Late last month, Dmitry Medvedev hit out at the “outrageous” Kremlin practice of selling government posts, promising to solve the problem by handpicking personnel for government positions. You may have thought the solution sounded somewhat off-key. Who’s to say, after all, that the President should have the authority to choose his personnel outside of a merit-based or otherwise democratic system? Well, that’s what Nikolai Petrov is wondering in this unusually critical piece from today’s Moscow Times, which calls attention to Medvedev’s proposals, and laments the absence of a “truly transparent and merit-based selection personnel recruiting process in Putin’s political system”.