Taking a new tact in fighting wildfires, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday granted a fire bell to a blogger who published a profanity-laden post accusing the government of incompetence.
In a rare deviation from his tough public image, Putin said he agreed with the blogger's harsh criticism, which included a dig at President Dmitry Medvedev by asking, "Why the [expletive] do we need an innovation center in Skolkovo if we don't have common firefighting vehicles?"
Medvedev hopes to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley at Skolkovo, outside Moscow.
Unlike Medvedev, Putin is not known for being technologically savvy, and his first known reply to a blogger smacks of populism ahead of the 2012 presidential election, an analyst said.
The LiveJournal blogger, known only by the nickname top_lap, complained in a post Sunday about lax fire safety measures in an unidentified village 153 kilometers away from Moscow in the Kalyazin district of the Tver region, where he said his dacha is located.
"With the [expletive] communists, who are scolded by everyone, there were three fire ponds in the village, a bell that tolled when a fire began, and — guess what — a firetruck," the blogger wrote in the 600-word post titled "Do You Know Why We're on Fire?”
He said everything changed when “the democrats” came to power, with authorities replacing the bell with a village telephone and filling the ponds with sand.
“Give me back my [expletive] fire bell, you [expletive], and take away your goddamn telephone,” the blogger wrote.
The blogger also suggested that his tax money be directed toward a firetruck.
A copy of the post, which has ignited a flurry of attention in the Russian blogosphere, was forwarded to Putin by Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio.
The post, Venediktov wrote to Putin, is a typical and “not overly sharp” example of the public criticism that the government is facing as it struggles to extinguish the wildfires.
"I knew I was taking a risk," Venediktov told The Moscow Times. "I purposely sent the text of the post to Putin, not Medvedev, because I know for sure that Medvedev really reads blogs on the Internet himself, while Putin would never see that post himself". The Moscow Times
