Little Faith

We met exactly a year ago. I knew the impression he made on women—and on some men, too. He is handsome like Kasyanov, smart like Chubais, a little flirtatious—somewhere half Nemtsov, no more, but at the same time courageous like Shoigu. And there is no such tie in the entire Russian government, and even in the government, and in the Kremlin, no one has such. Here he came up, looked with a squint, affectionately and attentively—Lenin!—neatly and somehow very intimately shook hands. Felt some rare and exquisite perfume, it seems to smell Shvydkoy. I looked at his dark brown wavy hair and thought: you are beasts, gentlemen. As you might have suspected, he paints them—it's a Teutonic knight, not some Hanoverian lawyer. Naturlikh.

... A small, but politically very motley and somewhere even immature group of Russian journalists was brought to Berlin last December to chat with Schroeder. So, simply, without ceremonial interviews and parquet reports, drink thin Berlin tea with cookies and try to understand this man, a great friend of our country, who was not understood by everyone in Germany then. There he was told that his friendship with Putin smelled strongly of gas, and he answered, they say, I’m trying for you, but a well-fried Christmas goose doesn’t smell of gas at all. He was told that Yukos and Chechnya were in Russia, and he answered, a dispute between economic entities and the fight against international terrorism. He was told that a dictatorship was coming in Russia, and there were also some problems with freedom of speech, and he nodded at Berlusconi, to whom Ernst and Surkov had yet to grow and grow. Gerhard Schroeder was an inflexible friend of our country. And now it's just ours.

He is ours, and there is no one else to be friends with. The tolerant and ascetic Western Social Democrat turned out to be his own on the board, the same as everyone else: he wants commanding heights, financial flows, maybe even deep down he wants a third term—not for himself, for that guy. The choice between democracy and sturgeon with horseradish has been made. We believed you so much, Comrade Schroeder, as perhaps we did not believe ourselves.

We no longer believe, but we delve into and realize. Already in Russia, they are well aware that Schroeder went to work at Gazprom not because of the money. To build such a gas pipeline is not to buy a donkey. They say that now he has a salary of one and a half million a year. Don't tell the big Russian middle managers, is that really money? It's for love.

The evil German tongues are now saying that German policy, it turns out, was based on Schroeder's private interests. The general secretary of the ruling CDU, Herr Pofalla, is furious: "Schroeder has destroyed faith in the ethical principles of a politician." This is not the case with faith, every Christian democrat and democratic Christian knows this. The German government is urgently developing a “Politician’s Code of Honor” named after the memory of Comrade Schroeder—do you know what will be written there? You will never guess: that a politician A YEAR before his alleged resignation tells the public what position he is going to take in the private sector, and whoever does not tell is a bad person and pays a fine. The size is being discussed, but it seems that Schroeder's salary will be useful to the Bundes budget.

However, the law in Germany is not retroactive. How they live with it is impossible to understand. But it is clear what Russia can do with this incident. If Angela Merkel asks us something about Chechnya or Yukos, and we will raise her gas prices to global prices, because, as you know, in our country the global price is 160 in the morning, and by lunchtime it’s already 230, you can ask Yushchenko . Humor, min hertz.