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A benign discussion on whether the Russian political system is up for the job of handling the global economic crisis has turned into a shouting match between senior Kremlin officials vying for the right to set the political agenda of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency.
Last week, Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov fired a powerful warning shot against Medvedev's senior economic advisers Arkady Dvorkovich and Igor Yurgens, who had the audacity to criticize the government's approach to handling the crisis. They went as far as to suggest that Russia's political system has become too rigid to withstand the crisis.
Surkov took issue with Yurgens' thesis that Putin's "social contract," in which Russians renounced some of their freedoms in exchange for the trickle-down economic benefit of high oil prices, is no longer viable. Now that the prosperous years are over, the people would like to have some of their abdicated rights back.
Surkov scoffed at the notion that prosperity limits freedom. "Freedom has a material dimension," he argued, "and the prosperity of citizens increased in recent years not in order to take away people's freedom but in order to make people free."
He defended Russia's political system as "working" in these challenging times. Its rigidity, he asserts, is its strength, not its weakness, because it will hold the country together during the crisis and not allow it to come apart at the seams as it once nearly did in 1990s.
Surkov is right when argues that those who call for a complete overhaul of the country's political system are downright irresponsible.
The Solidarity coalition has called for the government's resignation, the return of gubernatorial elections and a new Constitution by the end of 2009. Can the Solidarty leaders be trusted with running the country? You have to be kidding!
But Surkov is wrong in claiming that the system is working well. The State Duma, Federation Council and all major political parties have been emaciated by their utter irrelevance in developing a crisis response. Surkov's claim that no parliament in the world can produce effective solutions is simply ill-informed. Any political system in which the parliament is an irrelevant institution needs a lot more than a facelift.
The good news, though, is that the standoff has revealed that there is room for a healthy debate at the highest levels of power in Russia. Perhaps this a sign that the system may be working.
Vladimir Frolov is president of LEFF Group, a government-relations and PR company.