Beveik: Lunch near "Dolls Striptizo"
Lietuvoje į tai nebuvo nė vienos nuorodos žiniasklaidoje (Oops, VERSMES jau nurodė į L. Rytą) . Nors kai kurios detalės gana įdomios. Ir įdomiai parinktos.
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Midway through my lunch with Dalia Grybauskaite, I feel a strange urge to launch myself at her. It is not that I am attracted to the president of Lithuania. It is just that she is the only head of state that I know of who is also a karate black belt. The first half of our lunch has been devoted to a staid discussion of economics. Perhaps it is time to liven things up a bit, and test President Grybauskaite’s martial arts skills?
After a moment, a mixture of cowardice and respect for decorum kicks in - so I content myself with simply asking the president, who is 53 and clad in a blazer and flowery skirt, about her interest in martial arts. She got her black belt about a decade ago, when she was a diplomat in the US, and says she has little time to practise these days. Have her skills gone rusty, I wonder. “If I were suddenly to go mad and to attack you, would you be able to defend yourself?” I ask. The president smiles broadly and replies: “Any martial arts is about the avoidance of physical contact.” This is not how I remember it from the kung fu films, but she is insistent.
“Martial arts is understood too simplistically, that it is only physical exercise; it’s mental exercise that is very physical.” Any struggle between the two of us will be strictly psychological, she suggests. “I need to work in that way that you will never think about attacking me. That’s prevention of attack.” She fixes me with her pale blue eyes, and I shrink back in my chair. It seems to be working.
Grybauskaite is not the only political leader with an interest in martial arts in this part of the world. Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, has a black belt in judo. I mention this to the president, who was more of a karate specialist, and she says, with a touch of disdain in her voice: “That was typical in the Russian military forces. Judo was the only martial art allowed in the Soviet system.”
Lithuania broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991, when the country regained the independence and international recognition that it had lost during the second world war. Relations with Russia are still tricky. Doggedly pursuing the martial arts theme, I suggest to the president that she and prime minister Putin might one day attempt to settle any remaining differences between their two nations through personal combat. She either ignores the question or fails to
understand it, because she responds simply: “I’ve never met him yet.” And, in any case, as she emphasises, karate is for her “more a philosophy of life. It’s about attitude towards work, how you discipline yourself, how you structure your work, these kind of things.”
Grybauskaite was born in Vilnius in 1956 and studied political economy at university in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. As the child of a family of modest means, she had to work in a fur factory during the day to pay her way through night school. Nonetheless, the president remembers her days as a student with fondness. Although she was studying within the Soviet system, she rejects the
idea that her education was ideologically biased. “Everything was possible because Leningrad had a beautiful and very rich library - and all those three years was spent studying the history of economic thought from Aristotle up to Marx ... We studied Keynes, Smith, everybody.” English is her third or fourth language - after Lithuanian, Russian and Polish - and she speaks it in a
staccato, unadorned style that complements her brusque, no-nonsense personality. Occasional French phrases crop up, a legacy of her time in Brussels.
This combination of forceful personality, free-market views and blonde hair have provoked inevitable comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, and Grybauskaite is now also nicknamed the Iron Lady. But, unlike Mrs Thatcher, she does not have a husband to provide support at home and to pour her a whisky after a hard day. As an unmarried woman, she has faced speculation about her private life. During the election campaign, she denied being a lesbian. She has no immediate family. Both her parents are dead and she has no brothers or sisters. Her new position as president only adds to her isolation. She remarks wistfully that in Brussels “it
was very good, you could go out in jeans, it was very easy and there was huge personal freedom. Now my personal freedom is very restricted, but any rate that’s the price you pay.” Her life, now, she says, is “only work, work, work”.
Certainly, fixing up a lunch date with the president is a bit of a palaver. Her staff’s first suggestion was that we could eat at the presidential palace. I had countered that perhaps it would be nice to meet in a restaurant. On the morning of our meeting, I receive instructions to proceed to the Skybar on the 22nd floor of the Reval Hotel in Vilnius for a midday rendezvous.
One advantage of meeting at the Reval is that you do not have to look at it. Vilnius has a beautiful old town but the Reval is a refurbished Soviet-era skyscraper, on the banks of the River Neris. Arriving a little early, as instructed, I notice that the building opposite the hotel has a gaudy mural advertising its wares - “Dolls, Striptizo”. The Reval’s lobby is all but empty. There is a sign to the casino and an anxious manager awaiting the president’s arrival. I am directed to the top floor, where more nervous employees are hovering around. The restaurant is closed, and we have been assigned a private room at the back with wall-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, overlooking the river and the old city.
