The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  Indeed, the very idea of a reception office for the party came out of sincere attempts at democracy building. In Russia, every political institution has had reception offices since Soviet times. By 2005, after five years in existence, the United Russia party established its own network, with offices directed by either regional or municipal deputies from United Russia – party functionaries who usually headed committees in their local parliaments that were responsible for the social sphere.

  Even local deputies from the opposition Communist and Liberal Democratic parties had a budget of anywhere between £6,000 and £22,000 to spend on social issues in their electoral district, depending on the scale of the community they represented, whether regional, local, or municipal. The funds were set aside for help, such as with buying new homes for the poor, or paying medical bills, but ultimately it was up to the speaker of the regional parliament to approve each request.28

  But by 2008, several factors converged to mark these sleepy institutions for a convenient overhaul. The President of the Russian Federation, who every year held televised phone-in shows where citizens could ask him directly to sort out their pension problems and their broken pipes, was stepping down from his post, and would hence be known as: Prime Minister, Chairman of the United Russia party, and National Leader.

  Politically, the move to establish personalized reception offices fortified Putin’s image as a hands-on man of the people, sending a powerful signal that, no matter who was in the Kremlin, Putin was still very much in charge. For United Russia, the reception offices offered a role that the Soviet-era Communist Party used to wield: as an organizer of civil initiative where there was none. Putin’s party, as was his wont, was pre-empting and co-opting civil society by reaching out into places where it did not exist

  But examined from a social perspective rather than a political one, the move actually revealed a staggering lack of functioning local institutions that were accountable to the citizens of their district.

  In other words, the chances that a request to such an office would have any meaningful rate of success was dim – the papers would be filed away under the glass covering the desk of any official a citizen happened to appeal to.

  Linking the reception offices to the national leader ensured direct manual control of how each and every request was being handled. “The very algorithm of the reception office changed,” Anisimov said.

  “Deputies and their aides were involved in helping ordinary citizens on the orders of the chairman of the party – on the direct orders of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

  Deputies and their aides, in other words, are authorized to telephone local officials responsible for red tape, and, by dropping the name of the prime minister, pulling strings on behalf of the citizen. Vladimir Putin, in other words, is brought in to mediate between the residents and their direct, elected municipal officials – the ones in direct proximity to the people making the requests.

  3.

  Inevitably, the establishment of direct reception offices for the national leader attracted a whole slew of petitioners, some even described by reception officials as mentally deficient. An elderly woman at a Moscow reception office once asked a journalist if Putin would be receiving her in person.

  But Sergei Kvitko’s case seemed perfectly sound – moreover, it reflected Russia’s perennial gap between a self-sufficient, educated elite and a large majority systemically dependant on a paternalistic government. Unfairly written off as destitute, backward, or even crazy, these “average citizens” from the provinces simply could not find a common language with their better-off peers. And the misunderstanding appeared to be mutual.

  Had Sergei Kvitko been to “his senator” – his direct, elected representative? He had. But the local deputies in his town proved useless.

  “I went to local United Russia deputies. They told me that [my home] was already supposed to have gas,” he said. But they would go no further. “‘We don’t want to fight with the town administration,’ they told me. ‘We have to live and work with them.’”

  The local legislative branch, in other words, was more afraid of the local executive branch than of its voters.

  But if that was one reason that Kvitko still didn’t have gas in his home, it certainly wasn’t the main one. Rather, local parliamentarians answered to local administrative officials because they were powerless to do much in this vast terrain.

  And the problem of gasification illustrated this vastness perfectly – and demonstrated the dire limitations of local governance.

  Kvitko’s case seems to have fallen through the cracks of a local gasification drive that began in 2007. That April, municipal representatives of the Shekino district in the Tula region launched a three-year programme to bring gas to all rural settlements in the area.

  On April 27, the state-run Vesti channel was “pleased to announce” that the long-awaited “blue fuel” had finally arrived at the Shakhty-22 settlement – the same one where Sergei Kvitko lived. The news report identified the settlement as part of the Shekino district, and noted that 27 homes – and over 70 residents – were already connected to the new gas pipe infrastructure.

  But somehow, Kvitko wasn’t one of them. By the end of 2010 – when the 163 million rouble programme was supposed to be complete29 – there was no sign of any gas.

  “They kept telling me I was supposed to get gas. But there were only promises,” he said. “Vladimir Vladimirovich is always saying that money is being spent on gas. But where does this money go?”

  Kvitko earned just 13,000 roubles (£250) a month as a mine worker, and it would take him several years and a number of loans to save up enough money to modernize his home without government help. But the possibility of uniting with his neighbours was an option that Kvitko seemed to discard at once.

  “In Tula [the regional capital] deputies were surprised to hear that we don’t have gas yet,” he said. “But local authorities tell us to do this ourselves, to collect 800,000 roubles from our town, and the gas will be installed. How can we do that when our settlement consists of veteran miners and pensioners? Old women can contribute about 200 roubles each.”

