It is essential for me in any situation to remain a normal twenty-first-century human being. In the end, positions come and go…

Our policy is founded on a principle that, for all its self-evidence, I consider the most important in the life of any modern state seeking to provide high standards of living. This is the principle that the existence of freedom is better than its absence. These words are the quintessence of human experience.

I am talking here of freedom in all its different manifestations: personal freedom, economic freedom, freedom of self-expression. I think that achieving harmony between freedom and law and order is crucial at this stage.

Business should be confident that it will always have the state’s backing on the world markets – this is the state’s duty. This is particularly true of sectors subject to global competition such as the energy sector and high-technology machine building.

In the coming years the quality of the environment will be a key factor in the competitiveness of each Russian region and that of the entire country, not to mention the significant impact these factors have on the demographic situation and the health of the nation. As the President of Russia just pointed out in his opening remarks, in the context of the growth of our economy, it is essential to lay out the environmental aspects of this growth.

The most important thing in a country under the rule of law is the level of legal culture among the public, their willingness to obey the law and see that this is in their direct interest. Legal nihilism is a related problem in this respect.

The most important thing for the development of our country is the continuation of peaceful and stable development. We need decades of stable development. Namely, what our country has been deprived of in the twentieth century. Decades of normal life and focused work.

Today I would like to speak about not one country but three different countries; about Russia in 2000, Russia today, and the Russia of the future.

In conclusion, I would like to give an example that illustrates well the scale and systemic nature of the work we have taken on. At the President’s weekly meeting with the Government Cabinet members, I reported on our work to resolve the problem of school buses. The President listened to me and then made one simple remark. In essence, what he said was that it is all very well sorting out the school bus problem, but we will have to buy new ones every year unless we also sort out the country’s roads.  

Democracy and state sovereignty should go together, without a situation where one dominates the other.

As an active member of the global community, our country is also encountering new problems. The open economy of modern Russia offers far more development possibilities than our previously closed economy. Unlike our formerly closed economy, it does not allow us to move forward in a broad front in all sectors, but forces us to make rational choices based on analysis of our comparative advantages. The key factors on which a country’s potential in the globalising world rests are its human, production and natural resources potential.