Pavel K. Baev has a good article up about Vladimir Putin’s conspicuous absence from the Gazprom annual meeting earlier this month, when Alexei Miller had to give a long list of bad news, including an 85% dividend cut, a 35% cut in investments, and delays in production plans across the board.  But it’s not like Putin has just been sitting in his dacha – we’ve been treated to a long list of hands-on management and personal appearances, from the humiliation of Deripaska at Pikalyovo to the complaints over pork prices at a supermarket.  Baev lists some of these activities here:

Duties of prime ministers are certainly complex, but few apart from
Putin have taken to making blitz appearances in unexpected places and
performing small miracles by reviving paralyzed plants. It started in
the small town of Pikalevo, Leningrad oblast earlier this month where
TV crews arrived just in time to show Putin stepping out of the
helicopter, making a brief tour around the empty enterprises and
forcing the owners to strike a deal to re-start production, not even
leaving them the pen with which the contract was signed as a souvenir
(Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 11). Then came the visit to Barnaul where
the prime minister inspected the foundation of a new medical center,
but the mere fact of his presence in Altai krai was enough to resolve
the labor conflict at the Rubtsovsk tractor plant that suddenly saw
demand from new customers (Kommersant, June 20). After the visit to
Ilya Glazunov’s personal art gallery where the artist was eagerly
attentive to the prime-ministerial advice, some commentators started to
worry about Putin’s connection with reality (Ezhednevny Zhurnal, June
16). Last week he paid a surprise visit to a super-market in Moscow and
expressed dissatisfaction with meat prices, accepting reassurances that
they would be immediately revised down (Vremya Novostei, June 25). Yuri
Kobaladze, the executive director of the company that owns the chain
(and a former general from the Foreign Intelligence Service) had the
nerve to clarify later that it was only light hearted, but July sales
were nevertheless duly announced (Moscow Echo, June 25).

The
resemblance of this “manual management” to the trademark style of North
Korean “great-and-dear” leaders is more than a little amusing
(www.grani.ru, June 26). The public relations effect from such
attention to local problems is inevitably short-term, but it creates an
increasing demand for quick fixes of such complex problems as, for
instance, the stagnation of the “mono-cities” built around one or
several industrial enterprises (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, June 26). The
simple proposition that the depth of economic decline requires serious
reforms in the overloaded system of bureaucratic rent-extraction from
every business activity is not present in the recently revised
anti-crisis program. The “ideology” of this plan boils down to the
expectation that rising oil prices will restart the growth engine that
worked so wonderfully during Putin’s presidency, while the hands-on
tackling of some local situations will help in defusing public protests.  (…)

Gazprom is both a tool and a victim of this “it-will-pass” policy that
has already transformed the crisis into stagflation. Putin’s
micro-management of the company’s activities is never advertised, but
his hand is unmistakable in the brinksmanship tactics that defines the
development of parallel gas conflicts with Ukraine and Belarus.
Compromises in these quarrels are always only a means toward the end of
denying them any independent say in gas matters. Putin quite sincerely
does not see how this tough behavior damages Gazprom’s reputation in
Europe, much the same way as he cannot grasp the logic of the
diminishing effectiveness of performance by this overgrown corporate
behemoth under his enlightened guidance. Gazprom is allowed to reduce
its contributions to the state budget and is granted permission to
increase prices for domestic consumers despite their diminishing
incomes, its every acquisition or investment in Europe is backed by all
the necessary foreign policy resources – and it is still in far more
trouble than its glossy annual report admits. Every crisis brings
reinvigoration to businesses that can learn, but Putin remains adamant
that his course has always been faultless.

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