The gap between rhetoric and reality grows wider by the day in president Dmitry Medvedev’s Russia. In his state-of-the-nation address, Mr Medvedev on Thursday set out a vision of Russia’s future as a flourishing democracy with a thriving knowledge-based economy and secure external relations.

As a speech, it worked well. There were tough words on corruption and on unrest in the northern Caucasus, an eco-friendly promise on gas flaring, plans for modest electoral reforms, and, above all, pledges to modernise the economy’s “primitive structure”, with its “shamefully low” competitiveness and energy dependence.