With President Dmitry Medvedev going online to appeal to the Russian people for their support for his modernization agenda, one wonders whether he feels he has reached the limit of his power to bring change to this country.
Last week, Medvedev posted a long essay in a number of online publications where, in a poignantly emotional style, he called for a different future for Russia. His analysis of the nation’s challenges is honest to the point of being humiliating to Russia’s elites. The Russian economy, like in Soviet times, continues to churn out shoddy products few people in other countries want to buy. Russian companies, with rare exceptions, trade in goods and services they themselves never created, like energy and imported consumer goods. Energy efficiency and labor productivity at some of the best Russian companies are shameful by global standards, but their owners and managers are blissfully unfazed about this. Democratic institutions are stable, but people show little interest in democratic self-rule and continue to look to the government to solve problems they should tackle themselves as a community.
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