ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — With the country’s next presidential election scheduled for March, the incumbent, Dmitri A. Medvedev, complicated the riddle at the center of Russian politics by delivering a speech on Friday that implied criticism of his predecessor and presumed rival for the job, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
In the speech, an address to foreign investors and heads of state at an economic forum here, Mr. Medvedev warned of a new era of stagnation if the state continued to control the Russian economy. And he spoke, as he has before, of the inherent risks in a political system built around one man’s personality.
“We should say goodbye to bad habits,” Mr. Medvedev said after describing government meddling in the economy when Mr. Putin was president from 2000 until 2008. He did not, however, mention Mr. Putin by name.
Throughout the speech, Mr. Medvedev veered repeatedly toward staking out an independent position, but would pull back before making explicit any substantive disagreement with Mr. Putin.
Investors like those in attendance on Friday carefully parse Mr. Medvedev’s public comments for just this type of delicate positioning, because he is seen as occupying a politically precarious spot this summer.
To emerge from Mr. Putin’s shadow and become a credible candidate in the eyes of urban middle-class voters, his core constituency, Mr. Medvedev needs to demonstrate his independence. But he must take care not to appear openly disloyal to the man who is considered the most powerful in Russia.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have said that they will reach an agreement privately on which of them will run for president next year, and Kremlin officials say the announcement will come in September or October.
Mr. Medvedev used the occasion of the economic forum to highlight his credentials as a liberal reformer.
“If everything starts to work on a signal from the Kremlin — we have all been there, and I know from personal experience — it means the system is unsustainable and must be organized around an individual,” he said. “This is bad. It means the system should be changed.”
Remarking on the practice of state companies bulking up on assets, which was common during Mr. Putin’s presidency, Mr. Medvedev said, “There could be another stagnation hiding behind the so-called stability.”
“Private entrepreneurs should rule the Russian economy,” he said, adding, “Economies are like parachutes: they only work when they are open.”
Internal Kremlin politics have seeped into the public sphere several times this year, often in the form of Mr. Medvedev responding to comments by Mr. Putin with a retort so mild that it might go unnoticed in other countries, but is seized on here as important.
Daniel Treisman, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, described Mr. Medvedev’s maneuverings as “a passive-aggressive verbal strategy” for expressing his political views.
The divergence in their public positions also suggests that they are trying to appeal to different audiences, Mr. Treisman said. Mr. Medvedev is more popular with Western leaders and foreign investors of the type attending the economic forum, where the president traditionally delivers an economic policy speech.
This year, the message seemed mostly that Mr. Medvedev disagreed with Mr. Putin on economic policy. “Medvedev hints he is very upset about something, but nothing ever comes of it,” Mr. Treisman said.
There are occasional hints of a more substantive breach. This week, the newspaper Vedemosti reported that Mr. Medvedev had fired Aleksei Anichin, a deputy interior minister and one of Russia’s most senior police officials. Mr. Anichin was a classmate of Mr. Putin’s.
The Russian government is trying to sell $30 billion worth of shares in state companies that it intends to privatize. The chief executives of Citigroup and Bank of America, Vikram S. Pandit and Brian T. Moynihan, were among those in St. Petersburg this week to discuss the opportunities. Speaking of his economic agenda, Mr. Medvedev said, “This project should be realized regardless of who occupies which job in our country for the next few years.”
He then offered this riddle: “I will guarantee this personally, as the president of the state, together with my colleagues.” It was hard to see how he could do that without winning another term in office.
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