The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  At first glance, economic micromanagement, corruption, personality cults and divine mandate appear to be largely unconnected themes. Indeed, I initially conceived this book as a far less ambitious investigation into the outward displays of Putin’s personality cult. It became clear, however, that those displays could not be understood without delving into the deep patrimonial state that predated Putin.

  I realized that economic dependency and endemic corruption were crucial factors without which it would be impossible to answer my central question: what makes the deification of the state, and of the state personified, possible in a modern society?

  What has emerged in this book is a problem that has permeated Russia’s history but has far wider implications: a superb confusion about the role of Caesar and God. It is a confusion that affects those who hold power, but it rests with those who give up their powers in exchange for order, abundance, and justice. It is also a confusion that has hampered even recent efforts by Russia’s fledgling opposition movement to build the foundations of a functioning civil society. This creates a persistent paradox in any attempt to forge a functioning legal-rational state in Russia: change cannot happen as long as such gargantuan expectations are placed squarely on a government seen as so absolutely omnipotent that it is expected to transcend itself and curb its own powers. Without a clear delineation between secular and temporal power, there is little room for the rule of law, regardless of who assumes the role of Caesar.

  Finally, I should address some questions and misunderstandings that have come up since the first edition was published in Danish in March 2012. Part of the complexity of this book (aside from its eclectic scope) stems from the fact that I examine a current phenomenon through a historical prism, becoming a journalist treading on academic ground. I am writing about Putin and his subjects as though they have long passed away; as though the author is separated from her subject matter not just by time, but by space. In reality, of course, as a Russian living under Putin’s rule, I am very much in the picture. This book does not seek to be an academic study of modern patrimonialism and its causes. Instead, it seeks to reflect the real experiences – both objective and subjective – of living in a patrimonial state.

  For that reason, I also feel I need to answer one question up front: what is my own opinion of Vladimir Putin? Is this book a critique, an apology, or an indictment?

  Even from this introduction, it may sound as though I am shifting the blame for Russia’s current problems from Putin to the people themselves. When I describe Putin as being moulded into a sacred king, it may give the mistaken impression that he is blameless and powerless in this process. This, of course, is not so – Putin has cunningly taken advantage of social phenomena that predate him to further the livelihood of his friends and to ensure his hold on power. However, his agency in this process should not be overestimated: when examining leaders, we tend to focus on the the will to power, forgetting that to make the domination of one man possible, it also takes the will of millions to follow.

  Putin’s rise to power is not the subject of this book, since I seek to go beneath politics and policy to look at how human beings experience state power within the patrimonial state. The aim is not to shift the blame from the person in power to the people, or to deny that Putin is responsible for what he has become, but to look at a previously unexamined process – what role the people have played in moulding a patrimonial leader. Despite the controversial material described, this book is not meant to indict either the Russian leader or, more importantly, Russians themselves.

  Readers have asked me whether the first lines of this book are to be taken literally. I wrote them more as an expression of the collective unconscious than as a statement of a rationalized desire, for I believe that such yearnings, when unmitigated, are incompatible with human integrity and dignity.

  And yet they exist, and exist in all of us.

  Prologue:

  To give unto Caesar

  Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.

  For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

  - Romans 13:1

  Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

  - Matthew 22:21

  Shit, shit, holy shit. Shit, shit, holy shit.

  Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, banish Putin.

  - Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer. February 2012

  1.

  FATHER BORIS FLASHED his eyes and turned away momentarily. “That’s interesting. The church and state. But why not? What’s wrong with that? It has been like that, the [harmony] of the powers, the spiritual and the material.”

  He was referring to Symphonia, the harmony and interdependency of spiritual and temporal authority that had been a hallmark of Orthodox Christianity since the Byzantine Empire. But there was a contradiction: the Russian Constitution explicitly separated church and state, but implicitly, that separateness just didn’t make any sense. Not to church authorities, who had implied that summer that the separation of church and state was bad for Russia and hence did not exist, and not for the priest.

  We were sitting on the only bench in the priest’s rural church. He had looked, for a second, as though he had thought a lot about my question, and yet seemed startled, as if I had come at him from a different ethical plane. I had asked him about the relationship between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake of possibly the most bizarre court verdict in Russia’s recent history – that in the Pussy Riot case.

  “The Bible says that Man was created as one whole, [body and soul]. I am not against that harmony,” the priest said, his eyes crinkling and shining as he looked directly at me. “Power comes from God; the people get the ruler that they deserve.”

  It was August 2012. His rural church was in the throes of reconstruction, as a bearded, Orthodox-looking worker drilled outside, with a view towards a river and a rolling, grassy meadow. We were on the edge of the Moscow Region, about 100 km from the capital, about a half-hour’s bike ride on a dusty road to the nearest settlement. With its forests on the horizon, the lifestyle there seemed to have changed little in the past couple of decades, perhaps centuries.

  Built in the 1830s, the church had stood in ruins for as long as I could remember. During the 1930s, on orders from the new Bolshevik authorities, it was – not demolished, no, but its bricks were taken to build a pig farm nearby. Around 2007, I had noticed that it was being reconstructed. Then a wooden cottage and a garden went up nearby, with a few milk goats, and Father Boris was sent to serve in the church. His parish consisted mostly of Muscovites who had bought dachas, or summer homes, in the vicinity; natives were becoming increasingly scarce.

