The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  The Kremlin’s initial response to the protests was to act as though this was a normal part of the democratic process. When rallies broke out in early December, as people feared bloody clashes, city authorities took a consistent line on allowing mass demonstrations. A top government official praised the upper class demonstrators as “the best part of our society” and Putin proclaimed that he was “pleased” to see them protesting – it meant that the civil society he was so eager to foster was taking root.

  To demonstrate just how serious he was about democracy, he invited them for dialogue – and even designated liberals in his government as potential mediators.

  But within two months of the first protests, in early February 2012, it was already clear that the dialogue just didn’t seem to be happening – as one of the mediators told me then.

  It may have been that Putin never wanted genuine dialogue, or maybe he didn’t immediately recognize that by being open to dialogue he must be open to giving up the reins of power. Maybe he earnestly believed that the kind of democratic façade he had instituted was indeed the real thing, just like those gadgets they had in Europe that he was so keen to import. Maybe dialogue, to him, meant something on his own terms, a recognition of token concessions from him in order to bring the dissenters back into the fold.

  But the opposition, too, had little experience in political activity – in a country where, as they said themselves, politics did not yet exist. The most charismatic voice to emerge from the movement, lawyer and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, initially refused to run for office in a campaign that he did not recognize as real. When he finally ran for Moscow mayor in the summer of 2013, as we shall see later in this book, it was a forced decision. With Navalny facing a conviction that would bar him from public office, the liberal Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin eagerly backed him as a contender to ensure a competitive election, knowing full well Navalny could never pose a real threat.

  In early 2012, without a clear political platform, and with demands that were clearly fixated on Putin’s personal removal from power, the protest rallies bore all the marks of a carnival – at once hopeful, enlightening, and cathartic – but harbouring something darker underneath. If the rallies were a carnival, a true carnival carries the threat of death.11

  Inadvertently, an underlying current in the protest movement seemed intent on provoking Putin to reveal himself as a true autocrat, a feudal sovereign who would respond to revolt with physical repression, jailings and torture – either subduing his people, or giving them a pretext to depose him.

  For lack of an alternative, the confrontation between the “best part of society” and its ruler began to turn into a mirroring process, a game of chicken between two thugs of clearly unequal strength, staring at each other, waiting to see who would budge. It wasn’t about politics, it was about something that predated politics: sheer, brute force, and who had more self-confidence.

  When dialogue didn’t happen, the Kremlin stopped pretending. Out went the Kremlin official who praised the “best part of society,” and in came Soviet-style propaganda. To rival the carnival-like protests, the administration began rallying masses from all over the country – with a gentle mix of financial enticement and coercion. Teachers, accountants, nurses, clerks on the state budget, when given tickets to attend pro-Putin rallies in Moscow, didn’t really see it as much of a choice: When your boss tells you it’s voluntary, then it’s mandatory.

  If the inadvertent temptation of the protesting opposition had been to bring out the feudal sovereign in a bureaucrat struggling to play the game of democracy, then they succeeded. With the elections a week away, he wasn’t asking for their votes, he was asking them to lease their bodies and souls as the price of economic stability.

  Implicit in the role of feudal sovereign were the repressions – and they had already begun. Activists had been detained for a few weeks at the first unauthorized rallies, in early December 2011. But by 2013, nearly thirty people were in custody for taking part in a rally that had turned violent, some of them simply for standing next to a skirmish between police and protesters; opposition leaders were facing up to ten years in jail, and an activist had been snatched in front of a UN office in the Ukraine12 and taken to Russia, where he claimed to have been kept in a basement without food until he confessed to planning a mass revolt.13 (The authorities would deny the activist’s claim, saying he turned himself in voluntarily.)

  Just as repression was implicit in the role of a feudal sovereign, a sacrificial victim was implicit at a carnival.

  * * *

  Vadim Takmenev’s documentary aired on national television on Putin’s 60th birthday on October 7, 2012, and for the first time, fear emerged as a normal part of an interview – something that no longer needed to be concealed, an ironic allusion in a conversation set to tinkling, comic music.

  “When someone’s sitting in front of you like this, can you sense… if he’s afraid of you… if he’s embarrassed?” Takmenev asked Putin.

  “Of course. It’s visible.”

  “With me?” the journalist laughed nervously.

  “With you it’s less,” Putin said dispassionately, after considering him for a moment. “But you’re used to it.”

  3.

  Yekaterina Samutsevich didn’t really feel anything when, on February 21, 2012, she climbed to the altar steps of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the holiest section of Russia’s biggest church, forbidden, by church canon, to anyone but priests.

  “I had to act quickly, clearly, it’s very easy for something to go wrong and for everything to fall apart,” she described shortly after her release from prison in October 2012. “So it was a desire to do everything right, everything that I had thought through beforehand.”

