The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  One of them, a young civil worker named Alexei who said he lost his job for his political views, said that Russia needed a monarch who “has gone through military service.” But hadn’t Putin served in the KGB?

  Putin wouldn’t do for a monarch, Alexei said. “He is a sellout. It is not his path.” There is nothing holy in him, and therefore nothing that he can teach his people.

  By 2013, little remained of a protest drive of the sort that Russia had not seen since 1989. The protest rallies would dwindle back to the marginal figure of a few thousand people. If, at the end of 2011, the government felt threatened enough by the movement for Putin to make overtures to the protesters, within a year the government stopped paying attention altogether. Many of the leaders were jailed or demoralized; Navalny was facing trial, and Maria Baronova was depressed.

  And yet, one tiny, marginal group – feminist punks on the fringe of the radical art scene – had managed somehow to join the protest movement, split it asunder, and achieve the one thing that demonstrators had been craving, viscerally, all along: to provoke Putin into showing his true face.

  They were Pussy Riot, the five girls who donned balaclavas in Russia’s biggest cathedral and prayed to the Virgin Mary to banish Putin.

  4.

  The story of Pussy Riot wasn’t so much about their protest art stunt as it was about their punishment. In other words, Vladimir Putin’s reaction to what five girls did in a church was far more interesting than what they actually did. This is not to diminish their courage, since two of them remain in jail as of November 2013 – but that courage only appeared once they were facing jail sentences for something they never expected to result in such a colossal persecution.

  Let us look closely at the series of events that led up to the Pussy Riot verdict, for they speak for themselves.

  February 8, 2012. It is the height of the presidential election campaign. It is also a period of unprecedented dissent against Putin, with mass protests targeting Putin’s “sacred” image.

  Putin meets with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church, and representatives of other religions. The Patriarch calls the years during which Putin ruled a “miracle of God.” Whatever else he said, the meeting itself is perceived in the public eye as a blessing.

  February 21. Five masked members of Pussy Riot perform a “punk prayer” on the altar steps of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, forbidden to laymen and especially to women. They ask the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin away.” Their stunt is a direct allusion, as they would explain later, to the Patriarch’s meeting with Putin. They are chased out but not arrested.

  February 22. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin – a de facto mouth-piece for the church – condemns their act. “This is a sin that violates the law of God. The most important law. ‘For the wages of sin is death,’” he tells news media, quoting from Romans 6:23.

  February 26. Russian police announce that the Pussy Riot members are wanted on charges of hooliganism. Three of them are arrested the following month.

  March 6. Two days after his election, Putin’s reaction to Pussy Riot’s performance is revealed to be “negative” by his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who called their stunt “disgusting.”

  Much is made of this supreme displeasure. Political scientist Marat Guelman tells Dozhd TV that there is “information” that the Patriarch asked Putin directly for “revenge.” Journalist Sergei Dorenko tells news media of investigators who allegedly told him that they reported on the Pussy Riot case directly to “you know who.”

  April 2012. An investigator’s statement on the nature of their crime (they were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred) identified the consequence of their action as “diminishing the spiritual foundation of the State.” Experts recruited by prosecutors stated that the women had violated canons decreed by the Church Council of Trullo held in Constantinople under Byzantine Emperor Justinian II in 692. The defence, in other words, did not have to call the trial an inquisition: the various members of the prosecuting team had inadvertently done so in their own words, revealing that power in Russia still came from God, and that Pussy Riot’s true offence was not therefore just hooliganism per se (something that would warrant a suspended prison sentence at most).

  June 25. Vsevolod Chaplin tells The New Times that “the church as a world view cannot be separated from the government just as the people cannot be separated from the government.”

  August 2. The trial has begun. During his visit to the UK, Putin is asked about the case by journalists. He says, among other things, that they should “not be judged too harshly.”

  August 13. Vsevolod Chaplin reveals that he has been in regular contact with Putin’s chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, meanwhile, is appointed to oversee relations with religious organizations within the government.

  August 17. The three members of Pussy Riot are sentenced to two years in a penal colony. The lawyers refuse to recognize this as leniency, but it is one year less than the sentence demanded by the prosecution. The Russian Orthodox Church issues a statement that Putin should pardon the women.

  October 2012. Yekaterina Samutsevich gets a new lawyer, who argues that since her defendant never managed to participate in the performance, she should be cleared. Samutsevich is freed during an appeals hearing – drawing accusations that she “betrayed” the cause by essentially admitting her guilt.

  November 2012. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, still in jail at the end of 2013, dismiss their lawyers, Mark Feygin and Violetta Volkova, amid accusations that they tried to make money off the group, even attempting to register the Pussy Riot brand.

  Even if the brand wasn’t registered, it exploded internationally, rivalling even the brand of Vladimir Putin. It managed to split the protest movement and discredit it in the eyes of many average Russians, who sincerely saw the dance as a criminal desecration of their religious values. Some Muscovites who attended the protest rallies would stop speaking to one another over their arguments about Pussy Riot. It was as through the possibility of religion as an ideological value had been forgotten, and that it took a protest stunt to remind people it was still there.

  And yet, few would have heard the band’s name had the government not launched a prosecution. Something had forced Vladimir Putin not only to notice what they did, but respond. If, as various sources close to the government claim off the record, Patriarch Kirill asked Putin directly for retribution over the incident, something must have forced the returning president to take heed.

  Chapter 16

  The Church, the Tsar, and the Holy Fool

  “In the nature of his body the king is on a level with all other men, but in the authority attached to his dignity he is like God.”

  - Agapetus, 6th century deacon, to Byzantine Emperor Justinian

  “It is impressive that they think so highly of the prime minister’s work. But I would like to recall another of the main commandments: thou shalt not worship false idols.”

  - Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov in May 2011, on a religious sect in Nizhny Novgorod that worships Putin as the reincarnation of Paul the Apostle

  1.

  COLONEL IGOR GULICHEV, a Cossack, led me into the office of his boss, Ataman Sergei Shishkin. It was evening; for several hours Gulichev and I had been talking about what it meant to serve the Tsar, about Pussy Riot, and about Cossack patrols. Shishkin, who was relaxing with his comrades, many of them still in uniform, was in a jovial mood.

  “Putin. A mace. An icon,” he said as he motioned to the objects hanging behind him on the wall, as if telling me everything that I needed to know about the Cossack way.

  The proximity of the objects, and especially the picture of Vladimir Putin and Jesus Christ hanging on an equal level startled me; I wanted to ask about it, but then remembered the mace and the sabre, both of which were fake, and thought better of it. Here were men who wanted to connect deeply to some form of tradition. Even if it was just through uniforms and decorative
weapons, they were doing their best to believe that the Cossacks, that strange community with its mix of the ethnic, religious and military, was still alive, and was ready to serve Russia’s Tsar.

  The previous day, Gulichev had struggled to dispel stereotypes about his community that he was unwittingly fuelling.

  “Maybe you want me to crack a whip, to cut some heads off?” he asked a group of journalists who had accosted his Cossack patrol. “Well, we don’t need that. Cossacks aren’t sadists, we don’t like blood. But we want to defend the fatherland.”

  But the fact was, his patrol had turned out at one of Moscow’s biggest train termini in a voluntary bid to uphold law and order – by chasing away unregistered street vendors and pickpockets. He and his fellow officers said they had been negotiating with city authorities and the police to give them the legal mandate single-handedly to detain people.

  At first, the city government seemed eager to enlist Cossack help. Moscow’s Central Prefecture gave them a bus and a police escort, and even helped call a press conference.

  But when that Cossack patrol was accosted by an even bigger army of journalists, city authorities backed off and washed their hands of the matter, placing the initiative squarely with the Cossack community.

