In his off-hours, a seemingly dutiful government servant in Czar Nicholas I's Ministry of Finance would pass the time jotting down little aphorisms. Some were obscure in meaning: "Not every general is stout by nature." Or, "If you have a fountain, plug it up. Let the fountain too have a rest." Others mocked the state for which the official, a heavy-browed and dimple-chinned man named Kozma Prutkov, worked. "Our land is rich; there is just no order in it," he wrote of Russia under Nicholas, a reactionary authoritarian who personally censored the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and whose education minister came up with the dubious motto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." Prutkov's very existence -- a doltish, maudlin bureaucrat in a state overflowing with them -- was itself an admonition to the regime.
COMMENTS (5)
More...
Prutkov, however, did not actually exist. His verses and indelible image were the invention of writer Aleksey Tolstoy and his cousins, the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, who published his short witticisms in the thick literary journals so popular at the time.
It's hard not to think of Prutkov when scrolling through the short, sharp parodies on KermlinRussia, the wildly popular new Twitter account lampooning President Dmitry Medvedev and his anodyne official news feed at KremlinRussia. KermlinRussia's persona -- that of a solipsistic, foolish child-president -- seems an apt echo of the earlier satirist's bumbling scribbles. When I asked the anonymous author of the Twitter parody whether he was a latter-day Prutkov, he responded with characteristic bite: "More like a lie detector."
As of this writing, KermlinRussia has more than 50,000 followers and is adding a thousand or more each week. Its tweets, like Prutkov's acerbic little commentaries, pack the kind of sharp nuance for which Twitter is so well-suited, weaving together current events, history, literary allusions, and a very Russian sense of the absurd, all in 140 characters or less. It has been a successful formula. Not only is KermlinRussia the third-most popular Twitter account on the Russian-language Internet, it has among its followers the cream of the Moscow chattering classes and 40 percent of the real Medvedev's followers. All this has transpired over less than half a year, while readers remain happily unaware of the author's true identity, a tightly guarded secret.
When I asked KermlinRussia's author for an interview, the "Persident of Ruissia" agreed to grant one but only via Skype, through an account created just for the interview -- security fit for any world leader. The Persident dialed in first.
"Hello?" she said.
It's interesting, I noted out loud, that a country as patriarchal as Ruissia should have a female persident.
"Yes, it's unexpected, isn't it?" the Persident said, and released an airy, tinkling laugh.
"There's a male voice, too!" chirped a young man. "There's an author and a co-author," he added.
The author and co-author -- let's call them Masha and Sasha -- are young ("between 20 and 30," as they like to say) professionals, both of whom studied at St. Petersburg State University, an honor they share with Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and author Ayn Rand.* There, the two studied journalism (Masha) and economics (Sasha), and they now work as a copywriter (Masha) and financial analyst (Sasha).
Sasha's idea for a parody Twitter feed came about when Medvedev visited Silicon Valley last June and, to much fanfare, started his official Twitter account.
SUBJECTS:
(5)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE