The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  Alisa never really understood what was wrong with expressing her support for the prime minister with an erotic calendar. For her, posing in lingerie was a perfectly natural way to demonstrate her love to a national leader who had been around almost as long as she could remember.

  “I don’t understand people who think it is wrong to love Putin,” she confided in October 2011, just a week after Putin announced his decision to return to the presidency. “I don’t understand anything about politics. I’m studying to be a journalist and hopefully someday I will understand what it is about. I like him as an image and as a personality. We have the same type of dog. He’s just… charismatic. When I watched him on television, I always liked him as a man, his outward appearance… not a man as a sexual object, no, but just his appearance, as pleasing to the eye. So why not?”

  Kharcheva was no mindless cog used in a Kremlin campaign to buff up the image of Russia’s national leader. But nor was she self-aware enough to understand what, exactly, she was doing – and she certainly wasn’t channelling a crush on the prime minister to make a political statement.

  In other words, the twelve girls posing on the calendar were recruited and used – but not for a centralized campaign originating from the Kremlin.

  The way Alisa Kharcheva described it, she was drawn into the project by a mutual friend of the publisher, a journalism graduate named Vladimir Tabak who had set up his own publishing business called “Faculty.”

  “The friend asked me, how do I feel about Vladimir Putin? I said, ‘quite positively, why?’ And he asked if I’d like to pose for a calendar to support him and to wish him a happy birthday. I said, ‘of course I would.’”

  Alisa’s “of course” reveals two telling facts. On the one hand, a young, beautiful student found the opportunity to don stylish lingerie in a professional photo shoot as a fun and perfectly natural way to support a politician. At the same time, she was admittedly entirely apolitical.

  For Alisa, Putin was not a politician but a leader that she regarded on a more personal level. “I think a lot of people my age feel the same way and don’t get into the details,” she said. She “loved” Putin, in other words, but she could not quite articulate what exactly she loved him for.

  Aside from his image being “pleasing to the eye,” Putin as a leader was also an inevitability. “It’s not that he specifically has given me something, but if we are well off, then he must be running the country well. Among my friends, family and acquaintances, I have not heard anyone speak badly of him.”

  It is quite plausible that aside from a permanent, inevitable and unquestioningly benevolent presence, Putin had not appeared much in Alisa Kharcheva’s thoughts at all – apart from being pleasing to the eye. But when she was recruited to pose in the calendar, the experience didn’t seem to ascribe to her a political position – because there was nothing political to articulate. What, then, of the “friend of a friend” who came up with the idea of selling a calendar with lingerie-clad girls dedicated to the prime minister, and presenting it for his birthday? Was it his own initiative, or was he playing into a top-down personality cult crafted in the offices of the Kremlin and touched up to assume just enough trappings of postmodernism to distance the rebranded Russian national leader from his Soviet past?

  2.

  The first evidence of Putin’s personality cult began to appear as early as 2001, a year after he was elected president. They were unusual trappings, and it was an unusual personality cult. People started hanging his portrait in their offices without anyone telling them to do so. Pictures, statuettes, and other paraphernalia were being sold in subway underpasses, not because it was obligatory, but because there was a market for it. By the end of the year, a limited edition pin-up calendar entitled “The Twelve Moods of Putin” became so sought-after that one of the two artists, Dmitry Vrubel, was getting phone calls from people begging him for a copy.219

  It looked more like a pop fad than a cult, but it was a power cult nevertheless – for its focus was a human being who held a monopoly on the use of force. What was unusual about it was that it centred on a leader who didn’t really demonstrate the kind of charisma or authoritarian traits one would normally see in a power cult – unless it was the habitual cult that upheld a monarch ruling by divine right. Most importantly, this personality cult differed from those around Soviet leaders Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev in two ways: it occurred in a media culture that, however limited, still vigorously criticized the leader, and, while displays of affection were certainly encouraged from above, most of them came from below.

