Putin Denies Dictatorial Bent

President Vladimir V. Putin, in his first major speech since a landslide reelection victory two months ago, outlined a vision of a strong, rich and democratic Russia on Wednesday, while blasting critics who say he is drifting toward authoritarianism.

“Our goals are absolutely clear: high living standards in the country, with life safe, comfortable and free; a mature democracy and a developed civil society; and the strengthening of Russia’s position in the world,” Putin said in the annual state of the nation address.

While emphasizing economic development and better access to housing, medical care and education, Putin also called for military improvements.

“We must secure our country against any forms of military and political pressure and potential foreign aggression,” he said in the nationally televised speech. “In this connection, modernization of our armed forces, including providing the strategic nuclear forces with the most modern systems of strategic weapons, remains an important task.”

Putin warned that Russia must achieve its goals through its own efforts, and implied that some foreign critics of his consolidation of power were trying to weaken the country.

“Far from everyone in the world wants to see an independent, strong and confident Russia,” he said. “In the global competition, all sorts of measures of political, economic and information pressure have been used. The strengthening of our statehood has sometimes been intentionally interpreted as authoritarianism.”

But critics -- including liberal-minded Russian analysts -- continued to insist that a drift away from democratic norms is exactly what is going on.

“Putin has been trying to implement a standard model of authoritarian modernization in Russia, and there are quite a few of them around -- Chile, South Korea, Singapore,” said Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank.

“But he is making two big mistakes,” Piontkovsky said. “All these countries used authoritarian methods to accomplish a transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, while Russia’s task is to make a breakthrough to a postindustrial economy. And secondly, these authoritarian models worked more or less fine because the bureaucracy there was absolutely clean and not corrupt. In Russia, where everything is rotten and everyone is corrupt to the core, Putin’s authoritarian modernization will never work.”

In last year’s state of the nation speech, Putin announced the goal of doubling the size of the economy in a decade, and said a “consolidation of political forces” was necessary -- which critics saw as code for a dominant political party that would boost his power.

The Russian leader now has the power he sought. December elections for the lower house of parliament gave the pro-Putin United Russia party slightly more than two-thirds of the seats, and he won reelection in March with 71% of the vote.

Citing a 7.3% annual economic growth rate last year and an 8% annual rate in the first four months of this year, Putin said the goal of doubling the economy by 2013 was achievable and could even happen by 2010.

He added, however, that during the upheavals of the 1990s, the size of the economy fell by nearly half. The economy has still not recovered to its 1989 level, and 30 million citizens live in poverty, he said.

Putin also noted some of Russia’s other serious problems.

Life expectancy is 12 years less than in the United States, eight years less than in Poland and five years less than in China, he said, adding that “this is due above all to the high death rate in the working age.”

Although heavy drinking, smoking and a high-fat diet -- in addition to a lack of access to good medical services -- have led to a shorter life expectancy, Putin emphasized the need to ensure that basic healthcare is provided to those who need it.

He called for a two-tier medical system in which patients and medical personnel would be clear on what free treatment must be provided by the state for specific diseases, and “only extra medical care and a higher level of comfort in receiving it must be paid for by the patient.”

Russia needs a home mortgage system and more competition in residential construction to address a housing shortfall, he said, so that “by 2010 at least a third of Russian citizens, and not one-tenth like today, could afford to buy a modern apartment.”

Critics said Russia’s recent strong economic growth is based primarily on high oil prices, and that Putin failed to explain how he intended to promote the kind of industrial growth that could support his goals.

“Today, it is the international raw materials market that is doing the job for the government,” said Sergei Glazyev, a member of parliament who finished third in the March presidential race. But what Russia needs, he said, is “a transition to a knowledge-intensive economy.”

Gennady A. Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party, praised Putin’s emphasis on housing, healthcare and education.

“But ... there is not a single word about how the national locomotive -- called industry -- will function,” he said. “And it is impossible to successfully resolve a single social task without a developed industrial sector.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.