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Vlad! You eat with that mouth?
President Vladimir Putin has a reputation for foul-mouthed asides, but Italian journalists sitting in straight-backed chairs in a Kremlin reception room cannot have expected what was coming. Opposite them, Vladimir Putin, immaculately dressed and statesmanlike, answered a question about one of the country's notorious billionaires. The interpreter's voice petered away into embarrassed silence. "You must always obey the law, not just when they've got you by the balls" is a rough equivalent of what Mr Putin had said.

For a western politician such a salty choice of words, shown on national television, might mean political embarrassment, even censure. But President Putin, once seen as a faceless KGB officer with a wooden delivery, now regularly sprinkles his public statements with the argot of the street. Moscow liberals are appalled and say he is betraying his lack of pedigree for the highest office in the land.

But many ordinary Russians adore Putin's earthy indiscretions for the grit and defiance of convention that they convey. For many, they carry echoes of Nikita Khrushchev, the most boorish of Soviet leaders who took off his shoe at the United Nations and banged it on the lectern. Prof Robert Russell, the head of the Russian department at Sheffield University, said: "Like Khrushchev, Putin has an earthy turn of phrase. It means people see him as one of their own. He's always controlled and usually rather unemotional but there's something else Russians respond to, something more visceral. I think he does these things deliberately for that reason."

Mr Putin had only just come to power when he uttered his first corker, saying he would deal with Chechens by "wiping them out in the shit house". Last year when a French journalist asked a hostile question at a European Union summit in Brussels, the Russian president said: "Come to Moscow. We can offer you a circumcision. I will recommend a doctor to carry out the operation in such a way nothing else will ever grow there again." When the translation was released, European Union officials expressed their fury. In Russia it ruffled few feathers.

In recent history, the Kremlin has not been blessed with great orators. Leonid Brezhnev was interminably hard on the ear, especially after his first stroke. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke bureaucratic, convoluted Russian. Boris Yeltsin's tone was annoyingly familiar and his words often slurred.
The combination of Brezhnev's stroke and his alcohol consumption made him almost incomprehensible when he spoke. Gorbachev always made me think he was reading from Pravda, even when speaking off the cuff — very heavy on the polysyllables. I never actually heard Yeltsin speak that I can recall, but I'm told he was almost as bad as Brezhnev, since he was usually sloshed. I've only heard Vlad on the teevee before the voice-over translation kicked in, but he speaks clearly enough for my rusty ear to follow him with no trouble...
Mr Putin, by contrast, has shone. When the cameras stop rolling, Mr Putin is even reported to resort to mat, the bawdy and highly taboo domain of Russian invective that forms the mainstay of prison, military and teenage street slang.
"Mat" is Russian for "mother," and the range of comments and observations on her propensity for sexual activity is actually wider than it is in American street slang...
According to the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev, Mr Putin told the veteran Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov: "We don't fucking need a military base in Cuba!" At a recent meeting of leaders of the former Soviet states, he urged them to work harder and to stop "just chewing snot from one year to the next".
I give it a 9.8...

Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-11-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=20995