The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  “The election commission has decided that there were zero complaints,” he said with a smile.

  At two in the morning, I stood demoralized as I watched the pile of ballots with a check next to Putin’s name grow. Pypin would continue to battle the results with complaints to the courts, the prosecutors and the police, but I had already given up, seeing it was pointless to nitpick: weeding out the administrative and federal violations wouldn’t diminish in the slightest that towering stack of ballots.

  When confronted about violating a whole slew of regulations that Yelena Kiselyova should have known about, as an administrative official who had worked in election committees for 20 years, she brushed off my accusations.

  “We will work as we’ve always worked,” she said, and cheerfully continued counting the ballots. What other way was there?

  4.

  Much like his boss, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s long-time and charming spokesman, did two things with baffling skill. He managed to shroud the president in mystery even while insisting on his transparency. He elaborated on the institutional limits on Putin’s powers with a knowing look that seemed to nullify the very institutions he spoke of. And he never forbade journalists from asking particular questions of the president. He just indicated, with his beaming eyes and his smile, what the “right” questions to ask were. “Cameron is nothing, tariffs are everything!” he declared with a disarming grin to a group of journalists in the White House in the summer of 2011, as he “persuaded” them to leave the issue of the British prime minister’s meeting with Putin and focus instead on Putin’s promise to delay a hike in energy tariffs.

  I met Peskov for an extended interview in the summer of 2009; it was a period when, as prime minister, Vladimir Putin evoked more mystery than he ever did as president. Constitutionally, the president of Russia may have been endowed with virtually despotic powers in accordance with Yeltsin’s Constitution; but Putin’s influence as prime minister showed that he could continue wielding those powers from any office. It was the big question that dominated the political news for the next three years: was there any possible interpretation that Putin was not actually in power, and a mere prime minister subordinate to the president?

  I had only waited for about forty minutes in the plush reception of his White House office when Peskov emerged from the double doors, shook hands with an official, and turned to me, nodded and smiled. “So, what are you going to write?” he said, as he led me in and invited me to be seated. He was jovial, friendly in an endearing way, and there was absolutely nothing unusual, let alone sinister in that question. It was a question that any PR specialist would ask in an interview. Except that it invited a Russian reversal: In Russia, Putin interviews YOU.

  He sat back, but at times he leaned forward and looked from under his brows and smiled; at these moments he was saying some of the more pointed axioms – that Putin was misunderstood and demonized, and that those who demonized him hated Russia with the very “fibre of their soul.”

  That Peskov was smiling left no doubt that at that moment he believed every word of what he was saying. What was more worrying was that his smile dared you not to believe him.

  “What sometimes astounds me,” he said, “is that back in 2000, when foreign media called or sent requests for an interview, their argument was that it would be a chance to reach the audience of country X, be it European or North American or South American, to [broadcast] information about Putin, about his personality, about his passions, about his positions on key issues, about who he is…. What is astounding is that we still get requests formulated in the same way.”

  He paused.

  “Those who wanted to understand who Mr. Putin is – they have understood already. Those who did not want to understand him – they never will.”

  Peskov’s agitation had a specific reason. Just a few moments before he spoke those words, he answered a phone call on his mobile. A journalist was calling about the latest murder in Chechnya of a human rights activist, and the inevitable accusations that followed blaming Putin. Peskov’s face did not change as he answered the question in English. But when he turned to me it was clear that he was indignant.

  “Here’s a tragic case of a tragic murder of [Natalia] Estemirova. Just now I got a call from a Western journalist who is in an [emotional] state because she just got out of a press conference where… she heard the words that Putin. Is. To blame. For the murder of Estemirova. As I told the journalist, the pain of the loss of one’s colleague is understandable, but nothing can justify such stupidity.”

  What was “stupid” about blaming Putin for the death of Estemirova was not about his godly or, on the contrary, his demonic powers. It was the ignorance of all the good he had done in Chechnya. “To say that about Putin is to completely rule out all those efforts that he has made in the last nine years in bringing peace, stability and the rule of law.”

  Peskov could not reveal too much of the truth – that Putin’s manoeuvring space was severely restricted regarding Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a man accused of torturing and killing people, but who loyally kept the threat of separatism at bay. For by revealing this, Peskov would be puncturing the myth of omnipotence that had come to surround Putin.

  And so the logic was simple: state power did not deny its godliness when it was credited with good things, but grew indignant when bad things were attributed to that same omnipotence.

  “Everything that Russia does is received negatively,” Peskov lamented. “And, likewise, the demonization of anyone and everyone who has anything to do with Russia.”

  * * *

  I think it’s worth discarding, for a moment, all these attempts to demonize, deify or otherwise justify Vladimir Putin and look at him closely as we would at an animal in his habitat (no judgment!), considering his actions from the perspective of his environment and his history.

  The second president of the Russian Federation was born during the post-war deprivations of the late Stalinist period, in 1952. His parents were middle-aged factory workers sharing a communal apartment, who had lost their first two children during the siege of Leningrad. The daily squalor of the life led by George Orwell’s Winston Smith is only a slightly exaggerated approximation of the basic domestic conditions that Putin may have spent his early years in.

