The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (9 page)

By July 29, Verkhnyaya Vereya, a settlement of 321 homes about twenty kilometres southwest of Vyksa, was fighting for its life. Throughout the month, locals, frustrated by fruitless efforts to bring firefighters to their towns and save their homes, had gathered in groups with their cars, shovels, buckets and whatever else they could find, and fought the forest fires themselves. Vyksa, a relatively prosperous town with a metallurgical plant that produced pipelines for Putin’s pet gas project, Nordstream, couldn’t muster the basic infrastructure to protect residents on its outskirts from forest fires.

As a result, programmers, factory workers, pensioners, and young women found each other through a local internet forum, Wyksa.ru, which coordinated who would do the driving and who would do the spade work, and set out into the forests, facing the fire.

Local authorities were insisting they had brought in troops, Emergency Ministry officials, and soldiers to help in the efforts, but residents saw little sign of help. As fires were closing in on Verkhnyaya Vereya, the region’s governor, Valery Shantsev, boasted that no additional help was needed from the federal centre – even though Putin had publicly offered him federal aid.

But residents saw no signs of the local efforts. The soldiers, who often weren’t even equipped with radio transmitters, had to be fed by the residents themselves, and fire engines had to be supplied with fuel. When a fire engine did arrive, it was often out of water and thus useless. The firefighters would help residents put out their own fires with buckets of water.

And so, partly owing to the forces of nature, and partly because of a social infrastructure lulled into despair and inaction by the blistering heat, when the fire reached Verkhnyaya Vereya, the town succumbed instantly.

“We only had two fire engines,” Julia Volkhova recalled one month later. “And it all came down on us with such force that firefighters wouldn’t have helped. It was a hurricane of fire, you can’t call it anything else. If only to quiet the souls of residents, they should have sent more than eighteen-year old conscripts to dig ditches.”

Having fought ground fires, no one was prepared for the crown fires that swept over the village, levelling it to the ground in
one night. Not a single house was left standing. Nineteen people were killed.

The prime minister, arriving on July 30, walked through the ruins, his mood as black as the earth.

But he was hardly prepared for what awaited him on the steps of Vyska’s district administration.

Amateur footage of that spontaneous meeting relayed that same wail that seems to greet the prime minister every time he appears in public. But this one was desperate, grief-stricken and even hateful. “Down with this government!” a shrill woman shouted as Putin approached the crowd. “We’re standing here with nothing [in Russian the word she used was ‘undressed’]!” a woman cried.
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Accosted at once by dozens of people, the prime minister struggled to talk over the cries. The anger, of course, wasn’t so much directed at him as at the bald man standing next to him – the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Valery Shantsev.

“We’re burning, don’t you understand?” a woman said.

“I understand,” the prime minister told her.

“And no one will listen to us, you understand?”

“I understand. That’s why I’m here.”

“No one is extinguishing the fires.”

Then, Putin gave in to a momentary frustration. He faltered. “There’s nothing left to extinguish,” he said angrily. “Everything has burned down.”

“What do you mean nothing?! Our homes! Our homes are still there! You’re not doing anything! Stop promising!”

A man facing Putin was not weeping or screaming, and the prime minister used the pause to get his message across. “We’re going to transfer money to the region. Everyone will get compensated. And all the houses will be built anew. All of them.”

Interrupted by another man on one side, Putin flashed his eyes angrily at him: “Give me a second, wait please.”

Kommersant
reporter Andrei Kolensnikov, pictured in the crowd with a look of unwonted bewilderment, would write the following day that Putin indeed nearly lost his temper.

“A man shouted something at the prime minister. [The prime minister] turned and was about to go towards him, but then turned
away and went towards his car.”
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As Putin was leaving, another woman yelled at his back, “Our administration is working very badly. It should be tried. And hanged by the balls.”

