MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin, in his first major speech since a landslide reelection victory two months ago, outlined a vision of a strong, rich and democratic Russia on Wednesday, while blasting critics who say he is drifting toward authoritarianism.
"Our goals are absolutely clear: high living standards in the country, with life safe, comfortable and free; a mature democracy and a developed civil society; and the strengthening of Russia's position in the world," Putin said in the annual state of the nation address.
While emphasizing economic development and better access to housing, medical care and education, Putin also called for military improvements.
"We must secure our country against any forms of military and political pressure and potential foreign aggression," he said in the nationally televised speech. "In this connection, modernization of our armed forces, including providing the strategic nuclear forces with the most modern systems of strategic weapons, remains an important task."
Putin warned that Russia must achieve its goals through its own efforts, and implied that some foreign critics of his consolidation of power were trying to weaken the country.
"Far from everyone in the world wants to see an independent, strong and confident Russia," he said. "In the global competition, all sorts of measures of political, economic and information pressure have been used. The strengthening of our statehood has sometimes been intentionally interpreted as authoritarianism."
But critics -- including liberal-minded Russian analysts -- continued to insist that a drift away from democratic norms is exactly what is going on.
"Putin has been trying to implement a standard model of authoritarian modernization in Russia, and there are quite a few of them around -- Chile, South Korea, Singapore," said Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank.
"But he is making two big mistakes," Piontkovsky said. "All these countries used authoritarian methods to accomplish a transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, while Russia's task is to make a breakthrough to a postindustrial economy. And secondly, these authoritarian models worked more or less fine because the bureaucracy there was absolutely clean and not corrupt. In Russia, where everything is rotten and everyone is corrupt to the core, Putin's authoritarian modernization will never work."
