The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (8 page)

A similar conundrum appeared to be plaguing communities like Shakhty-22. Those who could afford to contribute had no incentive to do so because they had the means to modernize their homes on their own. Those who could not were failing to convince their wealthier neighbours to compromise – they simply spoke a different language.

And for someone like Kvitko, surviving on so little, the question of spending hours, days, or weeks first petitioning local authorities, then regional authorities, and then taking a day’s journey all the way to Moscow to petition Vladimir Putin made more sense than mobilizing a few dozen people in his community to come up with £20,000 so that all their homes could have gas.

For Vladimir Putin, the status of the gas pipe in Sergei Kvitko’s home – as well as a whole lot of other information – was now accessible in real-time through a nationwide database. Putin could simply log on – if he chose to, which he doesn’t very often – and see for himself whether Kvitko was still hauling firewood in the mornings. Kvitko had given him that opportunity.

“It’s one thing to take very important, necessary decisions in Moscow, in the Kremlin, in the White House,” Putin told United Russia leaders in Samara in September 2009. “It’s another to solve
a number of completely different problems across the whole country…. It is important to use all means to help a single specific individual resolve his issues, his problems, perhaps even his tragedies.”
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Sergei Kvitko’s petition, like requests to Vladimir Putin that fall on the desk of Alexei Anisimov, whether made in writing or in person, is filed in an electronic database that can be accessed by deputies and party officials at any time, from anywhere. Anisimov, asked how receptions report on their progress to their leader, was eager to point out that “even the Chairman of the Party can log on, using his login and password, to check the status of every request.”

Anisimov pointed out another telling statistic – in Moscow and St. Petersburg, about 70 percent of the pleas and appeals to Vladimir Putin are filed in writing, while about 30 percent are filed in person. But in the regions, the statistics are reversed – up to 80 percent prefer to file their applications in person.

While Putin was prime minister, institutionally it was still the Kremlin that got the bulk of citizens’ pleas – and President Dmitry Medvedev established his own set of reception offices almost simultaneously with Putin. In the first half of 2009 alone, the Kremlin administration received some 172,800 requests from around the country,
³¹
while the total number of nationwide requests to Putin through the reception network in over two years hit 500,000 in early 2011, according to figures provided by Anisimov.

What this illustrates isn’t the relative popularity of Putin and Medvedev (and Putin has consistently led Medvedev in approval ratings throughout the latter’s presidential term), but the symbolic power of appealing to the supreme, federal government – and the resilience of this habit on a societal level.

Though Medvedev had struggled to adopt a more legalistic approach, his use of online social networks like Livejournal and Twitter incited a bombardment of similar direct appeals – this time, not from rural residents, but from people who had their own blogs.

Shortly after Medvedev launched a blog on Livejournal in April 2009, another blogger asked him to help rebuild a dilapidated children’s hospital in the Ryazan region. Two days after the April 23 post, an official-sounding statement proclaimed that Medvedev had told Ryazan Governor Oleg Kovalev to look into the matter.
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In an even more widely-publicized incident in January 2011, the father of Yarslav Kolosov, a one-year-old suffering from cystic fibrosis, posted an open letter to Medvedev on Livejournal on behalf of his wife, who complained that medical personnel at the Moscow hospital where her son was being treated were consistently rude and insensitive to her needs.
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Medvedev reacted to the letter with a Twitter post – when asked by another well-known blogger if the government could do anything, Medvedev tweeted “It can.” He then had children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov check the hospital for violations. As a result, through an official (rather than informal) request to Health Minister Tatyana Golikova, the child was sent to Germany for treatment.
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Medvedev’s marathon press conference in May 2011 brought the point home – even Medvedev, a much softer public speaker than Putin and a leader positioned specifically to target the more self-sufficient, modern, and liberal part of Russia’s population, was not above issuing decrees on public request, for example promising a journalist that he would order the simplification of procedures for annual car inspections. The micromanaging role of the president was so clear in the press conference that it led one Western journalist to note that “little happens in this country unless the ruler in the Kremlin decrees it, just as it has always been.”
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Medvedev the Modernizer was, reluctantly, responding to deep-seated, unspoken traditions regulating interaction between the Russian sovereign and his people. But Putin, by establishing a venue for him to continue this type of intimate interaction after stepping down as president in 2008, was taking this sovereign function with him to the prime minister’s seat.

Asked how Putin’s reception offices differed from Medvedev’s, Anisimov pointed to Putin’s informal influence.

“[Medvedev’s] reception offices function within the legal framework, they are limited by the law – article 59, which regulates how long agencies need to take to respond to requests. They have [chains of command], they have officials that work within this framework. But we can go beyond these boundaries using party mechanisms and finance, and, above all, our people. We reach officials from another direction. There is a personal side, other mechanisms are involved.”

What Anisimov had essentially described was an extralegal process through which the sovereign could help his subjects solve their problems. Vladimir Putin wasn’t acting against the law. He was simply above it.

On December 4, 2008, during Vladimir Putin’s first live phone-in as prime minister (he had been holding them yearly as president), the voice of nine-year-old Dasha Varfolomeyeva, a third-grader from Buryatia, was broadcast nationwide.

“Uncle Volodya! New Year is coming soon. We live on Babushka’s pension, there is no work in our village. My sister and I dream of getting new dresses. I want to ask you for a dress like Cinderella’s.”

Putin, whose voice Dasha would later say she was so glad to hear, smiled. “Dashenka, I heard you. I want to invite you and your sister – and your grandmother too – to all come to Moscow for one of our New Year’s parties. We’ll sort out the business of the presents.”
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After a frenzy of back and forth phone calls among frantic regional officials struggling to comply with the orders, Dasha came to Moscow with her family and visited Putin at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.

