Reuters/Krasnodar, Russia

Medvedev speaks near artistes during his visit to a rowing centre in the southern Russian Krasnodar region
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev dipped into Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s lexicon to tell the ruling United Russia party yesterday that it should not take success for granted in a December parliamentary election.
Medvedev, a critic of Stalin’s deadly excesses, was trying to encourage United Russia to work hard to win seats in the State Duma, the lower parliament house, amid flagging popular support from Russians tired of its entrenched position.
“It is important for a party not to feel superior,” Medvedev told United Russia activists in the southern city of Krasnodar. “As soon as one feels superior, you get what the classic called ‘dizzy with success’.”
In an article titled Dizzy with Success in the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1930, Stalin criticised party officials for perceived errors in implementing his agricultural collectivisation campaign.
Opinion polls and regional vote results suggest United Russia could have trouble maintaining its constitutional two-thirds majority in the Duma despite the administrative support that rivals say makes elections grossly unfair.
Medvedev is to lead the party’s candidate list for the December 4 vote under a plan revealed last month for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to return to the presidency in a March 2012 election and make Medvedev prime minister.
Putin and Medvedev had kept Russians guessing for years about which of them would run for president, and for many the announcement of the decision last month deepened feelings of disenfranchisement and powerlessness in a top-down system.
Medvedev has been defending the decision by saying that Russians are free to vote as they wish.
The president, who is not a United Russia member and has often urged it to reform, said that it must win votes through action.
“A party should only concentrate on practical things ... we were well fed with slogans in the Soviet period,” he said. “I was member of the ... Communist Party too, and I remember it clearly: there was no faith and quite often no results.”
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and other critics have likened United Russia to the Soviet Communist Party, which was the only legal party in the country and propagated slogans that increasingly became empty rhetoric for many citizens.
True to his new task of leading the party into the parliamentary vote, however, Medvedev said: “No matter who says what, United Russia is the party which allows people to improve their lives.”
The party’s dominance has made parliament into little more than a legislative arm of the Kremlin, approving government initiatives including pension and wage increases that help it win votes.
President, PM are children’s book ‘characters’
A Russian publisher has released a children’s book in which boys called Vova and Dima, closely resembling Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, work and play together.
The book’s publishers, Maxim Perlin and Vladimir Tabak, presented the book on Thursday ahead of Putin’s 59th birthday on Friday and said they would send the premier a copy.
The 14-page book Vova and Dima, with black and white illustrations for colouring in, has a print run of 25,000 and will sell for 150 rubles ($4.62).
“We intend to sell the Dima and Vova colouring book in all the main Moscow and Russian bookshops,” Tabak said.
While Vova gets up early at 6.45am and does exercises in front of a map of Russia, Dima is shown in a bedroom decorated with a poster of rock group Deep Purple and the Apple logo – two of the politician’s enthusiasms.
The two boys ride tricycles and play badminton together and are also shown working at the White House and Kremlin.
“All the children of Russia know Vova and Dima well. And many of them want in future to be similar to our heroes,” the book’s blurb reads.
Last year, the same authors released an erotic calendar for Putin’s birthday in which students from Moscow State University posed in lingerie with captions such as “You put out the forest fires, but I’m still burning”.
The book went to press before the announcement on September 24 that Putin would stand for another presidential term, while Medvedev would stand aside and take on the role of prime minister.