The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (6 page)

“What brings me the most sorrow is the slavish awareness of our people (and myself included),” he wrote to me days later. “Despite all the democratic rhetoric, [we] know exactly who rules the country and are ever ready to demonstrate our loyalty to that ruler. And my actions (my applause) came into direct conflict with my political convictions.”

The 19th century Count, Vladimir Sollogub, recalled a telling appearance of Tsar Nicholas I during the 1830s. Count Sollogub was walking down St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect with the poet Alexander Pushkin and Sergei Sobolevsky, who had recently returned from an extended stay in Europe and was sporting a goatee – at a time when the aristocracy was still forbidden to wear beards in Russia, based on a decree by Peter the Great.

“Suddenly a plume of feathers emerged on a carriage up on Politseisky Bridge. It was the Tsar. Pushkin and I turned to the edge of the sidewalk and stopped; taking off our hats we waited for him to pass. But Sobolevsky disappeared. Seeing the Tsar approaching, he slipped into some store.” When Sobolevsky finally caught up with them, wearing the latest Parisian fashions and looking sheepish, Pushkin chided him, “So, what is it, brother? You have a little French beard, and a little Russian soul?”
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Pushkin was poking fun at his subservience. Sobolevsky, a modern, well-read, well-travelled member of the elite, who espoused moderately liberal views, was afraid that the Tsar would see his goatee.

Like many Russian poets even in this day, Pushkin had a deeply ambivalent personal relationship with the Tsar – and he already recognized the neurotic tensions inherent in a society pretending to be more modern and democratic than it actually was.

“Power and freedom must be combined to mutual benefit,” he wrote in 1832. “To presume humiliation in the rituals dictated by etiquette is sheer foolishness. An English lord, presenting himself to his king, kneels and kisses his hand. This does not keep him from belonging to the opposition, if he so desires.”
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By ritualizing primordial attributes of power in etiquette, he argued, a society is able to abandon them in substance. An English lord thinks nothing of kneeling in front of the king because the sovereignty of the law stands between them – and only an independent court can deprive the lord of life and liberty. But for an educated Russian who has taken on all the trappings of modernity and Western etiquette, even bowing slightly before his Tsar is demeaning because the reality of life has him falling on his face.

Various people present themselves before Vladimir Putin in different ways based on their caste, upbringing, income, education and dependence on the state. Not all display awe, adulation or servility, far from it. Many, in fact, show utter indifference. But no group is racked more with indecision, doubt and angst about how to behave in his presence – and whether to appear at all, if it can be avoided – than the intelligentsia.

For Alisa Ganiyeva, a writer and a journalist in her late 20s, agreeing to a meeting with Putin was accompanied by a deep ambivalence, as if she was somehow repulsed by the very idea of appearing in the presence of state power. She had expected to see a Tsar; she said she was disappointed to behold a man who didn’t evoke any emotions at all.

A young writer from the Muslim republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus, Ganiyeva initially refused an invitation to a writers’ meeting when she learned that it was going to turn into an official audience with the prime minister over tea.

Her ethnicity, in this case, was not very relevant to her unease. While she recognized that she would be used as a multi-ethnic “decoration” in the meeting, the real reason she initially refused was part of a more widespread attitude common among a number of
writers who consistently avoided any audience with Russian leaders, as if the leader’s mere presence could contaminate them.

“Initially, I decided not to go because I believe that there is very little point in these meetings,” Ganiyeva explained a few days after the meeting. “And they cast a shadow on your reputation. For me it’s an unconscious feeling. Every time there’s a meeting between writers and the government, there is an inexplicable feeling of resistance and some revulsion.”

Her editor at the
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
newspaper talked her into going, explaining that it would be “cowardly” not to and suggesting she ask about Mikhail Khodorkovsky – the staple oppositionist question used to demonstrate defiance. Ganiyeva, however, recognized the banality of asking about Khodorkovsky for the hundredth time and listening to Putin’s answers about the rule of law. Instead, she decided to bring up the controversial law on extremism, whose broad wording was widely used to jail oppositionists and expand the powers of the FSB (the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation).

