Putin vs. Obama: What People Search

You can tell a lot about a political figure by just looking at what people want to know about her. One of the simplest ways to learn it is to use Google’s search prompt.

Let’s compare what people search for with Putin and with Obama as keywords:

Lines of the first pic translated top-down:
– “putin and kabaeva” (there are rumors of Putin having an affair with young athlete, United Russia’s State Duma deputy Alina Kabaeva)
– “putin” (plain and simple, yet less popular than the Kabaeva story)
– “putin eats children” (it was a humorous slogan coined by Oborona in 2006 after Putin’s famous kissing of a small boy’s belly)
– “putin crab” (this is a pun made of Putin’s well-known statement that he’d been working “as a slave at a galley,” which sounds in Russian close to “as a crab at a galley”)
– “putin bio” (finally, at least somebody still wants to know something about this guy)
– “dismiss putin” (a popular opposition slogan and a name of a Website where signatures for his resignment are gathered)
– “putin jew” (the guys who tend to believe that Putin is connected with ZOG apparently want to check it)
– “putin vladimir vladimirovich” (his full name, like if there are many different Putins around)
– “putin must go” (it’s quite clear, right?)
– “putin kabaeva” (they stilll want to know more about it)

The least we can say is, few users take Putin seriously. He is either a hero of tabloids, jokes and puns or someone people want to get rid of. Nobody wants to read his speeches, follow his blog (well, he has none anyway) or even learn about any of his proposals (most of them are too vague and populist to be taken seriously, too).

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United Russia on Me

A funny news item appeared a few days ago at United Russia’s official youth site. Their author Ilya Ukhov condemns me using Stalin-times newspaper language. I am called there “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and my bio is retold like this:

Oleg started his illegal activities early: when he was 16, he joined a rat pack called Amnesty International, which is known for its furius support for different kinds of separatists, convicted by Russian courts spies as well as different petty criminals.

…In 2005 [Kozlovsky] founded Oborona–a kind of a youth fuse for organizing unrests and destabilization of the social-political regime. But the fate wasn’t so fortunate for the brainchild of foreign puppeteers.

Police has stormed his flat that was used for gatherings of liberal thugs and storing extremist literature.

We see with our own eyes establishing of liberal censorship, this lying and multiheaded hydra…

etc. etc.

If you read Russian, you’ll enjoy this article in original.

Paranoia United

Paranoics appear to be similar everywhere. In Russia, we have some very active men and women who love to either write anonymous letters to FSB about them being “rayed” with invisible radiation by foreign spies or, vice versa, accuse FSB of using “psychotronic weapons” against people. In some cases, these people are not really on their own, they are supported by some government-aligned group and try to participate in the opposition rallies.

Today I got a junk mail from one such group from the USA. These guys do basically the same thing. Reading their letter is quite fun (if you leave alone the fact that these people are most probably suffering from a mental illness). Here is a portion of its text:

OMON Speaks

Oborona with several other youth organizations held a protest action yesterday. Before it begun, an OMON (riot police) policeman tried to confiscate Oborona’s leaflets from our activist Alexey Kazakov. Eyewitnesses quote their remarkable dialogue:

Cop: You are going to tell with these leaflets that you don’t like the government of Russian Federation.

Alexey: Yes, I don’t like the government of Russian Federation.

Cop: This is a direct anticonstitutional act!

Alexey: You mean, I’m obliged to like the government?!

United Russia, OMON, and Thievery

Putin’s party United Russia launched their new Web site today. It featured a large image in the center of its frontpage with a pseudo-3D city (inside the blue circle):

Front page of United Russia's Web site (clickable)

In the lower left part of the image you can see OMON (riot police) troops shoot at civilians (a peaceful demonstration?):

OMON shooting at civilians

Russian bloggers quickly found that this picture had been stolen from the Web site of Orange Label design studio. Only a few changes have been made: for instance, the United Russia’s designers changed the words on the car from “SWAT” to “ОМОН” (OMON).

PS: The image has already disappeared from the front page but it is still on their server.