October 22:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) must work harder to protect the interests of Russian companies abroad, the Moscow Times reports. Putin’s made his televised comments on October 19th while introducing the new SVR chief, former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, to his staff. The SVR, said Putin, “must be able to swiftly and adequately evaluate changes in the international economic situation, understand their consequences for the domestic economy and, of course, it’s necessary to more actively protect the economic interest of our companies abroad.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said that the United States wants Russia to be “strong in 21st-century terms, not just with a strong independent center, but with strong independent institutions, an independent judiciary and legislature and independent civil society with a free media and vibrant non-governmental sector,” Agence France-Presse reports. “Democratic institutions and a free society are not a source of weakness, they are a source of strength in a dynamic and modern world,” Rice told a history conference on U.S.-Soviet relations.
Rice acknowledged recent discord between Moscow and Washington over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and a planned U.S. missile defense shield in Europe. “It is possible for the U.S. and Russia to disagree, even to disagree vehemently, but not to let our differences destroy the positive work that we can and must do together,” she said. Meanwhile, the Kremlin said in a statement that President Bush had telephoned Mr. Putin and the two presidents “underscored the need to conserve and reinforce cooperation mechanisms to guarantee perspectives for Russian-American cooperation in the long term.”
October 23:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that during talks in Moscow earlier this month, he and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proposed delaying the activation of the planned U.S. missile defense shield for Europe, Reuters reports. “We would consider tying together the activation of the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic with definitive proof of the threat, in other words, Iranian missile testing and so on,” Gates told reporters in Prague. “We have not fully developed this proposal, but the idea was we would go forward with the negotiations, we would complete the negotiations, we would develop the sites, build the sites but perhaps we would delay activating them until there was concrete proof of the threat from Iran.”
October 24:
Asked in a poll conducted earlier this month by the independent Levada Center what kind of political system they prefer, 35 percent said the Soviet system, 27 percent said Russia’s current system and 19 percent said Western-style democracy. Vedomosti reports that the responses were basically the same as those given to the same questions in a Levada Center poll conducted a year ago, except that the number of respondents favoring a “mixed economy” – with elements of both economic planning and the free market – grew from 44 percent last year to 47 percent this year. Twenty-four percent of those polled this year said they want to return to a planned economy and 60 percent said they disagreed that industrial enterprises in Russia should have been privatized.
[Editor’s Note: Given the effect of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
Representatives of associations of large food producers and retail chains have signed an agreement to freeze prices on some “socially significant” food products – including certain types of bread, milk, margarine and eggs - through next January, NEWSru.com reports. President Putin and other government officials have blamed suppliers and local officials for a recent spike in food prices.