The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  Whatever was happening in Russia in the 21st century was no spontaneous innovation. To understand its nature, we have to recognize it as part of an innate pattern of thinking about power dating back into ancient history.

  Going back far enough into the primordial origins of human nature, the deification of a ruler, the power cult itself, presents us with a chicken and egg question. Was the king first likened to a god, or were gods merely kings that went down as legend?

  * * *

  Four hundred years ago, in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of another dynasty, as the Time of Troubles came to a close in 1613 with the coronation of the first Romanov Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich, a certain Ivan Timofeyevich Semyonov, a clerk in the service of the Tsar, sat down to write a treatise on the history of the world.

  In that treatise, Semyonov, or Timofeyev, as he would go down in history books, found himself grappling with a pressing conundrum: which of the two natures of the Tsar, the divine or the human, predominated?

  Timofeyev was not elaborating on the nature of Jesus Christ – although a similar question would bother theologians from the earliest centuries of Christianity. Nor was he referring to a specific Russian Tsar that he may or may not have served. He was trying to spell out, instead, the nature of the very idea of Tsardom, laying down a framework for the kind of Tsar that he thought Russia deserved.

  Timofeyev was no original thinker in that regard, but given the scarcity of surviving Russian documents, his Vremennik offers an important insight into the logical process behind the deification of the Russian ruler.

  “Although as a human the Tsar was in his essence, he is by his power equal to God, for he is above all, and none on this earth is above him.”242

  Although his predecessors had elaborated on the dual nature of the Tsar, divine and human, Timofeyev seemed to have placed the stress on the divine aspect. If the Tsar is equal to God, then equally, as God he must be sacred, omnipotent, and immortal.243

  Born in either 1550 or 1560, Timofeyev had survived the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was easy to see how Timofeyev and his contemporaries could be confused by that question during the Time of Troubles.

  Just twenty years previously, Holy Rus had a tyrant who slaughtered his people in the name of God, but now, in the beginning of the 17th century, didn’t seem to have a government at all. Given that Ivan betrayed his sacred mandate through his tyranny, and given that Boris Godunov betrayed his legal mandate through sacrilege, what made a Tsar truly legitimate enough to be the viceregent of God on earth?

  As Timofeyev groped his way through that theological conundrum, he was influenced by two circumstances that possibly clashed with one another: the Byzantine legacy of the Basileus as the de facto head of the church, and the specific historical traumas that he and his contemporaries had stood witness to.

  But his synthesis produced a Tsar whose absolute sacredness exceeded that of the Byzantine emperor, stipulating a relationship between the Tsar, the church and the subjects that went beyond the most stringent forms of caesaropapism ever known in the Byzantine or Catholic world.

  The Tsar, Timofeyev wrote, can have dubious moral qualities, like Ivan and Boris; but whatever those qualities, by virtue of his position as having been enthroned by God he is to be praised and regarded “as God.” Where his subjects are concerned, the bodily, human aspect of the Tsar is virtually irrelevant, it is none of their business. Since only God can judge a Tsar, and since whatever abuse and tyranny the God-ordained ruler instigates against his subjects is merely God’s punishment for the sins of the people, it is also a crime against God, a heresy, to depose him.244

  Historians have noted this paradox in Timofeyev’s treatise: here he spends pages decrying the crimes of Ivan and Boris, elaborating on their betrayal of their God-given divine natures, and yet insists that the very office of the Tsar remains divine, while his subjects are not to make any distinction between their ruler and God.

  If Byzantine thought drew parallels between God and the monarch, then Russian thought in the 16th and 17th centuries went far beyond mere parallels, presupposing a sacralization of the monarch and attributing supernatural qualities to his persona.245 “The idea that the Tsar gets his power from God was then transformed into a direct deification of the Tsar,” the Russian historian Vladimir Valdenberg wrote in 1916.246

  3.

  Just as Surkov was not, essentially, saying anything new or unusual, Timofeyev was merely quoting from a 6th century Byzantine deacon, Agapetus.

  In one of a series of exhortations to Emperor Justinian, Agapetus wrote, “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.”247

  Agapetus, in turn, was drawing on the 4th century bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea. In AD 335, standing in the presence248 of the Roman Emperor Constantine, Eusebius delivered an oration in which he elaborated on a cosmos governed by one God, and a world governed by one ruler. “That ruler, the Roman Emperor, is the viceregent of the Christian God.”

  Both Agapetus and Eusebius may have been projecting onto the new tenets of Christianity a more ancient, pagan form of power worship.

