Kremlin offers lessons on democracy

By Michael Stott

YAROSLAVL, Russia (Reuters) - Organising a conference on democracy was always going to be a challenge for the Kremlin.

Keen to burnish his credentials as a political reformer after a year in office which saw little actual reform, President Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to stage an international conference on "The Modern State and Global Security".

The idea was to show how Russia, like Davos, could be a forum for open debate among international experts on delicate subjects such as democracy, terrorism and the world order.

But the result - an eight-hour conference held on Monday in the ancient university town of Yaroslavl on Medvedev's 44th birthday -- instead highlighted Russia's very particular political system.

Communists present praised Josef Stalin for his sensitivity to social issues, Russian analysts blasted U.S.-style democracy, a Chinese speaker railed against the "evil" of separatism and an American suggested China's late leader Deng Xiaoping as a model for introducing democracy.

"With Dmitry Medevedev's arrival in power as Russia's president, discussion of democracy in our country moved onto a higher level," Igor Yurgens, who chairs a think-tank founded by Medvedev, told the conference.

Medvedev, who took power last year, has repeatedly stressed the need for Russia to open up and modernise its political system. But opponents say he has made very few real changes to the tightly controlled set-up he inherited from his mentor Vladimir Putin.

The most vocal Kremlin critics -- such as former world chess champion Garry Kasparov or former premier Mikhail Kasyanov -- were not invited to the state-of-the-art ice hockey stadium in Yaroslavl for the conference at all.