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Russia is on the verge of radical changes. However, contrary to the common perception of recent times, the lion's share of the pending transformations will not be so much about the distribution of authority between the two centers of power, the President and the Prime Minister, as about overcoming a much more pressing issue of building a socio-political system that would be able to pull Russia out of its hazardous condition of supposed stability and tackle the task of accelerating modernization. Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration and Vladimir Putin's relocation to the White House should motivate civil servants and the society to solve the problem of mobilizing the economy and its modernization as soon as possible.

An era of drastic changes has graced Russia with a delay. In reality, it should have started in this country before the “intoxication of success” and the irrelevant euphoria of stability of the past few years. Putin took the reins of a country that was in a much worse shape than it is now being passed on to Medvedev. However, the task then was to restore the country, and the task now is to create something new, instead of restore. This is a much more difficult goal. Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration and Vladimir Putin's relocation to the White House could become just the cause to proclaim the start of a new era in Russia's history.

From the very start, the national leadership will be faced with three key challenges. “The first one is the demographic crisis, which, contrary to official statements, is not stabilizing, but instead is only about to reach a 'breakeven' point in a year or two. The second one is accelerating the development of the national economy. And the third challenge is to solve the issues of mass immigration, which is linked to the first challenge,” head of the Association of Cross-Border Cooperation's strategic planning department, Alexander Sobyanin, told RBC Daily.

However, now that civil servants and the society have wound down and come to observe cautiously as power is flowing slowly from the Kremlin into the White House's hands, it will be hard to make the political machine work effectively. As most bureaucrats are indiscreetly showing their defiance of the need of a breakthrough in the country's development and the population is demonstrating very little if any interest in political life, those in power can tackle such challenges only with the help of non-market methods. A system of reward and punishment, where any failure to follow orders would be punished, and any over-performance rewarded, is tipped to be the only way to go under the current circumstances.

In all these processes, the question of how President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will distribute powers, does not matter a great deal. What is truly important is that these processes are carried out without any harm to the primary task – the building of a new Russia. In order for this to happen, state power must turn into a guiding force (whether with two centers of power or one – time will tell), civil service should become efficient, and the society should become fully involved in this process.

Analytical department of RIA RosBusinessConsulting