  In fact, the most notorious artefact of the Putin cult was initially meant as a joke, until it hit the radio airwaves in 2002:

  “A man like Putin, full of strength A man like Putin, who won’t drink A man like Putin, who wouldn’t hurt me A man like Putin, who won’t run away! I saw him on the news last night He was telling us that the world has come to a crossroads Someone like that is easy to be with And now I want a man like Putin.”

  These words were no heartfelt address at a party congress. Instead, set to a trance music dance rhythm, they constituted a hit single by the girl-group Singing Together – whose name was a nod to the Kremlin youth group, Walking Together (later to be renamed Nashi). Singing Together was a project by poet and songwriter Alexander Yelin, and the project was clearly a joke – recorded for just £250, it hit Top 10 radio within four months.

  As Yelin explained to me years later, he intended the song as a mockery of the cult behaviour he was seeing around him, but when it was picked up by the radio, the song began fuelling the cult itself, almost becoming its anthem.

  Aside from the semi-official pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi – which engaged in flashmobs, demonstrations, book burnings and sometimes harassment – there now appeared a number of seemingly spontaneous, unrelated fan clubs for Putin, indirectly connected to Nashi via social networking sites and mutual friends.

  “Putin – he’s one of a kind, he is ideal! In the past there was a Tsar, and now there’s Putin, he’s like God to me. To me he’s like dad,” 17-year-old Vika Matorina, one of the “new fetishists,” gushed in June 2007220 - to eager coverage from the oppositionist press.

  Originating from below, these initiatives blended with the perpetual images of Putin on state-owned television, ostensibly generated from above: his hands-on involvement in the economy, his fishing trips, his horseback riding, his judo, and his theatrics with oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska. (A public stunt in August 2011, when Putin dived into the Black Sea to retrieve an ancient Greek amphora, backfired badly and even forced his spokesman to admit the amphora was planted). If the latter could easily be defined as Kremlin propaganda, then the former resembled a commercial product placement campaign. Those involved in it were not marketing Putin – they were using his brand to market either their products or themselves. But not only were they unwittingly creating a cult, they were also serving as proof of its very existence across a wide enough portion of the collective psyche – if Putin didn’t strike such a chord, he wouldn’t have been such an effective marketing tool.

  Throughout 2009, spontaneous commercial efforts to cash in on Putin’s name had sprung up across several retail sectors: following the notorious Putinka vodka brand which arrived on store shelves in 2003 (and claimed, like all the others, to have nothing to do with Vladimir Putin), entrepreneurs had tried to appropriate the Putin brand for the name of a bar, a club, and even a jar of baked beans (the jar was removed from my desk by thoughtful colleagues a day before Putin’s visit to our office). More surprisingly still, decades after the more fully-fledged personality cults for Soviet leaders were supposed to have inoculated the population against these seeming vestiges of a totalitarian past, the spontaneous, ironic and often unauthorized gimmicks actually paid off, generating, in the case of a canned vegetable brand, an increase in revenue by as much as a quarter.

  The Astrakhan Cannery – which produced the jar of baked beans I had on my office desk in
2009 – is one example of this approach. In 2007, the company started producing canned goods under the PUIN brand. Company management insisted the name was merely an abbreviation. But in the logo, the letters PUIN appeared on a two-headed eagle – Russia’s state symbol – with a sword in the middle, in the manner of a “t”. So the inscription not only clearly read Putin, but the logo itself clearly resembled the sword symbol of the FSB. The company management denied the obvious Putin reference for a reason – by insisting on the meaningless PUIN abbreviation and altering the state symbol, they were getting around a law that forbade the use of such symbols for commercial purposes. One journalist described the effect: “So you buy a bottle of Putinka vodka and a jar of PUIN eggplants, sit in your kitchen, drink a shot – and suddenly your head is filled with transcendent thoughts, and you feel important all of a sudden, as if involved in state affairs.”221

  Possibly the most bizarre evidence that the cult was spontaneous was an erotic party held by the Moscow nightclub Rai, labelled “I want the prime minister.” Despite warnings from the government that using Putin’s name for advertising purposes was illegal and they would potentially be prosecuted, the party went ahead – with the nightclub’s PR director, Artyom Shatrov, insisting that Putin’s name was not being used for advertising purposes.

