The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (36 page)

The same man would state on the record, more than a decade later, that Putin was sent by God to rule Russia.

Amid the increasing prominence of the Russian Orthodox Church during Putin’s third term in the Kremlin, baffled Western observers tried to explain this resurgence of religious traditionalism by a Kremlin courting the church in a bid to shore up its own legitimacy, as a government would lean on the church in countries where there was an independent church to lean on. What they failed to see was a dynamic that defied and inverted the Western tradition of church-state relations, where a powerful, independent Pope fought with and used kings for his own political purposes. The Orthodox Church was no equal partner. It was, instead, an institution largely subjugated by the government, and had been for hundreds of years. It was part of a tradition of caesaropapism, where temporal and spiritual power converged in the head of state. That tradition is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked factors among Westerners trying to make sense of everything from Soviet rule to what is happening in Russia today.

When Surkov said that that Putin was sent by God to rule Russia, he was referring to a problem as ancient as life itself.

For the sake of flattery or personal enrichment or security or protection from one who is stronger than you, or for the sake of material or existential comfort, human beings will do this with regard to other human beings: they will give them money or food to appease them, they will hang portraits on their walls of those already deified or about to be, or speak, in the very presence of the human being they wish to deify, of a pressing need to make him more like God. Today, amid the mitigating forces of de-personified institutions, this is done with a good dose of irony, just as the modern nod of
the head in greeting probably evolved from the gesture of falling on your face in complete prostration, anticipating and thus pre-empting harm at the hands of a much stronger member of your own species.

Whatever was happening in Russia in the 21
^st
century was no spontaneous innovation. To understand its nature, we have to recognize it as part of an innate pattern of thinking about power dating back into ancient history.

Going back far enough into the primordial origins of human nature, the deification of a ruler, the power cult itself, presents us with a chicken and egg question. Was the king first likened to a god, or were gods merely kings that went down as legend?

* * *

Four hundred years ago, in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of another dynasty, as the Time of Troubles came to a close in 1613 with the coronation of the first Romanov Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich, a certain Ivan Timofeyevich Semyonov, a clerk in the service of the Tsar, sat down to write a treatise on the history of the world.

In that treatise, Semyonov, or Timofeyev, as he would go down in history books, found himself grappling with a pressing conundrum: which of the two natures of the Tsar, the divine or the human, predominated?

Timofeyev was not elaborating on the nature of Jesus Christ – although a similar question would bother theologians from the earliest centuries of Christianity. Nor was he referring to a specific Russian Tsar that he may or may not have served. He was trying to spell out, instead, the nature of the very idea of Tsardom, laying down a framework for the kind of Tsar that he thought Russia deserved.

Timofeyev was no original thinker in that regard, but given the scarcity of surviving Russian documents, his
Vremennik
offers an important insight into the logical process behind the deification of the Russian ruler.

“Although as a human the Tsar was in his essence, he is by his power equal to God, for he is above all, and none on this earth is above him.”
²⁴²

Although his predecessors had elaborated on the dual nature of the Tsar, divine and human, Timofeyev seemed to have placed the
stress on the divine aspect. If the Tsar is equal to God, then equally, as God he must be sacred, omnipotent, and immortal.
²⁴³

Born in either 1550 or 1560, Timofeyev had survived the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was easy to see how Timofeyev and his contemporaries could be confused by that question during the Time of Troubles.

Just twenty years previously, Holy Rus had a tyrant who slaughtered his people in the name of God, but now, in the beginning of the 17
^th
century, didn’t seem to have a government at all. Given that Ivan betrayed his sacred mandate through his tyranny, and given that Boris Godunov betrayed his legal mandate through sacrilege, what made a Tsar truly legitimate enough to be the viceregent of God on earth?

As Timofeyev groped his way through that theological conundrum, he was influenced by two circumstances that possibly clashed with one another: the Byzantine legacy of the Basileus as the
de facto
head of the church, and the specific historical traumas that he and his contemporaries had stood witness to.

