Yearly car inspections are a senseless formality — how will you change this? (He’s drawing up a new law.) Local officials show you perfect villages — do you understand how people really live? (Yes, from blogging and reading the Internet.) Our veterans are suffering — can’t you guarantee each of them an apartment? (He issued a decree on that in 2008.) And what are you going to do about the parking problem in Moscow? (He has talked to the mayor.)
Early on in the 2-hour-15-minute news conference, Medvedev cheerfully deflected the question that has had Moscow preoccupied for weeks. Will he run for a second term next year, or step aside in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin?
“A press conference of this kind is not the right occasion for such an announcement,” he said. “I think decisions of this kind need to be taken and announced in a somewhat different format. . . . If I make such a decision, I will certainly announce it.”
His opaque answer led to lively speculation among analysts watching on television — the event was widely broadcast — that he would definitely run next year, while other camps took it to mean he certainly would not run.
Medvedev met with journalists at the Skolkovo School of Management, which he calls symbolic of his efforts to modernize the economy. He expects the school, which offers MBAs and teaches in English, to nurture development of a Russian version of California’s Silicon Valley — Arnold Schwarzenegger visited last year — in an effort to attract high-tech businesses and foreign investment that will help diversify the economy.
The location outside the city made the news conference an all-day logistical affair, with 500 Russian journalists (about 200 of them from the regions) and 300 from foreign publications driven by bus in shifts from the center of the city.
As they waited for Medvedev, who arrived promptly at 1 p.m., reporters were buzzing about a Putin interview published in the American hunting and fishing magazine Outdoor Life. Once again, Putin seemed to be upstaging his former chief of staff, who became president when Putin reached a two-term limit.
Reporters seemed to particularly enjoy the way the magazine interview dwelled on Putin often being photographed as a rough and tough action man, bare-chested and carrying a hunting rifle. They wondered if he was comparing himself to Theodore Roosevelt when Putin said he had seen the U.S. president pictured not only with a hunting rifle but also a lion he had killed.
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