The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  That too had a 16th century precedent: soon after Ivan the Terrible separated Muscovy into the lands of the sovereign (the oprichnina) and the lands of the Aristocracy (the zemschina), Ivan “abdicated” again in 1575 and appointed a Tartar prince, Simeon Bekbulatovich, to rule in his stead. For eleven months, Ivan the Terrible kept up the appearances of a loyal subject of Simeon even as he clearly continued to wield power. The causes of this masquerade remain a mystery to this day, but historians suggest that a vicious power struggle – between hardliners who wanted a return to the oprichnina and more progressive boyars in the Godunov family – pushed the increasingly paranoid Ivan to temporarily distance himself from the throne.213

  Putin’s anointment of Medvedev in 2007 was motivated only in part by a desire to install a reliable placeholder for the presidency, which Putin could not assume for a third consecutive term without changing the Constitution. The idea of a placeholder was too risky if Putin was bent only on returning to the Kremlin – it would have been much easier to hold a referendum in 2007, changing the Constitution. That suggests that the entire Medvedev project may have been partially a response to a similar, under-the-carpet struggle – albeit one that did not involve bloodshed. With Medvedev, Putin was placating the budding business and middle class, giving them a leader he thought they could identify with, and delegating the task of upholding the legal-rational state to a lawyer that he could trust.

  Putin was also separating out his own oprichnina – establishing a realm of nominal rule of law (Medvedev) while maintaining traditional forms of rule through personalized power, shock and awe (Putin).

  By doing this, he was confusing the constituents of both realms – the cosmopolitan, educated members of the elite, the people who lived and functioned without relying on the state, remained sceptical. And the rest – particularly those millions whose government posts represented their very livelihood – were growing tired of constantly having to figure out who the boss was, and what game he was playing.

  On September 24, when Putin took the stage for a second time, his party eagerly took up his speech for their campaign programme without as much as a discussion, joking that it would save time on having to devise their own. Their leader had delivered his most supreme instructions and order had returned to their lives.

  Speaking to journalists after the announcement, the United Russia functionaries didn’t show a hint of self-consciousness concerning what they said about their leader: it occurred to no one but the journalists just how Soviet their words sounded, how reminiscent of the Communist Party.

  But this wasn’t mere obeisance to their leader, it really did sound like genuine relief over the key decision in their careers and their jobs having been made for them.

  “Vladimir Vladimirovich’s programme gives us an opportunity to go calmly into the regions, it gives us a plan, a strategy to solve people’s problems,” Andrei Vorobyev, head of United Russia’s executive committee who would go on to become governor of the Moscow region, told journalists.

  When I asked him separately about the decision, he made it clear that party functionaries – the ones who by law were supposed to nominate leaders and candidates for president – had little to do with it. Like a thunderstorm after a drought, it had come from above.

  “That was the decision that was made,” he said with a smile. “That’s life. The demand was there, this was the news [we] wanted.”214

  Delegate Alexander Nikitin, chairman of the Tambov regional parliament, didn’t even try to mask his outright flattery. “Vladimir Putin is our leader. He is our guide. We orient ourselves around him. So what happened today is absolutely logical and obvious. We are happy to be his contemporaries.”

  I asked him if the party would have accepted the decision if it had been the other way around – with Putin as prime minister and Medvedev running for a second term. But the question seemed to stump him. “The decibels of applause were equally directed at the prime minister and the president. The party would support…” he paused, and corrected himself – “has supported the decision that was made.”215

  Just the previous day, I had probed one of the more astute United Russia members to share what her colleagues were talking about. Fresh from a meeting with Putin, she was beaming – she couldn’t find the words for a moment, but then it all came out: in spite of herself, she was “amazed” by the extent of his knowledge, the “precision” of his reaction. This experienced, insightful political expert, who had criticized Putin in the past, was in awe of what she had found at the pinnacle of power – and it was hard to imagine that the awe did not colour her perceptiveness.

  “People in the party have a firm position on this. That Putin is the leader. He is ours. With Medvedev it’s different. We respect this person, but he’s not the leader,” she explained, asking not to be quoted by name. “It’s not that a decision [where Putin doesn’t run for president] is unacceptable. It’s just something they wouldn’t understand. Everyone is waiting for Putin. They want him.”

  Just a few months earlier, at the height of the collective neurosis that the prolonged indecision had thrown the body politic into, one Konstantin Zatulin couldn’t take it anymore and openly spoke out in favour of Putin against Medvedev – only to lose a key post on the State Duma CIS committee.

  It would be a betrayal, he said, if Putin did not run for president.

  “I didn’t call Putin and his friends to consult about what I was going to say about him. Whether Putin now supports me or not, or in what form, whether he gives me a village out of generosity – that’s not what I’m thinking about right now,” he explained to me then. “I don’t want to live in a country where the vice president of the United States dictates who should and should not run for president,” he said of Joseph Biden’s recent praise of Medvedev that barely went short of endorsing him for a second presidential term.216

  These Duma deputies were easy to understand. Their careers had just been secured. And they did not see themselves as independent legislators and lawmakers, but as servants of the state charged with the impossible task of translating the most supreme instructions of the living law into a semblance of rules that could work on a local level.

