Being rather pressed for time today, I had to turn for inspiration to the Russian ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Putin) websites, those that are blocked in their country of origin for being, well, anti-Putin.
They have a field day with Vlad’s major contribution to mathematics, acknowledging that something in this vein is long overdue.
You see, Vlad isn’t merely a president. He is a ‘national leader’, a title that places him somewhere between a president and God, but closer to the latter.
In that demiurgic capacity, Vlad is expected to transcend politics and revolutionise areas seemingly outside his field of expertise.
For example, Stalin, Vlad’s idol and role model, made a seminal contribution to linguistics that he analysed from the lofty vantage point of Marxism.
Thus armed with the most universal and the only true philosophy, Stalin wrote a brochure Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, in which he contemplated whether language falls into the category of base or superstructure.
Stalin’s epochal discovery that language was neither took some linguists aback, and they had to be hastily re-educated in their chosen discipline at the institution of higher learning under the auspices of the State Administration for Camps, GULAG for short.
Khrushchev, being more of an empiricist, revolutionised agricultural sciences by deciding that if maize grew so abundantly in Iowa, there was no reason it couldn’t grow just as well in the sub-Arctic areas of Russia.
To test that hypothesis, he had many traditional rye and wheat fields ploughed and the cultures replaced with maize. As an immediate result of that trailblazing venture, Russia had to begin to import cereals and has been doing it ever since.
My friend Vlad switched back to less practical and more abstract sciences, in this instance mathematics.
Yesterday he delivered a Russian version of the State of the Union Address, in which he said, inter alia, that the mortality rate in Russia is stable, if unfortunately growing. Since there was no intrepid individual present who dared ask which it was, stable or growing, Vlad pressed on, putting a positive spin on the announcement.
The reason more people are dying is that Russians these days live longer, he explained. And the older we are, the sooner we die – no one could possibly argue against that.
Definitely not, though some might suggest that mortality rates are inversely, rather than directly, proportionate to life expectancy. Hence if, say, turtles live on average to 100 years, then it’s realistic to expect that their mortality rate would be about one per cent a year. And, if seals’ life expectancy is about 10 years, their mortality rate would be roughly 10 per cent. I don’t think that replacing animals with humans ought to change the arithmetic, but Russian national leaders have their own maths.
In a parallel and related development, Vlad played another mathematical trick on the ‘Immortal Regiment’ movement.
Some 15 years ago, people began to march through the streets carrying blown-up photo portraits of their parents and grandparents killed in the war. This, rather moving, practice started spontaneously and each year has been attracting more and more people.
Except that spontaneity is discouraged in Vlad’s Russia, especially if he feels left out. So this year he decided to lead the procession, proudly carrying the photograph of his father who had to have been killed in the war to qualify for the honour.
I’m sure he was, but, since Vlad was born seven years after the war ended, the late Mrs Putin had a gestation period whose length is highly unusual, among humans at any rate.
Every period of Russia’s history in which she is blessed with the presence of a strict but fair national leader invariably overlaps with an era of great discoveries. I’m glad that Vlad is keeping this fine tradition alive.