The Medvedev Doctrine

Just what exactly does Dmitry Medvedev want? Six months into his tenure at the Kremlin, the Russian president's signals are so mixed, he has Western policymakers and diplomats baffled. In speech after speech, to audiences at home and abroad, he has talked forcefully of putting an end to Russia's culture of corruption; diversifying Russia's economy beyond the oil and gas industry; integrating Russia into the world economy; instituting the rule of law; and guaranteeing freedom of speech. He has said Russia should be a country where ordinary people take a "more active role in the country's political life." Yet at the same time, he has blasted Washington for destabilizing the world's finances; blamed the United States for provoking the August war with Georgia; laid claim to Russia's "privileged interests" in its neighborhood; and proposed a massive shift in the global "architecture," which would give Russia a more pronounced say in world affairs.

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Earlier this month, in his first state-of-the-nation address, he delivered a more passionate commitment to liberal values than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, had ever voiced. Putin adviser Sergei Karaganov called the address "the most liberal presidential speech in Russian history." Yet he also managed to be even more hawkish than Putin by directly threatening the West with missile deployments. The upshot is that over the last several months, Medvedev has developed his own rather radical agenda: surprisingly liberal at home, and increasingly hawkish abroad.

The Medvedev doctrine amounts to an ambitious plan for fixing Russia's broken society at home and restoring Russia's place in the world. At its broadest, it is a plan to redraw the world's security and financial infrastructure, on Russia's terms. One way to do that, Medvedev believes, is to replace at least some of America's influence in Europe with Russia's through a mixture of military threats and the use of Russia's enormous gas reserves as leverage. For starters, he wants to keep America and Europe from meddling in Russia's near abroad, and he envisions rebalancing global diplomacy by building up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a loose body of Asian states that includes Russia and China, into a NATO-like bloc. Other goals include transforming Moscow into a world financial center, and creating a new OPEC-style gas producers' cartel, with Russia, the world's largest gas producer, as a leading member. "The old unipolar world is dying," says Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia's Upper House. "New power formations are appearing; besides the U.S. we see the rising power of Brazil, China, India, the EU and, obviously, Russia."

Medvedev's overwhelmingly ambitious goals have clearly evolved from Putin's longstanding plan to restore Russian greatness, at home and abroad. That's hardly surprising, since Putin remains Russia's back-seat driver from his post as prime minister, and is widely expected to return to the presidency after a decent interval. But there are clear differences between the two men. Putin used the language of democracy and liberalism when it suited—drawing, for instance, moral equivalencies between U.S. actions in Kosovo and Iraq and Russian policy in Georgia. Medvedev, a lawyer reared in glasnost-era liberal St. Petersburg, has adopted a more open and modern style. He surfs LiveJournal, Russia's biggest social-networking site, and said last week that he reads opposition Web sites daily, and that they make him "want to get up and start working, working and working." He arranges to "spontaneously" drop in at cafés and restaurants to chat with customers about things like rising prices and petty corruption. More substantively, Medvedev is also sending a resoundingly liberal message on the economy, local democracy and free speech—not because it's popular, but because he believes that to keep Russia functioning, it needs firm political control at the very top and something approaching an open society on a lower level, with accountability for bureaucrats and greater freedom for businesses. So even as he pushed a bill through Parliament that would extend the presidential term from four to six years—potentially allowing Putin to come back as president for 12 more years—he has also promised to revive Russia's moribund parliamentary democracy by mandating a regular, elected rotation of party leaders. Moreover, he has actually promoted and defended economic liberals like First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, a defender of shareholder rights, economics adviser Arkady Dvorkovich, a staunch opponent of nationalization, and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who created Russia's $150 billion stabilization fund and defended it against attempts to raid it for populist spending plans.

Perhaps most significantly of all, Medvedev has a clear grasp of the problems facing Russia—and isn't afraid to talk about them. Under Putin, economic growth hummed along at a 7 percent annual clip, thanks to rising oil prices, the lifeblood of the Russian economy. Yet Putin appeared to have little real interest in diversifying the economy or reining in the kind of corruption that makes entrepreneurship impossible and even dangerous. One of the hallmarks of Medvedev's speeches, by contrast, has been his brazen criticisms of Russia's corrupt judiciary and bureaucracy—though he's always been extremely careful never to suggest that Putin was at fault for not tackling these problems earlier. In his speeches, Medvedev has blamed bureaucrats for being "as suspicious of free enterprise as they were under the Soviet regime," and for controlling the media and interfering in elections—which may sound odd coming from someone who has benefited so much from the state's control of both the press and the ballot box, but it's a sharp critique of what's wrong with Russia nonetheless. In a speech last week to top ministers, he emphasized it was a "national priority" to encourage innovation and reduce administrative and other barriers to creating and developing small and medium-size business.

On foreign relations, Medvedev has been mindful to avoid appearing weaker than Putin. Putin talked of a "multipolar world." But it was on Medvedev's watch that Russia took international law into its own hands as Russian tanks went rolling into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Kremlin then implicitly reasserted Russia's imperial right to make—and swallow—nations by recognizing the breakaway Georgian Republics. In the aftermath of the war, Medvedev went a step further, suggesting that the ground rules of international diplomacy should be shifted to recognize Russia's "privileged interests" in countries where NATO's interference was definitely not welcome. Russia's "historical and cultural ties" to various countries along its borders "and beyond" should be recognized, he suggested—a clear assertion of the old Soviet principle of Moscow's sphere of influence. "We are not trying to rebuild the Soviet Union," explains pro-Kremlin Duma deputy Sergei Markov. "But Russia, as a great empire, should be surrounded with friends."

Still, for all the big talk, it's far from clear if any of Medvedev's grand strategic goals can be achieved. With enormous resentment and mistrust of the West, Medvedev has few models to look to in his attempt to fulfill his economic goals. So he has reverted to an almost Soviet-style strategy of policymaking: announcing ambitious plans to reform and then seeming to believe they will be accomplished by fiat, rather than through the difficult and often cumbersome task of building coalitions, negotiating and managing the entrenched interests that seek to thwart reform. Medvedev, in short, has talked a good game, but there has been little concrete follow-up.