  Clad in coloured tights, with a balaclava hiding her face, she prepared to dance out the trademark moves of her little-known feminist punk group, Pussy Riot, with four other girls, genuflecting in a mock proskynesis, the gesture of full prostration that, in ancient Russian custom, had been used before both secular and clerical figures. As she tried to remove her guitar from her case to lip sync the words to the song they intended to perform, a church guard seized her and removed her from the cathedral. She did not resist.

  The words she intended to lip sync were, “Shit, shit, holy shit, Holy Mother, banish Putin, banish Putin, banish Putin.”

  As Pussy Riot would later underline in their defence, they saw themselves as holy fools – those half-crazy, half-blessed social outcasts of Orthodox tradition.

  “There’s this situation of utter despair, when there’s no other way out, and in that case, in the Orthodox tradition you appeal to the Holy Mother. We quoted this cultural phenomenon.”

  If she intended to protest at an emerging status quo in which her government’s power was implicitly based on God, then on another level she wound up reinforcing it. By holding a punk prayer, whether they felt anything at all as they uttered those words, Pussy Riot’s inadvertent message was, “only God can replace the man who rules over us.”

  If their desecration angered Orthodox Christians – by sullying the sacred space of the church with something as corrupt as politics – then it was the duplicity of their message that enraged the church and the Kremlin, a Kremlin bent on legitimizing itself through elections and rule of law.

  As a punk group, Pussy Riot had already held several similar performances during that political season, and their anti-Putin song had debuted in other venues. An offshoot of the radical art group Voina, Pussy Riot could only dream of generating any nationwide publicity outside a fringe audience of protesting performance artists.

  In that milieu, their antics were designed to shock. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, whose pouting, pensive gaze through the bars of her court cage was immortalized during the trial, had taken part in a videotaped group orgy in 2008. Nine months pregnant, she was shown in Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum, having sex with her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, in a performance titled “Fuck for the Successo
r, Little Bear” – a reference to Putin’s protégé, Dmitry Medvedev. Another member of Pussy Riot – who did not take part in the Punk Prayer – was videotaped in a supermarket trying to stuff a raw chicken into her vagina.

  Samutsevich herself didn’t expect their performance in Christ the Saviour Cathedral to generate anything more than a brief media storm.

  And yet something in that dubious message, sounded from the altar of Russia’s top church, struck an unexpected chord, as if beaming straight into a collective unconscious that had already begun to stir.

  The supreme displeasure made itself evident immediately. On the following day, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin – a de facto mouthpiece for the church – condemned their act. “This is a sin that violates the law of God. The most important law. For the wages of sin is death,” he told news media, quoting from Romans 6:23.

  Within days, the law of God was neatly discovered in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation – hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, a sin that merited up to seven years in a penal colony. On February 26, the the girls who had taken part in the performance were named as wanted by the police.

  On March 6, two days after Vladimir Putin won the presidential election, his displeasure at Pussy Riot’s performance became known for the first time. His reaction to Pussy Riot’s performance was “negative,” said his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, calling their stunt “disgusting.”

  The beauty of a Byzantine power structure is that “rule by signal” can neither be proven nor disproven. There is no record, no personal decree by Putin, that citizens A, B and C should stand trial for any particular crime. According to several unconfirmed reports around that time, Patriarch Kirill, on close terms with Putin, had asked him directly to take “revenge” on Pussy Riot, while certain investigators on the case allegedly claimed to be reporting about it directly to Putin himself.

  Whatever spoken or unspoken instructions passed down from the very top, a signal was sent that was powerful enough to set in motion a whole criminal investigation – and whether it came from the church or from the Kremlin was immaterial, for the result was the same.

  That criminal investigation – as though itself a continuation of Pussy Riot’s art performance – reflected what, exactly, had displeased the authorities. In the indictment presented by investigator Lieutenant Colonel Artem Ranchenkov, Pussy Riot’s stunt served to “diminish the spiritual foundation of the government.” Experts recruited by prosecutors stated that the women had violated decrees by the Church Council of Trullo held in Constantinople under Byzantine Emperor Justinian II in 692.

  “Imagine if something like this happened under Tsar Ivan the Terrible,” a literary expert who would go on to testify in court, wrote in a patriotic publication. “The headless corpses of the heretics would have been thrown to the dogs. Terrible! But what was done in Christ the Saviour Cathedral was, in terms of the seriousness of the crime, far worse than the execution I mentioned.”14

  Each side seemed to be forcing the other to assume an ancient role. The “criminals” exposed a divine mandate that the supreme power found itself relying on, in the absence of other forms of legitimization. The criminal investigators responded in kind, identifying the “spiritual foundation of the government” as a legal concept, and initiating what, in effect, could be called an Inquisition. And the defence, opting out of the confused and ineffective paradigm of the law, focused instead on exposing and indicting that spiritual foundation. The effect was the same: both sides were proving that it existed.

