The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  “I felt this excitement, this fear,” Petrov recalled. “It concerned me personally, I couldn’t have imagined this in a nightmare. The meeting inside – there was no information about it getting out to the people, they were standing there for an hour. Once in a while someone would come out and say something, but it wasn’t very informative. So some of the stronger men started pushing their way in, and they burst through.”

  Petrov, like other residents, believed this spontaneous collective action to be organized by Svetlana Antropova. But judging by the random way people congregated, there was very little “organization” to this event or to the march of June 2, when about 400 people went to block the highway between Vologda and St. Petersburg.

  On May 20, footage51 showed residents randomly gathering in front of the administration building, huddled around in groups talking quietly to one another.

  Then slowly, almost lazily, the crowd started trickling up to the administration entrance. Mostly women, they filed up slowly and looked on as two men started trying to open the doors. “Break them, break them,” a woman said. Another joined her. “They broke our [factory.]” And another middle-aged woman added, shaking her head in dismay, “This isn’t life.”

  When the doors opened, they piled in slowly and crowded through the narrow corridor. By the time they reached the police guard in front of the meeting room, they had worked themselves into a state of frustrated desperation. “You have everything, we have nothing!” the women yelled as they haggled with him to let them in. They didn’t see the guard as one of their own at that moment, although to all intents and purposes he was – but they could not tell the difference. Their unformulated demands targeted the people they perceived as more powerful than themselves, and not necessarily the people who could actually help them solve the conflict.

  They started chanting “Water!”, “Work!”, and “Salary!”, behind the closed doors as the tension mounted. Finally the crowd, joined by several men hammering loudly on the doors, broke through and spilled into the meeting room, crying “What is this?” and “Our children are cold and hungry. What have you done?” A security guard was knocked over, and he rushed to pick up his papers from the floor.

  “There wasn’t so much fear as panic,” Andrei Petrov, who was in the crowd, said of the officials in the room. “It was an effect of unexpectedness. There, inside, in the crowd there were emotions. They weren’t necessary, but they were there. It was a crowd, after all, it was powerful, and they started trying to use it.”

  Two years on, Veber tried to downplay what happened in that room. “They didn’t burst in,” he told us in an interview. “They stood outside listening, because they had some questions to ask. The door couldn’t hold them. But you can’t say they burst in. They came in.”

  Did he feel the blame was directed at him?

  “At that moment, everyone could be blamed,” he said. “Especially since from the point of view of the worker, any representative of power, any boss, first and foremost has to decide and help.”

  Video footage showed that Veber was in no position to answer their questions – nor was the crowd prepared to hear out his “lies.”

  “You’re not letting us [talk],” he told the crowd. “Unless you leave the room you won’t let us decide anything. No one is going to turn on the water right now, and no one is going to pay you your salaries right now.”

  They tried to figure out who was to blame, but to a room full of women in raincoats, any man wearing a suit or a uniform was the enemy.

  “You think I am personally to blame for your salaries not being paid?” Anatoly Maslikov, the factory director general, stood up and said.

  “Yes!” the women cried in unison.

  The prosecutor, Fyodor Veretinsky, tried to reason with the crowd, telling them he was on their side. “We’re the ones who can defend your rights. If we deem the wage arrears greater than two months, we will consider… launching a criminal case against company directors.”

  The people listened quietly, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the prosecutor had no real leverage.

  “You understand that the [technical issues] are not within the competency of the municipal authorities.”

  It was building inexorably towards a solution that was on everyone’s mind. Finally, a woman interrupted the prosecutor.

  “Why not go straight to Medvedev and Putin?”

  “Excuse me, please name yourself,” the prosecutor said. But the woman, who could not be seen behind the crowd, remained silent.

  On June 2, Petrov, Matuzova, and about 400 others blocked a highway to St. Petersburg – the same road that Vladimir Putin was expected to travel along on his way to Finland, for an official trip.

  “It was the people’s despair. They didn’t understand what was happening to them and why,” Petrov recalled two years later. “We couldn’t understand – why had everything been working for so long, and why did everything suddenly stop working? For so long the country has needed aluminium – what’s changed? Aren’t airplanes flying anymore? And I think that’s what people wanted to know.”

  Just as before, Veber, Prosecutor Veretinsky, and representatives of the regional administration came out to talk to the people. But no one was listening to a word of what they said. All was “lies.”

  “These four hundred people broke up into groups,” Petrov said. “In one group was Veber, in another was Maslikov. And people surrounded them. They weren’t so much asking questions as making demands. ‘Give us our salaries back and our jobs.’ And the officials were trying to make promises, but the people … were in such a state of emotional excitement that they didn’t hear the answers anymore.”

  Their one unformulated demand was an appeal to supreme state power – i.e. that Putin should learn about what was happening on the ground and intervene.

  “Our actions were aimed at our government, so that they would finally hear us and see how we live,” Yelena Matuzova recalled.

  When Petrov was approached by a journalist during the march, he blurted out the only course of action that seemed likely to help.

