The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  Sociologists studying the symbol of Stalin in the public imagination have noted a paradox: the percentage of people who believe Stalin to be a bloody tyrant who killed millions of people (68 percent) overlaps considerably with the percentage of people who identify him as a wise ruler who made the country thrive (50 percent). This “doublethink,” as identified by political analyst Maria Lipman, points also to an irrevocable association between national greatness and violence – in the traumatized section of post-Soviet consciousness, one cannot exist without the other.228

  In the absence of effective political mechanisms for interacting with state power, the subject or the “citizen” turned to the personal, leaving him extremely vulnerable: for in a personal capacity, the ruler could be paternal, violent, or sexual. He could “bring man to birth” or give a “knock on the head,” as Putin once threatened potential troublemakers at protest rallies.

  But the reverse of this is also true. In primitive societies, the office of the sacred king was dependent on one condition: when he failed to make it rain, he was slaughtered.

  3.

  Before returning to Katya Obraztsova, it is worth looking at how and why the Kremlin, meeting these sexual fantasies half-way, made efforts to cultivate them.

  In late November 2011, as the State Youth Agency began mobilizing tens of thousands of activists of the Nashi pro-Kremlin youth group to demonstrate loyalty and support during the December 4 parliamentary elections, agency chief Vasily Yakemenko met with commissars of the movement to instruct them.

  To motivate them, he used an ancient allegory: “In 2000, our society married Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” he told them, according to an undercover journalist present at the closed meeting. “Society voted for him and said: Vladimir Vladimirovich, be our husband, care for us, protect us, and give us work.”229

  The words were allegedly uttered by Yakemenko, but there is evidence that he had learnt them from his de facto boss, first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov. According to a senior Nashi activist close to Vasily Yakemenko, the idea of state power as the husband and the people as the wife had already appeared countless times in the regular briefings Surkov would hold with Nashi leaders – the activist had brought up the marriage allegory spontaneously as she described her impressions of these briefings, before I had even mentioned it myself. Clearly, it was brought up often enough and she admitted that it had made a considerable impression on her.

  Surkov and Yakemenko seemed to be tapping into a powerful, pre-revolutionary myth of Russia as a bride, as Israel, and of the monarch as the sacred groom.

  This should not come as a surprise in a patrimonial setting – somewhat incestuously, the patrimonial leader often combines the functions of both the father and the husband.

  In Tsarist Russia, the paternal/sexual was taken to new heights. Because the Tsar was seen, essentially, as the earthly vision of God, so the country assumed the role of the church. The New Testament description of the church as the bride and Christ as the groom was applied, in Russia, to the relationship between the monarch and his subjects. This allegory persisted in odes to the Tsar and Emperor, and they reached a zenith under Nicholas I, once called “the most handsome man in Europe.” The indirect idea of a marriage was obliquely referred to in the propaganda of that time, reviving the legend of how Slavic tribes called on Varangian princes to rule over them in 862, and interpreted the incident as evidence of harmony between the Russian people and their Tsar.230 Unlike European nations, the myth went, Russians willingly called on the princes to rule over them, rather than be conquered by force.

  The church allegory may have become superfluous after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the eroticized deification persisted with a new force, channelling pre-Christian cults.231

  When I asked Katya Obraztsova about the marriage parable, it seemed to confuse her – even though her video was clearly elaborating a sexual fantasy involving Putin. “That’s an unusual comparison. I would compare the people to children. [The government, Putin] is our father, and we are children. After the 1990s, the people wanted a Saviour, a father, and so he appeared.”

  Katya Obraztsova didn’t really seem to be aware of what she was tapping into. Far from a being cog in a centralized, ideological sect, she didn’t seem to be getting any instructions at all. And yet she had spent three years as a teenager in an organization whose unspoken credo was to fight the opposition and support the government. How had she been recruited, and who were these girls, thousands like Katya, who were happy to offer a yearning for order and abundance to be picked up and exploited by a seemingly reluctant Kremlin? And exploited for what price?

  Chapter 14

  The Sect

  “Surkov… is fascinating. He talks about so many complex things. He is super well-read. But I don’t always understand what he means. Sometimes he talks about ‘business angels.’”

  - A member of Nashi. 2011

  1.

  I REMEMBER THE girl’s simple, suddenly exalted face as she stood beating on her drum, chanting “Putin! Putin!” When she noticed she was being watched intently, her eyes became more frenzied as she stared directly at me, chanting with even more force as if her life depended on it, the sound of dozens of drums both demoralizing and strangely enchanting. She seemed to like the attention. But when I tried to talk to her, she was told to stay silent by an older colleague at her side.

  All around me, riot police grabbed “unauthorized” anti-government protesters, dragged them away into buses that stood around the perimeter of central Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, and, once they thought no one was looking, beat them with whatever their conscience would allow: a baton, a fist or a boot.

