Gingerly, Medvedev Seeks a Little Distance From Putin

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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Texas Blogger’s ‘Man Crush’ on Putin Leads to Lengthy Heart to Heart

Nonetheless, last week Mr. Young scored a journalistic coup, publishing a lengthy written interview with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Young approached the Russian government last year after blogging repeatedly about his “man crush” on Mr. Putin, and the questions he sent the Russian prime minister were, shall we say, softballs. They included, “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?” and “Are you the coolest man in politics?”

The decision to grant the interview appears to be part of an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his image in the West. During the three years since Mr. Putin entered a power-sharing arrangement with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president has been cast as the smiling face of a “reset” in the relations with the United States. In the eyes of Western observers, that has left Mr. Putin as the bad cop, which could pose a problem if he decides to return to the presidency next spring.

“There is some truth in this argument, and I think Putin has realized he needs to care about his image in the West,” said Alexander Rahr, a Russia specialist at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The only argument which really speaks for Medvedev is this Western thing. That is his trump card. Putin has to counter it.”

The Outdoor Life interview — at times an exercise in mutual back-slapping — is not likely to have much impact, especially since it was released the same day as a much-anticipated news conference by Mr. Medvedev.

But it does show Mr. Putin trying to present himself in a softer, more friendly light. In between discussions of tiger poaching, Ernest Hemingway and the fragility of human existence, Mr. Putin tells Mr. Young that the United States and Russia have been powerfully drawn to each other since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The recent improvement in relations “seems to point to the fact that the vast majority of barriers between our peoples were unnaturally and artificially forced upon them,” Mr. Putin said. “Ordinary people always want to live in peace rather than in war and to be able to freely socialize, interact and make friends, if you wish. For too long, we had been cruelly held apart from each other, so it was only natural that the fall of the Iron Curtain generated a huge wave of interest toward Russia.”

Mr. Putin also plays up his image as an avatar of manliness, which has been established by photos of him riding shirtless on horseback, shooting a tiger with a tranquilizer gun or offering judo instructions. Asked about an episode last summer, when he shot a dart at the exposed back of a gray whale from a rubber dinghy, Mr. Putin drifted into Hemingway territory.

“All that surrounded me — the low sky, the stormy sea and, of course, the whales — was magnificent,” he said. “Besides, these elegant giants showed us a real performance, leaping out of the water in front of our boat.”

On that occasion, a reporter asked Mr. Putin whether it was dangerous, and the prime minister responded, “Living in general is dangerous.” In the Outdoor Life interview, he elaborated, saying that a human being is “still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth,” barraged by disease, disaster and criminality.

“However, this is not a reason to hide away from life,” he said. “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.”

It was the gray whale episode that especially captivated Mr. Young, 42. After he began writing about his “man crush,” his blog hits grew so high that his editors asked him for more, and he published an open letter to the prime minister proposing that the two men go hunting together.

Before long, Mr. Young was communicating with the press attaché in the Russian Embassy in Washington and with Ketchum, a public relations firm that represents Russia.

“My editors were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’?” Mr. Young said. But early in the spring, he was told that Mr. Putin was in the process of answering Mr. Young’s questions — at considerable length. The draft originally sent to Outdoor Life was almost 8,000 words long and had to be edited down by almost 3,000 words, Mr. Young said.

“I got to tell you, I’m more in love with the guy than ever,” he said. In an interview from his home in Texas, Mr. Young said Outdoor Life was hoping to send him to Russia to go fishing with Mr. Putin, who is not a keen hunter. It seemed Mr. Young’s ardor does not extend to Mr. Medvedev, since a mention of the Russian president’s name was met with silence on the other end of the line.

“You’re going to have to remind me who that is,” Mr. Young said.

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