I do love hearing that old anecdote about Andrew Marr rushing through the Kremlin en route to some assignment, and noticing various guards, soldiers and literal apparatchiks leaping up and clicking their heels, under the impression he was Vladimir Putin. Always, though, I find myself wondering whether anybody has ever had the guts to tell it to Putin himself. Shouldn’t have thought so. ‘Gollum?’ he’d say, peering at you with those cold, colourless eyes of his. ‘You are saying, comrade, that I look like Gollum?’ Brrr. You’d never eat sashimi again.
It’s a source of endless fascination to me, the vanity of Vladimir Putin. Because that resemblance is decreasing, isn’t it? Marr is ageing as God intended, sort of like a filleted, deflating Martin Clunes. Putin, though, has gone odd. Smooth, almost bulging, there’s a strange matt sheen to his face suddenly, almost like they’ve already done the old dictator pickle on him, even though he’s still very much walking about.
It’s not normal vanity, this. Two years ago, when rumour had it that his marriage was in trouble, Vlad and the missus, Lyudmila, invited Russian state TV into their home. The pair of them sat on a sofa that was brown in a room that was brown, both wearing clothes, remarkably, that were exactly the same brown as everything else. It wasn’t nice. And yet this is a man who shaves his chest and gets half-naked to be photographed riding a horse or fishing. Think about that. These are insecty pursuits, infamously so. To attempt either one of them without the protection, even, of hair? Proper alpha.
He’s paranoid about his height, too. You wonder why he’s only friends with Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez and the Chinese? It’s because, unlike the leaders of the free world (Sarkozy excepted) they don’t loom over him as though he was a child. Many have wondered exactly what qualifications Dmitry Medvedev had when Putin plucked him from nowhere and made him President. The answer? He’s even shorter, apparently by eight whole centimetres. I always thought the man wore weirdly huge ties. But they’re normal-sized ties, aren’t they?
The thing about Putin, though, is that he’s got game. He’s a plastic-faced, egomaniacal shortarse, sure. He’s an ex-KGB, sushi-poisoning, election-fixing, anti-democratic, Assad-supporting, Chechnya-bombing horror of a human being, I know. I wouldn’t want him in charge of my country. Indeed, I don’t particularly want him in charge of his own country. But I’m starting to grasp why so many Russians, even now, do. Did you see that bit in the BBC documentary — Russia, Putin and the West — the other month, where he bollocked Oleg Deripaska? He was in some horrible provincial town where the oligarchs had shut the factories, so he gathered them together and made them sign a contract agreeing to open them again. ‘Deripaska?’ he said. ‘Have you signed?’ ‘Yes,’ lied Deripaska. But Putin made him come over and sign it for real, on camera. And then, as he slunk back to his seat, he said, suddenly, ‘Oi!’ then ‘pen!’ Awesome.
They’re different, Russians. I’ve been to Russia twice, and I couldn’t get my head around it. The men, even when they aren’t, give the faint impression of being murderers. The women do a thing we don’t quite have a word for, but which is to flirting what an ice-pick is to a tooth-pick. Underneath it all, there’s this fatalistic pragmatism. Life is brutally simple, it says, and these are the levers you need to pull. And for almost a decade and a half now, Putin has been there, pulling them. I know it’s all gone a bit wrong lately, but how much do you honestly reckon he cares? There’s a presidential election on Sunday. If he wins it, he wins it, and if he nicks it, he wins it. He knows that, and he knows you know that, and he doesn’t give a damn.
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Speaking of despots, did you see the Oscars fuss about Sacha Baron Cohen? Formerly Borat and Bruno, he’s about to return to cinemas as Admiral General Aladeen — basically Gaddafi with a beard — in a film called The Dictator. On Oscar night he arrived in costume and poured what he pretended were Kim Jong-il’s ashes all over a TV presenter and the red carpet. When Academy officials barred him from entering the building, he called them ‘Zionists’.
This is all good stuff. Immediately afterwards, various Hollywood types started complaining about Cohen’s exploitation of the Oscars to — of all things — plug a film. Immediately after that, entertainment industry groupthink obviously gathered that this sounded uncool, and so they all started falling over each other to shriek about how totally relaxed they were about it all, because Hollywood was, like, just so crazy.
Hollywood is awful, isn’t it? I know this isn’t a profound insight, or even a terribly important one, but every year, come Oscar time, it strikes me anew. There’s just no dignity there. It’s a cattle show and the cattle are terrified. They’re the elect — the luckiest, most beautiful, best people in the world — and they look like they’re having no fun at all. Ah, Oscar night! Cheers me up no end.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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