“I decided to go and see this person who was shrouded in so many myths,” she said. The day before, she was telephoned and told that she would be sitting right next to Putin during a tea that would follow the meeting. Ganiyeva recalled with irritation how she was even told to wear something nice, “as if I had the intention of showing up in a torn sweater.”

If Putin was initially shrouded in myth, Ganiyeva couldn’t help feeling disappointed when she saw a small, pale, ordinary man, an official trying to ingratiate himself with a group of writers – that enviable class known in early Soviet times as “the engineers of the soul.” Putin seemed to be as curious about the writers as they were about him, eyeing them intently as if they were a bunch of strange animals. He smiled and laughed with the group in what clearly represented a “mask” he wore with the intelligentsia, as if he was trying too hard to make himself liked. Ganiyeva, who was seated just right of Putin during the tea, couldn’t help but notice that he filled a whole notebook page with platitudes about writers and power, jotting down every obvious word in his large script.

But the behaviour of the group revealed far more than Putin’s awkward camaraderie. As they waited for the meeting to begin, some
took to drinking the strong alcohol on supply, talking and joking. Others, like the writer Zakhar Prilepin, struck a pose of defiance, while many others appeared to be obviously enthralled.

“There was a change in mood when he entered the room. Everyone stood. I remained seated [along with another writer], and there were looks of disapproval,” Ganiyeva said. She went on to describe a scene involving a popular writer who “nearly melted” when Putin sat down next to her, turning radiant and engaging the prime minister in a whispered conversation. No one, of course, paid much attention to the actual union meeting – all eyes were on the whispering. Ganiyeva described how, following the tea, the popular writer immediately approached Putin with entreaties to visit, and as she grabbed his hand Putin became so flummoxed that he dropped a pile of books he had been forced to take. Flustered, he bent down to pick them up as she continued talking.

For Ganiyeva, however, the chief disappointment wasn’t Putin’s awkward ordinariness, or the sycophancy of some of the writers (she had anticipated that). It was that she never got the chance to ask a question. She went on at length justifying it, as if suggesting to herself that it was all for the better, and then going back to her regret as if it was all she had left from the meeting. That Prilepin, a member of the outlawed National Bolshevik party, managed to ask Putin about his billionaire friends and embezzlement at state-owned companies without a blink of an eye probably compounded Ganiyeva’s regret.

“I didn’t like the questions being asked,” she said, explaining that Prilepin’s was one of the few honest questions. “And I didn’t want to be too insistent. Everyone was raising his hand, Putin had to refuse them. And I didn’t want to be told to wait my turn. I consoled myself that maybe it was for the better that I didn’t ask. I might have just scored some liberal points. I just wanted to sit there incognito and watch, after all.”

But by not asking, she appeared somehow to feel that she had failed to justify her compromised presence. “It felt uncomfortable that I was there and didn’t ask a question,” she admitted.

And without a question, without speaking truth to power, the meeting left her more vulnerable to a perceived “closeness” to power that she was instinctively revolted by. What, apart from the popular
writer’s ingratiation, did the revulsion pertain to, exactly? That she was in the same room, witnessing the fawning and by proxy taking part of it?

On April 29, 2011, one of Vladimir Putin’s routine visits across the country found him in Penza, a provincial capital about 600 km southeast of Moscow. Before chairing a meeting on cultural development in a recently restored local theatre where he pledged to help subsidize a six billion rouble theatre district, Putin, as has been his custom, convened with his people right in the street.
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An unofficial video circulating on the internet shows the prime minister approaching the pavement. As he does, a multitude of cheers are heard from the crowd. The sound, once again predominantly female, is a more intense, louder variant of the curious wails I heard ten days before, in Moscow. And just as in Moscow, these sound less like jubilant cheers and more like desperate cries – either for help, or from relief of finally seeing him (the residents, of course, had been waiting for hours in the rain). Indeed, someone called out, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, please help us!”

