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President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Dear colleagues,

We agreed some time ago to hold periodic meetings of this kind. They relate to the execution of presidential instructions. This doesn’t mean that my instructions are not being carried out if our committee doesn’t meet – of course they are, and the Government of the Russian Federation, heads of various departments and agencies, regional governors and other institutions that receive such instructions all play a part in this. But we have not yet tried this mode of working.

I think that it makes sense to meet in this format to see how instructions were carried out last year. We have some relevant statistics on which the Head of the Presidential Control Directorate [Konstantin Chuychenko] will be reporting.

In general, I think that the situation with execution of instructions is quite difficult, because despite the fact that as President I regularly receive reports from the Cabinet, the regions, and other organisations, these reports are often not particularly meaningful.

Very often these are simply formal replies: seeking to meet a certain deadline, our colleagues report that they have done so and so. For all intents and purposes – and you begin to understand this – in effect they haven’t done a thing.

Strengthening managerial discipline is without a doubt the order of the day: it is a necessity. And I hope that this kind of videoconference, this kind of meeting, will facilitate this. We will be holding them regularly, so that there will be no significant time lapses and we can look everyone taking part in the eye.

Videoconferencing gives us some very nice options. Some of our colleagues currently on the job are with us on live video from different cities and even from different countries.

In addition to strengthening managerial discipline – this need is constantly invoked because unfortunately such discipline has always been poor in Russia – we need to look at the contents of these instructions and what is actually done.

Usually these presidential instructions do not take the form of state of the art innovations; on the contrary, I often find myself signing an order that quite frankly will change absolutely nothing, will bring about nothing new, but is rather a reiteration of something we’ve already said.

In this regard, everyone here, the Presidential Executive Office, presidential plenipotentiary envoys and the Cabinet should appreciate the power of presidential instructions. We don’t need a lot of them but they must be valid and they must be strictly enforced.

Finally, the third thing that we have to discuss today is the actual form in which presidential instructions are implemented, including the introduction of electronic government and other advanced technologies related to documentation.

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