SIX weeks before an election that he seems certain to win, Russia's
acting President is taking no chances. With the help of a fluffy white poodle and a casual
new wardrobe, Vladimir Putin and his campaign team have launched a concerted push to
reinvent him as the magnanimous peacetime leader that his country sorely needs.
Mr Putin announced yesterday the allocation of about £50 million for
the rebuilding of Chechnya's devastated economy. He told his Cabinet that the region's
healthcare, education and energy sectors should become top priorities and declared that
Chechen teenagers should be inculcated with ideals of kindness and not violence.
The remarks were in stark contrast to the furious four-month
bombardment of Chechnya that Mr Putin himself unleashed. He also raised eyebrows this week
with a tightly-controlled phone-in with readers of a Moscow newspaper, among them a
13-year-old girl who begged to be allowed to help with his campaign.
Yet it is the appearance of a poodle in the Putin political family that
is likely to be remembered longest. The dog, called "Chiapa", an
affectionate Russian term for dogs meaning "pooch", scampered across the acting
presidential lap during a long interview on state-run television. He starred in a
carefully staged scene aimed at putting a human face on a man known hitherto as a career
spy, an unsmiling technocrat and a champion of war.
"You have a very playful and touching dog," Mikhail Leontyev,
the interviewer, noted. "Is it your dog, your wife's or your childrens' dog?"
Mr Putin replied that his family, about whom almost nothing is known,
had lost a much larger dog in a car crash and for years could not bring themselves to
adopt another - "but the children wanted to have a little doggy and they talked us
into it. It's hard to say whose dog it is. It just sort of lives here on its own."
"So it plays the part of a cat?" Mr Leontyev asked.
Putin: the stern face of a former KGB man
Mr Putin, sitting on an orange sofa in his government dacha and dressed
in a grey crew-neck sweater, replied in a parody of the icy tone he uses against Chechen
rebels: "Do not insult our dog. It doesn't do a cat's job. A dog is a dog and we are
very fond of her."
The exchange removed any doubts that Mr Putin cares deeply about how he
is perceived both by voters and abroad, even though most recent polls suggest that he will
win the election on March 26 outright, with no need to continue to a second ballot. Thanks
to his wartime poll ratings, he is running virtually unopposed.
"There is no question that this is part of a calculated bid to
recast Mr Putin as a people-friendly leader before the election," Masha Lippman,
editor of the respected Itogi weekly, said. "He has a strong team of
image-makers, most of whom worked on President Yeltsin's reelection campaign in 1996. The
fact that he re-hired them shows how seriously he takes his image."
Igor Mintusov, Moscow's busiest political consultant, put it more
pithily: "They're trying to make him white and fluffy, like his dog."
The Times. February 11 2000