The prime minister rides new Harley three-wheeler in Novorossiisk.
On August 29, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended the Night Wolves motorcycle event in Novorossiisk. The Night Wolves are Russia's oldest motorcycle club. Last year, Putin attended the event in the Crimea, where he also rode a trike. This year's trike was a modified Harley-Davidson.
"This is a different bike, not the one the prime minister rode last year," Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told Izvestia. "It's not his motorcycle, but before the gathering, Putin regularly took bike rides around Moscow."
Putin took part in a low-key bike run, changing his limousine for the trike in a supermarket parking lot, probably a new experience for those at the supermarket. A "pack" of Night Wolves, standing proudly with their street bikes, waited for Putin in the parking lot. The prime minister greeted the head Wolf, a.k.a. "The Surgeon," and then mounted his shining three-wheeler. With Putin leading the pack, and Russian flags fluttering, the bikers roared off to the seaport.
All of Novorossiisk came to watch the spectacle. Even though it was a weekday, people flocked to the port for the concert. The bikers and their long-legged girlfriends (the latter holding their boyfriends with one hand and their helmets with the other) were living it up in the stands.
Against this loud background was a group of WWII veterans who had been invited to watch the show (the concert was dedicated to the Great Patriotic War). The bikers' chains rattled and the veterans' medals jingled quietly in response: biker logo versus the symbols of battle service.
The prime minister circled the square several times, waved to visitors and then climbed on to a platform mounted on the Mikhail Kutuzov, a decommissioned warship on permanent display.
"This year we decided to hold this undertaking both in Sevastopol and here on the sacred soil of Novorossiisk. These two are cities of Russian martial and naval glory. This soil is literally soaked with blood, the blood of our fathers and grandfathers," Putin said to the audience.
He thanked the Night Wolves for combining their biking runs with patriotic themes, and said that Novorossiisk's war history was linked with motorcycles. The city was liberated from its German invaders 68 years ago, and children had been evacuated to Sochi in motorcycle sidecars.
"The men on the beach assault force that liberated Novorossiisk 68 years ago had a great motto, 'Always move forward!', and it's just as important today, both for bikers and for the country in general," Putin said.
To loud applause, the prime minister stepped down from the stage and headed for his seat on the stand. The veterans were on his right and some Serbian bikers he had met a year ago in Sevastopol, were on his left.
This was the prime minister's company for the show. Event organisers had installed a 5-meter-high bike jump on the embankment. Covered with powerful lights, the Mikhail Kutuzov was also part of the show. It came aglow with a thousand lights reflected festively in the night-darkened water of Novorossiisk Bay. A costumed battle mockup was unfolding on the embankment in the meantime. Some "Germans" attempted to board the ship to bursts of automatic fire and fireworks displays. Flaming bikers rode carelessly into the water. A sailors' choir was singing war songs from the defunct ship.
Anastasia Novikova