Vladimir Putin walked off with the Russian X Factor title last night with 98.3 percent of the public vote, despite widespread allegations of vote-rigging. The Prime Minister and horse enthusiast sealed the dubious win with a performance of Frank Sinatra’s 'My Way' in temperatures below minus thirty degrees centigrade after a backstage generator ran out of potato oil.
Putin beat off a challenge from Belarus-based girl band ‘Little Minsk’ whose song about the impact of collective farming on rural families during Stalin’s Five Year Plans entitled The Impact of Collective Farming on Rural Families During Stalin’s Five Year Plans wowed judges Louis Zhirinovsky and Tulisa Yeltsin. Russians, meanwhile, feel cheated and this morning nearly 50,000 people gathered near the Kremlin to condemn the vote and demand that phone lines, as well as off-licences, be reopened. An alliance of communists, nationalists and Western-leaning liberals also roundly condemned what they claim was blatant lip-syncing by Putin.
Talent show analysts also point to suspicious betting patterns before the result was announced and a below par vocal performance from Little Minsk’s singer Natasha after she was found semi-comatose in her dressing room, having been careless enough to impale herself on a carelessly discarded syringe containing Polonium 90. The victory is the second in a row for Putin who beat hotly-tipped boy band Perestroika after their single ‘High Infant Mortality Rates Among The Families of Former Nuclear Submarine Workers’ received only two percent of the vote, though the band have since gained a loyal fan base in Siberia.
X factor fan and former chess grandmaster Anatoly Karpov said ‘I don’t know anybody who voted for Putin, but when I dialled the number to vote for Little Minsk and their catchy song about the impact of collective farming on rural families during Stalin’s Five Year Plans, all I got was a fax machine.’ But X Factor Judge Louis Zhirinovsky hailed Putin as a worthy champion and accused Karpov and the protestors of sour grapes. He told the star
‘You’ve got the vocals, you’ve got the work ethic, you’ve got the police, you’ve got the army, you’ve got Tulisa - the public are gonna love you.’