  “In Russia it is customary, if you are under investigation, to lick the shoe of the judge,” the fiery defence lawyer Mark Feygin, an ambitious activist and a former regional politician, proclaimed from the crowded defence bench. Behind him, the three girls of Pussy Riot sniggered from their glass cage, the same one built nearly a decade before to “protect” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon jailed in 2003 after falling out of favour at court. (The justice system was, of course, about protection – “we are protecting them from you,” a stony-faced court bailiff had told me as they led the members of Pussy Riot past us.)

  Feygin was on a roll. “You must weep, debase yourself, you must squash your identity. You must allow the government to tear you to pieces. You must turn into a complete nothing.”

  It was an irony that as Feygin spoke, he was not hauled off by the guard, as he would in a real Inquisition. It was ironic also that the judge, Marina Syrova, watched this condemnation of her work, her shoes and her implicit sadistic tendencies with a detached bemusement, as if not really comprehending the meaning of his words, but acknowledging that they must be part of the due process she was charged with overseeing.

  What made this scene startling as I watched it was that in an American courtroom, a lawyer making such an unwholesome reference to a judge’s shoe could well be held in contempt of court, given the relative independence of an American judge. But Judge Marina Syrova remained silent.

  For Yekaterina Samutsevich, the art performance stopped in early October, when she switched lawyers. Accused of that very bootlicking by more radical detractors (and later by her former lawyer, Mark Feygin), she opted for a less politicized lawyer who focused not on the statement she had been trying to make, but the fact that she never had the opportunity to make it – having been removed from the stage before she could start her performance.

  That had been enough, to everyone’s surprise, to set her free. And with Samutsevich out of jail, her performance stopped. The provocation she had set in motion was, for her, concluded.

  “Political art which holds events in public places is of course provocative. It’s a test. You make an event, you watch how a system responds,” she said.

  But if she believed that Russia was a secular state, then why test it, why stage the provocation? If there was a mix of the two, then why deliberately bring out that dormant, primordial matrix, especially if it posed a mortal threat?

  And then she said something else: “Harmony of church and state – of course we were trying to disrupt this harmony, and I hope we succeeded.”

  If there was harmony to disrupt, and a patrimonial deep state that ruled through personalized power instead of the constitutional state that ruled by law, then Pussy Riot should have known they would go to jail for their antics.

  There was something else she didn’t fully explain, possibly because she didn’t fully understand it herself: she seemed to have internalized the role of the sacrificial victim.

  “It’s as though there’s a mechanism for the opposition, created by the government, that the only way to be in the opposition is to be in jail,” she said.

  “As soon as you get out of jail, you lose that aura of the sacrificial victim. You’re not interesting. This image of someone who is behind bars – who is being silenced by force – it’s somehow been made more appealing for the opposition. It’s an illusion.”

  What she didn’t know – at least, she could not recall it when she spoke to me – was that it was Putin who, about a week after the Pussy Riot performance, made the first reference to sacrifice.

  He was talking about planned provocations at protest rallies, and was describing the potential methods. “I know about this. They’re even looking for a so-called ‘sacrificial victim’, someone famous. They’ll ‘whack’ them, if you’ll pardon me, and then blame the government.”

  There was something about Yekaterina Samutsevich that didn’t compute – a double origin, a combination of two matters that did not mix easily.

  On one level, Katya, as she had become known, looked and spoke like the kind of person I’d encounter in an American university town, or in Europe. Born too late to attend Soviet schools, she was a teenager in the 1990s, joining the workforce soon after Vladimir Putin became president. For a few years after college, she worked from nine to five in an office as a computer programmer writing code for a nuclear submarine, and then suddenly decided to drop out, downshift, as she put it.

  But on another le
vel – in the stunt that became the ultimate product of her yearning for creativity – she had tapped into the ancient identity of the holy fool. Thanks to her stunt and her subsequent punishment, she had helped expose a social paradigm where the holy fool is both a necessary and an inevitable role, a paradigm where all players, as if on cue, assume their positions: the victim and the executioner, who could not exist without each other.

  Free from prison, she would never be free from this. “Sometimes I feel like we are being used,” she said. She said this, as everything else she told me during our interview, with the air of a person who has very little idea of what is happening to her.

  4.

  Father Boris was too far removed from all this for the simple reason that he was restoring his church. If the government had once destroyed these churches and sent priests like him to their death, now it was helping restore what its predecessors had destroyed.