06.02.09

President Dmitriy Medvedev yesterday met with Mikhail Gorbachev, co-owner of Novaya Gazeta, and Dmitriy Muratov, chief editor of the publication. The president explained at the meeting held on the Kremlin's initiative why he had not reacted immediately to the assassination of the attorney Stanislav Markelov and the Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasiya Baburova. The chief editor of Novaya Gazeta raised with the president the question of prevention of the "elimination of democrats". Mr Medvedev gave the assurance that he has nothing to do with this.

The conversation between Dmitriy Medvedev and Messrs Gorbachev and Muratov could be called unprecedented--for the first time in the past several years a head of state has talked with a representative of the opposition press. Dmitriy Muratov said in response to Kommersant's question about whose initiative it was on which the meeting was held that USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, co-owner of Novaya Gazeta, was first called from the administration, he was called personally by Natalya Timakova, the president's press spokesman, and told that they would like to see him at a meeting with the head of state. The meeting was held in the Kremlin and lasted about an hour. Mr Gorbachev, who had not been in the Kremlin for a long while, his companion said, "surveying the situation, noted that things had become somewhat more opulent there." The ex-president himself had no comment on his visit to the Kremlin yesterday. The businessman Aleksandr Lebedev, co-owner of Novaya Gazeta, was not invited to the meeting. "I don't read anything into this," Mr Lebedev told Kommersant. "There was no need for me to be there, I associate myself with business issues, anyway, I now have an English newspaper also, I am a contradictory figure and I would blur the impression.... Chief editor of the newspaper and its important friend--that's enough. The president wanted to say something, and I tip my hat to him."

Dmitriy Muratov said that right at the start of the meeting Mr Gorbachev told the president that he believed that it was a big mistake that, following the assassination of the attorney Markelov and the Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasiya Baburova, he had not put out a statement or expressed condolences to the families of the deceased. The president, Mr Muratov said, replied that he would not make excuses but said that he had thought about speaking, but, as a lawyer, had declined. "Any remarks on a political assassination could have given a direction to the investigation and influenced its actions, which is wrong, I decided, therefore, to speak now, when the wave has subsided," Dmitriy Muratov paraphrased the president. The condolences appeared to him "very sincere." In addition, recalling that, according to one theory, the killings could have been committed by fascists, Dmitriy Muratov observed that Mr Medvedev "is very concerned at the problem of fascism in the country."

In turn, Dmitriy Muratov was incensed at the domination on the television screens of "staff Kremlin propagandists, who have been obstructing democrats." Mr Muratov remarked that even Aleksandr Auzan, member of the board of the Contemporary Development Institute, chairman of whose board of trustees is Dmitriy Medvedev himself, is being denied a television appearance.

In response, Mr Muratov said, the president assured his guests that "neither he nor his administration has given any instructions for the elimination of democrats and that these were vestigial phenomena."

In addition, the "humanization of society," specifically, a softening of the sentences for crimes not directed against the person, was discussed at the meeting also. Mr Muratov recalled Mikhail Khodorkovskiy, Platon Lebedev, and Svetlana Bakhmina convicted of economic crimes. The head of state said in response, according to the chief editor of Novaya Gazeta, that the sentences for crimes not directed against the person, economic, for example, could be humanized. The president believes that this could be criminal punishment in the form of a fine. The prospects for the release of Mikhail Khodorkovskiy and Svetlana Bakhmina were not discussed at the meeting.

Commenting on the president's meeting with representatives of a strongly opposition publication, Boris Makarenko, deputy general director of the Center for Political Technology, observed that the president had for the first time personally received people not only to express his condolences to them but also to condemn political assassination: "The president was in such a form--personal contacts--reacting to a scandalous crime." Mr Makarenko believes here that Dmitriy Medvedev received the Novaya Gazeta representatives not because this is an opposition publication but because the "paper is on some gunman's list...." The expert compared yesterday's meeting between the president and representatives of Novaya Gazeta with the visit of President Boris Yeltsin the day after the slaying of the reporter Vladislav Listyev at the Ostankino studio (March 1995). True, "it's a different era now, and Medvedev's meeting did not take place directly following the killing," Mr Makarenko observed.

Read More about Services from Alinga Consulting Group

Source: Kommersant