Newsmaker

Russian students create erotic calendar for Putin

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-10-09 16:39

MOSCOW - Vladimir Putin received an unusual birthday gift Thursday from 12 female journalism students, who posed in lacy underwear and used sexual innuendo to create a calendar dedicated to Russia's macho prime minister.

"How about a third time?" asks Miss February, hinting at a third presidential term for Putin, who served two terms as president from 2000 to 2008 and is eligible to run again in 2012.

"You put out the forest fires, but I'm still burning," says Miss March, referring to Putin's piloting of a firefighting plane during the summer's devastating wildfires.

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During his decade in power, Putin has been glorified in song and seen his name used to sell a brand of now-popular vodka. Students have formed Putin fan clubs, and activists in Kremlin-connected youth groups have chanted his name at their rallies and staged pranks ridiculing his critics.

The calendar created for Putin's 58th birthday takes its inspiration from the Kremlin-driven campaign to boost Putin's popularity and cultivate his alpha-male image. Putin himself has been known to show some skin, posing shirtless on horseback and while fishing.

The release of the pinup calendar was announced by the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, whose spokeswoman Kristina Potupchik posted the images in her blog. She gave the print run,?50,000, and said they were on sale in Moscow supermarkets for the equivalent of $8.50.

The calendars may also been the latest effort to profit from the prime minister's popularity.

The 12 pinup girls, all students of Moscow State University's journalism school, apparently risk no rebuke.

"I think this calendar is a rather frivolous production, but I don't see any crime in it," Yelena Vartanova, the school's dean, told Associated Press Television News.