  Here is how Athenians in the 3rd century BC sang to the Macedonian king Demetrius I, as cited by the scholar Norman Russel in a telling illustration of the way the Greeks defined their relationship to royal power:

  Other gods are either far away,

  or they have no ears,

  or they do not exist, or pay no attention to

  us, not in the least;

  but you we see before us,

  not made of wood or stone but real.249

  In an incident faintly echoed in Putin’s response to the Pikalevo crisis in 2009, Emperor Nero’s moves to rebuild Pompei after an earthquake in 62 AD was experienced, in the eyes of the contemporary inhabitants, as a superhuman ability. It wasn’t that people believed in the literal divinity of the emperor – it was just by virtue of status and living conditions he was as far above them, and as remotely detached from the fabric of their everyday existence as the gods.250

  After the conversion of Emperor Constantine, the transfer of the court to Constantinople and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century AD, the idea of the Celestial King was sublimated into the idea of the King on Earth, the Basileus, according to Mikhail Bibikov, a Russian scholar of Byzantine history. Emperors are depicted with haloes; mosaics show them walking in the company of Christ and the Apostles. The pre-Christian practice of proskynesis, the act of full prostration, becomes ritualized in the coronation ceremony: subjects, except for the patriarch, upon encountering the Basileus are to fall on their faces and kiss his feet (except, as Bibikov points out, on Sundays).251

  Bibikov draws particular attention to the phenomenon of two thrones standing side by side, “one of them reserved for the Earthly King, who can be experienced through the proskynesis, the other for the [unseen] Celestial King.”252

  In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian would spell out the living cohesion of the government and church as one body, reflecting this new mix of ancient power worship with the emerging legal-rational state: “The two greatest gifts which God, in his love for man, has granted from on high are: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, while the latter directs and administers human affairs; both, however, proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind.”253

  Here it was: the church-state Symphonia, or the harmony between temporal and spiritual power.

  The Roman Emperor’s move from Rome to Byzantium in the 4th century AD had become pivotal in the eventual East-West schism that would separate the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church.

  Leaving Rome behind for Byzantium, the Emperor helped foster an environment in the West where Roman bishops had no choice but to assume temporal authority either in the utter absence of it, or as they fought kings for influence. From the ruins of a crumbling empire, where bishops sometimes
found themselves the only source of law and civil administration, the Western Papacy emerged not only as a fully independent force, but one that had the power to depose kings. It was the Pope, not the emperor, who would become the Vicar of Christ, and it was his foot, and not that of a temporal emperor, that it became the norm to kiss.

  But in the East, the Orthodox Church thrived under the direct oversight of the Byzantine Emperor. The idea of church-state Symphonia, or harmony, was not only easier to sustain, it was necessary in order to justify, and mitigate, where necessary, the divine absolutism of the Emperor. But if harmony was the ideal, then caesaropapism was usually the reality.

  4.

  Consider for a moment how easy, how utterly appealing, caesaropapism can appear from a perspective of infirm faith, or simply in a situation where lack of powerful patronage meant persecution or death, where courtly flattery had turned into policy: “But you we see before us, not made of stone or wood but real.” Just as there is one God governing the universe, so there is one Emperor governing the human affairs of Christians – and like a Byzantine mosaic, like the gold incrustations on the hem of the Basileus’ robe, everything makes such exquisite, perfect sense.

  From the Black Sea, up the River Dnieper and the Volga, through fathomless expanses of steppe and forest, all this decadent, divine splendour trickled up into a place also cursed and blessed with two essential natures: inhospitable because of its cold and its expanses, it was also lawless.

  Prince Vladimir’s emissaries could not tell whether they were “in heaven or earth” when they beheld the full splendour of Byzantine Orthodox ritual, before Vladimir adopted Orthodox Christianity for himself and his subjects in 988. Brought into a frigid climate and landscape, that very splendour may have brought out the Old Testament in the new faith.

  The homegrown, 11th century idea of Russia as the New Israel would fuse with and in some ways exceed the rigid courtly and ecclesiastical rituals imported from Byzantium. This fusion may have helped emphasize the Old Testament qualities of God more as a wrathful judge than as a source of mercy and grace, according to American historian Daniel Rowland.254 Rituals and images of the Russian court, one historian noted, centred on an “image of the Tsar as chastising, unleashing his wrath on the wrongdoer. Like the Biblical God, the Tsar was to be feared.”255

  The practice of proskynesis too appears to have been brought in as part of Byzantine court ceremonial, partially fusing with local quasi-oriental practices. A lithograph from the reign of Tsar Alexei, the second Romanov, depicted a royal procession surrounded by peasants who were not merely kneeling, but dropping their heads to the ground in complete prostration.256 This deep bow was made, in a gesture that struck a visiting Austrian diplomat as particularly “devout” and “poignant,” just before the subjects were to cast their written petitions to the Tsar.257

  While striving for the Byzantine ideal of church-state harmony, Russian political doctrine ended up instead incorporating outright caesopapism, leading to the church’s increasingly vulnerable role.

  No Russian patriarch has wielded even a modicum of the influence of the Roman Catholic popes. While popes deposed emperors and kings in the West, Russian Tsars had patriarchs deposed, arrested or killed.

  When, in 1547, Metropolitan Makarii conferred upon Ivan the Terrible the title of Tsar, previously reserved for Christ, Byzantine emperors, and the Mongol khan, he did so in an attempt to instil in Ivan the conviction that he should rule as a just, Christian monarch. In a few decades, however, Ivan would sack Novgorod; aside from slaughtering thousands of civilians, his oprichniki would round up thousands of priests and beat them until they handed over their wealth.258 And when Metropolitan Filipp, Makarii’s successor, challenged the oprichnina, Ivan had him deposed and then murdered.