  The 800,000 roubles (about £15,500) that Kvitko speaks of is far less than the 4.5 million roubles that the Shekino administration, using part federal, part regional and part local funds, set aside to gasify a district that neighboured Shakhty-22. The problem is often one of income disparity. In one case observed by the author, the elected chairman of a dacha cooperative outside the town of Dubna said that residents could pitch in for a new water pipe network. After hours of vocal debates, the issue was stalled – wealthier residents who relied on their own, autonomous, networks did not want to pitch in because they did not intend to use the new system, and pensioners did not want to pay anything unless the wealthier residents paid. In the end, the pipe network remained the same.

  A similar conundrum appeared to be plaguing communities like Shakhty-22. Those who could afford to contribute had no incentive to do so because they had the means to modernize their homes on their own. Those who could not were failing to convince their wealthier neighbours to compromise – they simply spoke a different language.

  And for someone like Kvitko, surviving on so little, the question of spending hours, days, or weeks first petitioning local authorities, then regional authorities, and then taking a day’s journey all the way to Moscow to petition Vladimir Putin made more sense than mobilizing a few dozen people in his community to come up with £20,000 so that all their homes could have gas.

  4.

  For Vladimir Putin, the status of the gas pipe in Sergei Kvitko’s home – as well as a whole lot of other information – was now accessible in real-time through a nationwide database. Putin could simply log on – if he chose to, which he doesn’t very often – and see for himself whether Kvitko was still hauling firewood in the mornings. Kvitko had given him that opportunity.

  “It’s one thing to take very important, necessary decisions in Mosco
w, in the Kremlin, in the White House,” Putin told United Russia leaders in Samara in September 2009. “It’s another to solve a number of completely different problems across the whole country…. It is important to use all means to help a single specific individual resolve his issues, his problems, perhaps even his tragedies.”30

  Sergei Kvitko’s petition, like requests to Vladimir Putin that fall on the desk of Alexei Anisimov, whether made in writing or in person, is filed in an electronic database that can be accessed by deputies and party officials at any time, from anywhere. Anisimov, asked how receptions report on their progress to their leader, was eager to point out that “even the Chairman of the Party can log on, using his login and password, to check the status of every request.”

  Anisimov pointed out another telling statistic – in Moscow and St. Petersburg, about 70 percent of the pleas and appeals to Vladimir Putin are filed in writing, while about 30 percent are filed in person. But in the regions, the statistics are reversed – up to 80 percent prefer to file their applications in person.

  While Putin was prime minister, institutionally it was still the Kremlin that got the bulk of citizens’ pleas – and President Dmitry Medvedev established his own set of reception offices almost simultaneously with Putin. In the first half of 2009 alone, the Kremlin administration received some 172,800 requests from around the country,31 while the total number of nationwide requests to Putin through the reception network in over two years hit 500,000 in early 2011, according to figures provided by Anisimov.

  What this illustrates isn’t the relative popularity of Putin and Medvedev (and Putin has consistently led Medvedev in approval ratings throughout the latter’s presidential term), but the symbolic power of appealing to the supreme, federal government – and the resilience of this habit on a societal level.

  Though Medvedev had struggled to adopt a more legalistic approach, his use of online social networks like Livejournal and Twitter incited a bombardment of similar direct appeals – this time, not from rural residents, but from people who had their own blogs.

  Shortly after Medvedev launched a blog on Livejournal in April 2009, another blogger asked him to help rebuild a dilapidated children’s hospital in the Ryazan region. Two days after the April 23 post, an official-sounding statement proclaimed that Medvedev had told Ryazan Governor Oleg Kovalev to look into the matter.32

  In an even more widely-publicized incident in January 2011, the father of Yarslav Kolosov, a one-year-old suffering from cystic fibrosis, posted an open letter to Medvedev on Livejournal on behalf of his wife, who complained that medical personnel at the Moscow hospital where her son was being treated were consistently rude and insensitive to her needs.33 Medvedev reacted to the letter with a Twitter post – when asked by another well-known blogger if the government could do anything, Medvedev tweeted “It can.” He then had children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov check the hospital for violations. As a result, through an official (rather than informal) request to Health Minister Tatyana Golikova, the child was sent to Germany for treatment.34

  Medvedev’s marathon press conference in May 2011 brought the point home – even Medvedev, a much softer public speaker than Putin and a leader positioned specifically to target the more self-sufficient, modern, and liberal part of Russia’s population, was not above issuing decrees on public request, for example promising a journalist that he would order the simplification of procedures for annual car inspections. The micromanaging role of the president was so clear in the press conference that it led one Western journalist to note that “little happens in this country unless the ruler in the Kremlin decrees it, just as it has always been.”35 Medvedev the Modernizer was, reluctantly, responding to deep-seated, unspoken traditions regulating interaction between the Russian sovereign and his people. But Putin, by establishing a venue for him to continue this type of intimate interaction after stepping down as president in 2008, was taking this sovereign function with him to the prime minister’s seat.

