OREANDA-NEWS. October 19, 2011. The idea of establishing an ‘extended government’, which the President advanced at the meeting with his supporters last Saturday, was one of the main subjects of discussion.

The Public Committee’s purpose is to draft proposals for state administration reform and also propose feedback tools that would get the public more involved in running the country.

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PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon everyone, thank you for coming here today.

Let me remind you of the events of these last few days. There was the meeting with my supporters on Saturday, at which the proposal was made to establish a public committee to work on state administrative reform and reflect on the way we want our government and society to look in the future. It was Mikhail Abyzov who made this proposal, though the idea was in the air really and so Mikhail probably can’t claim exclusive authorship, but thanks to him anyway for formulating the proposal. It received my support and the support of the others present at the meeting too, as I recall it.

There has been quite a lot of reaction in the media, and I have read much of what people have been writing. We can discuss all of this today, discuss your comments and my responses. Whatever the case, the proposal has not gone unnoticed, and this is good because it means that we have touched the right public nerve. I therefore decided not to delay and to invite you all here to my office, those who were at the meeting on Saturday, and those who were not there, but who I see as likeminded people, to decide how to proceed from here.

If there are no principled objections to the idea of this public committee then we could discuss today what exactly the committee will do, what its future tasks will be, and how we can ultimately use it as a communications tool and prototype of the ‘extended government’ that I spoke about on Saturday at the Digital October centre.

All of you here are people who I know, people I have heard about, or people who work together with me. But the circle of likeminded people does not stop here. It can grow in any case, change and transform. Simply, today I have invited those who I want to invite to begin this work.

Last time, at the Digital October centre, I did a lot of the talking myself, talked for more than two hours in fact. I don’t know how you all found the patience. I heard some say it was no problem, but others say it got a bit wordy. I will not talk a lot today. I want to hear what you have to say, listen to your proposals on what you think the best way to begin this work.

You come from a broad range of walks of life: from the regional and local authorities, journalists, politicians, State Duma deputies, businesspeople, and members of the creative professions. Some of my helpers in the election campaign are also here, people from United Russia, but not only United Russia. You could say in any case that what has brought us all here today is also a kind of battle, not so much a political battle as the battle for our country’s brighter future. It has become a real tradition over time here to use battle terminology. It seems we cannot think in any other terms, though I can’t help but see in this the reflection of a constant sense of emergency that, frankly, is not to my liking. But our language has become so infused with this martial vocabulary that I cannot avoid it either.

In any case, we must move forward. I want us to discuss today how to go about modernising our country and society over the coming years in the political configuration that will result if we win the upcoming elections in December and next March.

We have set ambitious but noble goals that deserve our battle efforts. You all know these goals: a modern new economy based on intellectual advantage rather than raw materials resources, and modern democratic institutions that do not just exist on paper alone. I am far from thinking that our democratic institutions today exist on paper alone, otherwise I would not be in government at all and would no doubt join some other political movement, but I do think that our political institutions are not ideal in their work and frequently suffer from a range of problems. Just how to deal with these problems is another of the subjects we can discuss.

What else do we need? We need an effective social policy that encompasses the broad mass of our people and reaches out to almost every social group in the country. I do not think social policy should be narrowly focused on any one particular group.

Of course we need to work on the essential tasks such as eliminating poverty in our country and expanding the middle class. But it is clear that until such time as this happens we will need to think about the least well-off people in our country and try to make their lives more stable, attractive and modern.

Of course we also need to think about our veterans. Every country cares about its senior citizens of course. This is normal. We all need to reflect too on the situation we will face ourselves with time, because we all start off young of course, but eventually we all grow old.

We need to consider the needs of our people with disabilities. There are a lot of people with disabilities in Russia. These are active and creative people, but sadly, various social norms and laws have prevented them from always taking a full part in the normal modern life of which they would like to be a part. This is an issue we have discussed before. We need to look at how best to reorganise the legislation relating to people with disabilities and properly enforce these laws.

We need interethnic harmony. This is a separate and very complex issue for our country, which is home to a large number of peoples and religions, and for our society, in which we see the same processes and threats as exist in other countries today. These are challenges that need decisive and effective responses. We must act, and not just talk about building a harmonious world. The Soviet period did not succeed in building it, but perhaps we will. We need to feel out the right approach, work out how best to proceed.

Our political institutions, judicial system, law enforcement agencies, an honest police force, and the intelligence services all need to be under the control not just of the state authorities but of the public too.

The strong army that we have been developing and modernising over these last years is also an important institution in public life. It is my conviction, and I hope you support my view, that we must make sure that the changes that have taken place in the armed forces will remain in place and continue. Some of my colleagues think that our defence spending is a waste of money, but I do not share this view at all. We have begun genuine defence reform, and this has brought real change to the armed forces’ morale, as we saw in 2008, and not only then. Service pay and wages are higher, spirits are higher too, and they are getting new equipment. No country, and certainly not a vast and complex nuclear-weapon state such as ours, can get by without an army.

You all know these issues well. I want to hear what you have to say on any of these matters.

We need to develop our international relations, develop relations with the entire world based on mutual respect, recognition of state sovereignty of course, and also mutual enrichment. We cannot carry out our modernisation without other countries’ help and support. We should not fall for illusions: the iron curtain did not help anyone and the theory that social systems could develop autonomously ended up in a dead-end. But outside help should take the right form, meet our needs, and be based on equal partnership.

I have worked over these last few years to build our relations with the world, with West and East, and with our integration organisation partners, in just this spirit. I hope that we will continue developing this subject too, because much depends on the kind of relations we build with the countries around us.

The thing I want to say for a start is that of course everyone here believes that Russia and its people have a bright future ahead even if we do not always like everything that takes place here within the country and beyond its borders.

But under no circumstances can we turn back. The main fears in the air at the moment are about what this new political configuration will bring in the future: will we keep moving forward, or will we come to a halt and sink into stagnation. People draw analogies with the Brezhnev period. I already spoke about this at the meeting with my supporters at Digital October. Such analogies never hold up and are essentially pointless because the country has changed, we have changed, our social and political system and economic relations have changed, although we must not forget the past of course, must remember what the Soviet period meant. There can be no stagnation of any kind, no matter what fine words may decorate it. We must keep moving forward, confidently, perhaps gradually in some areas, but steadily. This is my credo, and I would hope that you all share it, so that we can continue our stubborn and steady progress towards achieving our goals.

Hasty measures never bring any good, although of course at times we would all like to set reforms moving faster, change the political system quicker and get our economic relations developing at a swifter pace, but not everything is in our hands here. As far as the economy goes, for example, we depend a lot on what happens elsewhere in the world, and no matter how great an effort we make ourselves to recover from the global economic crisis, we realise that what goes on abroad affects our growth rate, our recovery, our GDP growth, our efforts to curb inflation, and our work to resolve various social and economic problems.

In any event, the State Duma election campaign that is getting underway now is an excellent moment to reflect on the situation overall and consider the future. This is the main purpose of today’s meeting – to sum up the results and set out some approaches for the future.