Slashdot Mirror
Nature Lover Vladimir Putin Flies With the Cranes
Hugh Pickens writes "Russian President Vladimir Putin is a nature lover. In 2007, the bare-chested president rode a horse through Siberia. In 2008, he fired a tranquilizer gun at a rare Siberian tiger. In 2010, he used a crossbow to shoot darts at an enormous whale in a fog-shrouded bay to collect tissue samples. Now Der Spiegel reports that on his way east to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Putin stopped at the Arctic Circle to fulfill a mission for which the Kremlin says he prepared assiduously for a year and a half: helping to save an endangered species of crane. In a meadow some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, Putin donned a white jumpsuit and black aviator goggles before swinging himself into the seat of an ultralight aircraft and as loudspeakers played the recorded call of a mother crane, Putin lifted off and a group of orphaned white Siberian cranes followed, allowing the aircraft to lead them south toward their winter habitat. On the first attempt, only one of the young cranes followed him up, which Putin said was because a high tail wind had caused the hang glider to accelerate too fast. On the second attempt, five birds followed Putin, but only two stuck with him for the full 15-minute flight. Putin's flight, given many minutes of airtime on Russian television, provoked an array of contemptuous jokes on the Internet, one of the most popular being: 'So Putin is off to wintering with cranes. Does this mean he's not going to be back before spring?' The Russian president, however, hit back at critics telling reporters at the conclusion of APEC summit that, 'It's true that not all flew right away, but the ones that didn't fly were the weak cranes' apparently alluding to the errant ways of those involved in protests that have hit Russia over the last year."
These are exactly the same types of activities that Kim Jung Ill seems to excel at.
If he weren't, he wouldn't have to spend all his time desperately trying to prove that he's such a badass.
Nonsense. The guy is powerful beyond anyone's wildest dreams and is doing stuff that a) he enjoys; b) appeals as propaganda to the macho sort still prevalent in Russian.
Russia has become precisely what the left expected Reagan+Thatcher wanted in toppling the USSR: a corrupt, undemocratic kleptocracy with few new freedoms but no social cohesion or state protections, where middlemen and government have their hands constantly down each other's pants, jacking each other off while they kick the common man. It is the neocon dream realised.
Anyone who thinks that life wasn't better in Russia in the 1970s either 1) was not living there; 2) is one of the very few beneficiaries of business. (Hint: if you're a geek programmer living in Moscow, you're in category #2.) But the Soviet Russia will forever be remembered as it was in the late 1980s, which would be like judging capitalism only from the Great Depression, late 2008, the imperialist drive for profit, the Southern State free market definition of "person", Halliburton, &c., instead of all the good things it has achieved.
This is not quite right, I guess Putin doesn't care about these. You see, they weren't teenage girls and they have "protested" (personally, I believe them to be simply a bunch of attention whores) numerous times before, their leader even in a group sex session while being pregnant. Nobody cared until they tried to "perform" in the church and the church is a powerful institution in Capitalist Russia.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That things have changed dramatically since, for a variety of reasons, shouldn't negate the fact that there were good parts of the Soviet Union, and under some conditions socialism worked quite well. It is equally possible, and equally misleading, to create a dystopic version of both the USA and the UK simply by focussing on the rust belt, inner cities, areas of house price collapse and places with a large incidence of extremists of one persuasion or another.
The point about Putin for the average Russian is that Eltsine let his mates steal virtually the entire wealth of the country, and Putin has got a significant amount of it back. He has doubtless enriched himself in the process, but at least he has prevented the "last one out turn off the lights, if no-one has stolen them" end game of his predecessor.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Anyone who thinks that life wasn't better in Russia in the 1970s either 1) was not living there; 2) is one of the very few beneficiaries of business. (Hint: if you're a geek programmer living in Moscow, you're in category #2.)
Well, life in the Soviet Union was of uneven quality, on geographical as well as political grounds. There were certainly places where life was better then than it is now. There were also many places where it was worse then than it is now. I spent time in both Moscow and Leningrad (as it was then called) for a period as a foreigner in the early 1980s, and formed opinions based on what I saw and what I was told by actual Russians. I'd class it as weird as much as good or bad.
Taking the "good" side first, I saw no particular poverty (unlike most large Western cities), and the people were all fairly well-dressed and looked healthy enough. The streets were quite tidy, just like Nordic cities of today. Also, the people I met all had jobs or sinecures of some sort, and even the lowliest (cleaners) had some spare money. Basic rents were controlled and cheap, so was food.
Taking the "bad" side, those I talked to (including our translator) said that it was a privilege to live in "display" cities like Moscow or Leningrad. Moreover, if they lost this privilege, life would be much tougher in the backwoods, and even keeping well-fed could be a challenge. Internal travel was highly restricted, and our translator needed internal permission papers for every place we visited or spent the night. The reason everyone had spare cash was because there were no luxuries available, and there was not much to spend money on after paying for food and rent - except for booze. Booze was cheap and plentiful, and consumed in prodigious amounts.
Then there was the "weird" side. Whenever we went to a touristy place, we were met by well-dressed most unbeggar-like kids who were determined to haggle - they gave us badges with Lenin and suchlike, and we gave them Wrigley's chewing gum. I still have many of those badges, with their prices embossed on them from manufacture. The staff at every hotel wanted to haggle over our jeans - Levi's only, forget the designer shit - and paid up to 150roubles a pair in cash (a rouble was worth more than a dollar at the time). To break the ice when meeting groups of Russians in a business context, we learned to bring along a few bottles of vodka - it turned the event from a confrontation between potential foes into a meeting of long-lost friends after a couple of bottles were empty. On one of our first restaurant visits, we forgot to "bribe" or tip-in-advance the head waiter, so we ended up waiting a long time for a table. We were then informed that only the set meal was available, and that due to time constraints, we could not have the dessert but that the price was unchanged. The entire restaurant staff came out to indulge in "self-criticism" before we left, just to rub in the lesson and let the other guests know what cheap-skates we were...
Another anecdote: a colleague left a party early and very drunk in late winter. He woke up the next day in our hotel on the other side of Moscow, with no knowledge or recollection of how he got there (and he didn't know the way). Our translator said that probably the police found him drunk and unconscious on the street, and took him to the correct hotel based on the ID in his pocket. She said that regular Russians would have spent the night in a police cell and would have been released early in the morning (a cold shower for the hangover was mentioned, but perhaps jokingly). Apparently, the main work for the police at night was picking up drunks before they froze to death. Most of my anecdotes from that period tend toward the scandalous; that one is tame enough.
For a Westerner interacting with regular people, the weirdness overwhelmed the goodness and the badness.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As a former Soviet citizen I can attest that for great many people lives indeed were better back then than they are now. Even with the food and fuel queues. What good is all the abundance if you cannot afford anything? USSR, for some time, was certainly not the worst place to live.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Well, I'm reminded of a political cartoon I saw about 15 years ago, that had 3 pictures of a depressed-looking man with a glass of vodka in his hand. The first was captioned "Russia under the Czars", the second "Russia under Communism", and the third "Russia under democracy".
I am officially gone from