The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (2 page)

Putin appeared to have flaunted somewhat of an autocratic streak when he reined in independent television stations and chased out or jailed disloyal oligarchs. But compare him to the spectrum of Russian rulers, and he emerges as less of an autocrat than we have habitually assumed. In a historical context, Putin has demonstrated a lack of any easily identifiable ideology or even agenda, other than remaining in power, accumulating wealth for the loyal segment of the elite, and, where possible, restoring the semblance of order and imperial grandeur (semblance, here, is the key word). While he has definitely demonstrated a willingness to “resolve issues” by extrajudicial means and instigate repressions where necessary, he hasn’t inherently shown himself to be a strong leader – his notorious performances berating errant oligarchs notwithstanding, he has demonstrated, as we shall see, a laxity in firing and punishing corrupt officials even while promoting a campaign to fight corruption. Instead, by virtue of character and profession (and very much through an extension of his often noted personal character trait of reflecting the tone, gestures, and mood of whoever he is listening to), he has acted as a mirror of society, a product of his times, reflecting what was desired of him on a subconscious level. If he set out, as he claims he did, to impose a “dictatorship of the law” – essentially the Weberian legal rational state – then he has failed. Instead, he has succeeded in bringing out the complexes that Russians had forgotten they had. Seeing the need for a good Tsar and a patrimonial lord, he played the part expertly; seeing the need for
a despot to be feared, he played that too. And where necessary, of course, he was the businessman, one who could easily strike a deal or offer protection in a lawless country.

By acting as a mirror, Putin exposed and entrenched ancient habits that had never gone away, offering us an opportunity to see them in action. He served, essentially, as an easily recognizable caricature of Russian state power itself – quasi-divine, corrupt, at times brutal, and in charge of the country’s vast economic resources. Struggling to rule at the apex of a legal-rational state (as witnessed by his efforts to impose a “dictatorship of the law”), he has, to a large extent, allowed himself to be subjugated by the inner, patrimonial state. With Putin at the helm, the patrimonial state has in turn subjugated the legal-rational state, particularly its layered, tangled bureaucratic apparatus. Finally, acting within the unwritten paradigm of the patrimonial state, Putin has allowed society to mould him into a sort of sacred king, a role that many Russian leaders inadvertently assume.

As I traverse the inner, patrimonial state, I try in this book to reveal how that has happened.

For approximately four years, beginning in late 2008, I gathered interviews and case studies, trying to shed light on the patterns and expectations that moulded the Russian leader. Closely watching his interactions with his people, I studied how he responded to these expectations and how he reinforced and took advantage of existing psychological and economic patterns. My work on this book was aided by the fact that these four years marked a peculiar period of what has been termed by Russia watchers as “tandemocracy”: the apotheosis of the legal-rational world clashing with the neopatrimonial. Russia,
de jure
, was governed by elected President Dmitry Medvedev, but,
de facto
, ruled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Seeing Putin up close during that period presented me with a chance for an unprecedented experiment: how do we, his subjects, the journalists, the businessmen, the officials, know, at gut level, that he, Prime Minister Putin, and not President Medvedev, is our real leader?

The Putin Mystique
is structured to reflect how various groups of people along the social hierarchy experience supreme power in Russia. The titles of its four parts use 16th century caste terminology
to suggest the patrimonial parallels and historical origins, but should not be taken literally.

I begin with an examination of how people – including myself – behave in the ruler’s immediate presence, in a chapter that opens the first part of this book. Featuring examples from several regions outside Moscow, the first part deals with the economic aspect of how Russians relate to local, regional, federal and, ultimately, supreme authority. When institutional authority fails, people will resort to supreme authority, with appeals that are sometimes as irrational as those to a deity.

The second part of this book deals with the government’s security and repressive apparatus – and the feudal “understandings” that govern that apparatus in the weakness of the rule of law. Ostensibly, it is a section about corruption – but as several of the cases I describe show, corruption may not be the right word for a far more endemic phenomenon of tax farming and protection rackets, mechanisms that, in the absence of functional institutions to protect property rights, get the job done.

