Strongman, The

schoolbooks, which attempted to whitewash Stalin. He said: ‘Let’s just think about it: millions of people died as a result of terror and false accusations – millions. They were deprived of all rights, even the right to a decent human burial; for years their names were simply erased from history. But even today you can still hear voices claiming that those innumerable victims were justified for some higher national purpose. I believe that no national progress, successes or ambitions can develop at the price of human misery and loss. Nothing can take precedence over the value of human life. And there is no excuse for repression.’
    Contrast that with Putin, who as president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem, called for the reintroduction of Soviet-era basic military training in schools and allowed the publication of a manual for history teachers which described Stalin as an ‘efficient manager’. The book argued that one of the reasons for Stalin’s repressions, in which millions were incarcerated or murdered, was ‘his goal of ensuring maximum efficiency of the management apparatus, while the Great Terror of the 1930s had achieved ‘the creation of a new management class suited to the tasks of modernisation under the conditions of scarce resources’.
    It was not just ‘liberal talk’ on Medvedev’s part. He also took small but real steps that gave heart to the democrats. In January 2009, for example, he quietly scuttled a draft law backed by Putin, that would have expanded the definition of treason to include almost any criticism of the government or contact with foreigners, and said he had been influenced by the outcry in the media and society against the proposed change.
    He also took measures to defend the right to demonstrate. Since July opposition activists had begun holding unauthorised rallies on the last day of any month with 31 days, to draw attention to Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right of assembly. The rallies were invariably broken up within minutes by riot police, and protestors arrested. The Duma then passed a bill to restrict street protests even further, but in November Medvedev vetoed it. Putin’s view of protests, by contrast, is that it is normal for police to ‘beat demonstrators about the head with a baton if they’re in the wrong place’.
    In June 2010 a Duma bill broadened the functions of the security services to ‘fight extremism’. The law would have allowed the FSB to issue warnings to people it believed were ‘about to’ commit a crime, and threaten, fine or even arrest them for up to 15 days for disobeying its orders. After his Human Rights Council complained that the bill ‘revived the worst practices of the totalitarian state’, however, President Medvedev watered it down – and insisted: ‘I want you to know that this has been done on my personal orders.’
    Putin and Medvedev never, at this stage, openly contradicted each other. But a battle of ideas was being waged by their proxies. A liberal think-tank, the Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR), was set up just after Medvedev was elected president, and he became chairman of its Board of Trustees. The institute’s chairman, Igor Yurgens, says the president agrees with ‘some but not all’ of his views, but over the few years of its existence Medvedev has in fact veered more and more towards INSOR’s ideas. In February 2010 it published a long report titled ‘Russia in the 21st Century: Vision for the Future’, which suggested undoing many of Putin’s political reforms. It envisaged a Western-style two-party system, a media free of state interference, independent courts, directly elected regional governors and a scaled-back security service. The report was at once denounced by Putin’s spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov, who declared: ‘You can’t create democracy in three days, you can’t turn a child into an adult just like that.’
    But in November Medvedev himself turned his guns on Putin’s much vaunted ‘stability’. He used words reminiscent of Gorbachev’s, who branded the period of communist government just before he came to power as years of ‘stagnation’. In a video blog Medvedev appeared to condemn the de facto one-party rule of Putin’s United Russia party: ‘It is no secret that for some time now signs of stagnation have begun to appear in our political life and stability has threatened to turn into stagnation. And such stagnation is