I was reading a beautiful article this morning in today's Gazeta.ru (it's in Russian, folks; enter at your own risk) where it described Putin's rerouting of the trans-Siberian pipeline. Personally, I haven't seen such choreography since I attended "The Swan Lake" in Kiev in 2001. The move was so obviously carefully plotted and so gracefully executed that you'd think Putin was a ballet dancer, not a politician.
Here is the crux of what happened. A new pipeline to supply oil to East Asia was planned to have been given a home eighty meters away from Lake Baikal, a freshwater lake that Siberians aren't interested to see even more polluted (it's already in the process of getting tortured by the paper factory nearby). Putin was, at first, reluctant to ask Transneft (the state-owned company charged with building the pipeline) to move the pipe.
But, Vladimir Vladimirovich, never one to back out of theatrics, especially if it'll make him look good on government-"appropriated" NTV (the most popular channel on Russian television), decided to swing the gong in a different direction. During a meeting regarding the pipeline, VVP asked the CEO of Transneft if the pipeline could be moved. He was shown that it could. He proceeded to draw arrows on the map, all important-like, that illustrated where the pipeline would now be. The new plan, which will eventually cost East Asia millions of dollars in oil spikes, places the pipeline forty kilometers from a northern shore of Baikal.
Leonid Potapov, leader of an anti-pipeline project (against it when it was still running 800m away from the lake), said that there are a lot of "political roosters who scream that the pipe shouldn't be laid." He then advised said roosters to look into the paper factory, which has been polluting Baikal left and right.
American politics, in comparison, look innocent and pure.