  Putin recalls of his childhood: “Once I saw a huge rat and started pursuing it, until I cornered it. It had nowhere to run. Then it turned around and sprang on me. It was unexpected and very frightening.”275

  It is easy to imagine some of the values such a childhood could give rise to: comfort, stability, a bit of luxury in the form of Brioni suits – but of those, most of all, comfort. And also – pity, the kind of pity that keeps one from shooting a dying horse, or from firing a corrupt, inefficient, but loyal minister. And maybe, too, an insecurity, a slight chip on your shoulder. When someone snubs your men, your loyal men, you understand, and perhaps forgive, their extrajudicial revenge. Even if they murder a journalist on your birthday to demonstrate their loyalty.

  Whether due to their absence of squalor or the presence of the very sense of ideological mission that life lacked, Putin took a liking to Soviet spy movies, like the classic 17 Instances of Spring.

  While still in school, he went to the local KGB and said he wanted to work for them. He was told to get a law degree and come back.276

  He did, in 1975.

  In the 1980s, after spending years tapping, tailing and intimidating dissidents, he started speaking like those very dissidents during his posting in Dresden. “Volodya had already absorbed all of this dissident wisdom back in Leningrad,” according to a friend of Putin cited by Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky. “He spoke of many dissidents with esteem. He was especially respectful of Solzhenitsyn.”277

  This is important, for he had no allegiance to the idea of Communism, merely to the people that he served.

  In 1991, he went to work for Leningrad’s first democratic reformer, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, as th
e head of City Hall’s International Relations Committee. Putin warned his boss dutifully that he was a KGB agent. He resigned from the KGB on the day of the hardliner coup, August 20, 1991, when he no longer had a choice in what side to pick.

  And thus began possibly the most interesting and significant period of his life, as he used the only job experience and know-how he had – his career in the KGB – to bring foreign investment to St. Petersburg’s new free market.

  In 1991, he asked his friend Pyotr Aven, then chairman of the Foreign Economic Relations Committee, to get a federal licence for a city programme allowing City Hall’s International Relations Committee to export commodities in exchange for food. According to a notorious inquiry by Leningrad deputy Marina Salye, he won unauthorized tenders for friends in the timber industry. The friends got rich, the food was never seen, and St. Petersburg’s grocery shelves remained empty.278

  In 1991, as head of the International Relations Committee, Putin headed an enterprise that took control of 51 percent of the city’s gambling business, and, according to some allegations, pocketing some of the profits and distributing the rest among his friends.279

  Putin himself described this process as “attempts to bring order to St. Petersburg’s gambling business.”

  “To do this we created a municipal enterprise that didn’t own any casinos, but controlled 51 percent of shares in the city’s gambling establishment.” According to Putin himself, the enterprise consisted of the “main controlling organizations,” which were the FSB and the tax police. As shareholders, they (the exact word Vladimir Putin used is “the government”) were to profit from the dividends. Except that they never did, for the gambling establishments were “laughing at us and showing us losses.”280

  In a country stripped of its governing ideology, when the centuries-old tax farming mechanism had kicked in, Vladimir Putin found himself in the middle of the action.

  His subsequent rise to power through the Presidential Administration, the Security Council, and the FSB was part luck and part bureaucratic cunning. But what emerges again and again in biographical and political accounts is the lack of supreme ambition: the top job fell on Putin as if out of the blue. Insiders described the struggle involved in “getting Putin into the job,” while his wife Lyudmila spent New Year’s Eve 1999 weeping after Yeltsin publicly resigned.281

  He had not created this system; he had adapted to it. And he had adapted so well that the powerful circle of hundreds of men inside and close to the Kremlin crystallized around him and pushed him to the top, to stand above the laws when they failed to function, which was most of the time, and to rule over them and protect them.

  A leader is only as corrupt as the system that produces him. Given that inevitability, it was hard to expect that whoever replaced this small, grey man would not stand above the law.

  The idea of an autocratic government as little more than a protection racket is not new – some historians, and free market theorists in particular, have explained the emergence of government as a pillaging gang that settled down and had the leading “roving bandit” wear a crown, in the words of political theorist Mancur Olson.282

  Russia’s Primary Chronicle, that 12th century document of disputed origins, hails the voluntary invitation of Scandinavian princes by Slavic tribes to rule over them in 862, laying the ground for the myth of a mystical spiritual union between the people and their conquerors that would continue to be taken seriously as late as 19th century Russia. A likelier version, of course, is that those same Scandinavian princes started pillaging the thriving Volga River trade route connecting Byzantium with Scandinavia, but soon realized that a permanent protection racket could extract more rent, and so settled down and formed fiefdoms.283

  Similar fiefdoms had sprouted in Europe, perhaps over a smaller, more crowded territory. But in one major way, the process of legitimization diverged, and it seemed to have diverged very early on.

