The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (12 page)

The broadcast that night was the circus that came after the bread. Touring the plant, Putin asked plant managers why they had “turned it into such a dump.”

At the meeting, he turned up in jeans and a beige jacket that he didn’t bother to take off. He slouched in his chair, and he had only one hand on the table. He perfected a look of boredom and annoyance more terrifying than any flash of anger.

“I didn’t have to come here. We could all have met in Moscow. But I still decided to come here – not because I wanted to look at the empty factory, but because I wanted the authors of all this to look at this –” he paused and scowled. “Everything. That happened.
Here. For them to come and look at it themselves.” The dull thud of the fingertips of his right hand on the table next to his microphone punctuated each word.

“You’ve made thousands of people hostage to your unprofessionalism and your greed. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

And there it was – the popular legend of a benevolent, unknowing Tsar, and his vassals, the
boyars
, who lead him astray:

“No one can convince me that regional authorities did all they could to help the people. They didn’t want me to come here. They tried to convince me to see another new plant. I’m sure it was a great plant. But why did everyone scatter like cockroaches just before my visit? Why weren’t there people here who could make decisions?”

Deripaska was shown close up, bowing his head and covering his eyes with his fists – the lowest any oligarch had fallen since Mikhail Khodorkovsky was shown in a courtroom cage. Then followed the most humiliating moment: Putin produced a contract enabling all three plants to restart production.

“Oleg Vladimirovich, did you sign this? I don’t see your signature,” Putin said quietly and motioned with his fingers for Deripaska to stand up. “Come here and sign it.” Putin placed the contract at the edge of his table, took his pen – the one he had in his right hand throughout the meeting – and threw it on the contract just as Oleg Deripaska came up to the table.

“That contract right there,” Putin motioned.

Standing up, clearly a head taller than the seated Putin, Deripaska bent and bowed over the contract as he signed its pages. He looked up questioningly at Putin (there was a reason for that) when he was finished and quietly walked away.

As he turned, Putin delivered a final coup de grâce: “Give me my pen back.” He said that phrase so quietly, so deprecatingly, that there is still no absolute certainty about the exact words he used.

Whatever consolation the bread and circuses provided, it was temporary for a very simple reason: most people fully understood not only that Putin’s performance was just that, a mere performance, but that very little of what he said at the meeting was true.

To start with, the very contract that Deripaska was forced to sign was widely believed to be fake – sources at BaselCement Pikalevo repeatedly pointed out that a contract on raw materials
could only legally be signed by the general directors of the actual factories – not by the chief of the Basic Element empire.

It did not go unnoticed, too, that Deripaska had just benefited from a $4.5 billion bailout from the government, after lobbying Putin personally for the first of many such bailouts throughout the crisis.

But the very fact that Putin noticed his people’s plight and castigated an oligarch for neglecting his ancient duties as baron was met with immense gratitude.

“We would fall at his feet,” a woman said two years later in Pikalevo – even as she brushed off Putin’s appearance with Deripaska as an orchestrated spectacle. Obviously Putin was on the side of the barons, but at least he made it known that mere subjects deserved care and better treatment.

An opinion poll released in late June 2009 found that an overwhelming 69 percent of respondents felt that Putin did the right thing by resolving the problems at Pikalevo. But when asked who was at fault over the situation itself, just 12 percent blamed the federal government, with 34 percent placing responsibility on plant owners, and 31 percent blaming local government.
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But in the daily reality of life in Pikalevo, the actual feelings towards Putin and the government were far more ambivalent – the people still saw Putin as doing far less than he could have.

“Putin could nationalize us if only he wanted to,” Svetlana Antropova, the union leader, told us. She had sat in the first row, right next to general director Anatoly Maslikov, and reported to Putin about the wage arrears during the June 4 meeting. “But they’re trying to keep everyone happy. Every time I see Putin on TV, there’s Deripaska. But he could stamp his foot and say, ‘Oleg, you’re going to sell today…. I allow you to do this and that, under the following concessions.’”

On the one hand, the knee-jerk gratitude appeared to be genuine. “The people associated Putin with these salaries, that it was all thanks to him,” Antropova recalled. “Especially the women. I had one come in and tell me, ‘Sveta, I love Putin so much.’ And I told her, ‘You go on loving him, dear. I don’t love anybody.’ Because first they had to let it get so out of hand. For things to heat up. For people to block the roads. And only then come down and sort things out.”

On the other hand, almost everyone we spoke to admitted that there was something deeply wrong with calling in Putin as a way to solve their problems. At the same time, no one could pinpoint what, exactly, could have been done without Putin’s personal intervention in what were, essentially, the workings of three private enterprises.

Andrei Petrov described a mix of hope and regret in the way people interpreted Putin’s intervention.

“It was unusual. It was probably… [he paused] what [the people] had been waiting for, though they hadn’t said it themselves, and didn’t understand. But they were happy that it happened. Though they understood that this was wrong, that it’s not the way [to solve problems]. But they were glad.

“At that moment, the people were trying to change things in any way possible. Whether they understood that this was wrong – I think a lot of them didn’t – they were [overwhelmed by emotion]. I understood this only subconsciously. Only after so much time has passed did I begin to understand that this was wrong.”

And if Putin’s intervention gave them their salaries and jump-started the factories, it solved none of Pikalevo’s underlying problems.

“They heard us, but not quite. We got our salaries, yes, but they haven’t gone up. Not much has changed really,” Yelena Matuzova said.

“We had this hope that he would come here and change something. We hoped that they would fire Serdyukov. [Putin] promised long term agreements within a year. But there are no agreements.”

By December 2011, Yelena Matuzova had turned against Putin. She had trusted him, but he had betrayed that trust, and nothing had changed at her factory.

