The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (3 page)

Five months later, on August 17, a court found the three women guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, sentencing them to two years in a penal colony.

Father Boris didn’t want to discuss the case or the verdict. Initially, on the phone, he demurred and suggested I talk to someone higher up in the church hierarchy, explaining that they would be more knowledgeable.

“I’m telling you, it’s being blown out of proportion,” he kept saying with a smile. He was convinced, for instance, that, according to Russian state television there had been a copycat performance in Europe and the participants had been sentenced to jail. In reality, they had been fined for causing a disturbance, not imprisoned for a federal crime.

The truth was that, like many average Russians who reluctantly shared their views with me about the Pussy Riot case, he didn’t seem to have an opinion about the verdict. The group and what they had done disgusted him; as he saw it, their careless, self-serving affront to their own people, a people they did not even try to understand, was
not worth the words that we were wasting on them.

But there was a clear sense that the only reason we were talking about them was because the government decided to put them on trial. And that just didn’t seem to be any of his business.

“What can we do, if something political happens?” he said at length. “Do everything with love.”

“So can you just translate the word itself into Russian, or not?” Vladimir Putin asked the journalist provocatively, “or does it make you uncomfortable?”

It was the second time he’d tried to get Kevin Owen, his British interviewer for RT, the state-owned, English-language Russia Today channel, to say “Pussy Riot” in Russian – with no success. The band had an English name that everyone understood to be far cruder in Russian; the group was referred to using the English words. Owen tried to laugh it off; Putin smiled and tried again. “Maybe you can’t, for ethical reasons,” he said finally, smiling no longer.

Owen tried changing the subject. “Actually, I’d thought it was referring to a ‘cat’, but maybe I’m missing a point… Anyway, do you think that… the case was handled wrongly in any way?”

But Putin cut him off, raising his voice slightly. “You understand everything perfectly. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”

Owen, who was not a native Russian speaker, could be forgiven for misunderstanding. While crude, the English “pussy” is still a euphemism, not nearly as obscene as “cunt.” But Pussy Riot – as the group had named itself – was clearly aiming for the only Russian equivalent –
pizda
.

And Putin would try to make another journalist, this time a Russian, also translate the English name of the band into their native language, pushing him towards saying an obscenity on national television.

“I want to ask you about the punk group ‘Pussy Riot,’” Vadim Takmenev, a presenter at the federal NTV channel, asked in a two-hour long documentary that purported to portray the “real” Putin – with his dog, at breakfast, at the gym, and at the pool, where he spent most mornings. Takmenev, a seasoned prime time host and,
unlike Owen, a Russian, asked the more “uncomfortable” questions with a self-conscious nervousness.

But Putin seemed to have his own agenda. “How is the name translated?” he asked back.

“Yes, I know,” the presenter tried to smile, trying to nod away the obscenity.

“Can you say it?”

“I can’t say it.”

“Can you say it to your audience?” Putin insisted. “For people who don’t study foreign languages?”

Instead of saying the obscenity, the presenter said something unintentionally revealing.

“I can’t say it in front of you,” he gave in.

Putin laughed out loud. “If you can’t say it in front of me, then it’s an obscene word. You see? Those were talented girls. They forced all of you to say it. What, is that good?”
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It was early October 2012, nearly two months after the verdict that sent Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina to a penal colony (the third, oldest participant, Yekaterina Samutsevich, would be freed on probation at an appeals hearing just days after the interview aired). Putin no longer had to worry about his statements pressuring the court. He was using crudeness to make a point about how the women had undermined society’s moral norms.

He also seemed, unbeknownst to him, to be following in the footsteps of Nicholas I, who had the poet Alexander Polezhayev brought into his presence in the middle of a winter’s night in 1836, to force him to read a far less crude poem.