The gift was just one of a countless number of gestures Putin made as president and prime minister, having begun in 2001 with the first of these phone-in shows. Once a year, in a live broadcast on all federal television channels, Putin would sit down behind a desk in a Moscow studio before a small audience of selected representatives from around the country, and field apparently random telephone calls from viewers. The requests varied from individual complaints about back wages, late pensions and poor housing to larger infrastructural issues such as dilapidated hospitals, lack of roads and transport in the remote regions, and allegations of corruption.

Each year, these marathon sessions grew longer and broke new records – and Putin continued the tradition as prime minister, with the show exceeding four hours by 2011. When he returned to the presidency in 2012, the tradition continued as a massive press conference with hundreds of journalists from around the country vying for his attention. While appearing spontaneous, it is widely
believed that the shows are actually orchestrated, with many of the callers picked and primed in advance. But with no script and at least a veneer of spontaneity, Putin addressed minute local issues with a competence that no regional official could muster. From memory, he spouted numbers, names and towns, demonstrating a phenomenal knowledge of daily economic details from across his dominion, prompting comparisons with the “all-knowing” Stalin.

The Russian media covered this communion with his people with more than a hint of irony – Putin, for all purposes, was acting as a benevolent parody of Stalin, whom little girls had once thanked for their “happy childhood.”

But among the millions of petitions that Russians sent to their Tsars, requests for gas pipes and Christmas presents have intermingled with pleas for mercy.

In a letter dated 1946, kept in the Moscow archives of the Memorial Human Rights Society, the careful, school-age cursive of an 11-year-old girl asked “Dear Iosif Vissarionovich” to “please find out the truth” and rescue her father from what the child thought to be a miscarriage of justice. “They tortured my father and forced him to sign” a false confession. The girl couldn’t have fathomed, of course, that the leader she was writing to personally signed execution orders for thousands of people like her father. And while her fate is unknown, some of her peers to this day refuse to believe that Stalin signed the orders to execute their relatives, even when faced with the documented order itself.

Putin, of course, is no Stalin – at best a parody of him, at worst an empty threat. And while his propaganda machine was certainly exploiting and cultivating these deep-seated, paternalistic sentiments for its political purposes, it would be unfair to say that it had created them in the first place.

A great deal of these requests were genuine and sincere – and whatever these people felt about having to appeal directly to Putin to solve their problems – frustration with local incompetence, the anger that no one is accountable to them – for a large number of low-functioning residents like Sergei Kvitko, it was done with a great degree of relief.

That relief in itself is a beneficial result, perhaps the only one – a year later, the authorities had still not provided Kvitko with gas.

A case worker at the branch where Kvitko applied, speaking on conditions of anonymity, first confused his record with another Sergei Kvitko – a man she described as “mentally unstable” who had applied dozens of times to sort out his criminal record. “We get a lot of people like that,” she said.

As for Sergei Kvitko of Shakhty 22, she finally located his application, but said it was difficult to make a decision. “We’d have to investigate what is actually going on,” she said. From the way Kvitko described it, nothing made sense; he seemed to have failed to sort out and identify the problem himself, she said – and so, as it usually is over such vast terrains, no one was actually to blame.
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A fire consumed their homes;

I built them new dwellings; then forsooth

They blamed me for the fire!

-
Alexander Pushkin
, “Boris Godunov”
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“All hope is on him, on his words, on his constant monitoring.”

- A victim of forest fires in Nizhny Novgorod region following a visit from Vladimir Putin and a pledge to rebuild her home, August 2010

“For a variety of reasons people in this country invested all their hopes in the kind Tsar, in the state, in Stalin, in their leaders, and not in themselves.”

-
President Dmitry Medvedev
, in an interview with the
Financial Times
, June 2011

IT WAS STARTLING and more than a little eerie to listen to just how much hope a resident of the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya, who had lost her home to a spate of unprecedented forest fires, placed personally in the prime minister of her country.

“All hope is on him, to be perfectly honest with you. On his
words, on his constant monitoring,” Julia Volkhova
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told me. Just days before our conversation, in August 2010, Vladimir Putin had promised the residents of what was once the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya that he would personally ensure that their homes, which were among the thousands destroyed in the forest fires that swept Russia in the summer of 2010, would be rebuilt. Volkhova had been in Vyksa’s central square when Putin arrived in that neighbouring town, though she admitted that she hadn’t seen him up close. “He said that on November 1 we would all move in to our homes. We would have gas and water. If anyone else had said that, the people probably wouldn’t have believed it.”

The timid Volkhova, who admitted after speaking to me that she was concerned about getting in trouble with local officials for talking with a journalist, may have embellished her gratitude towards Vladimir Vladimirovich due to her fears.

But the way her gratitude gushed out revealed something far deeper than the square metres of living space that she was promised – it revealed that she had little other choice.

“Everything that the people had pent up inside them they expressed to Putin and [local governor Valery] Shantsev,” Andrei Gorelov, a factory worker who organized residents to fight fires in the absence of firefighters, explained. “You have a boss, right? And he has a boss. Well, imagine what happens when the very top boss, the boss of all bosses, comes down and says ‘I’m going to show you what’s what.’ What happens then? This is what happened here.”

By late July 2010, even the atheists in Moscow felt as if God had forsaken the city. A pungent, pink-grey-brown smog had enveloped the capital in a relentless grip, the product of a record-breaking heatwave that fixed temperatures at 38°C and sparked a series of wildfires so brutal that the prime minister’s trust rating plummeted to levels not seen since 2006.

But in Vyksa, a town of 56,000 people in the Nizhny Novgorod region, billows of dark-grey clouds had been engulfing the horizon for weeks – and they were not signs of a pending thunderstorm, but a reflection of raging forest fires that were closing in on the town.