that keep the warmth of the provisional hand of the first deputy head of the administration Vladislav Surkov - all this is mixed in Medvedev's hundred-minute speech with stumps of quotes from the proposals of the Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry of Justice and RSPP. The actual failure of the message, according to employees of the Kremlin headquarters familiar with the situation, is on the conscience of the head of the presidential referent office, Eva Vasilevskaya, who, however, was appointed to this post only on October 6.

* * Work on the message began, as they say, at the end of August 2009. Draft message in the form of an article “Forward Russia!” was posted on September 10th. But the latest version of the main presidential document until the moment of announcement was kept in a terrible secret. By Thursday evening, the complaints of influential people who had sent the above-mentioned “source codes” to the Kremlin had made the telephones in the presidential reception room white-hot. And the next morning, the message had already become the target of sarcastic comments from world agencies.

Before leaving for Singapore, Medvedev, according to rumors, told his speech writers everything he thought about their multi-useful activities. But for the message and some accompanying signals, it seems that their immediate boss, the head of the administration, Sergei Naryshkin, who formally coordinated the work on the document instead of Arkady Dvorkovich, is in danger of suffering in the first place.

VEB, Ramzan and others
Tellingly, it was Dvorkovich who was the first to comment on the message, from the preparation of which he was excommunicated. If Medvedev attacked the state corporations "as a whole", then Dvorkovich demanded the corporatization of the holy of holies - the Development Bank, the fiefdom of the prime minister and his most influential associate, Igor Sechin. Putin's reaction, according to official rumors, turned out to be very painful: Sechin hardly managed to convince him not to refute the statement of the presidential assistant for economics online. The corporatization of VEB is a very expensive business (giant cash injections into the authorized capital are needed in order to comply with the Central Bank's standards), moreover, it is the current status that protects VEB from the claims of a number of foreign creditors. Doesn't Dvorkovich understand this? Is this not a signal for an attack on the head of VEB, Vladimir Dmitriev, addressed to his enemies living in the Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Development? And the presidential passage about the inadmissibility of continuing massive state support for "inefficient industries" (behind which AvtoVAZ is guessed) looks like a "black mark" for the general director of Russian Technologies, Sergei Chemezov, who is also "subject to corporatization".

The resignation of the head of the administration, Sergei Naryshkin, who can immediately answer for both Dvorkovich's demarche and the speech writers, has been waiting for the third month. Naryshkin was tipped to be the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and Sergei Sobyanin, head of the White House staff, will probably be returned to his place. Although the analysis of the text of the message, in the opinion of insiders, confirms the assumption that the leaders of several other competing groups are “in the game”. This is primarily the head of the Kremlin control department, Konstantin Chuichenko, who patronizes Dvorkovich. This is the unchanging Surkov, who does not expect anything good for himself from Sobyanin's return to the Kremlin, but fundamentally avoids conflicts with the "chief controller". This, finally, is Chuichenko's main enemy - Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov, who is equally close to the president. So, perhaps, the change of the head of administration will still have to wait.

It is symptomatic that both Chuichenko and Konovalov have “support groups” comparable in influence and even their own creatures at the top of law enforcement and law enforcement agencies. It seems that this is partly explained by the unambiguous frontal "attack" on the Chechen leadership, which was voiced in the message. Passages about Ramzan Kadyrov, the “open embezzlement” of federal funds and the need to introduce the post of all-powerful governor of Moscow in the North Caucasus met with a positive response in the leadership of the FSB and the high command of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

From the content of the message and the meaning of the intrigues enveloping it, people in power concluded that the personal political quotes of the head of state continue to decline, and undercover showdowns are growing in his entourage. However, it continues to look for new hardware alliances. Not in order to conditionally look like the first person of the country until 2012. And to become unconditionally and undeniably second.

We will find iron in Antarctica,
We will find the land of Atlantis
Let's rush to the clear stars in rockets,
We will break through to distant planets.
We will light a new light over the Earth,
And with a mighty, all-powerful hand
We will pave the way through the centuries.
Let our children be proud!

(Student Olya P. Russian language textbook for the 4th grade. Uchpedgiz, 1974)