OK, I meant to have this done and posted on March 26th, but now it's the middle of the night, Europe has "sprung forward" to summer time, as they call it over here, and I still haven't finished the post (I was updating my links list).
For some reason, the date March 26th triggered a memory for me - something significant happened on this date...what was it again?
Then I remembered - 5 years ago, Russia elected Vladimir Putin president. At the time, I was enrolled in an M.A. program at Georgetown University's Center for Eurasian, Russian & East European Studies (CERES), and I was on a fellowship that required me to maintain the Center's small library. As part of those duties, I had a regular column in the CERES newsletter. Here's what I had to say at the time (in the April edition of the newsletter) about the Russian elections, which occurred the day after we took our comprehensive exams and had a massive party to celebrate that occasion:
[...] I would like to extend thanks from all the second-years to [M... P...] for hosting the comps party. Strangely, very few second-years showed up in the library on the following day to watch returns come in from the cliffhanger Russian presidential election. With the outcome of the race not in doubt, CERES students analyzed the coverage with an eye on the more superficial aspects, such as the relative youth, frequent awkward pauses, and questionable sense of style of the analysts on ORT. A consensus was reached among the female viewers that Sergei Kiriyenko is the hidden “hottie” of the Russian political scene. Thus, the viewing of the election returns was in keeping with the Russian literary tradition of examining serious themes through the lens of the absurd. [...]Could I really have been so light-hearted about the election of Mr. Putin? I guess I was more light-hearted about a lot of things back then. Five years ago... that was three months before I got married and a good five months before I started my first really serious job.
0 comments:
Post a Comment