Russian Rock Legend Funds Mayor Campaign by Selling Cats

MOSCOW, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russian heavy metal legend Sergei Troitsky, better known as Spider, said on Friday kittens will become the main source of funding for his Moscow mayor electoral campaign.

In his interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station on June 17, Troitky said that his cat recently gave birth to nine kittens, and seven of them were to be bought by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov for about 200,000 rubles each.

However, Troitsky gave different information on Friday, saying that he already sold five kittens, one of them to an unnamed bank for 50,000 rubles. The remaining four were swapped “for a three-percent stake in a major basketball club” by “a Russian billionaire” in a deal that Troitsky claims would bring him hefty $30 billion for his campaign funding.

“I’m now selling cats to get money for my electoral campaign. We have spent all our savings on the Khimki mayor campaign and are now low on funds,” he told journalists on Friday, referring to elections in a Moscow satellite city of Khimki last year, where he garnered about 2.5 percent of the vote despite a colorful election campaign, which has included proposals to supply local residents with flying saucers.

This time Troitsky, the sole remaining member of thrash/heavy metal legends Korroziya Metalla, came forward with an even weirder electoral platform, pledging to give every Muscovite seven bottles of Crimean wine every week and heat up water in the Moskva River so that people could swim there during the cold season.

In an obvious reference to a popular “dumb blonde” stereotype, Spider also promised to build a special “ring road for blondes” around Moscow.

This is Troitsky’s second bid to become a mayor of Moscow. He was set to run for mayor of the Russian capital in 1993 on the ticket of Radical Party of firebrand writer Eduard Limonov, but the vote was canceled because of a bloody failed putsch in the capital. In 1998, Troitsky run for the State Duma in Moscow, but his victory was annulled due to low turnout.

While there may be few comparable figures in the West, Spider is part of Russia’s post-Soviet tradition of political eccentrics. Russia’s other political oddities include Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party – the fourth biggest in parliament – who has in the past proposed supplying free vodka to everyone, introducing polygamy to solve Russia’s demographic crisis and reclaiming Alaska from the United States.