  “Pass it on to Putin and Medvedev, what is happening here,” he said.

  5.

  Reports that Putin would change his itinerary to come to Pikalevo began appearing as early as the evening of June 2. The visit itself wasn’t officially announced; instead, scared plant officials were told to prepare, leaking cryptic statements to the press about a pending meeting.

  At approximately 8 a.m. on June 4, hundreds began gathering in the rain on the wide, green lawn by the town’s swimming pool, expecting the prime minister to arrive there by helicopter. A helicopter did indeed land at around noon, but Putin was not on it. He would arrive later by train.

  Hundreds more surrounded the factory, where Putin finally toured the plant and met with management and owners. They stood in the rain and waited for him for about eight hours, insisting on speaking to him personally and hearing his message before it was distorted and misinterpreted by his underlings.

  “First they told us he would not come out [to the people],” Yelena Matuzova recalled. “But when we learned that the meeting was over, we started shouting to him, ‘Putin! Putin!’ And he came out, very quickly, just for five minutes.” Matuzova asked only if the plants would start running. And he told her and the small circle of people that had surrounded him that they would.

  “We wanted to hear it from him, really, we wanted to learn more,” she said when asked why they needed to speak directly to Putin.

  Andrei Petrov, who stood in the circle, also wanted to talk to Putin but didn’t get the chance. “I wanted to say something about the regional management. About [Governor] Serdyukov.”

  As the people waited for Putin to emerge from the meeting, they got text messages from their banks informing them that their salaries had been deposited. By the end of that day – and for some people, by the end of the visit – thousands of dollars in back wages had been paid in full.

&
nbsp; When they went home that evening to their television sets, they were rewarded further. For if the meeting itself yielded thousands of dollars in back wages (Petrov said he bought a car with that single payment), the experience of watching their errant master, Oleg Deripaska, being publicly berated by the only person in Russia who had that right, was priceless.

  6.

  It was Putin’s most brilliant performance as the angry Tsar, a performance that overshadowed President Dmitry Medvedev’s keynote speech at the St. Petersburg Economic forum, where Western investors gathered later in bars to discuss the latest thrashing of an errant oligarch.

  The broadcast that night was the circus that came after the bread. Touring the plant, Putin asked plant managers why they had “turned it into such a dump.”

  At the meeting, he turned up in jeans and a beige jacket that he didn’t bother to take off. He slouched in his chair, and he had only one hand on the table. He perfected a look of boredom and annoyance more terrifying than any flash of anger.

  “I didn’t have to come here. We could all have met in Moscow. But I still decided to come here – not because I wanted to look at the empty factory, but because I wanted the authors of all this to look at this –” he paused and scowled. “Everything. That happened. Here. For them to come and look at it themselves.” The dull thud of the fingertips of his right hand on the table next to his microphone punctuated each word.

  “You’ve made thousands of people hostage to your unprofessionalism and your greed. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

  And there it was – the popular legend of a benevolent, unknowing Tsar, and his vassals, the boyars, who lead him astray:

  “No one can convince me that regional authorities did all they could to help the people. They didn’t want me to come here. They tried to convince me to see another new plant. I’m sure it was a great plant. But why did everyone scatter like cockroaches just before my visit? Why weren’t there people here who could make decisions?”

  Deripaska was shown close up, bowing his head and covering his eyes with his fists – the lowest any oligarch had fallen since Mikhail Khodorkovsky was shown in a courtroom cage. Then followed the most humiliating moment: Putin produced a contract enabling all three plants to restart production.

  “Oleg Vladimirovich, did you sign this? I don’t see your signature,” Putin said quietly and motioned with his fingers for Deripaska to stand up. “Come here and sign it.” Putin placed the contract at the edge of his table, took his pen – the one he had in his right hand throughout the meeting – and threw it on the contract just as Oleg Deripaska came up to the table.

  “That contract right there,” Putin motioned.

  Standing up, clearly a head taller than the seated Putin, Deripaska bent and bowed over the contract as he signed its pages. He looked up questioningly at Putin (there was a reason for that) when he was finished and quietly walked away.

  As he turned, Putin delivered a final coup de grâce: “Give me my pen back.” He said that phrase so quietly, so deprecatingly, that there is still no absolute certainty about the exact words he used.

  Whatever consolation the bread and circuses provided, it was temporary for a very simple reason: most people fully understood not only that Putin’s performance was just that, a mere performance, but that very little of what he said at the meeting was true.

  To start with, the very contract that Deripaska was forced to sign was widely believed to be fake – sources at BaselCement Pikalevo repeatedly pointed out that a contract on raw materials could only legally be signed by the general directors of the actual factories – not by the chief of the Basic Element empire.

  It did not go unnoticed, too, that Deripaska had just benefited from a $4.5 billion bailout from the government, after lobbying Putin personally for the first of many such bailouts throughout the crisis.

  But the very fact that Putin noticed his people’s plight and castigated an oligarch for neglecting his ancient duties as baron was met with immense gratitude.