  There are usually two ways that brute force can become legitimate, transforming a “roving bandit” into a king: through the law, or through itself. Russian power has usually sought to legitimize through itself; but post-Soviet Russia has seen a curious mix of both approaches, each of which functions as though the other did not exist, and yet each coming to the other’s rescue. Where the legal-rational state fails, the patrimonial kicks in.

  By the 17th century, foreign visitors to Muscovy were struck not just by the absolute nature of its sovereign, but by the absence of lawyers. “Their laws provide that everyone plead his own case or have some kinsman or servant of his assigned to this, for they have no lawyers at all,” a certain Jacques Margeret wrote in 1606.284

  Part of the reason for this may have lain not so much in the weakness or corruption of the courts, but the absence of contracts to litigate.

  The historian Richard Pipes, who famously argued for a link between property rights and freedom, describes two uniquely Russian geographical circumstances that unwittingly suggest exactly the opposite – that in Russia, despotism came from a surplus of freedom.

  In the first circumstance, Pipes wrote that factors of climate created a situation in central and northern Russia where it was not profitable to invest more in one’s land plot than was necessary for basic sustenance. In other words, no matter how much you tend your field, you will still get less grain for your effort than in France or Italy. These low profit margins devalued land and dampened the incentive to protect ownership rights.

  The second concerned a uniquely Russian brand of feudalism. If in Europe the service of a vassal to a lord was dictated by a mutual contract that sprang up over generations of such service, then in Russia the contract was one-sided. The vassal came to serve the lord exclusively on the lord’s terms. How could such a situation sustain itself? According to a very simplified scenario, if the vassal found the service too burdensome, he moved to another land – he was free to do so. But precisely because he was free to do so, no mutual contract bound his lord to any obligation – and if it was this contract that would lead to institutions like independent courts and the rule of law in Europe, the very idea of a contract, a mutual agreement, was not internalized in Russia.285

  The Soviet critic Iurii Lotman took this a step further – identifying “agreement” (magical) and “self-giving” (religious) as two models of social culture and interaction, one based on contract, the other on submission. He traced how the later predominated in medieval Russia, where the very idea of a contract governing relations was looked down upon. Under this religious model, one submitted fully to power without the constraints of a contract. “The concept of government service that arose in these conditions presumed an absence of agreements between the two sides: from one side there was the full and unconditional giving of the self, and from the other there was grace.” A medieval literary character would not be ashamed to call himself a “dog” in demonstrating his loyalty to his prince.286 Utter freedom and utter despotism, thus, arose from economic conditions early on, and there could not be one without the other. There would be few of the “networks of mutual dependence” described by Pipes that, while constraining the individual freedom of Western vassals, also protected them from the tyranny of their lord. The Russian boyar was either free to go where he pleased, for the land was vast, or he was an utter slave, a “dog” to his sovereign, “on the table, and on the balcony.”

  In the absence of functioning laws and “networks of mutual dependence,” the legitimacy of the crown came from within. This form of legitimization had its own, particular appeal. The 4th century courtier Themistius, somewhat cynically, described this appeal in regard to Emperor Theodosius I: “For he is the animate law, not merely a law laid down in permanent and unchangeable terms… God sent kings on earth to serve men as a refuge from an immovable law to the safety of the animate and living law.”287 It is easy to see how businessmen like William Browder could be drawn to that living law, without immediately seeing how quickly one could also wind up “on the table and on t
he balcony.”

  But a self-sustaining living law also needed an idea, some form of New Jerusalem to justify its implicitly quasi-divine nature. Russia’s manifest destiny would be used by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Joseph Stalin to justify whatever blood they needed to spill on the way to achieving their holy mission – be that a New Jerusalem in the case of Ivan, a window into Europe in the case of Peter, and industrialization in the case of Stalin.

  Vladimir Putin, born just seven years after the last heroic exploit of Russia’s manifest destiny – the victory in World War II – came from a generation that had no more strength for heroic feats. After rising to the apex of the state, he paid only marginal dues to the legal rational state that struggled to legitimize his rule, and could not be held accountable to it. But if his predecessors answered only to God and a divinely-inspired mission, he didn’t have the faith or the strength to be a messiah-prince. So he just pretended to be Chuck Norris.

  As he aged, however, he was beginning to fail at that. His appearance in a hang-glider in August 2012, leading a flock of storks in migration, drew little but irritation from many Russians (seeing him on TV and not in a moment of supplication). Vague reports of a back injury morphed via Facebook into rumours of a sarcoma (that few took seriously). Attempts to continue looking young at sixty through evident plastic surgery (which was never admitted) only drew ridicule.

  The mass protests of 2011-2012 can be seen as a reaction of the middle classes to that lack of mission, the notion that they were being ruled by a corrupt opportunist, or even a false Tsar. It was not surprising that to remedy this, Putin’s government resorted to the latent caesaropapism of Russia’s past, drawing on the legitimizing force of the only other institution with a modicum of trust, the church. In the words of sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh, Putin was trying to privatize God.