  In his 50s, with a bushy brown beard and laughing eyes, he was originally a Muscovite himself, who became an Orthodox Christian well into adulthood, after years of atheism. He married and was ordained, then found himself here, living in a wooden house with no plumbing, between a forest, a field and the church. In his faith, he tended to lean towards the conservatism of those who had found God later in life.

  “Like the army,” he said of the orders to serve in the rural church, and smiled. It wasn’t clear if he was joking, or if the humour was dark or merely grey.

  For half an hour, I had been trying to get him to talk about Pussy Riot, five female punk artists who had donned coloured balaclavas and tights, and tried to lip sync in Moscow’s biggest church, Christ the Saviour Cathedral. In their song, they had appealed to the Virgin Mary to deliver them from Vladimir Putin. Two weeks after their performance, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia for a third term, after a four-year hiatus as prime minister under the nominal presidency of Dmitry Medvedev. Just days after the March 4 election, three members of the band were arrested and charged with hooliganism. Hardly anyone had heard of them or their radical art group; if average Russians were preoccupied with anything in that remote realm of power and polit
ics, it was with the unprecedented opposition protests that had spilled out into the street ahead of Putin’s presidential campaign. While Pussy Riot’s church stunt outraged religious Russians, no one paid much attention, not until the church started publicly condemning them, not until Vladimir Putin condemned them himself.

  Five months later, on August 17, a court found the three women guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, sentencing them to two years in a penal colony.

  Father Boris didn’t want to discuss the case or the verdict. Initially, on the phone, he demurred and suggested I talk to someone higher up in the church hierarchy, explaining that they would be more knowledgeable.

  “I’m telling you, it’s being blown out of proportion,” he kept saying with a smile. He was convinced, for instance, that, according to Russian state television there had been a copycat performance in Europe and the participants had been sentenced to jail. In reality, they had been fined for causing a disturbance, not imprisoned for a federal crime.

  The truth was that, like many average Russians who reluctantly shared their views with me about the Pussy Riot case, he didn’t seem to have an opinion about the verdict. The group and what they had done disgusted him; as he saw it, their careless, self-serving affront to their own people, a people they did not even try to understand, was not worth the words that we were wasting on them.

  But there was a clear sense that the only reason we were talking about them was because the government decided to put them on trial. And that just didn’t seem to be any of his business.

  “What can we do, if something political happens?” he said at length. “Do everything with love.”

  2.

  “So can you just translate the word itself into Russian, or not?” Vladimir Putin asked the journalist provocatively, “or does it make you uncomfortable?”

  It was the second time he’d tried to get Kevin Owen, his British interviewer for RT, the state-owned, English-language Russia Today channel, to say “Pussy Riot” in Russian – with no success. The band had an English name that everyone understood to be far cruder in Russian; the group was referred to using the English words. Owen tried to laugh it off; Putin smiled and tried again. “Maybe you can’t, for ethical reasons,” he said finally, smiling no longer.

  Owen tried changing the subject. “Actually, I’d thought it was referring to a ‘cat’, but maybe I’m missing a point… Anyway, do you think that… the case was handled wrongly in any way?”

  But Putin cut him off, raising his voice slightly. “You understand everything perfectly. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”

  Owen, who was not a native Russian speaker, could be forgiven for misunderstanding. While crude, the English “pussy” is still a euphemism, not nearly as obscene as “cunt.” But Pussy Riot – as the group had named itself – was clearly aiming for the only Russian equivalent – pizda.

  And Putin would try to make another journalist, this time a Russian, also translate the English name of the band into their native language, pushing him towards saying an obscenity on national television.

  “I want to ask you about the punk group ‘Pussy Riot,’” Vadim Takmenev, a presenter at the federal NTV channel, asked in a two-hour long documentary that purported to portray the “real” Putin – with his dog, at breakfast, at the gym, and at the pool, where he spent most mornings. Takmenev, a seasoned prime time host and, unlike Owen, a Russian, asked the more “uncomfortable” questions with a self-conscious nervousness.

  But Putin seemed to have his own agenda. “How is the name translated?” he asked back.

  “Yes, I know,” the presenter tried to smile, trying to nod away the obscenity.

  “Can you say it?”

  “I can’t say it.”

  “Can you say it to your audience?” Putin insisted. “For people who don’t study foreign languages?”

  Instead of saying the obscenity, the presenter said something unintentionally revealing.

  “I can’t say it in front of you,” he gave in.

  Putin laughed out loud. “If you can’t say it in front of me, then it’s an obscene word. You see? Those were talented girls. They forced all of you to say it. What, is that good?”8

  It was early October 2012, nearly two months after the verdict that sent Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina to a penal colony (the third, oldest participant, Yekaterina Samutsevich, would be freed on probation at an appeals hearing just days after the interview aired). Putin no longer had to worry about his statements pressuring the court. He was using crudeness to make a point about how the women had undermined society’s moral norms.