  But if Putin did not betray them, he had betrayed his other constituents.

  2.

  On November 20, Putin, as was his wont, decided to visit a martial arts match. After a close victory by Russia’s Fedor Yemelyanenko, Putin, whether from his sincere love of sports or as an ill-timed PR tactic, went up on stage to congratulate the winner.

  There were cheers as he appeared onstage, but then amateur videos that showed up the next day on YouTube demonstrated something very strange: as Putin started speaking, the sound was punctured by boos and whistles. It wasn’t clear what, specifically, caused the jeers – whether it was Putin himself or something else about the match entirely. By the end of his speech people were cheering again, and the incident should have been forgotten.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  The kind of jeering that most elected politicians easily brush off after sports events and even public gatherings was far more significant for an autocrat whose power rested on a mystique of fear and transcendence. Even as Putin’s spokesman fumbled with unconvincing explanations that the jeers weren’t directed at Putin, his denials only fed into the damage. One of Putin’s most virulent opponents, the rising star of Russia’s opposition, anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, called the incident “the end of an era,” sparking a collective neurosis that in itself was more significant than the jeering itself.

  The jeers struck a chord with a part of society that first felt betrayed by the manipulation of the Mikhail Prokhorov scandal – when the Kremlin dangled a candidate in front of these constituents and then petulantly snatched him away – and then was humiliated by a smug Vladimir Putin telling his subjects that he and Medvedev had decided “years ago” who would rule them.

  And so, when the Duma elections were predictably rigged on December
4, the routine violation, which had been largely ignored in the past, drew tens of thousands of these educated cosmopolitans onto the streets – enraged by the injustice of a leader who lived by “understandings” while forcing them to live according to the law. Their protest against the rigging was only a pretext, for in essence their rallies were personal: they were tired of a Tsar who pretended to be a mere politician when it suited him; the Tsar who had irrevocably violated his own transcendence in their eyes; they no longer feared him, and he must be deposed.

  “We are standing at a moment of critical change,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a well-connected former Kremlin strategist said after a glass of whisky just days before the second mass protest rally of December 24 – where tens of thousands of fledgling citizens turned up to inform Putin that he was a used condom. “The idea of the government as an overwhelming, didactic force is over.”

  With one foot in a tradition that did not allow for state power to admit mistakes (for a god did not make mistakes) and another in a fragile new world where a besieged politician struggled to improve his ratings, Vladimir Putin manoeuvred back and forth, moving to embrace the dissenters and then turning back to scowl at them.

  One of the first things he said during his last phone-in show on December 15, 2011, just five days after an unprecedented protest rally of tens of thousands of people urged him to leave power, was how pleased he was to see them.

  “I really did see young people on television, mostly young, active people who have a position, who are formulating it. This makes me glad,” he said. “And if it’s a result of the ‘Putin regime,’ then that’s a good thing.”

  But then he did an about-face, saying many demonstrators had been paid to show up and singling out opposition leaders, blaming them for trying to import Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to Russia. And then he was pressured into making his most damning comment, for the moderator asked him specifically if he saw any symbolism in the white ribbons worn by demonstrators.

  “To be frank, when I saw something on people’s chests, I’ll be honest – this is inappropriate – but I still thought that this was a promotion of the fight against HIV, that, if you’ll pardon me, they had pinned contraceptives.”

  The comment may have been intended for others – for those still loyal to Putin, who needed the aura of fear to function and to trust power, and who needed a signal that Putin wasn’t about to take a bunch of pampered Moscow hipsters seriously. And there was still that ancient Russian scapegoat, the foreign agent:

  “Of course, there are those who have a Russian passport, but act in the interests of foreign states. We’ll try to establish contact with them, but sometimes that’s impossible.” For those who did not heed reason, Putin threatened force – but with a half-baked, postmodern subtext: in part imitating the Jungle Book’s dreaded Indian python, Kaa, and in part imitating a caricature of himself, he raised up his palms, looked sternly at the audience, as if pretending to hypnotize them, and said, “Come hither, Bandar-logs!”217 referring to them as the scatter-brained monkeys in Kipling’s Jungle Book.

  Through the oprichnina he created, the realm of “understandings”, and the nominal realm of the “rule of law” which he had appointed Medvedev to lead, he was destroying his own mystique. By anointing Medvedev as his successor to conform, in letter, to the Constitution, only to return for a third term in 2012, he had tried to justify the autocracy, the unaccountability of the sovereign, with the one idea it could never be justified by – the idea of democratic institutions.

  Putin tried to appeal to this new middle class he had created, but his calls that they use the courts, the laws, and the institutions to get their demands met were not having their effect. They didn’t just want a new election, they wanted Putin gone, personally and viscerally.

  PART IV

  THE SOVEREIGN AS GOD

  Chapter 13

  The Cult

  “Imagine that the government is the husband, that state power is the husband, and that all of us – society – is the wife. In 2000, our society married Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Society voted for him and said: Vladimir Vladimirovich, be our husband, care for us, protect us, and give us work.”