Before the audience, someone had made sure that all of Polezhayev’s buttons were in place, for Nicholas was notoriously pedantic. After sizing up the student with his serpentine gaze, Nicholas handed him a notebook with his poem. “Read it out loud,” he ordered, but Polezhayev, feeling the Tsar’s eyes on him, was too petrified.

“I can’t,” he said. This was not just terror of the Tsar, who had clearly already read the poem: Polezhayev’s work contained words that, in those times, were considered indecent; and he could hardly bring himself to utter something dirty in that sacred presence.

“Read!” the Tsar ordered. Polezhayev read. The Tsar lectured him for a moment, then suggested that the young poet join the army
as a soldier, recommending that he use the opportunity of military service to cleanse his soul. As they parted, the Tsar kissed him.
⁹
Polezhayev would spend the rest of his life as a soldier; at the age of 34 he died in a military hospital from tuberculosis.

Like Nicholas facing an upper class revolt, Putin seemed to have found himself suddenly becoming a guarantor not just of the Constitution, but of the moral norms that often contradicted it. He was privatizing God, he was proclaiming his rights to the souls of his subjects, and he hadn’t the strength to conceal it any longer.

It was as though a façade had cracked: with the jailing of three women for dancing in a church, something that had lain dormant underneath, that we had thought we’d outgrown, was spilling out onto the surface, to ours, and to Vladimir Putin’s dismay, amid haphazard efforts to patch up the hole with repressive measures that only made it grow. It was as though the unmitigated relationship between a human being and his government was laid bare, along with the underlying mandate of Russian governance: a mystical mandate that preceded democratic institutions by thousands of years, a mandate that came down to something as simple as strength versus weakness, food or death, master or God. That an unlikely, poker-faced former KGB officer found himself at the apex of this primordial chaos and had initially tried to suppress it only accentuated its resilience.

It had started with the Dmitry Medvedev conundrum. For four years, Vladimir Putin had ruled from the seat of the prime minister, to where he had withdrawn in 2008 to preserve the letter of the Constitution, which forbade more than two consecutive presidential terms. For president, he handpicked a lawyer he had worked with for decades. And while Russians implicitly understood who the real boss was, there was an eagerness to play the political game, to bet on the soft-spoken liberal, to speculate whether he would run for a second term. Indeed, until the very end, the question of whether Dmitry Medvedev was merely a placeholder or a true successor remained shrouded in intrigue. Most importantly, even Putin – known to make decisions at the last minute – seemed eager to give him a chance, to test whether institutional – rather than personal – authority was strong enough to survive.

For months running up to the 2012 decision, rumours of a rift between the two men festered, fuelled, deliberately, by the Kremlin
itself. The suspense seemed necessary to uphold a façade of politics, as if getting politicians to take part in the rehearsal would eventually usher in the real thing. Then, sometime during the summer of 2011, the decision was quietly made between Putin, Medvedev and a few key insiders: the president was not going to run for a second term, and Putin would return to the Kremlin.

When Putin and Medvedev finally announced their decision in September 2011, admitting that they had reached it privately “years ago,” it came as a demoralizing blow to a whole swathe of society that had got used to the motions of democratic process, even if they understood that those motions were flawed. No one was surprised that Putin was returning to the Kremlin – they were shocked that he had admitted, so nonchalantly, that it wasn’t any of their business and never had been. It was as if, standing before 11,000 delegates of his majority United Russia party, he had admitted that it was all just a game used to bewilder his subjects, but that it had become too confusing, arcane, and risky to carry on with.

It took about two months for the frustrations in that swathe of society to boil over. The December 4 parliamentary elections became the tipping point. It did not matter that Putin’s United Russia party, though still winning, garnered far fewer votes than in the previous elections, nor that the vote rigging alleged was about the same – if not less – than last time. The damage had already been done, the gauze curtain had been punctured, and thousands of people began spilling into the streets in protest.