But his synthesis produced a Tsar whose absolute sacredness exceeded that of the Byzantine emperor, stipulating a relationship between the Tsar, the church and the subjects that went beyond the most stringent forms of caesaropapism ever known in the Byzantine or Catholic world.

The Tsar, Timofeyev wrote, can have dubious moral qualities, like Ivan and Boris; but whatever those qualities, by virtue of his position as having been enthroned by God he is to be praised and regarded “as God.” Where his subjects are concerned, the bodily, human aspect of the Tsar is virtually irrelevant, it is none of their business. Since only God can judge a Tsar, and since whatever abuse and tyranny the God-ordained ruler instigates against his subjects is merely God’s punishment for the sins of the people, it is also a crime against God, a heresy, to depose him.
²⁴⁴

Historians have noted this paradox in Timofeyev’s treatise: here he spends pages decrying the crimes of Ivan and Boris, elaborating on their betrayal of their God-given divine natures, and yet insists that the very office of the Tsar remains divine, while his subjects are not to make any distinction between their ruler and God.

If Byzantine thought drew parallels between God and the
monarch, then Russian thought in the 16th and 17th centuries went far beyond mere parallels, presupposing a sacralization of the monarch and attributing supernatural qualities to his persona.
²⁴⁵
“The idea that the Tsar gets his power from God was then transformed into a direct deification of the Tsar,” the Russian historian Vladimir Valdenberg wrote in 1916.
²⁴⁶

Just as Surkov was not, essentially, saying anything new or unusual, Timofeyev was merely quoting from a 6th century Byzantine deacon, Agapetus.

In one of a series of exhortations to Emperor Justinian, Agapetus wrote, “In the nature of his body the king is on a level with all other men, but in the authority attached to his dignity he is like God.”
²⁴⁷

Agapetus, in turn, was drawing on the 4th century bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea. In AD 335, standing in the presence
²⁴⁸
of the Roman Emperor Constantine, Eusebius delivered an oration in which he elaborated on a cosmos governed by one God, and a world governed by one ruler. “That ruler, the Roman Emperor, is the viceregent of the Christian God.”

Both Agapetus and Eusebius may have been projecting onto the new tenets of Christianity a more ancient, pagan form of power worship.

Here is how Athenians in the 3
^rd
century BC sang to the Macedonian king Demetrius I, as cited by the scholar Norman Russel in a telling illustration of the way the Greeks defined their relationship to royal power:

Other gods are either far away,

or they have no ears,

or they do not exist, or pay no attention to

us, not in the least;

but you we see before us,

not made of wood or stone but real.
²⁴⁹

In an incident faintly echoed in Putin’s response to the Pikalevo crisis in 2009, Emperor Nero’s moves to rebuild Pompei after an earthquake in 62 AD was experienced, in the eyes of the contemporary inhabitants, as a superhuman ability. It wasn’t that
people believed in the literal divinity of the emperor – it was just by virtue of status and living conditions he was as far above them, and as remotely detached from the fabric of their everyday existence as the gods.
²⁵⁰

After the conversion of Emperor Constantine, the transfer of the court to Constantinople and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century AD, the idea of the Celestial King was sublimated into the idea of the King on Earth, the Basileus, according to Mikhail Bibikov, a Russian scholar of Byzantine history. Emperors are depicted with haloes; mosaics show them walking in the company of Christ and the Apostles. The pre-Christian practice of proskynesis, the act of full prostration, becomes ritualized in the coronation ceremony: subjects, except for the patriarch, upon encountering the Basileus are to fall on their faces and kiss his feet (except, as Bibikov points out, on Sundays).
²⁵¹

Bibikov draws particular attention to the phenomenon of two thrones standing side by side, “one of them reserved for the Earthly King, who can be experienced through the proskynesis, the other for the [unseen] Celestial King.”
²⁵²

In the 6
^th
century, Emperor Justinian would spell out the living cohesion of the government and church as one body, reflecting this new mix of ancient power worship with the emerging legal-rational state: “The two greatest gifts which God, in his love for man, has granted from on high are: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, while the latter directs and administers human affairs; both, however, proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind.”
²⁵³

Here it was: the church-state
Symphonia
, or the harmony between temporal and spiritual power.