  It was December 6, 2011 – two days into a growing revolt over the ballot stuffing in the latest parliamentary election. The army of pro-Kremlin Nashi activists stood just outside the subway, hoarse with chanting and terrifying to behold, many of them bussed in from the nearby provinces by their Kremlin-affiliated organizers to demonstrate for a token bit of cash that the future belonged to them, and not to the more desperate-sounding protesters screaming “Down with Putin.” Every time the police pounced on a dissenter and dragged him away, the Nashi crowd cheered. Here they were, those hypnotizing “triumphant thugs,” as they were christened not just by the oppositionist bloggers, but increasingly by mainstream pundits disgusted by the rebirth of a phenomenon that had all the markings of a totalitarian youth militia. But who were they really?

  Natasha Kovaleva, a chirpy, 23-year-old senior assistant at the State Agency for Youth, may have felt that there was something cultist about joining a state-financed organization that got her a job, helped make friends, and was well on the way to building her life path for her. But she didn’t believe it, not really. “Those are the cult members,” she joked as she got off the phone with one of her colleagues.

  Nor did she seem to mind the price that she was paying.

  It was parliamentary election day, and Natasha, who took me to her favourite sushi chain just outside her office a few steps away from Red Square, was deliberating whether they should go to a forum where the agency’s chief, Vasily Yakemenko, would instruct tens of thousands of Nashi activists on how to behave as they took part in demonstrations to show their support for Putin, Medvedev, and United Russia in the face of oppositionist dissent.

  December 4, 2011, the day of the federal parliamentary elections, was cold, wet, dark, and bleak enough to have come out of a crime novel. Units of riot police were stationed just off Red Square, barring entry to pedestrians without an explanation, as occasional trucks filled with sleepy interior troops drove through the snowless city and groups of caped officers huddled austerely on street corners in central Moscow. It was as if a process as simple as voting held a mystical threat, as if state power, that perennial force of nature, blanketed Moscow instead of the snow that day, reminding voters of its eternal, unfeeling and inevitable force as they pretended to take part in a democratic process.

  Un
derstanding the likelihood of tens of thousands of dissenters, the Kremlin was amassing its own force – groups deployed for their sheer numbers, crowds that would block out and dilute – and, in cases, intimidate – the protesters by their very presence.

  In an organization balanced precariously between Communist Youth and the YMCA, why was a leading activist joking about how she had joined a cult?

  For Natasha, a chance attendance at a speech by Vasily Yakemenko in her home town of Tula – a historical town of half a million people about 200 km from Moscow – attracted her to the movement not so much for its promise of activism, but for its career opportunities. “There wasn’t really anything cult-like about it – though I had reservations at first,” she said.

  Instead, like many, she had purely practical reasons to join.

  The daughter of an out-of-work engineer mother who had failed to find a job after moving to Tula from Kaliningrad, Natasha found herself having to support her mother and sister from an early age. Her father, who owned an auto shop, was killed in the 1990s, when Natasha was just a child. Nashi didn’t just offer her something to do, it set her on a career path. By autumn of 2007, she was lucky to get an internship in the Tula governor’s office – all thanks to her membership in Nashi, she said.

  The normal avenues available – local schools, clubs, or businesses, did not promise the connections necessary. But a youth organization affiliated with the state – and thus viewed with approval by local teachers and civil servants – did. At the very least, it kept young people away from drugs and gangs. And for someone like Natasha, it offered hope of Moscow. Doors would keep opening, and by 2008, she was able to come to the capital to work for Yakemenko’s Youth Agency.

  Once there, the confluence of work, fun and activism that the job offered led her to stay. She didn’t have to take time off to attend the Seliger youth forum, and she could count on the job’s stability as she took evening classes towards a degree in economics.

  It was a story that seemed to repeat itself no matter what former Nashi member you asked.

  For Katya Obraztsova, the girl who took part in the provocative Putin video and who spent three years as a member of Steel, a militant affiliate of Nashi, joining the group was her only chance to get involved in activism on a local level, in a social environment where spontaneous volunteerism was rare. She had no thought of promoting a particular political movement. “I wasn’t concerned about who was financing it. I liked how as an organization we were able to help war veterans. Or if there’s a problem with bad roads in your town – you can do something about it through the organization.”

  She went further:

  “It’s not that the movement is doing something and I’m part of it. It’s that I’m developing myself through the movement,” she explained. “Say you come upon a huge forest. And the movement gives you a path through the forest. You walk that path yourself, but that path gives you direction. Otherwise you would get lost.”

  The direction is given by Nashi, by the state, and, indirectly, by Vladimir Putin.

  “Putin gave us the platform for self-realization,” Maria Aleshina, Katya’s colleague, said.

  Asked about the path in the woods, and if they felt they were being led by Putin, Katya and Maria paused. “It’s not that he provides the path, it’s that the movement comes from him…. I guess, then, yes, he does provide it. In the sense that it comes from him.”

  If the state offered them a path in the woods, it also wanted something in return.

