Words That Change the World sent to all Russian MPs and other political figures as a gift from presidential administration
The time when every Russian politician’s bookshelf was expected to contain the 55-volume complete works of Vladimir Lenin has long gone, but the country’s political elite have been gifted a slimline alternative this holiday season.
Words That Change the World is a 400-page compilation of Vladimir Putin’s most notable speeches, and has been sent out to all Russian MPs and other political figures as a gift from the presidential administration ahead of the country’s new year holiday.
Anton Volodin of the pro-Kremlin youth group Network, which published the book, told the Guardian: “A year ago we noticed when reading one of his early speeches that it was exactly right in its predictions, so we decided to check all of his other speeches. And it turns out basically everything he said has either already come true or is in the process of coming true at this very moment.”
There are 19 articles and speeches collected in the book, starting from 2003 and ending with Putin’s speech to the UN general assembly earlier this year. Volodin said: “If you read through them all, you can see a clear pattern in his rhetoric and thoughts. A lot of people say he’s unpredictable or untruthful, but actually everything he says is transparent, clear and fully formed.”
Volodin declined to say where the funding for the book came from but Network is believed to have links to the presidential administration. The manifesto on the organisation’s website describes it as a group of young people who believe Putin is a collective father figure for Russians. It says: “We are together with the father, at one with him. We do not fight against the power of the father; we share it, we learn to use it, and together with the father we direct its energy towards our present and future.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that he had no idea who was behind the book and was hearing about it for the first time. However, the newspaper RBK reported that last week the first deputy head of Putin’s administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, chaired a meeting in the Kremlin during which he spoke about the book and said it should be on the table of every politician.
“We decided to show a copy to people in the presidential administration and they liked it so much they asked us for copies,” said Anton Volodin, who declined to comment on whether he was any relation to Vyacheslav Volodin. He said the group had provided over 1,000 copies to the presidential administration for distribution.
The book’s cover features a grainy portrait of the Russian president overlaid with short random phrases such as: “They beat us and we get stronger”, “Russia is my whole life” and “I drink kefir.”
“You’d think it would be like Mao’s Little Red Book and it turns out to be total postmodernism,” wrote political analyst Ekaterina Schulmann on Facebook. “It looks like one of those online tests: the first three things your brain picks out characterise your state of mind.”
Inside, key quotes in the speeches are marked in bold, and each text is also annotated with comments from the book’s authors. The introduction to the first speech in the book, from the 2003 UN general assembly, notes that Putin was correct to predict chaos in international affairs if the UN and other institutions of international law are ignored.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/28/vladimir-putin-speeches-words-that-change-the-world