The Roman Emperor’s move from Rome to Byzantium in the 4th century AD had become pivotal in the eventual East-West schism that would separate the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church.

Leaving Rome behind for Byzantium, the Emperor helped foster an environment in the West where Roman bishops had no choice but to assume temporal authority either in the utter absence of it, or as they fought kings for influence. From the ruins of a crumbling empire, where bishops sometimes found themselves the only source of law and civil administration, the Western Papacy
emerged not only as a fully independent force, but one that had the power to depose kings. It was the Pope, not the emperor, who would become the Vicar of Christ, and it was his foot, and not that of a temporal emperor, that it became the norm to kiss.

But in the East, the Orthodox Church thrived under the direct oversight of the Byzantine Emperor. The idea of church-state
Symphonia
, or harmony, was not only easier to sustain, it was necessary in order to justify, and mitigate, where necessary, the divine absolutism of the Emperor. But if harmony was the ideal, then caesaropapism was usually the reality.

Consider for a moment how easy, how utterly appealing, caesaropapism can appear from a perspective of infirm faith, or simply in a situation where lack of powerful patronage meant persecution or death, where courtly flattery had turned into policy: “But you we see before us, not made of stone or wood but real.” Just as there is one God governing the universe, so there is one Emperor governing the human affairs of Christians – and like a Byzantine mosaic, like the gold incrustations on the hem of the Basileus’ robe, everything makes such exquisite, perfect sense.

From the Black Sea, up the River Dnieper and the Volga, through fathomless expanses of steppe and forest, all this decadent, divine splendour trickled up into a place also cursed and blessed with two essential natures: inhospitable because of its cold and its expanses, it was also lawless.

Prince Vladimir’s emissaries could not tell whether they were “in heaven or earth” when they beheld the full splendour of Byzantine Orthodox ritual, before Vladimir adopted Orthodox Christianity for himself and his subjects in 988. Brought into a frigid climate and landscape, that very splendour may have brought out the Old Testament in the new faith.

The homegrown, 11
^th
century idea of Russia as the New Israel would fuse with and in some ways exceed the rigid courtly and ecclesiastical rituals imported from Byzantium. This fusion may have helped emphasize the Old Testament qualities of God more as a wrathful judge than as a source of mercy and grace, according to
American historian Daniel Rowland.
²⁵⁴
Rituals and images of the Russian court, one historian noted, centred on an “image of the Tsar as chastising, unleashing his wrath on the wrongdoer. Like the Biblical God, the Tsar was to be feared.”
²⁵⁵

The practice of proskynesis too appears to have been brought in as part of Byzantine court ceremonial, partially fusing with local quasi-oriental practices. A lithograph from the reign of Tsar Alexei, the second Romanov, depicted a royal procession surrounded by peasants who were not merely kneeling, but dropping their heads to the ground in complete prostration.
²⁵⁶
This deep bow was made, in a gesture that struck a visiting Austrian diplomat as particularly “devout” and “poignant,” just before the subjects were to cast their written petitions to the Tsar.
²⁵⁷

While striving for the Byzantine ideal of church-state harmony, Russian political doctrine ended up instead incorporating outright caesopapism, leading to the church’s increasingly vulnerable role.

No Russian patriarch has wielded even a modicum of the influence of the Roman Catholic popes. While popes deposed emperors and kings in the West, Russian Tsars had patriarchs deposed, arrested or killed.

When, in 1547, Metropolitan Makarii conferred upon Ivan the Terrible the title of Tsar, previously reserved for Christ, Byzantine emperors, and the Mongol khan, he did so in an attempt to instil in Ivan the conviction that he should rule as a just, Christian monarch. In a few decades, however, Ivan would sack Novgorod; aside from slaughtering thousands of civilians, his oprichniki would round up thousands of priests and beat them until they handed over their wealth.
²⁵⁸
And when Metropolitan Filipp, Makarii’s successor, challenged the oprichnina, Ivan had him deposed and then murdered.