Putin tells West to stay out of Russia's affairs

Vladimir Putin

MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his Western critics on notice that his country will develop democracy at its own pace and will not tolerate any outside interference let alone a velvet revolution.

Delivering his annual state of the nation address, Mr Putin appeared to be directly addressing his critics, notably the United States, which has accused him of backsliding on democracy and of becoming too authoritarian.

Speaking two days ahead of an expected verdict in the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon seen as a robber baron by some and as a political prisoner by others, Mr Putin was obviously trying to forestall an inevitable barrage of criticism later this week.

Mr Khodorkovsky's case has become a PR nightmare for the Kremlin, which finds itself accused of staging a show trial purportedly designed to punish the outspoken oligarch for his opposition to the president.

Mr Putin therefore went out of his way to extol the virtues of democracy and talk up Russia's potential as a place for foreign investment.

However he was careful to make it clear that democracy would be tailored to Russia's own needs and that Moscow would not be lectured to.

"Russia ...will decide for itself the pace, terms and conditions of moving towards democracy," he told Russia's ruling elite in the Kremlin's echoing Marble Hall.

"We are a free nation and our place in the modern world will be defined only by how successful and strong we are."

There has been growing speculation among the Russian media that the country may be susceptible to a velvet revolution of the kind that has swept across the former Soviet Union in the last 18 months toppling governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

But Mr Putin said the Kremlin would react strongly to any "illegal" attempts to subvert democracy.

"Any unlawful methods of struggle ... for ethnic, religious and other interests contradict the principles of democracy. The state will react (to such attempts) with legal, but tough, means."

In an apparent attempt to steal his opponents' clothes he dedicated a significant chunk of his speech to the importance of freedom of speech in the media, notably on TV.

Talking earnestly about the need for ordinary Russians to receive objective information, he called for guarantees that state TV and radio would be "objective, free from any group's influence and reflect the whole spectrum of opinion throughout the country."

"Without liberty and democracy there can be no order, no stability and no sustainable economic policies," he told his audience.

Not for the first time he publicly lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 calling it "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe." Such rhetoric is likely to leave many of his critics bemused.

His speech, which lasted just over 45 minutes, was sporadically interrupted by enthusiastic applause and was rounded off with a rousing rendition of the Russian national anthem. Mr Putin, standing beneath an enormous gold-coloured double-headed eagle, Russia's national symbol, looked focused and unrattled.

His own ministers and many loyalist deputies hailed the speech as a sign that things were moving in the right direction but his opponents suggested he was being deliberately two-faced and doubted whether many of his fine words would come to much.

Irina Khakamada, leader of Our Choice party and a fierce Kremlin critic, said the speech appeared to have been specially concocted.

"The address did not contain fundamentals, but looked from its liberal rhetoric and its statements addressed to the West to be (merely) an export product," she argued.

Dmitri Rogozin, leader of the Motherland nationalist party, said the speech had shown there were two Mr Putins.

"One proclaims certain indisputable values and demands that we implement them," he said.

"This concerns the economy and finances in particular, as well as morals and so on. But there is another Putin - the one who heads the government and who has done nothing throughout all these years to make sure his own orders are actually implemented."

- INDEPENDENT