When visiting Berlin, President Dmitry Medvedev stated to Frau Chancellor Angela Merkel “that we are on the threshold of absolute freedom of media”. It turned out, however, that he meant not Russia, but the general situation in the world. To put it more exactly, he spoke of “the growing opportunities by the global Net”. According to him, the number of 30-35 millions of the home users plus digital TV, impossible to be “jammed”, has almost dismissed the charges by the West about violation of the freedom of speech in Russia.   

The mistress of the “Washing Machine” (this name was given to a Berlin residence of Angela Merkel) had nothing but to praise the English by her new partner from the Kremlin and to admit that he is the man who is possible to deal with. It seems that Russians have been able to find an approach to the West even without knowledge of German.   

People in Russia took note of something different. Reasoning on the Russian media situation, the President said that a few years ago it needed to be protected against enthrallment by private companies, while now it needs protection from the administrative apparatus on different levels of power. That means, he equated the state control with oligarchic one. Such an admission is worth a lot under conditions of the state monopolism in the home TV market.   

I remember Vladimir Putin say he likes more “what there is now” than “what was before”. The today’s prime minister has never repented publicly about that attitude. Moreover, in his interview for the “Monde” he gave to understand that exactly the current model of democracy is what Russian people need. Actual one-party system he interpreted as an ability by a large group of people to work out decisions that fit the interests of the majority of the population (nothing was said about interests by the oppressed part). Abolition of electiveness of the heads of the regional administrations Vladimir Putin called to be a passing of part of federal powers along with the financial resources. Well, who of the French could understand that the money is just passed down from level to level of the vertical of power! French journalists were more interested to know about the fortune of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And here the head of the government advised that his successor solve this problem in accordance with the law. Seems like a known sentence “everything for friends, and the law for the enemies”.    

“Kinglike” reception of Putin in the West, compared to warm but reserved welcome of Medvedev, means that the countries of traditional democracy have a good understanding of the Russian realities. Europeans must have been pleased to hear from Dmitry Medvedev about common roots – Roman, German, French law. But when during the economic forum in St Petersburg same man blamed the US for the world crisis, the Europe just shrugged its shoulders. Rhetoric reminding of the times of the cold war does not fit Medvedev, who was almost titled as the “another Gorbachev” for his Davos address two years ago. One should distinguish the difference between what is said to home and foreign audience, but it’s same people who come to Davos and to St Petersburg. So one may have a pity on them sometimes!    

More interesting and precise was the President’s address to the 10th World Congress of the Russian Press in Moscow. The audience was delighted with the promises by the President that the compatriots living abroad not only would be given domain names in the Cyrillic, but also the culture and morality in the Net would be protected without use of censorship.   

Well, adequate behavior by the top persons is more important than the gap between their speeches intended for home and foreign audiences. The interior of the chief office in the country now looks in a more modern way with two plasma displays, and the President says his computer is never turned off. It remains to substitute the software of the old regime after obsolescent “hardware” – metallic notes in the voice.