In a clear shot of Putin in the midst of the crowd, with his hand extended, a middle-aged woman, with short-cropped hair dyed dark red, is kissing his hand, amid repeated exclamations of “thank you.” As she tugs at him, he reluctantly offers his cheek. She kisses him on the cheek, then grabs his neck and kisses him repeatedly on the ear. With an expression of amusement bordering on disgust, he carefully and expertly frees himself from the embrace. Several women shout, “We love you!” He responds, “I love you too.”

This grotesque display of adulation was circulated over the internet and met with ridicule – but it was ignored by national television, which apparently recognized the discomfort that this somewhat unconscious behaviour elicited not just in those who somehow succumb to it, but in Putin himself. Two hundred, one hundred or even seventy years ago, it would have been an accepted norm – with Joseph Stalin stoically suffering through better choreographed communions with his people.

Somehow, despite the revulsion of the elites and a muted
disapproval from the state, this behaviour has survived centuries of violent modernization, occurring in the 21st century and contaminating far more orderly displays of deference to power. No one approves of it – not even those who unconsciously take part – but it still manages to surface in the most unexpected places.

The “Putin phenomenon” – the stability of his rule and the entrenchment of key features like bureaucratic loyalty and corruption – has been attributed to his popularity and, by sceptics, to high oil prices that have managed to keep the population complacent. But popularity and oil prices are too temporary to explain the perennial structural relationship Russians build with their state – and this explanation suggests wrongly that the majority of people who voted for Putin actually “like” or “prefer” him in the same way that an American voter would “like” or “prefer” Barack Obama.

Attitudes towards Putin have been examined largely in the context of his popularity on the one hand, and his contrast to his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, on the other.
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But Putin’s high approval ratings – averaging at over 70 percent before 2011 – do not indicate a genuine admiration among respondents who, pollsters have told me, are often simply answering what they feel is required of them. Moreover, based on interviews I conducted in 2010-2011, the same person can show feelings of exceeding gratitude (“we would fall at his feet”
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) one moment, and attitudes of scepticism, disappointment and ridicule the next (“It’s all for show, his behaviour. Nothing changes.”
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)

Behaviours like the one exhibited by the Penza woman have been attributed to a latent personality cult, but that would not explain the ways these behaviours present on a spontaneous level. The Putin cult doesn’t even have to be fostered by the government – much of it springs up from below, from sheer inertia, camp and irony-infused, with the potential of social networking at its disposal.
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And compared to Stalin, Putin is “no führer and no demagogue,” according to Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Centre, who insists there is no evidence of mass adulation in the surveys. “The basis of the trust in him is quite conservative, and, unlike totalitarian leaders, he is not connected to ideas for a new world order.”
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On February 24, 2009, the postcard of Putin was removed from the desk of the translator at our organization in anticipation of a visit
from Putin himself. But ten years before that visit, when that same building was the home of a Kremlin think tank, the staff – internet-savvy liberals – sported t-shirts bearing the anaemic, expressionless profile of the young presidential candidate, Yeltsin’s heir apparent, and the inscription: “Putin is our everything.”
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The words were a pun on “Pushkin is our everything” – a phrase that defined another century-old personality cult, around the poet Alexander Pushkin.

What accounts for that kind of behaviour, if neither popularity nor a powerful cult can fully explain it?

Sitting at my desk in February 2009, I felt the contagious excitement of some of our middle managers as they waited for Putin to appear. But it wasn’t the excitement of meeting someone famous. There was another even more important reason. Like many organizations, ours was funded by the state. Putin’s visit fell at the start of the year, when budgets were confirmed. In the unending, often unconscious scramble to secure funding, one cannot fail to see the advantages of being noticed in a positive light and the risks of being disgraced. And so it is easy to understand both the excitement of someone like a popular writer meeting Putin, and a local in Penza, who will be reaping the material benefits of a Putin visit (repaired roads, a new theatre, cleaner streets) for years to come.