The truth about Medvedev's recent State of the Nation speech
Monday, November 16, 2009 at 9:46PM About a week ago, something quite surprising happened in Russia. Dmitry Medvedev gave his State of the Nation speech, the equivalent of the State of the Union speech in the US. So far, you probably don't see what the fuss is about...
Well, the content of that speech was so surprising that I remember reading the BBC article and wondering if I wasn't in some sort of dream, and a good one at that! I won't bother giving an extensive summary of a nearly 2h long speech, but the BBC article can be found here.
Today I found an interesting analysis of that speech (from a Russian), telling me that my initial feeling of a dream wasn't too far from the truth. In essence, the speech "sounded" like great changes were about to take hold of the country, but it seems to be all an elaborate scheme that was started two month ago.
Next week (not sure which day), Putin will have a speech in front of the United Russia congress, which should offer some additional details about the "reforms" to be undertaken.
Reader Comments (1)
My favorite part of the bbc article: "Mr Medvedev promised to strengthen democratic institutions but warned that any attempts to disrupt national stability with "democratic slogans" would be stopped. "Freedom means responsibility and I hope everyone understands that," he said." I wonder how he's going to strengthen democratic institutions without the slogans... :) His talk about cutting the state-run industries loose was a good sign, wasn't it? Why do you think it's such a dream? After all, can the leader (or puppet leader) of a nation talk like this forever without it actually happening?