  “We would fall at his feet,” a woman said two years later in Pikalevo – even as she brushed off Putin’s appearance with Deripaska as an orchestrated spectacle. Obviously Putin was on the side of the barons, but at least he made it known that mere subjects deserved care and better treatment.

  An opinion poll released in late June 2009 found that an overwhelming 69 percent of respondents felt that Putin did the right thing by resolving the problems at Pikalevo. But when asked who was at fault over the situation itself, just 12 percent blamed the federal government, with 34 percent placing responsibility on plant owners, and 31 percent blaming local government.52

  But in the daily reality of life in Pikalevo, the actual feelings towards Putin and the government were far more ambivalent – the people still saw Putin as doing far less than he could have.

  “Putin could nationalize us if only he wanted to,” Svetlana Antropova, the union leader, told us. She had sat in the first row, right next to general director Anatoly Maslikov, and reported to Putin about the wage arrears during the June 4 meeting. “But they’re trying to keep everyone happy. Every time I see Putin on TV, there’s Deripaska. But he could stamp his foot and say, ‘Oleg, you’re going to sell today…. I allow you to do this and that, under the following concessions.’”

  On the one hand, the knee-jerk gratitude appeared to be genuine. “The people associated Putin with these salaries, that it was all thanks to him,” Antropova recalled. “Especially the women. I had one come in and tell me, ‘Sveta, I love Putin so much.’ And I told her, ‘You go on loving him, dear. I don’t love anybody.’ Because first they had to let it get so out of hand. For things to heat up. For people to block the roads. And only then come down and sort things out.”

  On the other hand, almost everyone we spoke to admitted that there was something deeply wrong with calling in Putin as a way to solve their problems. At the same time, no one could pinpoint what, exactly, could have been done without Putin’s personal intervention in what were, essentially, the workings of three private enterprises.

  Andrei Petrov described a mix of hope and regret in the way people interpreted Putin’s intervention.

  “It was unusual. It was probably… [he paused] what [the people] had been waiting for, though they hadn’t said it themselves, and didn’t understand. But they were happy that it happened. Though they understood that this was wrong, that it’s not the way [to solve problems]. But they were glad.

  “At that moment, the people were trying to change things in any way possible. Whether they understood that this was wrong – I think a lot of them didn’t – they were [overwhelmed by emotion]. I understood this only subconsciously. Only after so much time has passed did I begin to understand that this was wrong.”

  And if Putin’s intervention gave them their salaries and jump-started the factories, it solved none of Pikalevo’s underlying problems.

  “They heard us, but not quite. We got our salaries, yes, but they haven’t gone up. Not much has changed really,” Yelena Matuzova said.

  “We had this hope that he would come here and change something. We hoped that they would fire Serdyukov. [Putin] promised long term agreements within a year. But there are no agreements.”

  By December 2011, Yelena Matuzova had turned against Putin. She had trusted him, but he had betrayed that trust, and nothing had changed at her factory.

  Indeed, the lack of interest in any potential legislation that could help empower the workers was striking. In the wake of Putin’s visit, the State Duma held the first reading of a law on nationalization that would allow the government to take over control of failed enterprises like those of Pikalevo, but this was clearly a publicity stunt and the law was never passed. Meanwhile, when locals were asked about nationalization, they nodded with lukewarm approval at best. The intricacies of management didn’t seem to concern them, for their domain was their work and their salaries – the rest, they seemed to be saying, was none of their business.

>   Andrei Petrov was just one of several locals who noticed this passivity in conversation with us. He described seeing workers unwilling to talk to one another about the events they were taking part in; at the plant, they hardly communicated their plans – not because they were afraid or because their communication took on a conspiratorial air, but because there was little constructive communication to speak of.

  “The people that took part in the events – on the road, at the mayor’s office – they are very passive. When they’re sitting in their own kitchens, they care about what happens. But when it comes to action, they don’t do anything.”

  Were they afraid to lose the little they had? Were they afraid of a reaction from the authorities? Andrei shook his head.

  “No. It’s just a passive reaction of the Russian man. Especially in a small town. He’s interested in very little. He’s not interested in public life. This participation used to be forced, there were demonstrations and subbotniks [Saturdays of obligatory volunteer work]. But there’s none of that left. On the clock, within the gates of the factory – and then home – that’s his world.”

  The origins of that kind of behaviour go back to the archetypical Soviet enterprise, but their autocratic nature was clearly embedded over centuries – a survival mechanism that often favoured a dysfunctional status quo over a potentially “free” future where there was no work at all, and thus no hope of sustenance from an inhospitable land.

  The writer Alexei Ivanov describes a telling incident involving iron ore factories in the Urals during the 18th century. When, in 1773, the Pugachev Rebellion promised land to factory workers and peasants – all under the yoke of serfdom – the factory workers refused, and turned violently on the peasants. In this miniature civil war, “All were unfree. But they each wanted their own captivity. The workers didn’t want lands, for they had forgotten how to till them…. The workers chose their factories over freedom.”53