Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Chinese Shaolin monks in the Kremlin in Moscow on Tuesday, March 27, 2007. Last March Mr. Putin, who has a black belt in judo, visited Shaolin, the Chinese town regarded as the birthplace of the martial art of kung fu.
Photo: AP
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Vladimir Putin Gets a Taste of China
Yesterday Russian President Vladimir Putin spent two hours at the opening ceremony of the Chinese National Exhibition in Moscow, and before he left he performed a very important gesture. Kommersant correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov has the details.
"We've finally turned our faces to Asia!" trumpeted Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who stood in the middle of a narrow aisle separating the Russian businessmen and politicians from their Chinese counterparts. Mr. Zyuganov himself, however, was standing in such a way that it was impossible to tell exactly which way his face was pointing.
"But if we've turned our face to Asia, that means that to the West we've turned our…" – I paused, groping for a polite way to finish the sentence, but Gennady Zyuganov beat me to it: "Leave it! We're a Eurasian country! We are the bridge between the East and the West!"
After expressing a brief snarl of displeasure with the conditions offered to Russia for WTO entry, which Mr. Zyuganov believes are destined to lead ignominiously to the Chinese yuan conquering Siberia and the euro taking over European Russia, he was back to extolling the virtues of the country that has managed to united thousands of years of Confucian ideals with the ideas of Marx and Engels. We need to learn, learn, learn from the Chinese! he sang.
"Studying there costs money, by the way," said a correspondent from REN-TV who was standing nearby.
"It does not!" exclaimed Mr. Zyuganov. "I know, I gave a lecture there."
"And they didn't pay you?" I inquired.
"No, they didn't," he said, and was quiet for a moment before noting that all Chinese managers used to know Russian.
"Now that has all changed," I said. "Now the Russian managers need to know Chinese."
He had to agree.
At that moment, we were all requested to rise for the appearance of the Russian and Chinese leaders, who were met with thunderous applause from the assembled businessmen. The Chinese leader must have felt right at home.
After short and rousing speeches, the leaders and members of the delegations began their tour around the exhibition, which included Chinese supercomputers and a tastefully arranged selection of Chinese automobiles.
Despite his carefully arranged facial expression, Mr. Putin seemed rather unmoved by the accumulated evidence of Chinese successes that surrounded him, and he did not pause for more than a quick smile and a moment of conversation with anyone.
He paused the longest at a stand presenting the oil pipeline that is being built by Transneft from Russian to China. The display was digital and flashed a continually changing series of pictures, which Mr. Putin quickly tired of. "Okay, I see," he said, meaning that the pipeline is in the bag. Nothing more needs to be said about it.
While Mr. Putin and Mr. Hu stood surrounded at the next stand by several young ladies with fans and monks in orange robes who were busy assuming various threatening martial arts poses, several senior members of the Russian delegation wandered over towards a pond in the corner in which swam several red fish.
"How pretty," breathed Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov.
"Aren't they suffocating in there?" asked someone anxiously.
"In my opinion, they're not real," said Mr. Sokolov, breaking the silence that had descended following the last remark.
"That can't be true," said Gennady Zyuganov, sticking a finger in the pond and attempting to touch one of the fish. It flicked its tail. "And you said they weren't real," he said, shaking his head.
"It has a plastic tail," said First Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov. "I'm telling you, it does."
They all leaned closer to the surface of the water.
"They really are plastic, it seems," said Alexander Sokolov. "I've heard of things like that."
He appeared to be completely convinced that the tail was a prosthesis stuck onto a live fish, particularly since the tail was slightly whiter than the rest of the fish.
"This is some kind of model fish," decided Trade and Economics Minister German Gref. "Look – they're not sinking!"
"So they aren't!" echoed the others, somewhat dazed by the realization.
"But they're also not sticking up out of the water!" continued Mr. Gref. "Now that's high-tech."
"Good lord, do you think they might be remote-controlled?" suggested Alexander Zhukov.
"Well, of course!" exclaimed German Gref. "They have antennas on their spines!"
Now all they needed to do was find the Chinese engineers hiding somewhere with their remote controls, each one controlling his own individual fish. Unfortunately, by that point the rest of the Russian delegation had moved on, and they had to hustle to catch up.
Meanwhile, Mr. Putin was following the Chinese president's lead in some complicated maneuvers with a tea cup, while Mr. Hu's personal protocol assistant menaced an exhibit participant with a camera who was trying to get an unauthorized picture of the Chinese leader. In the space of fifteen minutes, the protocol agent confiscated no fewer than a dozen cameras from various unfortunate would-be photographers.
The climax came near the exit, when a Chinese man continued to furiously snap photos of the beloved leader despite the protocol agent yanking on his jacket. Eventually the agent simply popped him over the head with his fist and grabbed his camera just before the man began to lose consciousness. Interestingly, none of the victims appeared to harbor any hope of getting their cameras back. Apparently they understood that they had gotten off lightly.
At the exit from the exhibition hall, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao were accosted by a heart-rending cry: "Vladimir Vladimiroooviiich!" A Russian woman despairingly attempted to shove a piece of paper at the Russian president, who signaled to his minions to take it. Once he had left, I approached the woman.
Tatiana Tsvetkova had asked the president to give her mother in Yaroslavl an apartment that she had been waiting ten years for. The day before the exhibition, Ms. Tsvetkova had purchased some holy ground in a church and, late that night, when Russian television was broadcasting a concert marking the beginning of the year of Russia in China, she placed a candle in the earth and began to pray, bolstered by her close encounter earlier in the day with a relic of the Holy Mother in Taganka. She prayed that Vladimir Putin would hear her cry the next day and take the piece of paper from her. She figured that it would be most effective to pray while the concert was being broadcast on television, since the Russian president was sitting there in the concert hall and might thus be more accessible to her prayers through the television screen.
It's a good thing that she didn't know it wasn't a live broadcast. Then she never would have believed that she could accomplish her task the next day.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 28, 2007
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