Russian translation
The Prime Minister's swing through Russia.
Throughout last week Vladimir Putin startled everyone with a flurry of activities: he saved dolphins, galloped on horseback stripped to the waist, gave his watch to a shepherd's son, dropped to the depths of Lake Baikal and swam butterfly style. Some of these things may appear odd, but only at first glance.
The Prime Minister's yet another tour of the country began on July 31 with a visit to Chkalov Island in the Sea of Okhotsk where he met scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences studying white fish who are in the international Red Book of endangered species. Putin fed humpback salmon to the white fish and personally attached a satellite transmitter to a fish named Dasha before setting it free into the sea. The day after his meeting with Dasha Vladimir Putin climbed into a Mir-1 submersible to dive to the bottom of Lake Baikal to a depth of 1,395 metres. On August 2-3 Putin was in Tyva where he backed the programme to study and preserve the snow leopard, went rafting down a mountain river, displayed his butterfly swimming technique in cold water, spent some time in a tent and did some fishing. During one of his walks, the Prime Minister - quite accidentally - met a local shepherd. The shepherd, who hardly spoke any Russian, spontaneously invited him to his home. They reached the place on horseback. Putin was stripped to the waist (like two years ago during his first trip to Tyva with the Prince of Monaco). Before leaving, the Prime Minister gave his knife to the shepherd and his watch to the shepherd's son.
The eclectic nature of these publicity stunts merits an explanation. From his very first public appearance Putin has been posing as a hero. The hero's character is evolving. Vlast has long noted (most recently in the previous issue) that at first Putin posed as a Marshal Zhukov, Standartenfuhrer Stirlitz and Captain Zheglov rolled in one. During his ten years in power Putin has apparently become so confident that he has tried to pose as other heroes. Of course they are all movie stars, they are masculine and romantic, but they do not wear a uniform, they perform their feats not in headquarters but in rugged terrain and they appeal more to young boys than to middle-aged women.
His topless galloping makes one think of the heroes of East German films about Indians played by Gojko Mitić (a personal friend of the GDR leader Erich Honecker) during Putin's youth. Putin knows the GDR well. The physical resemblance is matched by the similarity in plot: the theme of the friendship between the Indian Vinnetu and the "good" cowboys resembles the scene in which he meets the shepherd and presents a watch to his son.
The good swimmer and wildlife lover theme conjures up the 1930s Hollywood classic Tarzan which drove the Soviet boys of the post-war generation crazy. Tarzan was played by the famous swimmer and many time Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller. In the recent version, Tarzan is combined with the youthful hero of the 1960s American film Flipper whose best friend was a dolphin. That film was also a huge hit in the Soviet Union.
Submersion to the bottom of Lake Baikal does not prompt a direct analogy, but the deep-sea Prime Minister does bring back memories of Ichtiandr from the romantic Soviet 1960s film "Amphibious Man." The movie hero persona would have been complete with a spectacular Zorro-style leap, in mask and black cape of course, from the second floor onto a waiting horse. But that omission was more than made up for by Providence. On August 4 Putin, apparently putting his Prime Minister's hat back on, went to Orenburg to conduct a meeting on the aftermath of the drought in Southern Russia. And there a truly cinematic miracle took place: during his visit it started raining for the first time since May, an episode in headlines of all the Russian news agencies.
Of course, rain is a pretty far fetched PR stunt, but even so it was a logical climax to the Prime Minister's tour.
Alexander Kukolevsky