Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 12 – Dmitry Medvedev, currently Russia’s prime minister but its president
in 2008 when Moscow launched its “short victorious war” against Georgia, a war
he took full credit for both then and now (kommersant.ru/doc/3707031),
was totally ignored in Moscow’s televised coverage on the anniversary of that
conflict.
Petr
Mironenko and Irina Malkova of The Bell
portal report that Medvedev was completely ignored in all the anniversary stories
about the war carried on the First Channel and Russia and appeared only in
archival footage on NTV (thebell.io/vojna-bez-glavnokomanduyushhego-v-syuzhetah-o-10-letii-konflikta-s-gruziej-telekanaly-oboshlis-bez-medvedeva/).
This might have not
been so striking, they suggest, except for two other developments. On the one
hand, Medvedev’s poll numbers have continued to fall with only 7.2 percent of
Russians now saying they trust him, far less than the 35.9 percent who say they
trust Putin – and only 24 percent approve the current prime minister’s
policies.
And on
the other, in the week of the anniversary of the Georgian war, the Central
Election Commission “unexpectedly approved three applications by ‘the legal
opposition’ for the conduct of a referendum on raising the pension age, the
main cause of the fall in the prime minister’s ratings.”
That
approval, of course, doesn’t mean that any referendum will in fact be held. In
fact, the procedures in place make it unlikely that it will. But giving even
this nod of approval to opposition is remarkable not only because it gives the
Kremlin a way of backing down if it has to but also because it represents such
a slap in the face of the current head of government.
Whiting
out former officials who fall out of favor is an old Russian tradition, classically
described in David King’s The Commissar
Vanishes. But in the handling of Medvedev in this case, Vladimir Putin has
gone Stalin one better: he has eliminated the image of an official who is still
in office if not of course in power.
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