Actors learn their lines for Carry On Up The Kremlin
Not since the great days of Anton Chekhov has Russia staged such a riveting original drama. It was a fine performance, given that Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov had a very short time to learn their lines, scrub up their knowledge of early English Gothic architecture and take on the parts of a pair of bemused civilian tourists rather than the military intelligence poisoners they so unmistakably are.
‘‘Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town,’’ said Petrov, looking as if he might pass out from nerves. It’s hard to act when you know the penalty for fluffing your lines is nastier than a bad review.
‘‘For normal blokes, to be carrying women’s perfume with us, isn’t that silly?’’ Boshirov asked, apparently unaware that buying a bottle of cheap scent at duty free for Her Indoors is practically a tradition for many normal blokes.
They left Salisbury after one day ‘‘because it was covered in snow’’, and returned the next because of inclement weather and not because they had been reconnoitring the place for an assassination.
I strongly suspect that Messrs Petrov and Boshirov had no idea they were going to have to take the stage until Vladimir Putin popped up in Vladivostok and announced that was what they were doing.
It is easy to mock the bumbling, inadvertently hilarious television interview on RT, but the underlying intention is anything but funny. In the West, the story that the two men arrived in Wiltshire on a two-day trip to see Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral seems utterly implausible, let alone that they were deterred by snow.
But in Putin’s Russia, nothing is real and everything is possible, and there the story will be believed, or at least not dismissed.
The Putin regime is a master of maskirovka, or little masquerade, the Stalinist disinformation technique designed to sow confusion and uncertainty. The double-act on Russian television was the latest example.
It was also a show of defiance. If the two men seemed badly under rehearsed and improbable to the point of comedy, that is of a piece with a botched hit-job that failed to kill the target, poisoned three other people and killed one.
The message of the performance may be the same one Russia has been pushing since March, and may have been the intent of the hit in the first place: we really don’t care whether you believe us, because we do what we want. – The Times