Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Spanish King Juan Carlos I understood each other wordlessly, as old friends do.
Photo: Ilya Pitalev
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Vladimir Putin Bowls Them over in Spain
// Visit
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived yesterday in Madrid on an official visit to Spain. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov has the details.
Spanish King Juan Carlos I and the queen and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero met the Russian president at the early-15th century El Pardo Palace, built as an unobtrusive hunting lodge. In the 20th century, the weddings of Spanish princesses were held here. (They were hunted by all the best grooms of Europe.) Now El Pardo is most often used as the residence of heads of state when they are guests of the king. Juan Carlos and his wife arrived at the palace at 1:15, a quarter hour early for the ceremony. It was about 5 degrees Centigrade and the king was dressed lightly but in a dark suit. The queen was wearing a light dress.
While they were freezing waiting for the president of Russia, the guard for the ceremony was thinning out before my eyes. Two of them within five or six minutes passed out and their comrades were unable to pull them out of what proved to be an ill-fated place. The rest of them would have lost consciousness with the least exertion of strength, will or thought. Even the huge number of horses, on which the guards were mounted, were neighing.
A wide variety of birds and beasts were waiting to greet Putin at El Pardo. When Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin arrived in their limousine, the guards who remained conscious (the fainting may have been from hunger, for it would be hard to attribute it to sunstroke) were being greeted by the king and queen and passing leisurely by a row of soldiers. I saw that several eagles were circling over them. That was not a great shock to me, but they made a powerful impression on the Spanish journalists, who claimed that they were not included in the protocol of the ceremony. This was later confirmed by the organizers of the event. Only two police helicopters were.
Remembering the two guards who fainted and were left lying on the steps, I wondered if the bird were after carrion, but abandoned that thought as absurd.
Cannons were set off. I decided that the rest of the guards would pass out now, but they withstood. The soldiers had gone off around a corner so they could then march out past the president and the king.
That ritual was an unconditional success. First motorcycles passed by the president and then infantry. Then horsemen. After them, an unusual quartet of horses appeared, pulling a canon. Normal horses are big all over (legs, head, rear…), but if they were made three times larger, they would look like these.
The king, an animal lover, was even more pleased by them than Putin. He was as happy as a child. His wife looked at him with affectionate reproach. I was desperate for some real politics.
I hoped to get just that in a few hours in the Madrid mayor's office, but my hopes were fated to be crushed. Madrid Mayor Ruiz Jimenez gave a welcoming speech, from which I learned that Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, who wrote A Summer Night in Madrid, was fascinated by Spanish folk music while he was visiting the city in the mid-19th century, as his correspondence confirms.
He also devoted several minutes of his speech to the battle against terrorism, which, it can be said without exaggeration, the entire Spanish people is fascinated with.
Jimenez presented Putin with the keys to the city “whose industrial growth exceeds the average European GDP by 17 base points.”
In his response, Putin compared Madrid to a human being with a thousand facets and congratulated it on its lawful 400th anniversary. (Strictly speaking, Madrid has been the capital of Spain for 445 years.)
Putin confirmed that Glinka did indeed write A Summer Night in Madrid and noted, tearing himself unwillingly away from his text for a joke of his own, that “a winter night is the same as our summer nights.” (The difference in temperature between Madrid and Moscow at that moment was 45 degrees Centigrade.)
After the exchange of speeches, the mayor and the president went inside for ceremonial tea drinking with the members of the municipality, and I understood that there would be no real politics anywhere in this city today.
That impression was somewhat alleviated by Spanish journalist Pilar Bonet, who already distinguished herself at a meeting with Putin when she complained to him about the absence on his website of the part of her conversation with the president concerning the disappearance in Moscow of a Spanish citizen employed by YUKOS who had come to Moscow voluntarily for questioning. Bonet said that she had personally handed a parliamentary enquiry about the fate of that person to Putin. She was calmed by the presidential press service, which made a variety of suggestion on the topic. The most logical of them seemed to me to be that the former YUKOS employee who was ready to give information to the Russian prosecutor's office had been isolated in a witness protection program. That would also account for the disappearance of the information about him from the presidential website and his mysterious disappearance in Moscow. It would account for just about any event in the life of anyone who finds himself in the capital city of our homeland.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 09, 2006
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