  It was easy to see why reports of Cossack patrols had spun journalists into such a frenzy. Cossack regiments – with their ultra-conservativism and their brute force – had been active ever since Pussy Riot performed their punk prayer. Soon after the incident in February 2012, they pledged to protect churches from similar desecration. In September, a Cossack regiment stormed a Pussy Riot-themed exhibit at a gallery belonging to Marat Guelman. In March 2013, a similar Cossack raid interrupted a Pussy Riot-themed play at the Sakharov Centre – a museum dedicated to the memory of the Soviet dissident. In fact, the Cossacks were directing their ire at anything perceived as Western: Madonna concerts and gay parades were the usual objects of their attacks.

  But Cossacks weren’t the only group to send out activists in defence of Orthodox values – they were merely the only one that had been doing it longer than anyone else, for hundreds of years.

  The Pussy Riot case had split society, bringing out a whole array of once marginal ultra-religious groups like the Icon Bearers, with their mix of nationalism, statism and xenophobia. Those disparate groups had long sought to fight for traditional values, what they saw as the Russian way of life – for years, joining forces with the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, they would be seen harassing controversial exhibits and performances. Following the Pussy Riot debacle, they were delighted and emboldened by the Kremlin’s apparent overtures in their direction.

  The government would turn out a whole slew of “traditionalist” bills: one banned gay propaganda, another criminalized insults against faith, although Russian law already included religious hatred in its criminal code. Russia’s so-called anti-gay law, passed in summer 2013, riled the international community, but it was, in essence, part of a wider attempt to return to some ideal “Russian way” by rejecting what were believed to be Western imports.

  Orthodox Christianity – and the ideal of church-state harmony – were integral to that “Russian way.” In spring of 2012, Putin was shown on national television walking alongside Patriarch Kirill in a ritualized procession as the two accompanied the Iveron Icon of the Mother of God into Moscow’s Novodevichy convent. As the procession was shown solemnly entering the church, a TV announcer narrated how Tsar Alexei had first welcomed the icon; on screen, it was like watching a Byzantine ritual transferred into the 21st century.

  Long dormant, elements of caesaropapism, where a secular head of state also bore the sacerdotal status equal to a priest, began exposing themselves unintentionally. A Macedonian monk was forced to make an official apology to President Putin in August 2012 for spontaneously kissing his hand during a visit to the Valaam Monastery in the northern region of Karelia. Putin was captured on camera jerking his hand away, visibly irritated with the connotations of the gesture.238

  For the leader of the Icon Bearers, Igor Miroshnichenko, a re-emerging harmony between the church and the Kremlin was all only natural. “In goals, in tendencies, the connection between the church and government is always increasing. Thank God, thank God. In Europe, I hear, the church and government are separate. We hope for the opposite tendency.”239

  If the “protest class” constituted just 15 percent, these guardians of the Russian way were part of the 15 percent at the other end of the spectrum, who thought Pussy Riot’s two year sentence was too lenient (33 percent said it was too harsh, and 31 percent said it was adequate).240 The Kremlin was courting this social force, but unlike the all but defunct Nashi it had never created them. And an even more important difference between these groups and Nashi was the ideology they genuinely espoused, rooted, as they saw it, in Russian tradition.

  Gulichev, a Cossack, seemed to speak on behalf of a tradition that carried deeper origins.

  “They should have got more. Seven years,” Gulichev told me of Pussy Riot. “A person does something, creates so much harm, and then says he’s sorry. No. You need to suffer, accept grief and pain. And maybe then we’ll forgive you. When you come, having gone through pain, then we’ll think about whether we should forgive you or not. But first you have to suffer.”

  As for the protesters who had been rallying in the streets since late 2011, if Gulichev got the order, he would readily go and fight them, he said.

  The Cossacks had never been an easily classifiable community. Several theories of their origins associated them with groups of escaped serfs who roamed in the southern steppes basking in the kind of absolute freedom that was only possible side by side with absolute autocracy.

  “Everyone wanted to live freely,” Gulichev said. “But the Cossacks did it!” Before the 1917 Revolution – which few Cossack communities survived – one could only consider himself a Cossack if he was born as one. But today, those boundaries are utterly blurred; Cossacks register into district cells not by birthright, but by identification. Cossack patrols were met with scepticism not least because many Muscovites didn’t believe they were for real. Many of those with real Cossack roots disputed the very possibility of being genuine in the 21st century – how could someone be a Cossack when he spent his entire day in an office?

  Gulichev, judging by his eagerness to serve the state by helping maintain law and order in the streets, didn’t seem too happy about spending his day in an office either.

  Still, for him, anyone could “become” a Cossack, much like being initiated into a club, or a religion.

  “People who want to become Cossacks, they come to the society, we talk, if they accept our rules, our values,” he said, “we let them in.”

  And the two crucial criteria were being Orthodox Christian and serving in the army. “There are those who don’t serve in the army. But we won’t pat them on the head,” Gulichev said.

  God and guns, he seemed to be saying, but in a completely different way. One could only serve God if one also served Caesar.

  So much had made sense before 1917 – or, at least, with the benefit of hindsight – when the heir of the Tsar, who was the steward of God on earth, was also honorary supreme Ataman, or Cossack chief. You served God by serving the Tsar. Now, of course, Gulichev didn’t really know where the secular powers stood: his first floor office in Moscow’s sleepy residential district of Lyublino thrived by the grace of the fact that the prefecture of that district just happened to be a Cossack too. But city authorities as a whole were playing all sorts of “bureaucratic tricks” with them, he said dejectedly.

  Before he showed me out, he opened the door and smoked a cigarette through the crack, out into the November blizzard. “There’s talk of the government setting up an all-Russian Cossack [association],” he said quietly. “There’s word that Putin will head it.”

  “Will that be a good thing?” I asked.

  “That would be…” he opened his mouth to pronounce what sounde
d, to me, like okhuyenno, an obscenity that meant “spectacular.” But then he seemed to reconsider, stopped himself, and said instead, “that would be great.”

  2.

  In March 2000, a decade after the fall of a dynasty, a collapse that left the country plundered and on the brink of civil war, in the wake of the abdication of a catastrophically unpopular ruler, Vladimir Putin celebrated his presidential victory in the offices of his campaign staff. According to one apocryphal account of that night, an elegant, dark-haired man presumed to be Vladislav Surkov poured a glass of champagne and raised a toast, “to the deification of state power.”241

  The same man would state on the record, more than a decade later, that Putin was sent by God to rule Russia.

  Amid the increasing prominence of the Russian Orthodox Church during Putin’s third term in the Kremlin, baffled Western observers tried to explain this resurgence of religious traditionalism by a Kremlin courting the church in a bid to shore up its own legitimacy, as a government would lean on the church in countries where there was an independent church to lean on. What they failed to see was a dynamic that defied and inverted the Western tradition of church-state relations, where a powerful, independent Pope fought with and used kings for his own political purposes. The Orthodox Church was no equal partner. It was, instead, an institution largely subjugated by the government, and had been for hundreds of years. It was part of a tradition of caesaropapism, where temporal and spiritual power converged in the head of state. That tradition is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked factors among Westerners trying to make sense of everything from Soviet rule to what is happening in Russia today.

  When Surkov said that that Putin was sent by God to rule Russia, he was referring to a problem as ancient as life itself.

  For the sake of flattery or personal enrichment or security or protection from one who is stronger than you, or for the sake of material or existential comfort, human beings will do this with regard to other human beings: they will give them money or food to appease them, they will hang portraits on their walls of those already deified or about to be, or speak, in the very presence of the human being they wish to deify, of a pressing need to make him more like God. Today, amid the mitigating forces of de-personified institutions, this is done with a good dose of irony, just as the modern nod of the head in greeting probably evolved from the gesture of falling on your face in complete prostration, anticipating and thus pre-empting harm at the hands of a much stronger member of your own species.