  He also seemed, unbeknownst to him, to be following in the footsteps of Nicholas I, who had the poet Alexander Polezhayev brought into his presence in the middle of a winter’s night in 1836, to force him to read a far less crude poem.

  Before the audience, someone had made sure that all of Polezhayev’s buttons were in place, for Nicholas was notoriously pedantic. After sizing up the student with his serpentine gaze, Nicholas handed him a notebook with his poem. “Read it out loud,” he ordered, but Polezhayev, feeling the Tsar’s eyes on him, was too petrified.

  “I can’t,” he said. This was not just terror of the Tsar, who had clearly already read the poem: Polezhayev’s work contained words that, in those times, were considered indecent; and he could hardly bring himself to utter something dirty in that sacred presence.

  “Read!” the Tsar ordered. Polezhayev read. The Tsar lectured him for a moment, then suggested that the young poet join the army as a soldier, recommending that he use the opportunity of military service to cleanse his soul. As they parted, the Tsar kissed him.9 Polezhayev would spend the rest of his life as a soldier; at the age of 34 he died in a military hospital from tuberculosis.

  Like Nicholas facing an upper class revolt, Putin seemed to have found himself suddenly becoming a guarantor not just of the Constitution, but of the moral norms that often contradicted it. He was privatizing God, he was proclaiming his rights to the souls of his subjects, and he hadn’t the strength to conceal it any longer.

  It was as though a façade had cracked: with the jailing of three women for dancing in a church, something that had lain dormant underneath, that we had thought we’d outgrown, was spilling out onto the surface, to ours, and to Vladimir Putin’s dismay, amid haphazard efforts to patch up the hole with repressive measures that only made it grow. It was as though the unmitigated relationship between a human being and his government was laid bare, along with the underlying mandate of Russian governance: a mystical mandate that preceded democratic institutions by thousands of years, a mandate that came down to something as simple as strength versus weakness, food or death, master or God. That an unlikely, poker-faced former KGB officer found himself at the apex of this primordial chaos and had initially tried to suppress it only accentuated its resilience.

  It had started with the Dmitry Medvedev conundrum. For four years, Vladimir Putin had ruled from the seat of the prime minister, to where he had withdrawn in 2008 to preserve the letter of the Constitution, which forbade more than two consecutive presidential terms. For president, he handpicked a lawyer he had worked with for decades. And while Russians implicitly understood who the real boss was, there was an eagerness to play the political game, to bet on the soft-spoken liberal, to speculate whether he would run for a second term. Indeed, until the very end, the question of whether Dmitry Medvedev was merely a placeholder or a true successor remained shrouded in intrigue. Most importantly, even Putin – known to make decisions at the last minute – seemed eager to give him a chance, to test whether institutional – rather than personal – authority was strong enough to survive.

  For months running up to the 2012 decision, rumours of a rift between the two men festered, fuelled, deliberately, by the Kremlin itself. The suspense seemed necessary to uphold a façade of politics, as if getting politicians to take part in the rehearsal would eventually usher in the real thing. Then, some
time during the summer of 2011, the decision was quietly made between Putin, Medvedev and a few key insiders: the president was not going to run for a second term, and Putin would return to the Kremlin.

  When Putin and Medvedev finally announced their decision in September 2011, admitting that they had reached it privately “years ago,” it came as a demoralizing blow to a whole swathe of society that had got used to the motions of democratic process, even if they understood that those motions were flawed. No one was surprised that Putin was returning to the Kremlin – they were shocked that he had admitted, so nonchalantly, that it wasn’t any of their business and never had been. It was as if, standing before 11,000 delegates of his majority United Russia party, he had admitted that it was all just a game used to bewilder his subjects, but that it had become too confusing, arcane, and risky to carry on with.

  It took about two months for the frustrations in that swathe of society to boil over. The December 4 parliamentary elections became the tipping point. It did not matter that Putin’s United Russia party, though still winning, garnered far fewer votes than in the previous elections, nor that the vote rigging alleged was about the same – if not less – than last time. The damage had already been done, the gauze curtain had been punctured, and thousands of people began spilling into the streets in protest.

  For the Putin generation, come of age under the high oil prices of his pseudo-autocracy, it was like a form of psychotherapy as they began articulating their attitudes in an attempt to desanctify state power. “You are not a Tsar, not a God,” a group of veteran paratroopers sang at rallies, joining an urban, professional class. After the president ridiculed their white ribbons and compared them to condoms, the protesters turned up with all sorts of creative descriptions for the president as a used condom. Sex – which, under Putin, emerged for the first time as an explicit feature of a personality cult around a Russian leader – proved an easy target. At one rally, a girl boldly proclaimed “I do not want you,” in a country where a fifth of the female population did.10 She may have not meant it, but she seemed to be suggesting that sexual willingness was a key condition of political loyalty. “A president who is not doing it with his wife is doing it to his country,” a protest leader proclaimed from the stage at the same rally. A day after Putin won the presidential vote in the first round, another leader proclaimed from the stage that the rigged elections had been tantamount to rape.