The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult
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But if those attempts – coupled with a repressive crackdown (which helps bring out the government’s quasi-sacred nature) – succeeded partially in disorienting a marginal opposition that itself lacked any ideology or political programme, they had not succeeded in guaranteeing legitimacy. Putin was drawing on a traditional force, on church-state harmony, even as he tried to uphold a legal-rational state. By meandering back and forth between the two, he risked exposing himself as a false Tsar, and further awakening the need for a real one.
5.
Vladimir Putin had probably heard me say his name, just as he had heard a few others. He continued answering a question about corruption – it consumed him. “Look at me, I’m talking to you,” he told a journalist standing next to me. He had not turned in my direction, each was supposed to wait her turn (I had realized with some dismay that, aside from nervous security guards, mostly women had encircled the president). Since I had mustered the courage to say his name to him once, I could easily say it again, I should have said it again, I was a journalist, the fear of irritating him, the unpredictable consequences of his answers, should not have stayed me. But what would I say once he turned to me? Ask him to consider the statistical likelihood of more dead orphans before signing the bill? He knew this already, just as he already knew that he would sign the bill. I could only elicit his annoyance or his favour, depending on what he saw in me. I also suspected that, by looking at me, he could discern even better than I whether I was in real opposition to him or not. And somehow, I didn’t want him to know it, because I didn’t want to know it myself. But there was something else that stopped me from continuing, that allowed me to just let it go and walk away: it was the sudden sense that what we were engaging in was not exactly a press conference, and we were not exactly journalists anymore. It was a more ancient exchange that I realized I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to ask him for anything.
Epilogue
Russia without Putin
“I believe that power originates from the impenetrable depths of the human psyche. From the same place as love.”
- Vladislav Surkov
“Freedom is a religious problem. The insolubility of the soul. The inevitability of the separation of everything from everything.”
- Vladislav Surkov
I WANTED THE leader to decree how to live, what to think, how to fight, and what to want. I heard his quiet, metallic voice unravel and expand from the stage, drawing, dividing, abusing, uniting the crowd on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.
“Do you trust me? Do you trust ME?” he intoned.
“Daaaaaaa!” the crowd roared desperately, with a hint of a wail as their cries dissolved in the September chill.
His name did not consist of a quiet, two-syllable, blue-grey word; hearing the crowd chant it, it was expansive, burning yellow like the sun: Naa-VAAAAHL-ny. Naa-VAAAAAHL-ny. Naa-VAAAAAAHL-ny.
The previous night, he had done the unthinkable. A charismatic activist who openly and publicly called Vladimir Putin a thief, who managed to rally tens of thousands from around the country to volunteer for his cause, was not only not in jail, but had been allowed to take part in the Moscow mayoral election.
When his campaign kicked off in June, he had less than 10 percent of support. By the time Muscovites went to the polls on September 8, he had 18 percent. But when the final votes were counted, Alexei Navalny, a blogger and anti-corruption crusader who had emerged as an opposition leader on a wave of popular protest and had never run for office, garnered over 27 percent. It was no victory, of course, but it had nearly forced the incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, who had barely edged past 51 percent, to face a runoff.
On September 9, 2013, speaking before a crowd of about 10,000 people, Navalny tentatively took the microphone.
“If you want to know what a rock-star feels like, then first of all, it’s really scary,” he began. “They say, throw yourself into the crowd, but I can’t jump that far. I am at a rally of tired people.” Towards the end of his speech, he would say something very much in the vein of his foe, Vladimir Putin: “I love you all very much.”
The election had seemed, at least for the most part, to be conducted according to the letter of the law. Navalny’s campaign, meanwhile, was as modern as anyone could have hoped for, built from the grass roots up. His campaign videos had matched and exceeded the sleekest political ads on American television. Through crowdsourcing, he had managed to raise $1 million, and draw over 14,000288 volunteers, many of them activists from the region who were determined to put their newly-acquired organizational know-how to local use. Stickers, posters, and 1,000 cloth “cubes” bearing Navalny’s photograph dotted the city; a red circle with Navalny’s name in the middle, the mayoral candidate had become an easily recognizable brand. He had everything: the organizational skills, the door-to-door activism, the picture-perfect wife and family, and the presidential smile.
And yet, despite all that, whatever had taken place at the polling stations on September 8 still defied the spirit of elections. In the patrimonial state, power begets power, and power originates from the Kremlin.
It is possible that the people Navalny had managed to unite, not around a cause but around himself, understood this on some level, understood that he would never be mayor and that the only reason he was allowed to run was that the authorities knew he could never win.
Could these people see Navalny, who had united a splintered opposition, as their future president?
“If he doesn’t make any major mistakes,” said Oksana Savchenko, a doctor in her 40s. “He’s still young, he has yet to grow. He still needs to do a lot to be a people’s president. There’s a lot more people that recognize him now, but there is still a lot of distrust.”
