Dune out of the blue

This is the case when Putin’s press secretary refuted the entire essence of an article in the foreign press about the Russian bureaucracy not with a meaningful public response, although he tried unsuccessfully, but with unconventional behavior. He violated the “golden rule” of any high-ranking bureaucrat - “don’t stick your head out for trifles and unnecessarily from behind the red-brick parapet.”

His completely unexpected and inadequate reaction to a basically ordinary piece in the Guardian about the ill-fated experience of a newspaper correspondent in a Moscow dry cleaner (that’s news!) and the bureaucracy provided food for a new English demarche. For some reason, Peskov tried to publicly compare this ordinary everyday epic with the red tape when Russian citizens obtained a British visa. Just recently, no one believed that badminton was contagious!

Now, in a new article entitled “Do you want to get an answer from Putin’s press service? There is one win-win topic - dry cleaning,” Miriam Elder is indignant:

“For five years I have been writing about corruption, human rights violations, murders of journalists and rigged election results, but only now I have finally discovered the real weak point of the Kremlin - Russian dry cleaners. Do you want to figure out what the connection is between taking clothes to a dry cleaner and submitting documents to the British visa? Look up the term "whataboutism" in the dictionary. It originated at the height of the Cold War and described a favorite tactic of Soviet propagandists - closing a discussion with a counter question: "What about?.." This method is still practiced in Russia today.

According to Elder, she tried to contact Peskov and ask why, of all her articles, he responded to only one - an article about dry cleaning. Articles about alleged election fraud, human rights violations in Chechnya and Dagestan, investigations into the murders of Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Magnitsky - all this was met with silence, the journalist emphasizes. Perhaps it's easier to practice "whataboutism" when it comes to bureaucracy?

In the coming month or two, as expected, one of Putin’s first foreign trips in his no longer new capacity as Russian president (besides the United States and China) will be to London, where he has not been for a long time. It can be assumed that Dmitry Peskov himself or through his secretaries was faced with the tedious, fiddly process of filling out paperwork for a British visa. Well, here, consider it an opportunity to “smack them properly for this.” Still, they were racking their brains - why, why, and what connection... And maybe there wasn’t even a lock in the chest. Why break stools on the eve of a dignitary visit? Lavrov will be dissatisfied, and he may even go and complain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/russia-abuses-bureaucracy-putin-drycleaning