As wild fires rage through Russia’s heartland, its leaders are approaching the people with a very modern twist. Almost 3,000 miles of land have been scorched in the worst summer forest fires in Russia for 150 years. Economically, this spells disaster for thousands of farmers and businesses for the next year, and it has been officially reported recently that the Russian government has banned all grain exports until December, in order to recover.
As with all natural disasters, there are inevitable feelings of helplessness from the public, which then turn to ire, then the desire to place blame – usually at the ineptitude of politicians and the speed at which the response came (Hurricane Katrina et al, come to mind). This time it’s no different. Moscow may have the tendency of bumping-off journalists that criticize the government, but on paper, at least, there is a ‘free press’ in place and that is most apparent on the internet. So, to respond to the public outcry over the lack of usable fire fighting services (aging trucks, poorly maintained warning bells), Prime Minister Putin has gone online to (ahem) fight fire with fire.
For a man that admitted in a 2007 Time magazine article that he’d “never written an e mail” this seemed like a remarkably modern volte-face. Apparently a blog was set up through a Moscow radio station loaded with comments from citizens, angry that the government had poorly maintained services in place for such disasters. Unlike President Medvedev, who is a very vocal ‘modern man’ with a blog and Twitter account, Putin is of the old guard – until now. He responded, as Business Week reports, with a mixture of “flattery and irony” responding to one scribe by saying that “You’re definitely a gifted writer,” if you made a living by writing, you could live in Capri, just like Vladimir Lenin’s favorite writer, Maxim Gorky.” The response was curt, “We have no hope in you, we all understand that your one principle in life is that everybody owes you. But you’re mistaken, you owe us and you owe us a lot.”
Something tells me Putin won’t lose sleep over this, but it’s interesting to think of how far the country has come since the Soviet era – and how far there still is to go.
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Big Bosses and The Blogosphere
As with all natural disasters, there are inevitable feelings of helplessness from the public, which then turn to ire, then the desire to place blame – usually at the ineptitude of politicians and the speed at which the response came (Hurricane Katrina et al, come to mind). This time it’s no different. Moscow may have the tendency of bumping-off journalists that criticize the government, but on paper, at least, there is a ‘free press’ in place and that is most apparent on the internet. So, to respond to the public outcry over the lack of usable fire fighting services (aging trucks, poorly maintained warning bells), Prime Minister Putin has gone online to (ahem) fight fire with fire.
For a man that admitted in a 2007 Time magazine article that he’d “never written an e mail” this seemed like a remarkably modern volte-face. Apparently a blog was set up through a Moscow radio station loaded with comments from citizens, angry that the government had poorly maintained services in place for such disasters. Unlike President Medvedev, who is a very vocal ‘modern man’ with a blog and Twitter account, Putin is of the old guard – until now. He responded, as Business Week reports, with a mixture of “flattery and irony” responding to one scribe by saying that “You’re definitely a gifted writer,” if you made a living by writing, you could live in Capri, just like Vladimir Lenin’s favorite writer, Maxim Gorky.” The response was curt, “We have no hope in you, we all understand that your one principle in life is that everybody owes you. But you’re mistaken, you owe us and you owe us a lot.”
Something tells me Putin won’t lose sleep over this, but it’s interesting to think of how far the country has come since the Soviet era – and how far there still is to go.
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Filed under Commentary, Russia
Tagged as Blogosphere, fire, Medvedev, online, Putin