The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  And Ivan, who had killed higher men for lesser things than that, turned around and left.

  Not only would Ivan not harm the holy fools who harassed him – by sending him pieces of raw meat during Lent, for instance, in a clear reference to his butchery – he fuelled their cults, eventually leading to the canonization of the most famous holy fool, St. Basil. The most easily recognizable tourist attraction in Russia, the St. Basil Cathedral on Red Square, is named after him.

  According to Ivanov, there is a reason for this tolerance and respect – Ivan saw holy fools as the only human beings absolute enough to converse with. Like him, they went beyond human norms and laws. And on some level, society in general, which accepted the sacredness of the holy fool, went along with this state of affairs: Ivanov cites a legend circulating around the time that had a holy fool choose Ivan to rule as Tsar.

  By 1667, the church turned on the holy fools, condemning most of their antics. The decision started a wave of persecutions; needless to say, holy fools were banned from churches.

  Today, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most respected institutions in Russia. It would be fair to say that amid the general distrust of most institutions, there are only two with consistently high trust ratings: the person of the president (51 percent) and the church (50 percent).262

  In February 2012, at the peak of Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign, he was shown on state television meeting with Patriarch Kirill, who publicly labelled the last twelve years of Putin’s rule as a “gift from God.” Although clerics from all major denominations were also present (Russia is, after all, formally a secular state with a Constitution that separates the government from religion), the public meeting, where the future president and the Patriarch greeted each other with the customary kiss on the cheek, was interpreted as a bid by Putin to use the church to bolster his legitimacy.

  Amid the protests and plummeting trust ratings, amid a failing anti-corruption drive, and most of all, amid mounting criticism that Putin lacked an ideology or “anything holy” at all, it was only natural that he would lean on the church, drawing a mandate from its blessing in a way that had something in common with Ivan insisting on a blessing from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

  But in this secular state, where church and religion were formally separate, the Russian Orthodox Church was still eerily intertwined with the state. That month, Kremlin courtiers began to talk openly of church-state harmony.

  The Moscow Patriarchate, which hadn’t existed in any real sense since Peter the Great replaced it with a Holy Synod, was formally reinstated by Joseph Stalin in 1943. There was even an apocryphal account of his meetings with clergy at that time, who showed up in plainclothes, without their church garb. This, apparently, provoked a question from Stalin: “What, you fear me but don’t fear Him?”263

  After that, the KGB would maintain a close watch on leading clergy, grooming the most promising to move ahead in the church hierarchy. This was the path of Patriarch Alexis II, who, as Alexei Ridiger, was recruited into the KGB sometime after 1950, propelling his career. In fact, the close cooperation between the KGB and leading clergy like Alexei Ridiger demonstrated the very essence of the kind of church-state harmony extolled in past centuries. Patriarch Alexis II would go on, by some accounts, to play a pivotal role in taking a stand against the hardliner coup in 1991, helping bring down what at least on paper was an atheist dynasty.264

  But the ties between church and state would continue; Alexis’ successor, Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyayev) was also known to have KGB ties. But if the late Alexis was widely respected for his integrity, Patriarch Kirill – whether due to sheer timing or, indeed, because of the cynicism that many Russian observers ascribe to him – was less fortunate. By winter of 2012, all sorts of allegations against him were being leaked to the press. Aside from a successful tobacco importing business he and other church leaders were allegedly involved in (which was not illegal), Gundyayev was implicated in an embarrassing apartment scandal, where he was accused of pressuring the courts to allow him to annex the upstairs apartment of a former health minister. The pretext was that the neighbour’s reconstruction had ruined Gundyayev’s rare book collection – damages that a court estimated as being worth over a million dollars.265

  The scandal quickly coincided with mounting reports of hit and run incidents by priests driving fancy cars – either the public was genuinely getting fed up with clerical hypocrisy, or someone was trying to discredit the church. Patriarch Kirill, who never really commented on the apartment scandal allegations – and particularly his hardliner spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin – insisted someone was deliberately attacking the church.

  It was in this environment of Orthodoxy apparently under siege that Pussy Riot, in their stated bid to drive a wedge between church and state, danced in Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

  As the church, and the particularly outspoken Chaplin, lashed out at the punk group, singling them out for committing what they described as a deadly sin, it was the government’s decision to prosecute them that exposed the church-state harmony Pussy Riot had merely poked fun at.

  If there indeed was a meeting in which Patriarch Kirill directly asked Putin for retribution, as some allege, then it wasn’t just Putin leaning on the church. It was also evidence of a subordinate church seeking protection from the state. The pact seemed to have worked spectacularly. In a society where a majority condemned what Pussy Riot did, by using their stunt to accuse the opposition of unleashing “Satanic rage” against the church, in the words of Vsevolod Chaplin, the government may have succeeded in driving a wedge into the opposition. In the eyes of many Russians who were indifferent to the protesters but dissatisfied with Putin, the Pussy Riot scandal functioned as a sort of deal breaker: this government may be corrupt and illegitimate, but are those hooligans any better? Finally, Chaplin would go on and publicly state that that “the religious neutrality of the state is a fiction.”266

  But there is, perhaps, also another, somewhat esoteric explanation, in the light of the history of the centuries we have rather haphazardly explored in this chapter: The Tsar can’t just ignore the ire of a holy fool – as the one force that can compete in its absoluteness, the Tsar is as dependent on the holy fool as the holy fool is on the Tsar. And so, if the holy fool bids the Tsar to go away, the Tsar must respond by either complying or unleashing all his wrath; ignoring him is not an option, for by ignoring the holy fool the Tsar would be belittling his own status before his people. But in punishing him, he acts at his own peril – for the holy fool is sacred. The challenge, thus, becomes a self-fulfilling curse.

