Thursday, August 20, 2009

Who's Been Sleeping in Putin's Bed?

. Thursday, August 20, 2009

From FP Passport:

In a move towards great transparency and accountability, the Kremlin yesterday released figures detailing a recent order of new furniture. It sounds simple enough but, as is usually the case with Russian politics, it quickly became the stuff of legends -- or at least, Aesop's fables. The total value of the interior ministry's furniture tender, it appeared, was $755,900 (24.4 million roubles) and included a cherry wood bed with head and footboards coated in a thin layer of 24 carat gold. Though other items will be delivered to an address in the exclusive dacha district on the outskirts of Moscow where many senior officials live in state-owned homes, the gilded bed will be sent to the ministry headquarters.

Unsurprisingly, the news has received much criticism in a country where the economy shrank 10.9 percent in the last quarter. I think the question praying on all our minds is: who's going to be sleeping in the gold bed?


Good question, but maybe not the right one. If this is what happens after the government is made to be more transparent, imagine what was going on before. So the right question is "How many other gold beds are there that we don't know about?" Perhaps everybody is sleeping in gold beds.

Oh, who am I kidding. The gold bed must belong to this guy:

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Who's Been Sleeping in Putin's Bed?
 

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