Russia Strives to Maintain Economic Momentum Amid Shifting Political Landscape

MARGARET WARNER: Simon, they said they are not. Despite the fact that President Medvedev has sent some kind of encouraging signals. He met with and gave an interview to -- his very first one as president -- to [Dmitri] Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper that has lost, I believe four or five of its staffers in recent years, to really brutal gangland-type slayings, and they are among the 16 or so who have lost their lives since the year 2000. But the journalists we talked to say despite the sort of nice words from Medvedev, they don't feel a difference.

Now, there has been speculation, however, that in the case of Novaya Gazeta that Medvedev has almost extended kind of personal protection to the newspaper and that it means, in the words of one columnist, no more killing of Novaya Gazeta's journalists. Now nobody knows if that's the case, and certainly no one's saying.

SIMON MARKS: Well, let's go to questions from our viewers, Margaret. And we've had one from Mark in Los Angeles, which is directly related. He says, how do ordinary Russians, just regular people on the street, view their leaders?

MARGARET WARNER: That is the toughest question. Tell Mark that's a very tough question. From our conversations with them and also public opinion surveys, they are generally very supportive of both Medvedev and Putin. Both of them still have approval ratings in the 60s or approaching 70 (percent).

That said, the economic crisis has begun to take a little bit of a toll in what we would call the job approval rating. Even though they're still personally popular, the job approval rating has slipped somewhat. And we've seen, especially Prime Minister Putin, who is really the crisis manager of the economic crisis, taking some well-publicized sort of populist steps recently. For instance, he went to one factory that hadn't paid its workers and dressed down the oligarch who owned it, Gary Paska, saying, "You've got to pay these workers." That was featured on Russian state TV, which as you know most of the televisions stations -- all but one are completely owned by the Kremlin or its friends. And then he went to a grocery store this past week to look into the complaints about the high prices, especially the price of pork. We went to the same grocery store a couple of days later, however, and people were still grumbling about the prices, and saying that nothing, nothing had changed.

So, you know, there's clearly an awareness on the part of both Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev and the Kremlin and prime minister's office that despite their personal popularity they have to try to address the anxiety that many Russians are feeling right now about the economy.

SIMON MARKS: Well, our next question comes from another viewer who asks, "What is your sense of whether Prime Minister Putin is putting Russia on a stable political path, or as a former KGB officer, is he moving Russia back into a dictatorial future, perhaps not Stalinist, but as a place without many of the freedoms the United States deems essential?"

MARGARET WARNER: Prime Minister Putin, when he was president, decisively took over the media here, particularly the electronic media. And there are now just four national TV networks left, three of the four are completely controlled by the Kremlin and its friends, and the fourth one, as one activist said to us, knows exactly where the line is, so censors itself.

There are some independent newspapers, like the one that President Medvedev gave the interview to. But only 20 percent of Russians get their news primarily from newspapers, 80 percent from television. So if people don't know much about other people's complaints, it's kind of a self-reinforcing loop. At least that seems to be the climate here.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, that's hard for me to answer quite that way, but let's just say that as you know well, Stalinist legacy is very visible all around Moscow. The skyline is still somewhat dominated by these seven skyscrapers known as the "seven sisters" that are built in this, sort of I guess you'd call it gothic, or other people say it's Russian baroque style. And it's the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and it's Moscow State University, to name two. And those were built during Stalin's last years.

But it's very hard to tell, at least for me not speaking Russian, how Russians feel about him. If you talk to people who speak English and who are from a certain kind of intelligentsia class, there is a deep level of embarrassment and I would almost say shame about certainly the mass repressions of the Stalin era.

At the same time, if one looks at analyses of public opinion, and even just talks to ordinary people, there is tremendous nostalgia for the days when the Soviet Union was a great power in the world and Stalin epitomizes that. He is the one who led the Soviet Union through World War II, and to victory. And was here until the early 1950s when the Soviet Union was a power to be reckoned with.

Finally, though it's not as confined a public discussion as, say, a Tiananmen Square in China, it is certainly not a topic that you're going to read about or hear about on the news. So I would say that whole question about what is the legacy, what does it really mean to Russia today is still very much unresolved.

SIMON MARKS: Well, let me ask you a question about Russian politics today. This comes from Peter Ward in Arlington, Va. And he asks, "The governors of Russia's far-flung provinces are appointed now by federal authorities in Moscow, instead of being elected locally. How do senior Russian politicians justify such an undemocratic process?"

MARGARET WARNER: Well, Simon, so far they haven't had to. When then-President Putin imposed this direct, this selection by the president, of these regional governors, rather than the election, there was not a peep really out of the public. Not from the political classes, nor the liberal activists.

However, the Levada polling center, which is a very respected survey organization here in Moscow, just released a new poll in which 57 percent of Russians, something like that, well over 50, said they now thought these governors should be popularly elected. What's more, a few of the governors of the regions, even though they themselves have been appointed, have been quoted as saying they think they should be elected and that their legislatures, regional legislatures should be, because otherwise they don't have any popular support.

So, I don't know if a change is in store, but it's definitely something that is now being talked about.

MARGARET WARNER: There are certainly lots and lots of small businesses, lots of them and medium-sized businesses, but as a share of the Russian economy, it's just a pittance. And that is because the Russian economy is still so dominated by the oil and gas export business. So that kind of overshadows everything else.

There are efforts now in part generated by the government to kick-start investment, in particular high-tech enterprises. And so we did go see Anatoly Chubias, who's the controversial architect of the early-'90s economic reforms, about this corporation called Rusnano that he is head of, in which they invite and arrange these joint ventures with foreign companies to, for example, open up a new silicon wafer plant in Russia.

However, President Medvedev has actually been a little critical of even that enterprise, saying again these companies they're creating are too big. So the latest is they're going to start this fund, and invite Silicon Valley venture capitalists to be part of it and others in the rest of the world to try to kick-start small and medium-sized business.

The final thing I'd say about that is that there are still these large industrial businesses that are really being kept alive really through subsidies. I'll give you one example. We went to the Gaz auto plant in Nizhny Novgorod last week, and the manager is walking me around one of the plants and I said, you know, we don't see a lot of people actually working here and what do you do when you can't -- and he said well, a lot of our lines aren't going half the time because we don't have orders. And I said, so what happens to those workers? And he said oh, we send them out to clean the city's streets. I said who pays for that? He said we pay part of it and the city pays part of it.

So in other words, they aren't laying off those workers but in fact those factories if they had to exist in the market, truly in the market, already are completely uncompetitive and unprofitable.

So in that climate I would say it's very much a work in progress to try to generate Russian-made products that actually the rest of the world would want.