  Chapter 17

  The Living Law

  “I know that stare. And I know of no other more terrifying than that hopeless, metallic stare.”

  - Alexander Hertzen, 1856, describing a meeting with Nicholas I

  “I drove up to them, sat up, and one of the fishermen turned, looked at me, and began to cross himself. I asked: ‘Why are you crossing yourself?’ When he realized that it was really me he said: ‘We drank a little bit yesterday and I thought I was seeing things.’”

  - Vladimir Putin, recalling an incident when fishermen allegedly took him for Christ walking on the water. 2012

  “Everything is so complicated, so tangled, brother. But there is no time to sort it out. Our madhouse is voting for Putin. Our madhouse will be glad.”

  - Alexander Yelin, songwriter. Author of the lyrics to “A man like Putin,” performed by the girl group Singing Together. 2011

  “…When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” - Abraham Lincoln. 1855

  1.

  IT WAS A matter of time before he looked at me; when he did, his eyes did not linger on my face, but slid down and stopped on my boots. I realized nervously that despite the sludge of early spring, I had not cleaned my boots in
days.

  Here stood the Basileus, the cold grey-blue eyes of the living law were cast upon me, and my boots were dirty.

  Putin reportedly suffers from far-sightedness – a defect of vision which may cause him to focus piercingly on things at a distance of several metres without necessarily seeing them.267 It’s quite possible that he could not tell what colour my boots were, let alone whether they were clean. But you don’t just brush off that gaze; journalists who have encountered it lead their stories with it; if you meet him, what is spoken is often secondary. What people really want to know is, “What did you feel when he looked at you?”

  Part of the lasting genius of George Orwell’s 1984 was not just its uncanny insight into Stalinist society, but the ability to identify the central experience of absolute power: Big Brother is watching you. He will gaze at you, unmoving, as you talk, you will try not to mirror his gaze, try not to anticipate the impact your words are having on him, if they are having any at all. But by being watched, and by acknowledging who you are being watched by, you enter into a game as old as time, a personal transfer of power, an understanding and an implicit designation of who stands above the law. It doesn’t matter whether you see him or not. What matters – what always matters – is who he is looking at, and what he sees.

  On December 20, 2012, I remembered my dirty boots, how he could look at you, how journalists and foreign heads of state had spun all sorts of legends about the “killer eyes” and the “icy glare,” as I scanned the press hall for a place to sit where he would be able to see me. Front row seats were taken, but I didn’t really want to sit in the front row anyway. I picked a seat in the second row to the side, still within his field of vision, then nibbled queasily on an unripe nectarine from the refreshment stand. This wasn’t like that spring of 2011 in the government building of the prime minister, where we stood silently as he posed for a photo op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If I didn’t need to do anything then but watch, if the whole point of that photo op was to see and be seen, then today was Putin’s first press conference since formally returning to the presidency, and I was determined to ask a question. Why show up at a press conference otherwise?

  “We are entering the heart of darkness,” a veteran journalist in the van had joked as we drove up to the press hall. Jokes like this had followed the press pool, they were an integral part of it when reporters were forced to sit for hours with nothing to do, kept waiting like Byzantine courtiers for the Emperor to show up because waiting underlined his divine nature – but if it was a ritual 1500 years ago, then it was mere inefficiency today. “He drinks our blood,” another journalist told me of the times he’d been kept waiting, locked in small rooms, for what resulted in little more than a glimpse. In the 21st century, did we have anything left but irony? Forced by circumstance to deify or demonize this?

  Five hours later, the same journalist who joked about the heart of darkness, a seasoned veteran, would leave the press conference with what he described as “the heaviest feeling of depression.”

  My question had to do with orphans, and, like all real questions, it wasn’t a question at all, but a confrontation over what had quickly spiralled into the most depressing story of Putin’s thirteen years in power, the Browder story, as told in Chapter 9.

  The resulting anti-Magnitsky Law, banning Americans from adopting Russian orphans, had sparked an outrage.

  In a country where, whether due to climate, infrastructure, or simply the sheer exhaustion of its people, orphanages were struggling to clothe and feed 105,000 orphans and abandoned children, where 1,220 children had died while in the care of Russian adoptive families between 1991 and 2005, the government was banning American adoptions on the pretext that 19 Russian children died in the care of American families. Many had done the maths: for approximately 1000 children who would not be adopted as a result of the anti-Magnitsky Act that year, the likelihood of death would increase 22-fold. Before he signed the bill, I wanted to confront Putin with those statistics, and I wanted to ask if he thought the deaths of those children were worth the retaliation effort.