Petr Bakulov, a businessman in his 30s, said he wanted to see Navalny become mayor first. “Not yet,” he said of Navalny’s presidential potential.
But as the euphoria of the elections wore off, the reckoning began. If Navalny represented the future, then what kind of future was it?
“This future will come not as the result of a revolution by the creative masses,” one of Navalny’s prominent supporters, journalist Oleg Kashin, wrote the day after the rally. “It will be a future that results from the continuation of the Kremlin’s strange game, the strangest episode of which were the Moscow elections.”289
Kashin wasn’t being pessimistic, he was simply stating a perennial truth: “when our President Navalny thanks us for our patience, it will no longer be possible to trust him.” Not because he was Navalny, but because you could not trust any president.
If Kashin and many others were reconciling themselves to that kind of future, then what kind of present was it?
Who was Alexei Navalny? And was he the kind of leader that would eventually come to replace Vladimir Putin?
* * *
The story of the Moscow mayoral elections is a story in which Alexei Navalny played only a supporting role. This pragmatic, often abrasive debater, a lawyer and a minority shareholder in a number of Russian companies who had rallied a following by launching a successful anti-corruption crusade, had been appropriated as a cog in a political game the government was playing as it juggled several different objectives at once.
In June 2013, Navalny was about to be handed down a sentence on embezzlement charges that would put him behind bars for five years. The investigation and trial had dragged on for well over two years – the charges, which amounted to Navalny advising Kirov regional governor Nikita Belykh on what turned out to be a money-losing lumber contract, had surfaced soon after Navalny launched his anti-corruption campaign in late 2010. As he was pushed to the helm of the popular street protests that broke out in late 2011, it seemed that the government wasn’t quite sure what to do with him: jail him like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and risk galvanizing the opposition, or let him stay free in hopes that he would grow tired of the battle and be forgotten?
Whatever the decision about his fate, it could not have been unilate
rally political. In 2012, Navalny had angered the powerful head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, by revealing that he had founded a real estate firm in the Czech Republic. It was then that Bastrykin’s agency relaunched a case against Navalny based on the old embezzlement allegations. It was widely assumed, thus, that the persecution of Navalny was based as much on Bastrykin’s personal revenge as it was on political expediency.
By 2013, the opposition rallies had largely dwindled and Navalny didn’t seem to represent much of a political threat anymore, at least in the short term. The authorities seemed to be taking the careful approach: keep him free and let the trial take as long as possible, then, perhaps, hand down a suspended sentence that would, by law, bar him from public office but also let him stay out of jail. But in June, it was not clear what course the authorities would take.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally and an apparent liberal, suddenly called a snap election for the coming September. The move appeared baffling, but given several conflicting strategies the Kremlin was pursuing, it made political sense: that year, direct elections for governor had been reintroduced for the first time since 2004 – in an apparent liberal concession to the protesting classes. Running for mayor prematurely (for Sobyanin’s term wouldn’t expire until 2014) and winning (for there was no doubt he would win) would help bolster Sobyanin’s legitimacy and help deflate the opposition’s claims that elections in Russia were rigged.
More importantly, it would play into a general drive towards democracy-building supported by many of those close to Putin, and, contrary to appearances, by Putin himself. As we have seen in previous chapters, Putin’s government is not averse to democracy, in fact it has spent considerable resources building up democratic institutions – as long as those institutions function on the Kremlin’s own terms.
When Navalny announced he would run for mayor, it was not clear whether this decision was the result of negotiations with Sobyanin’s administration, or simply a desperate bid to make it more difficult for the authorities to jail him. But as the situation developed, it became evident that Sobyanin had an interest in keeping Navalny in the race. In an unprecedented move, the incumbent mayor publicly called on municipal deputies to endorse Navalny, helping him get the necessary 110 municipal signatures so that he could be registered as mayoral candidate.290 Neither Navalny nor his campaign manager Leonid Volkov were keen on drawing attention to it, but it was a fact that Navalny would not have been able to gather the necessary number of signatures on his own. Not because of political pressure, but because most municipal deputies, mostly members of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, couldn’t consider endorsing anyone but the man in power.
These overtures from Sobyanin bolstered Navalny’s popularity. But it would take another move from the government to really set his campaign in motion. That move came on July 18, when Navalny, against the hopes and expectations of many, was sentenced to five years in jail and taken into custody. Although a conviction barred him from public office, technically he would remain eligible until the conviction and the sentence took effect, pending appeals.
Navalny’s arrest brought thousands of people to the streets to demonstrate just outside the Kremlin for his release. Whether it was due to the rally or, as some speculation had it, to Sobyanin’s lobbying, or both, another spectacular thing occurred: Navalny was released the following day after prosecutors suddenly changed their minds about taking him into custody.
