In February of this year, President Medvedev decreed that Russia would not follow the long-standing practice of turning the clocks back one hour at the end of October, but would instead remain in a permanent temporal, if not meteorological, summer.  Yesterday chaos was apparently manifest, as people were confused about whether the decision had in fact been made law.  Today, reports came in of problems for Russia’s financial sector, which is now four hours behind London.

The aptness of this as a metaphor for Medvedev’s political career has not been lost on Russia watchers.  The President has, since the announcement that Putin would return to the Presidency next year, been described variously as a seat warmer and lame duck.  An attempt to regain credibility through the unlikely medium of badminton, only provoked more derision.  Today an op-ed from Alexei Pankin in the Moscow Times has picked up on how the President’s predilection for the Internet has been not been taken as a sign of cutting edge dynamism, but rather the glaring stasis of a political screen saver: