Medvedev’s legacy erodes

Former Russian PM sees Putin abandon his liberal agenda

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Friday defended the enactment of new laws that rolled back his own liberal agenda as Russia’s previous president, a tacit acknowledgment of how little influence he has now that Vladimir Putin is back in the Kremlin.

In an interview with journalists from five Russian television stations, Medvedev said he was “basically happy with how my life has gone” over the past year, despite see- ing the Kremlin abandon his conciliatory, modernization-focused platform in favour of cracking down on dissent.

As soon as Putin returned for a third presidential term in May, parliament began passing a series of laws introducing Internet censorship, hiking fines for unauthorized protests by 150 times, and recriminalizing slander, which had been made an administrative offence on Medvedev’s initiative only months before.

Other laws branded nongovernmental organizations that got foreign funding “foreign agents” and expanded the definition of treason to encompass potentially any exchange of information with foreign organizations.

The language used in the laws recalls Soviet-era spy mania, when the vast majority of foreigners were treated with suspicion. Putin has repeatedly blamed foreign governments, particularly the U.S. State Department, of meddling in Russian domestic affairs and organizing protests.

On Friday, Medvedev insisted the terms used were innocuous. “What’s so bad about the word ‘agent’?” Medvedev said. “An agent is a representative, that’s it.”

Medvedev went on to deny that the laws were repressive and said the issue was simply one of expectations. “These expectations very often have nothing whatsoever to do with what’s really happening in the country,” he added.

Russian Internet users mocked Medvedev’s interview by sending a Twitter hashtag of the word “pathetic” into the Top 10 global trends on Friday.