Andrei Gorelov, a local factory worker who had been organizing volunteer brigades to keep the raging ground and crown fires around Vyksa in check for the third week in a row, told a story that local officials didn’t seem to want to hear.

After an emergency situation was declared in fourteen regions, news wires and state television channels had been reporting hourly updates on the volume of troops, machinery, and equipment involved in fighting the forest fires in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The powerful Emergencies Ministry chief, Sergei Shoigu, was on the spot, giving regular updates, together with Valery Shantsev, the governor just fresh from being chastised by Vladimir Putin.

But to hear Gorelov speak, it sounded as if he was talking from a different region altogether.

“Me and the guys from Vyksa are still fighting the fires. Yesterday a brigade from Nizhny Novgorod came to join us.”

An Emergencies Ministry brigade?

“No. Volunteers,” he said with some disappointment.

Just a few moments ago, I had spoken with Yevgeny Muravyov, an official spokesman of Governor Shantsev in Nizhny Novgorod.

“There are no volunteers there,” he said. “They aren’t being allowed anywhere near the fires. Maybe there’s one or two or three. What kind of volunteers are you talking about? It’s an emergency situation!”

Shantsev, the official spokesman said, started every morning at the site of the fires near Vyksa. “Our residents are soon going to start setting fire to their own homes once they see the kind of houses that are being built. All the necessary equipment and troops – military and civilian – everything was working even before all this started.”

Officially, 1,800 federal and regional troops were deployed to fight fires in the area. But Gorelov and other volunteers only saw them on paper.

“I saw the amount of equipment that we had officially. When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t figure out: then how come we’re burning?”

Vladimir, a local programmer who gave only his first name, said the soldiers that were sent weren’t equipped with basic necessities like food, fuel and radio transmitters.

“There was no coordination. To have coordination, you need radio receivers. They didn’t even have those.”

Vladimir, a Muscovite by birth, may have been overwhelmed by a sense of adventure. He said he had never seen anything like a crown fire – a wall of flame that literally overtook his car as he and other volunteers were trying to escape it. But perhaps because of his urban upbringing, he was more sceptical than others about relying on the government – and that motivated him to take matters into his own hands. If other volunteers like Andrei Gorelov didn’t hide their outrage at the negligence and inaction, Vladimir seemed to take it in his stride.

“There are still more volunteers than firefighters. No one is under the illusion that the government will help,” he said, days after Putin’s visit. “The government will not help. Nothing helped. Not Putin, not Shantsev, not Shoigu.”

Considering the natural disaster that the summer of 2010 was turning into, one obvious approach was to collaborate with volunteers to help fill the holes in the dilapidated municipal and regional political infrastructure. Moscow understood this – and President Dmitry Medvedev, shortly after declaring an emergency in fourteen regions, issued a decree allowing firefighting brigades – which came under Shoigu’s Emergencies Ministry – to include the kind of volunteer brigades that Andrei Gorelov was organizing.

But that wasn’t happening – either Shantsev’s office hadn’t had time to distribute the orders, or commanders on the spot had no intention of complying with them.

“There’s only one [approachable] person in the forces, a certain Alexander Alexandrovich,” Gorelov said. “We talk to him. All the others – whether firefighters or emergency officials – refuse to deal with civilians.”

Despite Medvedev’s decree, volunteer efforts like Gorelov’s were not condoned by local officials. For one thing, they represented
a grass-roots organizational effort that, whatever the rhetoric from Moscow, local governments were reluctant to tolerate.

Gorelov said that shortly after the forum began organizing volunteers, it underwent a series of hacking attacks, while local security officers checked employees at the Vyksa Metallurgical Plant for any evidence that they had logged on to the town forum.

Such seemingly useless intimidation measures were common in areas that posed threats of social unrest, and went back to mechanisms used by the KGB. I have encountered them in regional cities across Russia faced with unemployment, natural or technogenic disasters, or any other problem that threatened to spark genuine mass dissent. Rather than dealing with the problem, the measures serve to create a climate of fear amid the workforce which, when supported by the management, discourages local initiative.

