Putin, a longtime Soviet KGB officer who is considering returning to the presidency in the March 2012 election, made clear the government had the means to limit Internet freedoms but suggested it would be morally wrong to do so.
“One can always impose control, but the question is ... whether the state has the right to interfere,” Putin told pupils at a secondary school he visited on the first day of the school year, according to Russian news agencies.
“In the modern world you cannot limit anything, you must simply work more effectively in this area,” he said, apparently hinting that the government should make better use of the Internet to counter the criticism it faces online.
In a country where much of the media is state-run and street protests are tightly restricted, the Internet is one of the last bastions of free speech. Bloggers who criticize the government or crusade against corruption have won broad followings.
Denial-of-service attacks on Russia’s most popular blogging site earlier this year kindled fears that authorities want to control Internet use before a December parliamentary election and the presidential vote next year.
Concern deepened during the Arab Spring unrest, when Russia’s domestic security service, which Putin once headed, said uncontrolled use of communication providers such as Gmail, Hotmail and Skype could threaten national security.
Putin, replying to a question from an 11th grader about potential limits on the Internet, suggested restrictions were not the best way to fight phenomena ranging from child pornography to “negative political appeals.”
“It is impossible to block this, it is necessary simply to create understanding in people, to form an internal rejection of such things,” state-run RIA and Interfax quoted him as saying.
Russia’s iPad-wielding president, Dmitry Medvedev, has also ruled out draconian controls on the Internet while suggesting there should be a discussion on how to deal with clearly illegal content such as child pornography.
Putin also sought to court millions of Russian drivers this week by sending supporters on an epic car journey across eight time zones to check the state of Russia’s notoriously poor roads ahead of the elections.
Opinion polls show more than half of voters are unhappy with the dire state of Russia’s roads, an issue that could become a theme in the December parliamentary election and a presidential election in March.
Putin told officials that members of his All-Russian People’s Front, a movement he created to boost the ratings of his ruling United Russia party, would inspect the roads on a car journey of more then 7,350 km from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.
“They will see with their own eyes how the roads are being built and what they look like,” Putin told government officials, construction workers and activists during a video conference.
“We are here today to speak about an eternal problem, one of Russia’s eternal problems — the roads,” he said, hinting at a popular proverb which says that Russia has two eternal problems: fools and roads. Putin says Russia needs to spend $285 billion over the next decade to double the rate of road building and cope with soaring car ownership which is forecast to reach 60 million by 2020.
Putin, 58, has still not said whether he or his protege, President Dmitry Medvedev, will run in the March election.
But the former KGB spy has been sharpening his image among voters with a string of stunts, baring his muscular torso for a well publicized medical checkup and revving up a three-wheeled Harley Davidson at the head of a bikers motorcade.
In one stunt last year, Putin drove 2,165 km in a yellow Lada along a newly paved road which for the first time linked the European part of Russia with the Far East.
But Putin was stunned when told by an activist that some of the road covering had all ready disintegrated, a frequent problem for hastily constructed roads which have to endure the strains of the bitter Russian winter.
“For me it is a surprise. I was there last year and everything was paved. Are there unpaved parts? Or parts of the road are under repairs?” Putin said.