  During the pro-Kremlin, anti-opposition rally on December 6 on Triumfalnaya Square, one Sveta Kuritsina, a student at a trade school in Ivanovo, became the poster child for these activists-for-rent after she struggled to explain to a cameraman that United Russia had transformed the country because people “are dressing more better [sic].”

  From the standpoint of the opposition, Sveta’s fumbling, painfully naïve and badly memorized speech symbolized those “triumphant thugs” for hire: their manners, their level of education, and their non-existent political awareness. Protesters would turn up at later rallies brandishing her “dressing more better” gaffe. But then Sveta’s threadbare origins emerged: her mother a textile worker, her father a driver, she lived in a meagre, hand-to-mouth world that had no room for political ideas. This explained her motivation as she chanted Putin’s name in the cold for the equivalent of a few dollars in cash. And there were hundreds like her on Triumfalnaya.

  Sharing a dilapidated dorm room with four girls on the outskirts of Ivanovo, she was studying to be an accountant. As she faced a bleak provincial future, she groped for every opportunity that presented itself – and when she got a chance to join Steel, she took it eagerly.232 Sveta could be forgiven for believing that she owed what chance of social mobility she had to the state. Maybe she really did adore Putin, but that was only while she was drumming in the cold and chanting his name. As for the rest, she had to do what she had to do, and that only meant climbing a career ladder dangled in front of her by a government that, after more than a millennium, was still the dominant organizing force that “fructifies the earth.”

  But if the state was offering these girls a path through the woods – in exchange for beating a drum and chanting Putin’s name, as Sveta and hundreds of others did that December – then where did that path lead?

  2.

  By 2011, Nashi – by sheer virtue of its affiliation and Kremlin funding – had become possibly the most reviled organization in Russia, and even some parts of the political establishment have openly criticized it. By the following year, after a spate of unprecedented protest rallies that put up the biggest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s rule, the organization was all but defunct. Vladislav Surkov was replaced as chief ideologist by the more conventional Vyacheslav Volodin, while Vasily Yakemenko quit the State Agency for Youth. It seemed it was just a matter of time before something more meaningful would be concocted to take its place.

  By December 2011, amid a genuinely fomenting middle class that was taking to the streets for the first time in two decades, cheerleading for the state in the manner of Nashi – especially for cash – symbolized, for many, the cynical, managed, and orchestrated nature of a democracy that few believed in.

  But for over a decade, the group had done its thing – and subsisted on millions of dollars of government funding spent on constructing an ideology that never fully materialized.

  Getting its start in 2000 as the obscure Walking Together group, the initiative was reportedly pitched personally by its leader, Vasily Yakemenko, a former sports trainer and businessman who found himself in the Presidential Administration, to his boss, deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov,233 who liked the idea of reviving a modern version of the youth groups of the Soviet Union, opening doors for its members to coveted careers in the party and the state.

  But the rank and file were drawn in through much simpler means – benefits. Vasily Polovinkin, a 26-year-old estate agent, described in 2012 how he was recruited as a teenager with promises of free football game tickets, discounts, and possible career options. “There wasn’t any underlying idea I was aware of,” he said, and he left the group because he didn’t want to take part in political rallies, especially if he didn’t understand the idea behind them.

  Walking Together quickly became notorious for carrying out post-Soviet Russia’s first book burning, as activists destroyed the novels of postmodernist writers Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin and threatened them with legal cases. Bizarrely, the group lashed out at the writers not for their political views, but for the “depravity” and the sexual and drug-related content of their books. Touted as an independent group, from the beginning it was widely linked to Surkov, who was in turn deemed to be the only Kremlin official erudite enough and with the black sense of humour necessary to go after writers like Pelevin and Sorokin. Most Nashi activists had not even heard of them.

  In 2005, the Kremlin reorganized the group to form a larger body called Nashi – still under
the leadership of Walking Together’s Vasily Yakemenko. In the next six years the group would target oppositionists more aggressively, with some members staging vicious flashmobs to desecrate pictures of dissenters, or hounding and harassing them with legal action. This was not a unified, top-down effort – and Natasha Kovaleva said she disapproved of many of their actions – but to what extent these moves drew on a sincere loyalist position or were more of an attempt to curry favour with higher-standing members of the team is hard to tell. Though its Kremlin sponsorship remained unofficial, most seemed to understand where the group, which would hold rallies of 50,000 each year even as oppositionist groups were being denied the right to assemble, got its protection and patronage.

  During the regency of Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin gradually stopped denying its affiliation. Nashi was heavily featured at the summer career forums organized by the State Agency for Youth at Lake Seliger, which were regularly graced by Surkov and Vladimir Putin himself. In 2010, Surkov spoke at Nashi’s national convention, and specific information about the organization’s funding began to appear in the press. Nashi officials initially claimed that the movement was sustained by private donations from businesses – but in 2007 a defector from the group revealed that each unit had a budget of up to £7,000 a month.234 A 2010 study of federal grant and spending records revealed that between 2007 and 2010 the government had invested well over $15 million in the group and its affiliates – the bulk of which came directly from the State Agency for Youth, which Yakemenko had come to head.235