  While drawing on all the traditional attributes of the power cult, the phenomenon that developed around Putin had all the trappings of a commercial brand.

  “I look at Putin on television and he doesn’t evoke any emotions in me,” Oleg Sivun wrote in his 2007 pop-art novel, Brands, where Putin was named alongside Coca-Cola and Google. “He can be filled with any meaning. I try to see him as the collective unconscious, but that is too difficult and not very beautiful…. I try to see him as a shining dot, and it works. A shining dot – that is what Putin is. Putin is only that which we ourselves have imagined him to be. Putin is a product of our imagination.”222

  It was in that context of history repeating as farce, and a power cult returning as a brand, that Alisa Kharcheva found herself stripping for Putin. The friend of a friend who got her involved in the gig was a fellow student not much older than herself, named Vladimir Tabak.

  By his early 20s, Tabak had graduated from the journalism department and created a successful publishing house called Faculty. Much like Katya Obraztsova, he was indirectly linked to the Nashi youth group – he had friends in the State Agency for Youth and had taken part in its yearly youth forum on Lake Seliger in the summer of 2010. There were even reported ties between his father and Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov – but Tabak would deny this.223

  For him, the calendar was clean, safe fun – he didn’t even see it as political.

  “I think a personality cult is when people kiss a leader’s hand or fall on their knees in front of him,” he explained to me. “Projects like these – I don’t consider them a cult of personality.”

  The calendar, for Tabak, was a commercial endeavour that also served as a channel to express his “respect for Putin.”

  But Tabak also admitted, like Kharcheva, that the respect was personal rather than political.

  “I’m sure Putin himself doesn’t like this situation,” where personality reigns in place of politics, he said. “But at this point our political system isn’t developed enough.”

  If Tabak was trying to differentiate between Putin-themed paraphernalia and a personality cult, then he was undoubtedly referring to the one form of leader worship that occurred recently enough for at least one generation to remember it: the personality cult of Joseph Stalin.

  Compare Putin’s “latent” cult to Stalin’s full-fledged one, and we will find one key difference, and one key similarity – the combination of which dramatically illustrates how Russians experience state power personified, and what role the media and the market play in that experience.

  Tabak was wrong about hand-kissing and bowing as inherent traits of a bona fide personality cult, for none of those things were common around Stalin. (They were, however, common for earlier, particularly pre-Romanov, Tsars, who were venerated according to the Byzantine fashion, in the same manner as a human would worship a god: with full prostration, face to the ground – a practice that bewildered and intimidated European ambassadors who were forced to adore Russian monarchs in such a fashion. As for hand-kissing, Putin was not immune to this practice: a 2012 video caught a Macedonian monk kissing the president’s hand; Putin, as was his wont, was seen flustered, trying to remove his hand with disgust.)

  Stalin would be surrounded instead by worshipful speeches at party congresses, their fervour likening their object to a god:

  “Thank you, Stalin. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well. Thou who broughtest man to birth. Thou who fructifies the earth….”224

  The key difference between the cults of Stalin and Putin is the obligatory nature of the former. While there was no controlling institution for the phenomenon that Nikita Khrushchev would go on to label as a “personality cult,” party functionaries and citizens offered this kind of lip service because they had to, and the element of coercion cannot even be compared to the relative freedom enjoyed in post-Soviet Russia, even during the most repressive periods of Putin’s rule.