The third part details how businessmen interact with state power and what role is played by their personal connections to Vladimir Putin. Given the murky rules in a world that struggles to play by the arcane, contradictory network of formal laws, business in Russia can be a deadly gamble that depends on patronage, luck, and, ultimately, your favour at court.

The fourth and final part examines the mythical, psychological and ideological packaging of supreme state power in Russia – quasi-divine, sacred, and thus prone to personality cults that have taken on a curiously sexual dimension in the 21st century. In a patrimonial setting, displays of affection can take place spontaneously from below – and some of the most fascinating material I was able to gather was the testimony of members of pro-Kremlin youth groups seduced by the state through glamour, money, and the exploitation of a primordial relationship to authority. The recent popular street demonstrations against Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 provided valuable evidence of the experience of patrimonial power from the perspective of dissent. The case of Pussy Riot – three female members of a punk band jailed for singing an anti-Putin song from the sacred altar steps of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour
Cathedral – hit at the heart of the mystical foundations of the patrimonial-irrational state, and is an important case study in this book. The penultimate chapter traces the Kremlin’s closeness to the church – or, rather, the church as an appendage to the Kremlin – in the the context of power cults through history.

At first glance, economic micromanagement, corruption, personality cults and divine mandate appear to be largely unconnected themes. Indeed, I initially conceived this book as a far less ambitious investigation into the outward displays of Putin’s personality cult. It became clear, however, that those displays could not be understood without delving into the deep patrimonial state that predated Putin.

I realized that economic dependency and endemic corruption were crucial factors without which it would be impossible to answer my central question: what makes the deification of the state, and of the state personified, possible in a modern society?

What has emerged in this book is a problem that has permeated Russia’s history but has far wider implications: a superb confusion about the role of Caesar and God. It is a confusion that affects those who hold power, but it rests with those who give up their powers in exchange for order, abundance, and justice. It is also a confusion that has hampered even recent efforts by Russia’s fledgling opposition movement to build the foundations of a functioning civil society. This creates a persistent paradox in any attempt to forge a functioning legal-rational state in Russia: change cannot happen as long as such gargantuan expectations are placed squarely on a government seen as so absolutely omnipotent that it is expected to transcend itself and curb its own powers. Without a clear delineation between secular and temporal power, there is little room for the rule of law, regardless of who assumes the role of Caesar.

Finally, I should address some questions and misunderstandings that have come up since the first edition was published in Danish in March 2012. Part of the complexity of this book (aside from its eclectic scope) stems from the fact that I examine a current phenomenon through a historical prism, becoming a journalist treading on academic ground. I am writing about Putin and his subjects as though they have long passed away; as though the author is separated from her subject matter not just by time, but by space. In reality, of course, as a Russian living under Putin’s rule, I am very
much in the picture. This book does not seek to be an academic study of modern patrimonialism and its causes. Instead, it seeks to reflect the real experiences – both objective and subjective – of living in a patrimonial state.

For that reason, I also feel I need to answer one question up front: what is my own opinion of Vladimir Putin? Is this book a critique, an apology, or an indictment?

Even from this introduction, it may sound as though I am shifting the blame for Russia’s current problems from Putin to the people themselves. When I describe Putin as being moulded into a sacred king, it may give the mistaken impression that he is blameless and powerless in this process. This, of course, is not so – Putin has cunningly taken advantage of social phenomena that predate him to further the livelihood of his friends and to ensure his hold on power. However, his agency in this process should not be overestimated: when examining leaders, we tend to focus on the
the will to power
, forgetting that to make the domination of one man possible, it also takes the will of millions to follow.

Putin’s rise to power is not the subject of this book, since I seek to go beneath politics and policy to look at how human beings experience state power within the patrimonial state. The aim is not to shift the blame from the person in power to the people, or to deny that Putin is responsible for what he has become, but to look at a previously unexamined process – what role the people have played in moulding a patrimonial leader. Despite the controversial material described, this book is not meant to indict either the Russian leader or, more importantly, Russians themselves.