This evident indecisiveness on the part of the government galvanized Navalny’s supporters. His campaign staff began organizing aggressive meetings with Muscovites around the city. His volunteers were all but campaigning door-to-door, in the best Western traditions.
But even among his more moderate supporters, murmurings began that questioned what, exactly, made Navalny so different from Putin. Always a fierce debater, Navalny had mostly resorted to figures and facts when fighting his opponents as he battled corruption. But suddenly, he had taken on an overly aggressive flair. At one point, when confronted about his nationalist views, he was borderline rude, retorting to a journalist’s question with a sarcastic “Hello?!!”291 The political analyst Nikolai Zlobin was rudely rebuked by Navalny’s campaign manager Leonid Volkov for questioning Navalny’s programme. In response, Zlobin likened Navalny’s style to Putin’s.292
When leaked evidence was published that Navalny had registered a company in Montenegro in 2007, Navalny lashed out at those who dug up the report as being hired detractors – but didn’t address the evidence, and brushed off the incident itself by vaguely saying he had only planned to register a firm, but never did so.293 There was nothing illegal, of course, about registering such a firm, but given Navalny’s crusade against government officials with property abroad, it was a circumstance that a more experienced, Western politician might have addressed with better skill and less animosity.
Some journalists, meanwhile, began noticing that Navalny would only grant interviews to friendly outlets. His mobile number, once accessible, would now only answer to the select few – so that it became easier to reach Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, than Putin’s foe, Alexei Navalny. It seemed that the “love” he spoke about from the stage would be bestowed not necessarily on those who shared his views, but on those who were loyal to him personally.
More prominently, his popularity was increasingly becoming compared to a personality cult, with a number of fellow oppositionists likening his speech on September 9 to that of a Führer. Referring to Navalny as a “messianic” leader was becoming increasingly commonplace.294
What accounted for this kind of behaviour from a leader whose entire programme was built on opposing what he called a corrupt, authoritarian, and self-serving regime?
That answer, just as with the answer to many questions about Vladimir Putin, lies with the myriad uncertainties faced by Russian society as a whole. As I write this in October 2013, no one knows what will happen to Navalny. Putin, who was elected president for a third term in March 2012, will be up for re-election in 2018 – a re-election that he has not ruled out. If Navalny wants to run for president in 2018 – something he has admitted – he would not only have to maintain and increase his following, but fight the courts to get his conviction overturned. Given the dependency of the courts on the Presidential Administration, that would take careful back-door negotiations and the support of patrons close to Putin.
Nor is Putin’s own future fully certain. For six years, the government had funnelled a good share of its resources – both monetary and ideological – towards the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. Rife with corruption and scandal, a lot of effort went into maintaining the kind of stability necessary to pull off such an ambitious project. There was talk, even, that political decisions, from a parliamentary reshuffle to decisions involving the volatile North Caucasus region nearby – in particular, Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechnya – were put on hold until after the Olympics in order to avoid destabilization. Many predicted a new wave of corruption scandals and sackings.295 Such tension leading up to one single sporting event – no matter how big – creates inevitable uncertainty after the fact. Would the Olympics prove to have been a force holding things together? Would the absence of an ambitious, consolidating project, amid a stagnating economy, exacerbate political and economic instability and the centrifugal forces that have perennially plagued such a large country as Russia?
Whatever happens to Navalny, he himself is not a major part of the equation. Whether in jail or free, he may fail to garner the kind of political support that will be necessary to eventually propel him into any kind of office, and be forgotten. Or he may become the client of powerful patrons within the government and the oligarchy who may, through a number of government posts, eventually groom him into potential presidential material. The transfer of power to a person like Navalny can come quietly, from within the government, or it can come through revolution violent or bloodless, for Russia has seen both varieties.
Why is this the case? Why can’t a society just elect a leader who will rule in accordance with the law, in accordance with democratic procedure? Because first there must be laws a society has agreed upon.
I have evaded this question throughout the book, primarily because such a question presumes we are dealing with a problem that needs to be fixed, whereas I believe we are instead dealing with a problem that first needs to be understood.
The dominant assumption about Russia – held for over a hundred years by both Russian philosophers and outside observers – is that Russians tend to forge an intrinsically collectivist society, where the interests of the group predominate over those of the individual. The idea, which pitted Russian society against a presumably individualistic West, is so dominant that communists used it to justify their ideology, arguing that communism was a natural destiny for collectivist Russia, while capitalist reformers during the 1990s tried to “cure” Russians of collectivism by imposing an individualistic doctrine. It is telling that both attempts proved, to various degrees, disastrous. Perhaps the collectivism that the communists tried to exploit, and the market capitalists tried to cure, was actually lacking?