Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov was both a patriot and an opposition figure. During his yearend press conference he cited Lermontov’s verse “Death of the Poet” and “Farewell, Unwashed Russia”, the Kremlin press service reports. “We recently marked the birthday of Lermontov, who wrote: ‘Farewell, unwashed Russia, land of slave, land of overlords,” Putin noted. According to the president, “Lermontov certainly was an oppositionist but I think he was a patriot all the same,” Putin said. “This borderline is very thin. Recall that Lermontov was an officer and he exposed himself to enemy bullets in the name of the country’s interests.” Responding to journalists question, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he did not accept the charges with breathing a new life into the ‘fifth column’ term. “I don’t feel any responsibility for this,” Putin said. “All my actions aim to consolidate our society and not to divide it,” Putin said. He said there was an opinion that he should be more accurate in his public statements, adding: “I’ll think over it but it’s impossible anyway to coat everything with polish endlessly. Sometime you have to call a spade a spade.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 21:47:11 +0000
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