“Komsomolskaya Pravda”: “The next trip will be to see the polar bears”
The audience at Gostiny Dvor from where the Prime Minister addressed the people yesterday consisted of workers and students. Not a single government bureaucrat.
There was a large delegation of workers from Tula.
The workers readily shared their problems and only one of them looked grim. When I approached him he stopped me with a gesture of his hand. "I do not talk with the media," he said and pointed to his watch. I immediately realized that this was the famous Tula worker, Viktor Zagayevsky, who had provoked Putin into giving him his watch when visiting a plant in Tula.
"What is the time?" I took a gentle jab at him, knowing that everybody had been asking him the same question.
He confirmed my guess:
"They got under my skin. Just you try to write anything. I am patient, but when I lose my temper," he made a threatening gesture...
Incidentally, although some media had been spreading the rumour that Major Dymovsky, a policeman sacked for tackling corruption, was surely going to make a call, from our information no calls from him were registered.
After the video linkup Putin approached journalists.
"How do you recover from such a marathon, do you have a recipe?" we asked Putin.
"I don't go in anywhere to get my wind back, this is my job," Putin replied. "My colleagues and I always work hard."
Putin explained that the journalists had gone to the places he had visited, so this gave him a chance to see how his instructions were being followed.
"It is important to know what is happening in reality and not on paper," Putin explained.
He cited the example of the Amur Shipbuilding Plant, which on paper had paid all the wage arrears.
"But that is not true," the Prime Minister conveyed the piece of information he got during his video linkup. "They will pay within days."
When asked where Putin would go next as the new head of the Russian Geographic Society's Board of Trustees he said: to Siberia, to the polar bears, as part of the programme to save rare animals.
Putin was also asked one of the questions that were running over the screen in the shape of SMS messages but were not read out loud:
"How do you see the end of the world?"
"I think such apocalyptic sentiments are harmful," the Prime Minister said.
"We should think not about the end of the world, but about the light at the end of the tunnel. I mean the crisis."
"Will there be government reshuffles?" Mr Putin was asked.
"What for?" Putin shrugged.
Journalists asked the Prime Minister for his reaction to the bureaucrats who say "Putin promised it to you, let him do it for you."
The Prime Minister responded with a gesture as if he was sweeping with a broom.
"It is not about what I said or promised," he explained his gesture. "It is the government decision. Those officials who do not want to fulfill it will have to look for another job."
Andrei Ovchinnikov; Larisa Ryabtseva; Andrei Sedov
