The rhetoric of renovation and reinvigoration cultivated by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been severely curtailed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who presented to the State Duma last week the last report on the work of his government.
Putin claimed full credit for the fact that “the national economy has made a post-crisis breakthrough” and asserted that Russia needed a decade of “steady, uninterrupted development”. What surprised most commentators on this lengthy speech loaded with figures was the resolute dismissal of the philosophy of modernization and the firm intention to lead “without sudden radical changes in course or ill thought through experiments based so often in either unjustified economic liberalism or, on the other hand, social demagogy”.
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