SEX AND SCANDALS ABOUND IN THE POST-SOVIET WORLD
David Marples
Freelance
The Edmonton Journal
Monday, April 28, 2008
In the age of Internet and headline information about the private lives
of national and international leaders, it is heartening to see that
the independent states of the former USSR have not fallen behind. In
fact, in many ways, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in particular are
setting new trends, albeit in rather different ways.
Vladimir Putin is stepping down as president of Russia but he has
not departed from the stage. He has not only agreed to become prime
minister, but he has also accepted the leadership of the country’s
largest political party, United Russia, even though he is not actually
a member of it.
He also declared earlier this month in a recent private conversation
with U.S. President George W. Bush that Ukraine, Russia’s closest
neighbour and trading partner, is not really a country, which provoked
an official protest from Kyiv.
More interestingly, Putin, for some time has colluded with the Russian
media to establish himself as the leading sex symbol. He has been
photographed frequently in military regalia as well as bare-chested
and on horseback while on vacation in Tuva region of Siberia last year,
and sporting a Marlborough hat.
Clearly, however, he was taken aback by the antics of French President
Nicholas Sarkozy, who suffered a painful divorce but rebounded to
marry model Carla Bruni.
Recently the newspaper Moskovski Korrespondent issued a story that
Putin is about to divorce his wife of 25 years, Lyudmila, to marry
Alina Kabayeva, a rhythmic gymnast who has twice won the world title,
and was born the same year that the Putins wed.
Kabaeva is half-Tatar and has been a member of the Russian Duma for
United Russia since last year.
Her displays as a gymnast include a remarkable routine with a ball
that would leave David Beckham drooling.
When asked about the rumours, Putin denied them with a smile,
remarking that Russian women are the most beautiful in the world and
only Italian women bear comparison — his comments were made in the
presence of another lothario, newly re-elected Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi, aged 71.
Subsequently the owner of Moskovski Korrespondent, Aleksandr Lebedev,
a billionaire former KGB agent — no work of fiction could concoct
better descriptions — halted publication of his newspaper and its
editor resigned in protest. The deputy editor, however, has stood by
his story.
Switch to Minsk, Belarus, where the U.S.-styled "last dictator of
Europe" Alyaksandr Lukashenko, 53, has been in power for the past 14
years. Lukashenko’s wife has never been seen in the capital and has a
job as a dairy maid in his native province in the east of the country.
However, Lukashenko has another family — the Belarusian people —
who refer to him as "Bat’ka" or "Father."
A recent issue of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belorussii —
literally it means ‘young Communist truth in Belarusian land’ but it
neither advocates Communism nor espouses the truth — counters the
adulation for Russia’s Putin by providing a large colour portrait of
Russian and Belarusian leaders. The headline reads "Lukashenko is 10
years older and 20 centimetres taller than (Russian president-elect
Dmitry) Medvedev" and alongside each figure is listed his height:
Medvedev, 168 cms, Lukashenko (towering) 188 cms, Putin 170 cms,
and Belarusian Prime Minister Sidorsky 180 cms. Belarus may not have
the ideal leader therefore, but at least he is bigger than anyone else.
Lukashenko, like Putin, is a devotee of sport and captains a hockey
team that remains unbeaten in all competitions.
During games, the president wears the number 1 shirt and no one to
date has ever dared check him. Other players set up goals for him
which he invariably misses. Such is his devotion to the game that he
has had hockey rinks constructed in every venue in the country that
he might visit. Last year he won a cycling competition, his hulking
250-pound frame huddled over the handlebars, because no competitor —
they were all massed behind the front-runner — dared overtake him.
Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko might once have been a rival
of Putin as a sex symbol but he was badly disfigured when his rivals
tried to poison him in the 2004 presidential election campaign. He
is now taking a back seat to Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, 47,
a.k.a. the princess of Ukraine. The offspring of a Russian mother
and Armenian father, she has used her onetime husband’s name to good
effect, adopting Ukrainian braids as her trademark.
Tymoshenko’s personal website contains more than 6,300 photographs
of herself in various poses. It also contains perhaps the most
self-serving biography of any modern political leader, about
her constant battles against corruption and how more or less
single-handedly she took on the oligarchs, as well as leading the
Orange Revolution against the discredited regime of former president
Leonid Kuchma. In the process she somehow became a billionaire. The
sale of Tymoshenko’s handbags alone could pay off Ukraine’s national
debt.
Whatever one may say about Princess Yuliya, she can at least hold
her eggs. During a 2004 election campaign speech, an egg splattered
on her designer dress without her turning a hair.
Not so former prime minister and Regions Party Leader Viktor
Yanukovych, the loutish former governor of Donetsk with a
criminal record for manslaughter. Stepping off his campaign bus
in Ivano-Frankivsk he keeled over as if he had been shot and was
rushed to hospital. Subsequently a raw egg was revealed to have been
the weapon. Not surprisingly, he has never been associated with a
rhythmic gymnast.
By comparison, Western leaders Bush, Harper, Brown, and company seem
rather dull.