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June 6, 2005
Ludmila (calculatingly?) spills the beans
The man - a terse, authoritarian workaholic - comes home, knackered, to his kitchen table in the leafy suburbs between 11.30 and midnight, slumps into a chair, and drinks a glass of yoghurty milk. The family know this is the time to approach him to seek his consent for things, but never to ask him about work. He grunts, makes dark and ironic jokes that bemuse his long-serving and adoring wife, seldom asks his family's advice about the myriad of incurable problems besetting his brow and beloved motherland, and then goes to sleep.
The man? Volodya Putin, according to his missus.
The interview text, or at least the Guardian's summary of it, reminds me of unreliable narrator Olga in Nedelya kak nedelya; tenderly, and apparently unknowingly, painting a portrait of a true domestic tyrant. But the Guardian (and they probably know better) is of the opinion that the interview is anything but innocent.
The interview text that appears in each of the three newspapers is identical, suggesting that Putina's spin doctors may have had as much play in its conception as the four participants of the interview. But all the same, it shows us how the Kremlin's Alastair Campbells want us to think life in the Putin home works. For Kremlin watchers, it also provides the intriguing possibility that a president increasingly criticised for his authoritarian and anti-democratic methods, first learned how to dominate in the home.
Posted by michele at June 6, 2005 10:18 AM