Indeed, the lack of interest in any potential legislation that could help empower the workers was striking. In the wake of Putin’s visit, the State Duma held the first reading of a law on nationalization that would allow the government to take over control of failed enterprises like those of Pikalevo, but this was clearly a publicity stunt and the law was never passed. Meanwhile, when locals were asked about nationalization, they nodded with lukewarm approval at best. The intricacies of management didn’t seem to concern them, for their domain was their work and their salaries – the rest, they seemed to be saying, was none of their business.

Andrei Petrov was just one of several locals who noticed this passivity in conversation with us. He described seeing workers unwilling to talk to one another about the events they were taking part in; at the plant, they hardly communicated their plans – not because they were afraid or because their communication took on a conspiratorial air, but because there was little constructive communication to speak of.

“The people that took part in the events – on the road, at the mayor’s office – they are very passive. When they’re sitting in their own kitchens, they care about what happens. But when it comes to action, they don’t do anything.”

Were they afraid to lose the little they had? Were they afraid of a reaction from the authorities? Andrei shook his head.

“No. It’s just a passive reaction of the Russian man. Especially in a small town. He’s interested in very little. He’s not interested in public life. This participation used to be forced, there were demonstrations and
subbotniks
[Saturdays of obligatory volunteer work]. But there’s none of that left. On the clock, within the gates of the factory – and then home – that’s his world.”

The origins of that kind of behaviour go back to the archetypical Soviet enterprise, but their autocratic nature was clearly embedded over centuries – a survival mechanism that often favoured a dysfunctional
status quo
over a potentially “free” future where there was no work at all, and thus no hope of sustenance from an inhospitable land.

The writer Alexei Ivanov describes a telling incident involving iron ore factories in the Urals during the 18th century. When, in 1773, the Pugachev Rebellion promised land to factory workers and peasants – all under the yoke of serfdom – the factory workers refused, and turned violently on the peasants. In this miniature civil war, “All were unfree. But they each wanted their own captivity. The workers didn’t want lands, for they had forgotten how to till them…. The workers chose their factories over freedom.”
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During the Soviet Union, despite ownership being in the hands of the state, the local administration of factories remained deeply patrimonial.

Sociologist Simon Clarke, for instance, described a Soviet enterprise as headed by an all-powerful director who answered
straight to Moscow for implementing the production plan and making sure that the workers were cared for. “The ideal general director would be the subject of stories of legendary achievements and enjoyed the loyalty and even the affection of his employees, symbolizing the enterprise and the achievements of its labour collective.”
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The very fabric of life proved to be so difficult that having a capable and just leader – one who could provide food, shelter, water, and benefits – under the given conditions was often a matter of life and death. But over centuries, this evolved into a disempowerment process that was often initiated by the workers themselves.

“Workers attributed their relative good or bad fortune to the personality of the chief…,” Clarke writes. “There was therefore a high degree of collusion by the workers in their own exploitation….”
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In a single industry town like Pikalevo, these archetypes are easily recognizable. The ideal plant director was Koren Badalyants, who managed alumina production with an iron fist from 1960 up through 1980. It was Badalyants who was credited with maintaining the highest salaries in the region, and, working within the Soviet allocation system, winning the choicest vacations for his workers. He built Pikalevo’s swimming pool – the pride of the town, which still bears a memorial to his name upon its entrance – and established some of the best kindergartens and schools.
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Sergei Sofyin – who, like Badalyants, was a home-grown director and thus an exception to a string of managers sent in from Moscow – elicited a similar awe due to his strong authoritarian and paternalistic streak.

An imposing man in his 60s with piercing eyes, Sofyin demonstrated a sincere connection with his plant that was valued by his workers. “Badalyants would say, the plant is my life,” he told us of his career at the plant, with tears welling up in his eyes. “I can’t add anything else to that.”
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But he was also efficient in making sure workers’ needs were met, locals said, calling him “strict but fair.” Yelena Matuzova, who got a two-room apartment from Sofyin, said that he should be the mayor instead of Veber, but doubted that he would choose to run after being fired from the plant.

Strong, popular local plant managers like Sofyin and Badalyants can serve as a key to understanding local attitudes towards supreme power in Russia. If they were seen as demigods, the awe and affection was also tempered with a fierce independence, and, most of all, an awareness of the leader’s “otherness.” For in the unwritten system of rules and rights that governed working relationships, the boss could enjoy the privileges provided by his caste as long as he never neglected to care for his workers.

In this sense, an expletive-ridden characterization by Pikalevo factory driver Kirill Karpov
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spoke volumes about the ambivalence that workers felt both for Putin and for “good” managers like Badalyants and Sofyin.

“They say all the right things. Seems to be a sensible guy. [Putin] can say [something so awful], then you see he’s not mad. Badalyants was like that. Could tell everyone to fuck off. He could lie to you and punish you [pertaining to both Badalyants and Putin]. But he was objective.”

Karpov claimed that he wasn’t afraid of his boss. When Badalyants raised his voice at him, Karpov said he threw his keys on the table and refused to work. “He didn’t raise his voice at me again. He was an [excellent] psychologist.”

And reverently, he said of Badalyants: “He was a boss.” As if there were no other real bosses in his experience.

Those contradictory experiences of management reflected the way locals experienced power on all levels – as a force that had an unwritten, God-given right to exploit them in exchange for bringing order to their lives. That meant that Putin’s interference, regardless of whether what he said was actually true or not, was an act of order in itself.

As Sofyin told us, “I think Putin’s visit was received as a manifestation of reason.”

It’s the Tsar on a horse, in a golden brocade,

With a posse of butchers around him,

Armed with axes and ready to hack and to hang,

And to execute at the Tsar’s pleasure