Stalin demands a recount, as Nevsky is already dead.
I don't know how we missed this one, or maybe I just did. Apparently, the Russia TV Channel held a Name of Russia contest to find the most notable personality in Russian history. Individuals voted over the Internet and were given 500 personalities to choose from. The top three:
1. Aleksandr Nevsky
2. Aleksandr Pushkin
3. Fyodr Dostoevsky
Apparently there was some controversy surrounding the vote. Namely, there were complaints that the system was biased against communists including Stalin (#12, although BBC and wikipedia report that he was #3) and Lenin (#5). RECOUNT!
Other notables: Peter the Great was #4; Catherine the Great was #7 (still not sure if the horse rumor hurt or helped); and Ivan the Terrible was #8.
For what it's worth: I would totally have voted for Gogol. "A Terrible Vengeance" changed my life.
4 comments:
That's so weird - BBC reported that Stalin got third.
Hmmm...so did wikipedia. Maybe they already had a recount :) I just went with the Russia TV site.
If Bulgakov didn't make the top three the fix is in.
What did Nevsky ever do except not slip on the ice?
Ern - Stalin did come in third - you accidentally went with the wrong Name of Russia webpage.
This contest has gone on for something like a year. First they had a big campaign on choosing the first round winners: the top 12 greatest Russians.
Despite urgent appeals by the TV show's organisers to vote for someone else and grassroots campaigns to push up other candidates, Stalin kept ending up at the top of the list. So eventually, the organisers apparently (according to my co-blogger Dagmaraka) claimed a massive hacking incident and deducted a million votes for Stalin.
That ended up Stalin in 12th place in the first round ranking - which is the one you found. But then those 12 went on to the final round, to decide the actual winner.
That round, which was much shorter and thus involved only some four and a half million votes - has now been completed, and Nevsky came first, Stolypin second, and Stalin third. Lenin came in sixth. See this ranking on the Name of Russia site.
We blogged about it here:
1/4/2009
10/7/2008
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