In the case of Vyksa, it was also becoming clear why local authorities were unwilling to tolerate a grass-roots volunteer effort. Whether the volunteers ended up collaborating or not, their sheer existence revealed that local government services were so deeply dysfunctional that they could not be relied upon in a natural disaster. By taking the firefighting into their own hands, the volunteers were demonstrating, in spite of themselves, that the money being spent on fire engines, interior troops, and Emergencies Ministry equipment was going to waste. They were unmasking local inefficiency, making it particularly vulnerable to the displeasure of the federal centre.

Shantsev’s press secretary was not trying to impress the general population. Just like his own boss, he was trying to impress the boss in Moscow – or at least conceal local shortcomings.

In his rambling 1839 work,
Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
, the French Marquis de Custine marvels, among other things, that Russian newspapers were forbidden from reporting on the notorious St. Petersburg floods during the 1820s. After all, one could accuse the Autocrat of All of Russia, Nicholas I, of many things – but certainly his conscience should be spared from floods and other natural disasters, so why the censorship?

One mystical explanation for this kind of squeamishness – which continues to plague Russia’s government to this day – was offered by the historian and novelist Vladimir Sharov: “Even the intimate tie that Russian power has with God is perilous. It has created that unique responsibility of a Tsar before his people that is only encountered in antiquity. He could not be faulted for any of his own deeds; a Tsar could only be blamed for that which is in the hands of God.”
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In a nation that thought itself the Third Rome ruled by the steward of God on Earth, famines, droughts and earthquakes could only mean one thing: God had turned away from his chosen people, for a false Tsar had usurped the throne, and he must be deposed.

Towards the end of the 19th century, anthropologist Sir James Frazer collected accounts of the treatment of sacred kings among aborigines. A single pattern emerged, carried over from pre-history: primitive tribes from all over the world worshipped a sacred sorcerer king, prostrating themselves before him when the rain fell, and killing him in times of drought. Frazer’s work forms part of the foundations of anthropology, but the chief criticism against him was that, as he tried to separate his own world from that of the “savages,” he failed to acknowledge the extent to which such primordial practices were incorporated into modern governance.

In their incessant drive to rein in, level, and civilize an inhospitable and unwilling landmass, Russia’s rulers primarily sought to suppress and censor those natural manifestations of chaos that threatened their power the most.

But whether they succeeded or not is another question.

The responsibility of a sacred monarch requires him to transcend simply populist measures and to ensure his superiority over a natural calamity through both economic and spiritual means. In Putin’s case, this was doubly important, since the fires had demonstrated a systemic vulnerability that is common to feudal social structures: a near total lack of control over the local fiefdoms of regional governors, and the resulting absence of an infrastructure aimed at responding to cataclysms.

When examining Putin’s regime as inherently authoritarian, it is hard to reconcile this fact with the weakness of the central government in the regions. Western scholars – and, at one point, even this author
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– have stumbled over this paradox, arguing that
Putin’s regime is less authoritarian than believed, because the chain of command is so weak and inefficient. If autocracy implies centralized control, then Russia’s lack of it in the regions defies the autocratic model. But this lack of control over the regions is not evidence of autonomy, but of feudalism – and once we recognize the feudal elements that have coexisted with autocratic ones, things start falling into place,
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and we begin to understand the underlying factors that dictate relations between the regional leader and the Russian ruler on the one hand, and the Russian people and their sovereign on the other. And the key aspect that reinforces the sacred, transcendent nature of whatever ruler occupies the Kremlin (or White House) is exceedingly simple: he is very, very far away.

Opinion surveys point to a telling dichotomy. Muscovites and residents of remoter regions were asked in October 2010 (with the experience of the summer heatwave fresh in their minds) who their own local situation depended on the most – the federal centre, the regional governor, or the local administration.