  - Vasily Yakemenko, head of the Russian State Agency for Youth. In a seminar with the pro-Kremlin youth group, Nashi, December 2011

  The Russian people does not want to be a masculine builder, its nature defines itself as feminine, passive and submissive in matters of state, it always awaits a bridegroom, a man, a ruler.

  - Nicolas Berdiaev, religious philosopher. 1915

  “The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain…. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

  - George Orwell, 1984. 1949

  1.

  IN THE SUMMER of 2011, Katya Obraztsova, a student from the Novgorod region, decided to put her creativity to good use. She painted her face, got on all fours at one point, and sang passionately, desperately even, about wanting to be Vladimir Putin’s dog.

  “I want to be your Connie, on the desk and on the balcony.”

  The video confused the blogosphere when it started making the YouTube rounds that summer. For the past decade, girls had been singing about their crushes on the president, displaying a personality cult that had turned overtly sexual. But this video, set to the music of a Subways song, seemed to have crossed the line: no one was quite sure whether it was just one of a multitude of Putin fan clubs getting creative, or an indirect attempt to smear the prime minister and future president.

  I had the same doubts when I tracked down Katya. She turned out to be a former member of the Stal (Steel) youth group, a militant off-shoot of Nashi, a Kremlin-funded youth organization. She left the group and started her own fan club called Girls For Putin, she explained when she met me with her colleague, Maria Aleshina.

  No one seemed to have told them to start the fan club or sing about Putin, but there was a high likelihood that their spontaneous efforts were rewarded. According to Katya and Maria, a bunch of girls got together and started brainstorming a video that would both support Putin and be provocative enough “hopefully” to catch his attention. While they insisted it was their own idea, they said they had sent the final product of their collaboration to Vasily Yakemenko, the head of the State Agency for Youth and the informal leader of Nashi. When he did not reply, they took it as his tacit approval.

  “We don’t deny that we’re attracted to Putin,” Katya said. “We don’t deny that we’re doing this to express our fantasies,” Maria added.

  But what they wound up expressing went beyond a mere crush on a powerful person. In the video, which featured several girls, there were alternate scenes of one dressed in a school uniform and an office suit. All of that came off, and at one point Katya, in case the lyrics were not suggestive enough, was shown on all fours on a desk, and then stumbling down a highway with a portrait of the prime minister and a bottle of whisky. If this was a fantasy about Vladimir Putin, then it gave off a tinge of willing self-debasement and death.

  If Katya struggled to articulate the parallels she had unconsciously expressed in our conversation, history had already done it for her.

  The punk group Barto, which had earned a name for its provocative, witheringly critical songs, had already taken that fantasy to its bloody conclusion with its 2011 song, “KGB”:

  “Fucking fed up with living from salary to salary.

  I’m surrounded by assholes, and they’re not even rich.

  It’s time to change something in my life.

  I want to lie down under a colonel of the KGB.

  Being behind him is like being behind the Wall of China.

  Order. Abundance. Eternal peace.”

  The video was set to graphic scenes from the 1992 film Chekist, about a Bolshevik secret police officer in the early days of the Revolution, who, after watching thousands of counter-revolutionaries shot in cellars on his orders, goes insane and himself pleads to be shot. As social commentary, Barto’s video w
ent beyond what girls like Katya thought they wanted Putin, a colonel of the KGB, to do to them. You can talk all you want of order, abundance and peace, the song seemed to be saying, but what you really want is death.

  And that was only natural.

  In 2000, when Alisa Kharcheva was a seven-year-old girl, she had momentarily confused the name of her new president with the word pautina, or spider web – the abode of the pauk, a creature that she feared. She denied that the president’s name had inadvertently imprinted an image of fear in her mind, but this random association somehow remained one of her most vivid memories of Vladimir Putin.

  In September 2010, as a first year journalism student at Moscow State University, Alisa Kharcheva posed in white lingerie for an erotic calendar to be presented for Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Vladimir Putin was pleased with the gift.218

  The calendar, which appeared on bookshelves just a few days before Putin’s birthday on October 7, 2010, featured twelve female journalism students wearing semi-provocative lingerie, with a dubious message to “Vladimir Vladimirovich” next to each one. The caption for February read “How about a third time?” while the March girl complained, “You put out the forest fires, but I am still aflame!” Another expressed a wish to “personally” congratulate Vladimir Vladimirovich on his birthday, and offered a mobile number (which turned out not to work). Alisa’s was possibly the most innocent of the twelve: “You are the best!” her caption read. The calendar quickly became a bestseller, with over 100,000 copies distributed.

  But for the educated, urban and often oppositionist milieu that the journalism faculty belonged to, servility to a government headed by a former KGB officer was unacceptable; that this servility acquired an outright erotic dimension was enough for ostracism. Alisa got dirty looks from the university faculty; there was talk of penalizing the twelve girls who took part in the project. As if to cleanse the tarnished reputation of the student body, an oppositionist group released their own calendar, featuring girls (fully clothed) with their mouths taped to suggest that their freedom of speech was suppressed, asking Putin candid questions like “Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?”