Russians Brave Cold, Put Heat on Putin in Q & A

Russians across 11 time zones stood for hours Monday in temperatures as low as minus 20, hopping from foot to foot to keep warm, waiting for the chance to put a question to the president, Vladimir V. Putin.

What came through in more than two hours of conversation broadcast on live TV was a howl of discontent from the provinces, as people complained how hard it is to survive on meager pensions and state salaries.

Some struck it lucky, like struggling pensioner Antonina Arzhanova, 79, or a 7-year-old boy named Vanya, whose house had burned down. Like a czar strewing favors, Putin promised them that help would come.

Citizens waited in the cold in public squares across Russia, where cameras and big-screen TVs were set up. Members of the public could also phone in or e-mail their queries, and during the course of the program there were 20 attempts to call per second. In all, half a million questions were posed.

Although the television event was billed as spontaneous, it was meticulously stage-managed, with the questions carefully selected and the participants coached.

After Arzhanova rang a call-in phone number two days before, a woman called back and asked her to repeat her question.

“Then she asked me to repeat it again and said that someone would contact me. And she instructed me to put my question in writing so that it would be easier for me to repeat it when the time came,” Arzhanova said in an interview after the program.

“Yesterday, a man called me and asked me to repeat my question again. Then he said that I should be ready to speak to the president today at noon.”

The program recalled an old but enduring Russian idea: that the czar himself was a good man surrounded by corrupt and venal subordinates. And that the one chance an individual had to resolve a problem was to skirt the bureaucrats and somehow appeal directly to the ruler.

When Arzhanova got her chance Monday, she did not hesitate. A World War II veteran from Volgograd, she survives on 1,000 rubles a month, about $1.20 a day.

“Please help me. I fought in the ranks, but for some reason I only get a pension of 1,000 rubles,” she implored Putin.

The leader looked puzzled. Something was not right. He searched out a figure.

The amount, he said, should be 3,400 rubles, not 1,000. “If your pension has not been recalculated for some reason, it’s strange. It must obviously be the mistake of the agencies responsible, who should attend to it. I hope that the studio has your telephone number, and it will be conveyed to us and I promise you that the issue will be solved,” Putin said.

“Everybody tells me that my pension should be much higher because of my war record, but no one ever helped me to correct this injustice,” said the delighted pensioner.

When Tatyana Dasyuk, from the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, complained that her village had no natural gas service, Putin sought an answer from Gazprom, the gas monopoly partially owned by the state. He later informed her that the village would have gas within a few weeks.

Vanya, the 7-year-old who was picked by Putin from a group of callers, said: “Our life is hard. Our house burned down. We have nowhere to live. I rarely see my mother because she has to work too much. I miss her very much.”

Putin replied that “there are a lot of kind people around. I have grounds for thinking, Vanya, that you and your family will get help. A happy new year to you.”

Liliya F. Shevtsova, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said Putin’s conversation with the people was an imitation of communication and an imitation of democracy.

“The president feels much more comfortable communicating with the people in a precooked, prepared-in-advance show,” she said.

The president’s image-makers were “building an image of Putin as a man of the people who offers all things to all people, a man eagerly responding to people’s pain, a man who is not cold or overly rational.”

“They are now building a humane and human image--a considerate and kind father of the nation--in a typically tyrannical spirit that we know only too well in this country,” she said.

During the show, Putin frequently played to popular sentiment that a leader’s good intentions are undermined by bad subordinates, and he blamed regional authorities for many of the problems raised.

The calls revealed Russians’ anger about low salaries and pensions, high energy prices, corrupt traffic police, drug addiction and other issues.

A young schoolteacher in Yekaterinburg complained that her salary was “comical” and that her medical student husband’s base pay would be less than $6 a week upon graduation. The program’s moderator said their position was a “nightmare,” and Putin agreed that the couple is clearly not being paid enough.

The salary issue was the centerpiece of Putin’s opening comments. He said average wages had increased about 20% and wage arrears to public-sector workers had dropped from $83 million to $50 million.

There may be many others such as Arzhanova, struggling on pensions lower than they should be. But that apparent injustice did not worry her.

“I know there must be other elderly people with similar problems, but it is up to them how to resolve their problems. I called the president and I got through and he talked to me, so I expect my problem will be resolved soon.”

Putin said such a dialogue between a Russian leader and his people had never before occurred.

“The top leader of the state simply must communicate with his citizens, listen to them and hear them,” he said. “There must be feedback.”