  The origins of the Stalin cult are believed to lie with his inner circle of Bolsheviks, whose group dynamics wound up spilling out beyond the Kremlin into a nationwide ideology. Stalin, historians note, distanced himself from the adulation, but that was probably only a ploy to make it more genuine.225

  Putin, by contrast, was being marketed in the same way as a pop celebrity is – the way that a Hollywood icon helps its purveyors make money. The existence of entrepreneurs like Tabak and activists like Katya Obraztsova suggests that the Kremlin tentatively encouraged this sort of behaviour even while publicly distancing itself from displays of affection. Both Tabak and Katya Obraztsova and her friends had connections with Nashi. They worked and spent their leisure time in the same circle – with close friends and colleagues in Nashi.

  Tabak’s activities were apparently green-lighted: he told me that he was approached by “certain people” he would not name, clearly close to the Presidential Administration, asking about his plans for the calendar. When he explained, they were satisfied and left him alone.

  Another major aspect of the differences between the Stalin and Putin cults rests with the medium of expression: the power of the internet and social networking to decentralize various fan clubs and “cults” – coupled with the unprecedented criticism and hate these cults and adulation are met with in the blogosphere – make it impossible for the Putin cult to be nearly as coercive as the Stalin cult. The internet, in a way, determined the very nature of the Putin cult through viral marketing and internet trolling – rendering it voluntary, largely spontaneous, and open to derision, as the frequent hate of Putin on the internet can attest.

  But what of the parallels, the common denominator that neither Tabak, nor Katya Obraztsova, nor Alisa Kharcheva would admit to, but that continue to exist?

  The Bolshevik ideologues who played a role in generating adoration for their leader among the masses did not invent the cult – they channelled widespread social habits for their political ends.226

  It would be stating the obvious to say that those social habits did not die. But what is interesting is that they have erupted with such full force despite the relatively hands-off way that the current Kremlin has channelled them. Nor has Stalin’s cult, despite being officially condemned – first by Khrushchev then by post-Soviet leaders – disappeared entirely. In fact, opinion polls have reflected a positive trend in the way that Russians have viewed Stalin in the last several years. By 2012, a majority of respondents identified Stalin as the leading figure in Russia’s history.227

  But there is a more startling parallel that emerges when we return to the content of the actual messages that subjects send when they appeal to Stalin or to Putin.

  “Thank you because I am joy
ful. Thank you because I am well,” said a party functionary in 1935. In 2011, Alisa Kharcheva told me the that “we are well off” because of Putin.

  The leader is good because his subjects are comfortable, not through any political or institutional affinity. And if this sounds obvious, then a far darker, more primordial element is introduced when we consider him “who fructifies the earth” and him whose mere name drives up retail sales for a completely unrelated product sold on a free market.

  If food and profit emerged as one dimension of the power cult, then sex was another.

  Putin’s association with fertility rituals recurred on a regular basis: aside from directly calling on Russians to have more babies, he once asked a female TV anchor how many children she had and indicated she should have more. He repeated the question during a phone-in show in 2013: by that time she had three children. During an appearance at the Lake Seliger youth camp, one girl asked him how many children she would end up having – he said three. It was no wonder that girls like Kharcheva and Obraztsova found themselves expressing support for their leader primarily through a sexual channel.

  The entire roster of Putin’s PR “miracles” – from delivering salaries in Pikalevo, to putting out forest fires from a jet – is suggestive not so much of a populist politician, but of a sacred king who navigates the tangled, impossible universe of Russia and becomes himself an elemental force.

  We first met Sir James Frazer’s sacred king in Chapter 3. It is appropriate to reintroduce him now to distinguish the marketing phenomenon around Putin from those around other celebrities: in contrast to pop cults, death follows the power cult like a shadow. Katya Obraztsova’s ambivalent fantasy was expressed in a mass media context where the leader is frequently accused of involvement in – or at least the tolerance of – political murders. There is no evidence linking Putin to a single political murder. But the fact that organizers of such political murders are rarely, if ever, brought to justice, and the repeated allegations against Putin, have a major effect on the popular imagination. What Putin is believed to be capable of doing becomes more important in the public imagination than what he actually does. The cult, thus, is both positive and negative. It is telling that when journalism students responded to the erotic, pro-Putin calendar with their own, critical one, the question “Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?” was one of the captions.