President Dmitry Medvedev is considering firing his main speechwriter as he looks to develop a style independent of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Wednesday.
Medvedev has rejected speeches written by Dzhakhan Pollyeva, who served in the Kremlin during Putin’s presidency, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified Kremlin official.
Pollyeva might be replaced by Eva Vasilevskaya, an aide to Medvedev when he was a first deputy prime minister, the report said. Vasilevskaya previously worked in the press office of Gazprom, where Medvedev was chairman before becoming president.
The Kremlin had no comment on the report.
Alexei Mukhin, a political analyst with the Center for Political Information, dismissed the report as an old rumor that also surfaced in the run-up to the president’s state-of-the-nation address last fall.
Medvedev is expected to give his second state of the nation address by early November.
National and international media have been awash with reports recently that Medvedev is trying to distance himself further from Putin.
The speculation received fresh fuel by reports about an upcoming paper from a Kremlin-connected think tank that would discard sovereign democracy, a concept associated with Putin’s presidency.
The influential Institute of Contemporary Development, chaired by Medvedev, will publish a report called “Russia in the 21st Century: Shaping Tomorrow,” and its authors are convinced that the time of sovereign democracy has passed, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Wednesday, citing Nikita Maslennikov, one of the report’s authors.
A spokeswoman for the institute confirmed Wednesday that the report was planned but would not comment on its implications.
A report published Tuesday on the Slon.ru web site said the document would try to shape a new liberal ideology to deal with national problems outlined by Medvedev earlier this month in his 3,000-word essay “Go Russia!” which was published by several media outlets.
But Mukhin said all the talk about a rift between the president and prime minister was unconvincing because both were so interdependent. If one attacks the other, both will fall down, he said.
Slon.ru reported that the Institute of Contemporary Development’s report shares this skepticism by calling Medvedev’s and Putin’s work “City of the Sun,” after the work published in the early 17th century by Italian utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella.