Democracy only divides

President Dmitry Medvedev may have diagnosed Russia's "chronic backwardness" but he still considers the comprehensive democratisation of the country unnecessary, the Tagesspiegel concludes: "'All attempts to stir up the situation in the country with democratic solutions, to destabilise the state and to divide the society will be thwarted' - someone who talks like this is following the centuries-old tradition of Russian rulers who have no trust in their own people's power and ability to develop. Instead the state is to do this for them and the country to be modernised from the top down. This strategy may not have worked for the Tsars, Stalin or Gorbachev, but it does have a decisive advantage: there's always someone else to blame for the failures, be it the opposition, a country like Georgia or the West, towards which Medvedev's attitude was noticeably cool."

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