Readers have asked me whether the first lines of this book are to be taken literally. I wrote them more as an expression of the collective unconscious than as a statement of a rationalized desire, for I believe that such yearnings, when unmitigated, are incompatible with human integrity and dignity.

And yet they exist, and exist in all of us.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.

For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

- Romans 13:1

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

- Matthew 22:21

Shit, shit, holy shit. Shit, shit, holy shit.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, banish Putin.

- Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer.
February 2012

FATHER BORIS FLASHED his eyes and turned away momentarily. “That’s interesting. The church and state. But why not? What’s wrong with that? It has been like that, the [harmony] of the powers, the spiritual and the material.”

He was referring to
Symphonia,
the harmony and interdependency of spiritual and temporal authority that had been a hallmark of Orthodox Christianity since the Byzantine Empire. But there was a contradiction: the Russian Constitution explicitly separated church
and state, but implicitly, that separateness just didn’t make any sense. Not to church authorities, who had implied that summer that the separation of church and state was bad for Russia and hence did not exist, and not for the priest.

We were sitting on the only bench in the priest’s rural church. He had looked, for a second, as though he had thought a lot about my question, and yet seemed startled, as if I had come at him from a different ethical plane. I had asked him about the relationship between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake of possibly the most bizarre court verdict in Russia’s recent history – that in the Pussy Riot case.

“The Bible says that Man was created as one whole, [body and soul]. I am not against that harmony,” the priest said, his eyes crinkling and shining as he looked directly at me. “Power comes from God; the people get the ruler that they deserve.”

It was August 2012. His rural church was in the throes of reconstruction, as a bearded, Orthodox-looking worker drilled outside, with a view towards a river and a rolling, grassy meadow. We were on the edge of the Moscow Region, about 100 km from the capital, about a half-hour’s bike ride on a dusty road to the nearest settlement. With its forests on the horizon, the lifestyle there seemed to have changed little in the past couple of decades, perhaps centuries.

Built in the 1830s, the church had stood in ruins for as long as I could remember. During the 1930s, on orders from the new Bolshevik authorities, it was – not demolished, no, but its bricks were taken to build a pig farm nearby. Around 2007, I had noticed that it was being reconstructed. Then a wooden cottage and a garden went up nearby, with a few milk goats, and Father Boris was sent to serve in the church. His parish consisted mostly of Muscovites who had bought dachas, or summer homes, in the vicinity; natives were becoming increasingly scarce.

In his 50s, with a bushy brown beard and laughing eyes, he was originally a Muscovite himself, who became an Orthodox Christian well into adulthood, after years of atheism. He married and was ordained, then found himself here, living in a wooden house with no plumbing, between a forest, a field and the church. In his faith, he tended to lean towards the conservatism of those who had found God later in life.

“Like the army,” he said of the orders to serve in the rural church, and smiled. It wasn’t clear if he was joking, or if the humour was dark or merely grey.

For half an hour, I had been trying to get him to talk about Pussy Riot, five female punk artists who had donned coloured balaclavas and tights, and tried to lip sync in Moscow’s biggest church, Christ the Saviour Cathedral. In their song, they had appealed to the Virgin Mary to deliver them from Vladimir Putin. Two weeks after their performance, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia for a third term, after a four-year hiatus as prime minister under the nominal presidency of Dmitry Medvedev. Just days after the March 4 election, three members of the band were arrested and charged with hooliganism. Hardly anyone had heard of them or their radical art group; if average Russians were preoccupied with anything in that remote realm of power and politics, it was with the unprecedented opposition protests that had spilled out into the street ahead of Putin’s presidential campaign. While Pussy Riot’s church stunt outraged religious Russians, no one paid much attention, not until the church started publicly condemning them, not until Vladimir Putin condemned them himself.