Ordinary Gweilo

I see that Time magazine are insisting that their decision to make Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin their “Person of the Year” should not be regarded as an accolade:

TIME’s Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse.

Shaping the world?  I think not.  The whole point of Putin is that he is trying to make Russia stronger, both economically and politically.  He is not very interested in the rest of the world.

So why chose him as Person of the Year?  It must be because he’s so very different from “Western” politicians in the way that he is happy to cultivate an image of being both ruthless and charmless.  The Russian people clearly hold him in very high regard for what he’s done for their country, and many in the rest of the world have a more grudging admiration for his achievements.     

I have to admit that the photograph of Putin on the cover of their so-called double issue is really rather splendid, portraying Putin as both belligerent and indifferent:

Charm is not part of his presentation of self—he makes no effort to be ingratiating. One senses that he pays constant obeisance to a determined inner discipline. The successor to the boozy and ultimately tragic Boris Yeltsin, Putin is temperate, sipping his wine only when the protocol of toasts and greetings requires it; mostly he just twirls the Montrachet in his glass. He eats little, though he twitchily picks the crusts off the bread rolls on his plate.

And so on.  Yes, he’s an interesting character, but was he really the most important or influential world leader in 2007?  No, which is why it is an accolade.

I can’t help thinking that China has had a much greater impact on the world in the last 10 years than Russia.  Yet in the last twenty years they have picked Soviet/Russian leaders three times (Gorbachev got it twice in 1987 and 1989, which is probably fair enough), but you have to go back to 1978 and 1985 for Deng Xiaoping, and no Chinese leader has won it since.  Hu Jintao was a runner-up this year, and got a whole page in Time as his reward, but he’s probably too dull to become Person of the Year.

In fact, looking at the list of the winners in the last 20 years, many of the selections look very eccentric indeed.  Ted Turner?  Jeff Bezos?  You?  Of course, every recent American president (bar Gerry Ford) has been chosen at least once, and most of them twice, which probably tells us all we need to know.

Recent winners (from Wikipedia):