For the Putin generation, come of age under the high oil prices of his pseudo-autocracy, it was like a form of psychotherapy as they began articulating their attitudes in an attempt to desanctify state power. “You are not a Tsar, not a God,” a group of veteran paratroopers sang at rallies, joining an urban, professional class. After the president ridiculed their white ribbons and compared them to condoms, the protesters turned up with all sorts of creative descriptions for the president as a used condom. Sex – which, under Putin, emerged for the first time as an explicit feature of a personality cult around a Russian leader – proved an easy target. At one rally, a girl boldly proclaimed “I do not want you,” in a country where a fifth of the female population did.
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She may have not meant it, but she seemed to be suggesting that sexual willingness was a key
condition of political loyalty. “A president who is not doing it with his wife is doing it to his country,” a protest leader proclaimed from the stage at the same rally. A day after Putin won the presidential vote in the first round, another leader proclaimed from the stage that the rigged elections had been tantamount to rape.

The Kremlin’s initial response to the protests was to act as though this was a normal part of the democratic process. When rallies broke out in early December, as people feared bloody clashes, city authorities took a consistent line on allowing mass demonstrations. A top government official praised the upper class demonstrators as “the best part of our society” and Putin proclaimed that he was “pleased” to see them protesting – it meant that the civil society he was so eager to foster was taking root.

To demonstrate just how serious he was about democracy, he invited them for dialogue – and even designated liberals in his government as potential mediators.

But within two months of the first protests, in early February 2012, it was already clear that the dialogue just didn’t seem to be happening – as one of the mediators told me then.

It may have been that Putin never wanted genuine dialogue, or maybe he didn’t immediately recognize that by being open to dialogue he must be open to giving up the reins of power. Maybe he earnestly believed that the kind of democratic façade he had instituted was indeed the real thing, just like those gadgets they had in Europe that he was so keen to import. Maybe dialogue, to him, meant something on his own terms, a recognition of token concessions from him in order to bring the dissenters back into the fold.

But the opposition, too, had little experience in political activity – in a country where, as they said themselves, politics did not yet exist. The most charismatic voice to emerge from the movement, lawyer and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, initially refused to run for office in a campaign that he did not recognize as real. When he finally ran for Moscow mayor in the summer of 2013, as we shall see later in this book, it was a forced decision. With Navalny facing a conviction that would bar him from public office, the liberal Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin eagerly backed him as a contender to ensure a competitive election, knowing full well Navalny could never pose a real threat.

In early 2012, without a clear political platform, and with demands that were clearly fixated on Putin’s personal removal from power, the protest rallies bore all the marks of a carnival – at once hopeful, enlightening, and cathartic – but harbouring something darker underneath. If the rallies were a carnival, a true carnival carries the threat of death.
¹¹

Inadvertently, an underlying current in the protest movement seemed intent on provoking Putin to reveal himself as a true autocrat, a feudal sovereign who would respond to revolt with physical repression, jailings and torture – either subduing his people, or giving them a pretext to depose him.

For lack of an alternative, the confrontation between the “best part of society” and its ruler began to turn into a mirroring process, a game of chicken between two thugs of clearly unequal strength, staring at each other, waiting to see who would budge. It wasn’t about politics, it was about something that predated politics: sheer, brute force, and who had more self-confidence.

When dialogue didn’t happen, the Kremlin stopped pretending. Out went the Kremlin official who praised the “best part of society,” and in came Soviet-style propaganda. To rival the carnival-like protests, the administration began rallying masses from all over the country – with a gentle mix of financial enticement and coercion. Teachers, accountants, nurses, clerks on the state budget, when given tickets to attend pro-Putin rallies in Moscow, didn’t really see it as much of a choice: When your boss tells you it’s voluntary, then it’s mandatory.

If the inadvertent temptation of the protesting opposition had been to bring out the feudal sovereign in a bureaucrat struggling to play the game of democracy, then they succeeded. With the elections a week away, he wasn’t asking for their votes, he was asking them to lease their bodies and souls as the price of economic stability.