President Medvedev said the right things yesterday about Russia’s urgent need for reform. But he has been saying them for years. Russia has not reformed, and those calling for change now fear a future of stagnation, decline, and eclipse by China.

“Medvedev is facing a credibility crisis,” said Oksana Antonenko, senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “He’s been saying this for some time but modernisation has not happened.”

Mr Medvedev, inaugurated as President in May 2008 after three years as Deputy Prime Minister, has made modernisation his slogan. “But each time he talks of the need for change he highlights the gap between his rhetoric and reality of what is happening to Russia under his presidency,” said David Clark, Russia analyst and former adviser to Robin Cook and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. “He calls for a new process of democratisation and the restoration of political rights, yet the recent local elections were probably the least free since the Soviet Union’s pre-Glasnost days,” said Mr Clark. Mr Medvedev talks about making Russia friendly for business, but it has just pulled out of the Energy Charter Treaty, “one of the few remaining legal protections for foreign investors concerned about property rights,” Mr Clark added. The “second show trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky” — the jailed Russian tycoon opposed to the Kremlin — undermines the claim to promote the rule of law.

Most glaring is the failure to diversify the economy. Russia is now, Mr Antonenko argues, the “weak link in the Brics” — investors’ nickname for the four giants of the developing world, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Oil and gas account for more than a fifth of the economy, generate more than 60 per cent of export revenues and attract nearly a third of foreign investment.

But the bars to reaching Mr Medvedev’s dream of a “knowledge-based economy” extend through society. Russia’s population of 142 million is about 5 million lower than what it was when the Soviet Union broke up, although the demographic decline, variously attributed to alcoholism, poverty, social turmoil and emigration, has now slowed. Yet male life expectancy is just 59, compared to 70 for women.

As Mr Antonenko sees it: “I don’t think the prospects for change are encouraging. The middle class was assumed to be the driver for change. But it was hit hard by the economic crisis, and is less vocal now.” Would Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, change this if he ran for a third term as president in 2012? He has talked of the need for reform, yet he made Russia much more authoritarian.

Where will Russia be in 15 years if reform fails? Like Venezuela, say reform-minded officials, darkly: corruption, authoritarianism, the opposition imprisoned, failing to help its poor despite vast natural resources, importing all consumer goods and turning to the army to impose control of a closed system. Worse, some suggest, is the risk of becoming “a province of a greater China” as Beijing expands its access to global resources. As Mr Antonenko puts it: “Russia is now being displaced by China on key international issues. The only place it is a key player is in strategic nuclear arms control.”

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