Once a year the Russian leader Vladimir Putin engages in a bizarre ritual: he holds a marathon question-and-answer session broadcast live on Russian television. Year after year, he beats his own record for the length of time spent in front of the camera in one sitting. The questions are pre-screened, as they are during Putin’s other annual political ritual, his press conference. These two yearly events represent the sum total of Putin’s direct communication with the public.
On Thursday, Putin spent four-and-a-half hours answering questions. It could not have been easy: Putin’s popularity rating is lower than it has ever been before, and Russia is in the midst of the largest wave of political protests in 20 years. So Putin tried to make light of the situation, making it clear just how out of touch he is with the people of Russia and the reality of his own precarious position.
Asked about the recent protests against rigged parliamentary elections, Putin confessed that he had first mistaken the white ribbons many of the demonstrators wore for condoms. “And what did the opposition leaders shout to the people they brought out to protest?” Putin asked rhetorically. “They shouted, ‘Sheep, go forward!’ Is that any way to treat people?” He also claimed that college students who participated in the protests had been paid. “But that’s all right,” he said magnanimously. “It’s good the kids can make a little bit of money.”
When a prominent doctor tried to bring up the issue of kickbacks that he said are “strangling” Russian business, Putin laughed and said, “So that means they have the money to pay the kickbacks.” Commenting on dealing with the opposition if he is again elected president in March, Putin promised with a smirk, “I will say, ‘Come hither, bandar-log,’ ” referring to the monkeys from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.’’ The creatures are marginal characters in Kipling’s fictional world, characterized by anarchic ways and a chant that goes, “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful.’’
“I have loved Kipling since I was a child,” said Putin. Asked yet another question about the election, Putin said, “I am fed up with these elections,” apparently intentionally implying that he is fed up not only with questions about the elections but with the tedious democratic process itself.
While Russian bloggers waxed incredulous at the prime minister’s crude and inappropriate speech, Putin seemed pleased with himself. He appeared especially happy with the condom joke: he even repeated it as soon as the subject of white ribbons came up again. This sort of below-the-belt humor has worked for Putin before: he earned his first spike in popularity in 1999 when, as a newly appointed prime minister, he promised to fight terrorists by “rubbing them out in the outhouse.”
For most of the last 12 years, Putin has probably been correct in assuming that a majority of the Russian public was charmed by his vulgarisms: they were pitched to people who were starved for straight talk. But Putin has missed a tectonic shift that has occurred in the last few months. Judging from the high turnout at the Dec. 4 parliamentary election, the precipitously falling popularity ratings of Putin and his party, United Russia, and the impressive scale of street protests, many Russians, perhaps even a majority, are sick and tired of being lied to and being taken for granted by the politicians and being squeezed by the corrupt state bureaucracy.
In making his crude jokes now, Putin is mocking not the foreigners or the bleeding-heart liberals but his own old supporters — and in doing so, he is undoubtedly speeding up the demise of his own regime.
On Thursday, Putin spent four-and-a-half hours answering questions. It could not have been easy: Putin’s popularity rating is lower than it has ever been before, and Russia is in the midst of the largest wave of political protests in 20 years. So Putin tried to make light of the situation, making it clear just how out of touch he is with the people of Russia and the reality of his own precarious position.
Asked about the recent protests against rigged parliamentary elections, Putin confessed that he had first mistaken the white ribbons many of the demonstrators wore for condoms. “And what did the opposition leaders shout to the people they brought out to protest?” Putin asked rhetorically. “They shouted, ‘Sheep, go forward!’ Is that any way to treat people?” He also claimed that college students who participated in the protests had been paid. “But that’s all right,” he said magnanimously. “It’s good the kids can make a little bit of money.”
When a prominent doctor tried to bring up the issue of kickbacks that he said are “strangling” Russian business, Putin laughed and said, “So that means they have the money to pay the kickbacks.” Commenting on dealing with the opposition if he is again elected president in March, Putin promised with a smirk, “I will say, ‘Come hither, bandar-log,’ ” referring to the monkeys from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.’’ The creatures are marginal characters in Kipling’s fictional world, characterized by anarchic ways and a chant that goes, “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful.’’
“I have loved Kipling since I was a child,” said Putin. Asked yet another question about the election, Putin said, “I am fed up with these elections,” apparently intentionally implying that he is fed up not only with questions about the elections but with the tedious democratic process itself.
While Russian bloggers waxed incredulous at the prime minister’s crude and inappropriate speech, Putin seemed pleased with himself. He appeared especially happy with the condom joke: he even repeated it as soon as the subject of white ribbons came up again. This sort of below-the-belt humor has worked for Putin before: he earned his first spike in popularity in 1999 when, as a newly appointed prime minister, he promised to fight terrorists by “rubbing them out in the outhouse.”
For most of the last 12 years, Putin has probably been correct in assuming that a majority of the Russian public was charmed by his vulgarisms: they were pitched to people who were starved for straight talk. But Putin has missed a tectonic shift that has occurred in the last few months. Judging from the high turnout at the Dec. 4 parliamentary election, the precipitously falling popularity ratings of Putin and his party, United Russia, and the impressive scale of street protests, many Russians, perhaps even a majority, are sick and tired of being lied to and being taken for granted by the politicians and being squeezed by the corrupt state bureaucracy.
In making his crude jokes now, Putin is mocking not the foreigners or the bleeding-heart liberals but his own old supporters — and in doing so, he is undoubtedly speeding up the demise of his own regime.
