Baltimore Sun: Singing Together: 'I Want Someone Like Putin'

Baltimore Sun
September 3, 2002
Putin's popularity reaches high note
Pop song celebrates Russian president's sobriety, responsibility; 'I Want 
Someone Like Putin' 
By Douglas Birch
Sun Foreign Staff

MOSCOW - Vladimir V. Putin has been celebrated in books, T-shirts and 
calendars. His bust sits on the desk of many a bureaucrat. Newspaper and 
magazine covers frequently feature his somewhat doleful image. One man has 
even tried to name a new variety of tomato after him. 

But a new pop song, "I Want Someone Like Putin," appears to mark a milestone 
in the remarkable career of the former-KGB-spy-turned-Russian-president. He 
might soon be elevated from statesman to sex symbol. 

In the tune, which can be heard blasting from cars crawling along Moscow's 
streets these days, the lead singer in the all-girl group Singing Together 
complains about her alcohol-guzzling boor of an ex-boyfriend and coos about 
Putin: "And now I want a man like Putin, who doesn't drink. A man like Putin, 
who doesn't hurt me. A man like Putin, who won't shame me." 

Though the song is somewhat romantic, it carries a heavy political backbeat. 
And critics consider it a thinly disguised political commercial - the first, 
perhaps, of an election still two years away. They grumble that the creators 
are trying to cash in on Putin's undeniable popularity. 

To some, Singing Together sounds suspiciously like Moving Together, a 
mysteriously well-financed pro-Putin youth organization. Moving Together has 
launched a crusade against alleged agents of cultural despair, taking aim in 
particular at avant-garde writers who ridicule Soviet-era heroes. But Moving 
Together and the man behind the Putin song deny any link. 

The promotion of Putin over the past couple of years has been denounced here 
as a revival of the Soviet tradition of the cult of personality. But Putin's 
fan club remains a pale imitation of the original Kremlin personality cult, 
that of the dictator Josef Stalin. People who weren't sufficiently adoring of 
Stalin were shot. 

Defenders say political leaders elsewhere, including the United States, are 
treated like celebrities and they don't see anything wrong with doing that in 
Russia, too. 

Indeed, the man behind "I Want Someone Like Putin" says he has purely 
unselfish goals. Nikolai Gastello, media secretary to Russia's Supreme Court, 
says he decided to create Singing Together and its music to help cure Russia 
of what he considers a cultural malaise. 

"The music should help Russians to finally shake off depression and 
decadence," Gastello told the newspaper Izvestia. 

The artists involved say they share Gastello's vision. "I believe that music 
should help people," says Kiril Kalashnikov, the 30-year-old composer. "If my 
music helps even one person, then my life will not have been wasted." 

Gastello hired Alexander Yelin and Kalashnikov to write the song in February. 
Last month, he recruited three singers in their 20s and recorded the tune. 
Then he approached the owners of several Moscow radio stations. "I Want 
Someone Like Putin" has been playing repeatedly on Russian Radio, Dynamite FM 
and AutoRadio since. 

Singing Together is re-recording the Putin song in English and Spanish, 
Kalashnikov says. And the song's creators will collaborate on several other 
tunes about social ills, the first on the high incidence of abortion in 
Russia. They plan to put out an album, perhaps as early as October. 

The song is heard so often in Russia that children have begun singing it on 
playgrounds and in schoolyards. 

"The melody is good," says Yevgenia Slivkina, 12, who says all her friends 
know the lyrics. Even a 2-year-old neighbor has memorized most of the song, 
she says, although he can't pronounce "Putin." "When we sing 'Putin,'" she 
says, "he always shouts 'Pooh.'" 

Until now, no Russian leader has neared pop idol status. "It is clear that 
neither [former Russian President Boris Y.] Yeltsin, nor [former Soviet 
leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, could be the subject for a girl's dream," says 
lyricist Yelin, 44, of Putin's older, less svelte predecessors. 

But he says he has talked with his female friends and relatives about the 
president, and they find him irresistibly stalwart, romantically responsible 
- and, best of all in this nation troubled by alcoholism, sober. 

"Women in general, they are always seeking some ideal of a man. And I should 
say that ... ideal of a man is Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] - rather than 
Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson - because Putin is serious, smart and reliable." 

So, then, does Yevgenia want a boyfriend like Putin? Not really, she says, 
respectfully. The typically dour president isn't "appealing." 



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