  Asked how Putin’s reception offices differed from Medvedev’s, Anisimov pointed to Putin’s informal influence.

  “[Medvedev’s] reception offices function within the legal framework, they are limited by the law – article 59, which regulates how long agencies need to take to respond to requests. They have [chains of command], they have officials that work within this framework. But we can go beyond these boundaries using party mechanisms and finance, and, above all, our people. We reach officials from another direction. There is a personal side, other mechanisms are involved.”

  What Anisimov had essentially described was an extralegal process through which the sovereign could help his subjects solve their problems. Vladimir Putin wasn’t acting against the law. He was simply above it.

  5.

  On December 4, 2008, during Vladimir Putin’s first live phone-in as prime minister (he had been holding them yearly as president), the voice of nine-year-old Dasha Varfolomeyeva, a third-grader from Buryatia, was broadcast nationwide.

  “Uncle Volodya! New Year is coming soon. We live on Babushka’s pension, there is no work in our village. My sister and I dream of getting new dresses. I want to ask you for a dress like Cinderella’s.”

  Putin, whose voice Dasha would later say she was so glad to hear, smiled. “Dashenka, I heard you. I want to invite you and your sister – and your grandmother too – to all come to Moscow for one of our New Year’s parties. We’ll sort out the business of the presents.”36

  After a frenzy of back and forth phone calls among frantic regional officials struggling to comply with the orders, Dasha came to Moscow with her family and visited Putin at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.

  The gift was just one of a countless number of gestures Putin made as president and prime minister, having begun in 2001 with the first of these phone-in shows. Once a year, in a live broadcast on all federal television channels, Putin would sit down behind a desk in a Moscow studio before a small audience of selected representatives from around the country, and field apparently random telephone calls from viewers. The requests varied from individual complaints about back wages, late pensions and poor housing to larger infrastructural issues such as dilapidated hospitals, lack of roads and transport in the remote regions, and allegations of corruption.

  Each year, these marathon sessions grew longer and broke new records – and Putin continued the tradition as prime minister, with the show exceeding four hours by 2011. When he returned to the presidency in 2012, the tradition continued as a massive press conference with hundreds of journalists from around the country vying for his attention. While appearing spontaneous, it is widely believed that the shows are actually orchestrated, with many of the callers picked and primed in advance. But with no script and at least a veneer of spontaneity, Putin addressed minute local issues with a competence that no regional official could muster. From memory, he spouted numbers, names and towns, demonstrating a phenomenal knowledge of daily economic details from across his dominion, prompting comparisons with the “all-knowing” Stalin.

  The Russian media covered this communion with his people with more than a hint of irony – Putin, for all purposes, was acting as a benevolent parody of Stalin, whom little girls had once thanked for their “happy childhood.”

  But among the millions of petitions that Russians sent to their Tsars, requests for gas pipes and Christmas presents have intermingled with pleas for mercy.

  In a letter dated 1946, kept in the Moscow archives of the Memorial Human Rights Society, the careful, school-age cursive of an 11-year-old girl asked “Dear Iosif Vissarionovich” to “please find out the truth” and rescue her father from what the child thought to be a miscarriage of justice. “They tortured my father and forced him to sign” a false confession. The girl couldn’t have fathomed, of course, that the leader she was writing to personally signed execution orders for thousands of people like her father. And while her fate is unknown, some of her peers to this day refuse to believe that Stalin signed the orders to execu
te their relatives, even when faced with the documented order itself.

  Putin, of course, is no Stalin – at best a parody of him, at worst an empty threat. And while his propaganda machine was certainly exploiting and cultivating these deep-seated, paternalistic sentiments for its political purposes, it would be unfair to say that it had created them in the first place.

  A great deal of these requests were genuine and sincere – and whatever these people felt about having to appeal directly to Putin to solve their problems – frustration with local incompetence, the anger that no one is accountable to them – for a large number of low-functioning residents like Sergei Kvitko, it was done with a great degree of relief.

  That relief in itself is a beneficial result, perhaps the only one – a year later, the authorities had still not provided Kvitko with gas.

  A case worker at the branch where Kvitko applied, speaking on conditions of anonymity, first confused his record with another Sergei Kvitko – a man she described as “mentally unstable” who had applied dozens of times to sort out his criminal record. “We get a lot of people like that,” she said.

  As for Sergei Kvitko of Shakhty 22, she finally located his application, but said it was difficult to make a decision. “We’d have to investigate what is actually going on,” she said. From the way Kvitko described it, nothing made sense; he seemed to have failed to sort out and identify the problem himself, she said – and so, as it usually is over such vast terrains, no one was actually to blame.37

  Chapter 3

  Playing God

  A fire consumed their homes;

  I built them new dwellings; then forsooth

  They blamed me for the fire!

  - Alexander Pushkin, “Boris Godunov”38