Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) during a meeting with G8 journalists at his residence near Moscow on June 1, 2007.
Photo: Дмитрий Астахов
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Putin Serves Up a Hot Menu
// G8 Journalists Dine with Russian President
On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an interview to journalists from the countries of the G8. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov, a participant in the meeting, recounts the dramatic story of Putin's swim in the fraught waters of international media. We'll all just have to wait for the dramatic story of Putin's decision to extend the president's term in office to seven years.
The president hosted the meeting, which was organized according to the principle of "one country – one journalist," at his residence near Moscow. The most well-known among the journalists was Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Stefan Aust, who also turned out to be central to both the biggest event of the interview and to its biggest problem. Besides him, the other participants at the meeting were Italian Corriere della Sera columnist Franco Venturini, British Times columnist Bronwen Maddox, Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun correspondent Yatsusiko Ota, French Le Figaro international editor Pierre Rousselin, Canadian Globe and Mail European Bureau chief Doug Saunders, and American Wall Street Journal Moscow Bureau chief Gregory White.
We waited for the president for two hours or so, the majority of which was spent agreeing on when the interview would appear in the newspapers represented by the various participants in the meeting. The interview was ideally supposed to appear in all of them simultaneously, which appeared to be an almost impossible feat, since Der Spiegel, for example, comes out on Mondays, while several of the newspapers wanted to publish at least an advance mention of the interview on Saturday.
The members of President Putin's press service worked hard to convince all the rest of the participants to wait for Der Spiegel. As soon as every journalist in the room had sworn a solemn oath that the interview would be held back until early Monday morning, Mr. Aust became a stranger amidst his own.
The most annoyed by the agreement was Corriere della Sera's Mr. Venturini, who subjected the German to an unnecessarily scorching look.
Vladimir Putin did not look at all well-rested that evening. When the journalists lined up to greet him one by one before taking their seats at the table, he even seemed somehow upset, unusual for the beginning of an interview. Then I remembered that he had just returned from a visit to Naina Iosifovna Yeltsin, since June 1 marked the end of the forty-day mourning period following the death of Russia's first president.
The conversation began in Mr. Putin's office on the first floor of the guest house attached to the president's residence. Long before the meeting began, however, I spotted famous Moscow restauranteur Arkady Novikov in the house and realized that a fortifying dinner would be an essential part of the evening.
Mr. Putin gave a short introductory speech, answered three questions (the journalist had earlier agreed amongst themselves who would ask them), and then invited us all upstairs for a bite to eat.
On our way up the stairs, we passed several people sitting on the second floor, in front of a monitor set up in the corner of the room that was broadcasting live from the president's office. The journalists heading upstairs in single file waved dolefully at their colleagues, who had come to offer them moral support, as though they were the friends and family of condemned men being sent to Siberia. It occurred to me that some of the journalists participating in the interview wouldn't rule out that possible evolution of events.
When we arrived in the dining room, the menus lying on the table promised us "sea bass tartar with black caviar, gazpacho with crab, turbot fillet and risotto with asparagus, sliced duck breast with green beans and gooseberries, and wild-strawberry soup." The last offering was particularly interesting to me. In addition to all of that, our palates were tempted with a 2003 Tignanello Chianti and a 2004 Terre Alte Friuli. Suddenly, there was nowhere to rush off to.
The conversation continued after we had seated ourselves, though I wouldn't say that Mr. Putin was enormously enthusiastic about it. The right to ask a question passed clockwise around the table, but several journalists, strenuously avoiding meeting their colleagues' eyes, took the opportunity to ask two or even three questions at a time. President Putin methodically satisfied their various curiosities, but I didn't notice in his words either the occasional thrust of wit or even a minimum of enthusiasm. He did not smile a single time while giving his replies, and it seemed that he had long ago prepared answers for each of these questions and was now bored. Over the next half an hour, he perked up only twice.
But then the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel asked the Russian president whether he is, as former German chancellor Gerhard Shroeder has said, a democrat of the finest sort. This question was put to Mr. Putin several says ago at the EU-Russia summit in Samara, and I thought that the president would be miffed about it. Instead, however, we received the answer of the year: "Of course I am a pure and absolute democrat…but the real problem is that after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, there is no one [for me] to talk to."
When I asked Mr. Putin about the ban on sending biological materials out of the country, he agreed only that the process is not sufficiently legally regulated – he was perplexed by the issue of whether sending tissue and blood samples abroad for analysis might be of some use to anyone.
Later, after the interview, I learned that Mr. Putin had paid much more attention to the information than he had wanted to let on. Apparently, rules for the transport of biological materials out of the country will be worked out according to his decree within the next few days instead of the several weeks or months that these things usually take.
Before that, however, the interview continued for more than two more hours, and at some point Mr. Putin suddenly burst out, "What time is it, anyway? 11:30?! You're torturing me! We need to wrap this up!" Realizing how that must have sounded, he quickly added: "Or I'm the one who's torturing you. But anyway, we need to finish up."
"Do you agree with Iran possessing nuclear weapons?" asked one of the journalists.
"I agree completely," said the president hastily, tucking heartily into his wild-strawberry soup, a strange but tasty concoction made from water, fresh wild strawberries, and a certain something that made Vladimir Putin gulp it down as if he couldn't get enough. Indeed, as the president was responding listlessly to a question about the difficult fate of Aeroflot, a waiter arrived and asked if he could take away the remainder of the soup, to which Mr. Putin replied in no uncertain terms: "Leave the kissel."
Mr. Putin's enthusiasm for the strawberries was much greater than for the questions being fired thick and fast at him by the assembled journalists, who eventually forgot about the established order and began to interrupt each other. The Italian journalist finally resorted to holding a piece of paper over his head with both hands that said, "I have a question too!"
Towards the end of the interview, the president announced that it would be "acceptable" to increase the president's term in office from four to five years, and maybe even to as many as seven. He even explained why, and began to loosen up and relax a bit as the conversation wound towards the finish line.
Presumably this was because he had expected more than a single question, and that one just for the sake of protocol, about the fate of Andrei Lugovoi, as well as the ritual questions about the investigation into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, about Chechnya, and about Beslan. But they never came. The journalists were interested in different topics: the Japanese journalist complained that the ban on the export of crab meat from Russia's Far East means that the Japanese will run out of crab meat for sushi, though Mr. Putin admitted that he much prefers tuna.
Finally, Mr. Putin exercised his authority to bring the conversation to an end sometime past midnight. Mr. Aust from Der Spiegel rushed to his colleagues on the second floor, who were furiously dictating Mr. Putin's answers to their boss's questions for the Monday issue of the magazine.
At the exit, everyone agreed again that there was an embargo on publishing the results of the interview until Monday morning, and everyone cut their eyes again at Mr. Aust.
The next day, the website of Der Spiegel featured an announcement about the interview that constituted an extended answer from Mr. Putin to the burning questions of the day, as well as a base breach of the agreement. The German sally was immediately countered by the reporter from Corriere della Sera, who on Sunday decided to give the full version of the conversation. In the end, only the courageous press service of the Russian president managed to abide by the embargo almost until Monday.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of June 04, 2007
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