President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s state of the nation address went on for 85 minutes and contained more than 8,000 words, but the section that prompted the most chatter on Thursday was a single sentence, the one that proposed lengthening the Russian president’s term to six years from four.

The proposal in the televised speech on Wednesday sounded odd, coming from a man just six months into his first term, and he offered little insight into his motive. It has led to rumors that Mr. Medvedev was laying the groundwork for his mentor, Vladimir V. Putin, the former two-term president who is now prime minister, to return as president, perhaps as early as next year.

What was, however, more significant in Medvedev's presentation was the outspokenness with which he condemned the Russian state apparatus's interference in elections, mass media, civil society and the economy - all of which gives, in Medvedev's opinion, birth to corruption in the bureaucracy.

Under president Vladimir Putin, the various official and unofficial alterations of Russia's political system amounted to a centralization and insulation of power in the Kremlin, which by 2007 had led to the restoration of authoritarianism and a de facto one-party system.

In contrast, Medvedev made it clear that he wants to return power to the people and to see politics becoming more pluralistic. Thus, Medvedev proposed that smaller parties should have a voice in the political process, suggesting that those parties falling below a 7% threshold in parliamentary elections yet reaching more than 5% should in the future be represented with at least one or two deputies in the Duma. (One suspects that this peculiar modification of the electoral system is a result of a somewhat awkward compromise between Medvedev, who apparently wants to make the composition of the legislature more diverse, and conservative forces in the government who seek to preserve the high 7% threshold. The latter was introduced only recently to secure the nearly total control of the lawmaking process by Putin’s United Russia Party.)

Still, in formulating its policies towards Moscow, the West should take due notice that the formally most powerful politician in Russia can be counted on as a firm supporter of democratic values.

Of course, the West was still careful about directly supporting independence movements inside the Soviet Union. When the Lithuanian authorities approached the American embassy in Moscow to ask whether the United States would lend support to the independence of Lithuania, the immediate response was negative. When the Soviet Union tried to use force to reestablish control in Baltic states in January 1991, however, the reaction from the West--including from the United States--was fairly straightforward: "Do as you wish, this is your country. You can choose any solution, but please forget about the $100 billion credit."

What were Gorbachev's options at the time? He could not easily dissolve the Soviet empire; the conservative elements inside the Soviet leadership were strongly against this notion. Yet he could not prevent the dissolution of the empire without a massive use of force. But if force was employed, the Soviet state would not get the necessary funds from the West, without which Gorbachev had no chance of staying in power.

On August 22, 1991, the story of the Soviet Union came to an end. A state that does not control its borders or military forces and has no revenue simply cannot exist. The document which effectively concluded the history of the Soviet Union was a letter from the Vneshekonombank in November 1991 to the Soviet leadership, informing them that the Soviet state had not a cent in its coffers.

Russia will be attending the G20 summit next week, but they want a reduced role for the IMF while the west wants it strengthened.

Dvorkovich said any country willing to participate in global financial management should be allowed to play a role in new institutions, in contrast with the IMF, which Russia views as dominated by the U.S. and other G7 nations.
Russia's other proposals for G20 summit include more powers for global financial institutions, new global risk management system, more advanced information disclosure, harmonisation of accounting rules and capitalisation of financial institutions.
Russia bears a longstanding grudge against the IMF, which provided advice for many ill-fated market reforms in the 1990s and decided against bailing Russia out in the wake of the 1998 financial meltdown.

The organisation, which comprises Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is widely seen as a counter-weight to NATO's influence in Eurasia. It is primarily concerned with security issues. This time, however, the sides are discussing how to develop social and economic cooperation.

At the beginning of his speech at the SCO Council of Prime Ministers, Vladimir Putin stressed the role the SCO countries should play in the changing world political and economic landscape.

“We now clearly see the defectiveness of the monopoly in world finance and the policy of economic selfishness. To solve the current problem Russia will to take part in changing the global financial structure so that it will be able to guarantee stability and prosperity in the world and to ensure progress,” he said.