Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center

Last week Dmitry Medvedev celebrated the second anniversary of his landslide victory in the 2008 presidential elections of the Russian Federation. For observers, it was a moment of heightened interest, awe, and bottomless speculation that the country may take a turn away from Vladimir Putin's heavy handed political model toward a new era. Two years on, a similar bated-breath optimism for reform remains oddly suspended in mid air.

Let's take a moment to dig back into the news archives to see what people were saying about Medvedev two years ago. Alexei Arbatov of Carnegie Moscow Center had argued that "Putin's selection of Medvedev likely represents a real decision on his part in favor of reform and modernization," and that "There is a sense of change and a new mood arising in Russia today which points to a new stage in Russia's political and economic development."

At the time, when Sen. Hillary Clinton was still gunning for a victory in the presidential primaries, she issued this statement  to welcome the new president: "Mr. Medvedev has said some hopeful sounding things in the course of his campaign, and the job of a new American President will be to test these words, to see whether they could mark a new approach in Russian politics and foreign policy." (My, how things change.)
Even Tony Barber over that the Financial Times was drinking the Kool-Aid: "All this supports the argument that Medvedev will introduce changes - to the Russian economy, to the Russian state's treatment of its citizens, and in time perhaps to Russian foreign policy. But he will do it in his own, very personal, very Russian way."

But eerily, we appear to be at the exact same point two years later, looking at modernization as forever in suspended animation. Compare Medvedev's cornerstone speech in Krasnoyarsk on Feb. 15, 2008 outlining his liberal values with his later "Go Russia!" think piece, to his most recent speech to the State Council on Jan. 22, 2010.
If you think about it, it really is an incredible accomplishment. Medvedev has managed to say the same thing, over and over again with slightly different words, for more than two years and still his audience is perched on the edge of the seat wondering what will happen.

But the impatience is beginning to show in some sectors. In a much-discussed Newsweek article, Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova lay down a broadside rejection of the myth that the Russian president is making any progress toward liberalization. Even if the president genuinely holds the many values he talks about, the journalists write, his unwillingness to create "any institution such as independent prosecutors, press, or political parties that could challenge or investigate" the business interests or corruption of government elites has rendered his modernization program toothless.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has also lashed out with impatience over the government's failure to fulfill promises of reform: "[The authorities] have returned to the monopoly of the party of power and are even proud of this," he said. "We have the institutions: we have a parliament, though I don't know whether you can call it a parliament, we have courts. We seem to have everything, but we don't. It's like decorations."

I think that Gorbachev has got it right on this one: that most of the modernization buzz assumes that the Russian leadership - on Medvedev's side or Putin's side regardless - is actually working toward the establishment of functional institutional political structure, but in fact most of these words, policies, and goals end up just being decoration. Brian Whitmore of RSF/RL recently used the words "unitary executive" (summoning visions of certain American abuses) to describe the goal of the Putinist political model, which oddly overlaps with a recent description by Kremlinologist Gleb Pavlovsky that Medvedev is seeking to capitalize on the "efficacy" of the system to make Russia "more normal."

So perhaps it is this character of Russian modernization, reform, and liberalization efforts that makes it so hard to pin down, and possible to remain in suspended animation: nobody is sure exactly what we mean when we talk about these subjects. Is modernization just the firing of some corrupt cops and prison officials while the political prisoners are kept in the gulag? Is reform measured by the extension of greater autonomy to regional governors, while direct elections remain out of reach?
Perhaps observers of Kremlin politics would find it more useful to not assume that all these measures are made to increase the efficiency of the governing apparatus, and look rather to the service provided by the "decorations" of reform, the perception of proactive progress, and all the other continuities such processes are able to hide.

By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center