The restaurant’s manager approaches and asks if I would like to order. I say that perhaps I should wait for the president but I’m told that her office has already phoned her order through. She is having the seasonal salad with marinated eggplant. Slightly nonplussed, I ask the manager if she can point me in the direction of any Lithuanian specialities. How about the potato pancakes, she suggests. But it is a sunny day, and I think I might feel a bit self-conscious stolidly eating pancakes while the president picks at some lettuce. So I choose the Caesar salad and a bottle of sparkling water.
I am now feeling a bit awkward, so I retreat to our private room and stare out of the window. At noon precisely, the president bustles in, with her press man in tow. Is this one of your favourite restaurants, I ask her brightly. No, she replies, she has never been here before.
I can see that small talk is going to be difficult. I had remembered Grybauskaite from her time in Brussels as bold, outspoken and funny. But things have changed. She is now a head of state, her country is in deep economic trouble and there is a voice-recorder on the table, with its little red light on. She must weigh her words carefully.
As we settle down at the table and await our salads, the president remarks, uncontroversially, that Lithuania has suffered from a bubble economy. She also says that her country might have to apply to the International Monetary Fund for a loan if it cannot raise money on the capital markets. This sounds like news and I make a mental note to call the FT newsdesk, after the lunch.
The Lithuanian political system is weighted more to parliament than to the presidency and so, in theory, Grybauskaite’s powers are relatively limited. But the new president ran as an independent and has a powerful personal mandate that
she intends to use. She makes a distinction between her limited formal powers and the “de facto” situation. “People want me to do a lot, especially during the crisis and, de facto, I am responsible in answering my people for everything. Not only the economy, but also for morality, for culture, for everything.”
One moral and cultural question that she has inherited is a new Lithuanian law banning the “promotion” of homosexuality among the young through education, which has been condemned by international human-rights groups such as Amnesty International. Her predecessor as president vetoed the law but the Lithuanian parliament has overridden the veto and so Grybauskaite had no option but to sign the bill. But she has set up a commission to re-examine the question and makes it clear that she personally is opposed to the new measure. “Some
elements of homophobia are growing ... partly because of the economic slowdown, people are looking for some enemies to blame.” The Jewish community in Vilnius, which made up some 40 per cent of the population before the Holocaust, is now tiny.
There is no question, however, that the success or failure of the president’s time in office will ride on the fate of the economy. There had been hopes in Lithuania that the country would not suffer as badly from the economic crisis as Latvia, its Baltic neighbour, which has already had to go to the IMF for a loan. But the GDP figures have been shocking, unemployment is rising, wages are shrinking and Lithuania is under pressure to devalue its currency.
Until the global economic crisis hit, Lithuania had enjoyed all the advantages of being a small, nimble country - able to set its own policies and tax rates. But now the country is discovering the downside of being small. While Britain and the US have pursued policies of massive deficit spending to try to shock their economies back into life, that path is not open to Lithuania. “Small countries do not have these options,” remarks the president. “If we were eager to have a 10 per cent or 15 per cent deficit, nobody would lend us the money.”
Lithuania has had to choose the path of austerity. But, a former economics student, Grybauskaite takes a more than academic interest in the debate between the Keynesian deficit spenders in the Anglo-American world and those Germans and central Europeans who are preaching budgetary discipline. Sipping on her coffee she remarks - “We joke sometimes that each Nobel Prize-winner has his own different opinion about how to deal with things ... If somebody wants more expenditure, they choose Krugman.” So politicians can always find an academic scribbler to justify their choices: it is “whatever you want, according to taste.”
The president reckons that the debate about whether it is better to respond to the economic crunch by “putting yourself on a diet or going on a fiesta” will only be settled by watching how events pan out over the next three years. And she issues an invitation.
“In two or three years, come back and have dinner again, and we can talk.”
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs correspondent
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Reval Hotel
Vilnius
Caesar salad with chicken 23 Litas
Seasonal vegetable salad with
marinated eggplant and smoked cheese 19 Lt
San Pellegrino 20 Lt
Espresso x 2 12 Lt
Total
(including service) 74 litas (€22)
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San Pellegrino vanduo ten 20 Lt?