The physical growth of a person, as well as the volume of the brain, is far from an indicator of his abilities and capabilities. The trouble is that if a small woman, like Ioannina Zheimo (known from the film "Cinderella"), is lovingly called "miniature, " for a short man, literature and folk dialects do not store any respectfully affectionate names. Widespread in vernacular, many offensive nicknames painfully offend male pride.
Boy on an oval
Some time ago, an anecdotal work that had faded away was stubbornly exaggerating the theme: "What is the real growth of Putin and Medvedev?" The attack behind the podium, which was made by Dmitry Anatolyevich, was certainly surrounded by a red oval line in documentary photographs and “photo-toads”.
Yes, it so happened that the first persons of the state of the Russian beginning of the XXI century are not tall. So what? The little finger-boy, known to everyone from an old fairy tale, was quite quick-witted and, in terms of quick wits, gave odds to his tall brothers. It seems that if there existed the slightest prospect of nanotechnology, it was he who would have invented Skolkovo! So why investigate Medvedev’s height in cm, if you can evaluate his political weight, his contribution to the promotion of domestic science, culture, improving the life of citizens and many other very important parameters of a statesman?
"I stood on the shoulders of the giants"
The great Isaac Newton said these words about his predecessors, whose works helped him discover the basic laws of dynamics. The first and foremost of them was a man of small stature - Robert Hooke. The one whose name bears the well-known Law of elasticity. Such a respectful memory "just like that" does not remain in science and history.
The low growth of Putin and Medvedev does not prevent them from being giants, on whose shoulders, remembering the expression of P. A Stolypin, Great Russia will survive in the era of great upheavals. Strength of mind, diplomatic intuition, the ability to rally people loyal to the Fatherland around themselves - behind these qualities, the question of the physical growth of the heads of state is lost.
Visual effects
We see the first persons of the country mainly in telecasts, in the photo of professional reporters. It is worth taking a closer look, and it begins to seem: Medvedev's "relative" growth seems to be changing from frame to frame. Optical effects can not only favorably emphasize the advantages of appearance, but make an individual visually high compared to the environment (this is facilitated by the simple law of perspective, well-chosen angles).
The capabilities of video equipment, even without Photoshop, are very large. A case is known when the illuminator, to whom the hero of the program was unsympathetic, made a curly-haired person visually bumpy-bald with just a light. There are also examples closer to ordinary people: our photos on a document do not always correspond to what we immediately observe in the mirror before shooting!
Personal photographers of the first persons, perhaps, were given the order most often to demonstrate the growth of Dmitry Medvedev, the second person in the Kremlin tandem, the same as that of the charismatic leader of the country.
Acceleration Waves
At the end of the last century, scientists seriously started talking about the phenomenon of teenage acceleration: boys and girls achieved significantly greater growth than people in previous generations. Subsequent analysis of historical data allowed us to put forward a hypothesis: periods of "growth" and "low" replace each other throughout the development of mankind. Therefore, the leaders, one and a half meters in height - Alexander the Great and Charles the Great - did not seem so short against their own, in the majority of stocky, contemporaries.
The growth of Medvedev (like Putin, the representative of the post-war generation) in the crowd of people looks small precisely against the backdrop of younger accelerators. By leveling this effect, reporters try to show the tandem most often together, or choose camera angles with enlarging the figures of the President and the Prime Minister, and make waist portraits.
So who is still higher?
It is difficult to determine how tall Putin and Medvedev are when they are close. Frequent observation of reports leads to the conclusion: approximately equal.
Putin’s denser figure: the athlete’s broad shoulders, a low-set head, which, in comparison with the slender Medvedev (whose shoulder line is also lowered, and the head and neck are more elongated vertically), makes Vladimir Vladimirovich more proportionally folded, and therefore visually high. In fact, according to various sources, Medvedev's height is from 162 to 172 cm (an average of 167 cm), Putin (officially recognized) - 170 cm.
The different heights of the shoes in combination with the daily shrinkage of the spinal disc (up to 3 cm in any adult healthy man) give the effect of approximate equality of growth. It can be argued that Putin, on average, is only slightly superior (by 3-5 cm) to his "tandem partner." Moreover, both of them turn out to be low only against the background of the general acceleration of the people and stereotypes of perception rooted in this connection (for example, the height of A.S. Pushkin, traditionally considered small for us, was 164 cm).