  The Great Schism of the 17th century, which resulted from top-down efforts to reform the Orthodox Church, was another illustration of an influential bishop – the most powerful Russia would ever see – ultimately succumbing to the state. Patriarch Nikon joined forces with Tsar Alexei in an unprecedented attempt to overhaul church practices to bring them in line with contemporary Greek rituals, trying to bridge a divergence that he saw as threatening unity within the Orthodox Church. Nikon took advantage of the coercive powers of the state to unleash a wave of terror on those clergy who refused to break with the traditions of their forefathers in favour of what to them appeared as newfangled Greek rituals, like using three fingers to cross oneself rather than two, or having parishioners kneel instead of fully prostrate themselves. But in his growing confidence, in his attempts to transform Russia into a New Jerusalem, he crossed a line: when he insisted on the title of Great Sovereign, a title borne only by the Tsar, then Alexei had him deposed. Alexei kept the reforms, however; despite the backlash from below, the Schism that would create the Old Believers, it was the only type of reform that ever succeeded in Russia: reform from above.

  When Alexei’s son, Peter the Great, unleashed an unprecedented campaign of Westernization by force, a campaign that would only be rivalled by Stalin, the church resisted. Peter, in a bid to sweep away the stifling patriarchy, and the exhortations of Timofeyev and Agapetus about the divinity of the Tsar, wound up only unwittingly vindicating them. When the church resisted, Peter, by the power of his own charisma, transformed the Patriarchate into a mere government body consisting of both clergy and laymen, the Most Holy Synod.

  But it would be the Bolsheviks who would achieve the ultimate apotheosis in the divinization of state power, wiping out the church entirely and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of priests. Armed with the ideology of Communism, they set out to build a New Jerusalem par excellence, a true vision of heaven on earth; where their predecessors had failed, they would exceed both Ivan and Peter in the terror they unleashed.

  We could not do justice to the story of that dynasty here; but in the context of a review of church-state relations in Russia, it is important to stress that Soviet totalitarianism owes at least as much, and probably more, to these traditions of caesaropapism as it does to the ideology of communism.

  5.

  In their closing arguments before the court in August 2012, the three young women arrested for performing a punk prayer in Christ the Saviour Cathedral and ridiculing church-state ties, insisted that they were merely acting in the traditions of the holy fool.

  Caught between stifling church ritual on the one hand and the church’s subjugation by the government on the other, some members of Christian society in both 6th century Byzantium and 16th century Russia stumbled upon a curious loophole of absolute freedom.

  They stripped naked or wore rags, they wandered about their communities throwing rocks at the nobility and the clergy, and casting insults at state officials. They danced naked and yelled in churches. They inverted social norms and etiquette; when offered wine by those coming to them in kindness, they would pour it on the ground; when approached by the Tsar they would curse at him; when the rest of the community fasted, they ate raw meat. By doing so, they invited unspeakable abuse. They were called the yurodivy, the fools for Christ, or, more simply, holy fools.

  According to the Russian scholar Sergei Ivanov, one of the few experts on the phenomenon, it was no accident that holy fools – who differed from their European jester counterparts – emerged first in Byzantium and then in Tsarist Russia. By testing accepted norms and ethical standards, they demonstrated the impossibility of fathoming or predicting God; by testing the bounds of freedom, they made an irony of it. The holy fools thus served as a wedge between church and state: with the failure of the church to set any limitations on state power, they sought to act as a sort of spiritual control mechanism.259 Of course, it would be wrong to speak of the success of such control mechanisms in any institutional sense, but on occasion these strange troublemakers – who were by no means necessarily opposed to the government, as we shall see in a moment – managed to achieve some curious results.

  Ivanov identifies the reign of Ivan the Te
rrible as the peak of the phenomenon of the holy fool. It is no wonder, he writes, that Ivan himself practiced such traits: watch him weep and debase himself when facing adversaries, such as monks he suspected of treason, or in his letters to the exiled Prince Kurbksy. Ivan would in all honesty refer to himself as a “foul-smelling dog” one moment, only to strike a mercilessly regal tone in finally indicting his audience. Isn’t he contradicting himself by debasing himself one moment, and then chastising his foes the next? Not in the least, Ivanov argues: “[The debasement] by no means lowers the dignity of the Tsar; on the contrary, it proves his superhuman essence, which allows him to transcend earthly laws and norms.”260

  Enter a real holy fool. In 1570, after Ivan’s oprichniki slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and clergy during the sacking of Novgorod, eyewitness accounts by at least one oprichnik and later recollections recall an extraordinary incident: a certain Nikolai, a recluse who lived alone on an estate that he did not tend, where animals roamed in their own excrement and yet continued to thrive, called out to Ivan. There are several accounts of what Nikolai said, but they all came down to this: “Ivashka [the diminutive, almost derogatory term for Ivan], why don’t you get out of here and stop spilling Christian blood?”261