Free The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson

Medvedev is addressing minorities and Putin is addressing majorities,” says Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Russian online journal
Caucasian Knot
. “Medvedev is talking specifically about the problems. It’s a very wise division. They are talking to different sides of society—those who are rich and those who are poor, those who are supporting the political rule and those who are protesting them.”
    Nevertheless, the signs that Medvedev might actually harbor ideas at odds with Putin’s “power vertical” grew with time. And if there was one laboratory working to cultivate these ideas, it was the Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank that is said to have advised Medvedev. Medvedev served as the think tank’s chairman and is rumored to have backed the founding of the organization as an independent source of analysis for his administration. (Igor Yurgens, the director of the think tank, told
Newsweek
in 2009 that Medvedev had saidthe Kremlin didn’t need “brown-nosers.”) A month before I arrived in Moscow,the institute released a report that sent a jolt through the Russian political establishment. In essence, the authors called for rolling back almost every feature of Putin’s power structure. Among its proposals, the report recommended restoring the direct election of governors, creating a genuine multiparty democracy, abolishing the FSB (the successor to the KGB), and ending the state control of media.
    If Medvedev had an independent streak, the researchers at this think tank may have been the ones feeding it. I went to meet with Evgeny Gontmakher, the institute’s deputy director and one of the report’s authors. I asked Gontmakher what was the purpose of the report. “Our main goal is as a provocation,” he replied. “[The idea] is democracy—not imitation democracy. The reaction of Medvedev was very good. Unofficial, but very good.” The provocation, as Gontmakher explained, was directed very much at those who typically promote less pluralistic ideas. People like Gleb Pavlovsky.
    By chance, I had actually raised this report with Pavlovsky when we met a few days earlier. I told Gontmakher what Pavlovsky told me: “It is a political fiction.” As soon as I mentioned it to Gontmakher, he laughed. “A propagandist. He is very clever, and he is right. It is a fiction, even science fiction.” But, as he explained, in the competition for Medvedev’s thinking, it didn’t matter. The report had scored a victory in influencing Medvedev, and it was at odds with the direction promoted by Pavlovsky, so naturally he was disparaging it. “Pavlovsky is a very dangerous person. [His ideas] are all manipulation. It’s all ideas about how to control TV, how to control our civil society. But this power vertical is not science fiction.”
    The institute’s report had put forward a number of ideas for reform. So, I asked Gontmakher, what was the one reform that would do the most good? He didn’t hesitate. “The first step is to free TV. It will be an absolutely new atmosphere here. New faces. Open discussions. It will be a new beginning in our political history. That’s why Putin in the beginning closed TV. And he was right, from his position,” replied Gontmakher. “But to change TV takes one day. It only requires a decision from two people.”
    Free TV. Not a change in election laws, not greater respect for human rights, not more genuine NGOs, not even a drop in the price of oil. It was a telling suggestion from this economist and political adviser. He would begin with freedom of speech over the airwaves. Russians already enjoy unfettered access to the Internet, and it had increasingly become a venue for political satire as well as the exposure of official wrongdoing. But even as the number of Russians online grows rapidly, as much as 80 percent of the country still gets its news and information from television. In Gontmakher’s view, ending the Kremlin’s ability to stifle the free