Potemkin Putin and his Lemon Lada

Perhaps Prime Minister Putin is more attuned to Western criticism than he lets on.

For example, two years ago the British motoring show Top Gear rather harshly called the Lada Kalina – the newest model from Russia’s much maligned firm – a poor copy of  a mid 90s Fiat, made out of turnips.

Yet when Putin decided to embark on a trans-Siberian road trip in a yellow Kalina to revive the national carmaker image and confound the haters, he must have secretly taken Jeremy Clarkson’s words to heart.

Amateur video taken by a group of off road enthusiasts shows two ‘spare’ yellow Kalinas in his entourage, including one that had already broken down being carried on a flat bed truck.

On the tape featured today at Radio Liberty, the citizen journalists are heard laughing with incredulity at the fact that the Kalina couldn’t be trusted to cover even a 200 mile stretch without incident, as well as in disgust at the over 100 official security and support vehicles (all foreign made) accompanying Putin on his ‘solo’ drive.

“This is all paid for with our money”, one of the men is heard muttering.

“The organisers forgot that he was not making the trip in the age of Potemkin and his villages, but in the age of digital cameras and the internet” gloated a Belarussian news report on the fiasco.

This is not the first time that Putin used false advertising to promote the domestic automaker. In January, he debuted his personal camo-coloured Lada Niva jeep only to admit that its original engine had been specially replaced with a German one.

Of course, the Lada stunt proves that the Potemkin village conceit – the age-old tsarist and later Soviet fixation with posturing (derived from an intense insecurity vis a vis the rest of the world) remains well entrenched in the current regime.

But that’s not even the worst of it!

For Semyon Shifrin, one of the men who filmed Putin’s roadtrip, an even greater disappointment was that for all his machismo, the Prime Minister was not man enough to handle a Lada like an ordinary Russian:

We didn’t expect to see as many as three of these much-advertised Lada Kalinas. It made us laugh,” he says. “If they want to promote this car, why take three of them on the trip? Putin is a grown man. He can make repairs himself if something breaks. He could even turn this into a PR stunt.