  I was not surprised that the first question centred on the adoption ban and the Magnitsky case. Critical questions were a hallmark of Putin’s conversational style; that he had the patience to field each and every one of them was certainly meant to suggest pluralism and democracy. In each of the questions, he veered off into the Magnitsky Act. Americans had snubbed Russia, this was an appropriate retaliation. As for the adoption ban, “I repeat: I must look at the details of the law, but in general I understand the mood of State Duma deputies.”268

  Over the course of about eight increasingly confrontational questions, Putin meandered back and forth, dipping below the law, only to rise above it. He encouraged people to submit a petition to the Duma, he spoke of “details of the law,” tantalizingly suggesting that within the framework of the law he could even, perhaps, veto the bill, as if it had not originally come from him anyway. And then the patrimonial living law would shine through the legal-rational state, and he would say something like, “Sit down, Masha,” or “How can it be normal when you are humiliated [by Americans]? Do you like it? Are you a masochist?”269

  Given the number of people in the country who were eager to interpret his displeasure as an order to act, that cold gaze, when directed at you, was not just a PR gimmick. The journalist who was told to sit had the grace to reply, “Thank you, Vova,” but there was also the danger of utterly unpredictable consequences. Another journalist’s newspaper would be shut down after Putin quietly scolded the press corps for laughing at the name of her Chechen newspaper, Kadyrov Pravda (Ramzan Kadyrov is the ruthless leader of Chechnya; they interpreted the paper as part of his personality cult, through, as Putin corrected, the name referred to the late Akhmad Kadyrov). He reprimanded the press hall, not the woman, and yet local officials in Chechnya registered his annoyance and shut down her paper. He had been displeased; anything could happen.

  The public officials who quake in the presence of “the boss,” the stock market shares that plummet at the slightest hint of his “hopeless” eyes looking in the direction of any industry that displeases him, and the opposition journalists who doctor their websites after meetings with Putin will all go through the motions of life in a modern, if flawed democracy, but sense with their gut how things actually work. The non-verbal signals may appear to be coming from Putin – who expertly plays into them – but they are actually the response of those who surround him.

  I knew all this as I held up a sign with my paper’s name; one of hundreds, perhaps not as eagerly as the others. When he cast his eyes in my direction, I couldn’t help but hide my face behind the sign. It was one thing to know the statistics, but to say them to his face, as he stared back, bored, his gaze unmoving, inexpressive, all-knowing?

  Four hours of this, and the press conference was suddenly over. He had not called on me, I had not asked my question. As he stepped down toward us, we encircled him. Someone wanted that last chance to use him to make page one, someone just wanted his attention, his favour or his grace, some wanted to show their defiance. Some asked for a photo together, some squealed, some were determined to confront him, to score points, to restore a semblance of dignity.

  The cold-eyed human being who stood a metre away from me, who absorbed the attention of millions until his human nature had dissolved in it, was propelled above the laws he intoned. I took a deep breath, called out to the Tsar, spoke his name and patronymic, and faltered, tripping over the consonants: “Vldimvmich…!”

  2.

  On a crisp, sunlit day in late February 2012, just a week before Vladimir Putin’s re-election, Oksana Abdulayeva, a kindergarten teacher from the suburban town of Serpukhov, sat in the crowd of Moscow’s largest outdoor stadium at Luzhniki. She had been given free tickets by the municipal bosses of her kindergarten, and she had gladly shared the tickets with me, saying that she was told the more people showed up the better. “The labour union invit
es you to a holiday concert,” her print-out said. Tens of thousands of people slowly gravitated towards the stadium, drawn by dancing, rope-skipping, free music and pop stars performing their latest hits. Women with wreaths of paper flowers around their heads stood along a carpeted path leading to the stage.

  Abdulayeva, given a free ride to enjoy a holiday in Moscow, watch a show, and see the city, was more than happy to go.

  Did she know that Vladimir Putin planned to attend the rally? No, she did not. But she smiled and said wistfully: “That would really be nice if he did.”

  Except that Oksana Abdulayeva did not like, trust, or plan to vote for Putin. She told me she deeply disliked him, in fact. And yet she had no qualms about attending a rally for his benefit, a demonstration of his inevitable popularity, to be broadcast across the country.

  “We had these tickets,” she told me later. “We’re from Serpukhov. We wanted a nice day out in Moscow.”

  In response to the hundred-thousand-strong protest rallies that spilled into Moscow’s streets in the winter of 2011-2012, Putin’s new Kremlin ideologue, Vyacheslav Volodin, retaliated by amassing hundred-thousand strong rallies of support. Factory workers, low-level civil servants, school and kindergarten teachers and anyone else who was on the government payroll were bussed in, cajoled, and often paid to show up for these pro-Putin demonstrations. They numbered tens of thousands, they eagerly competed with the protesters, but when caught on camera many had trouble explaining why they were there.

  At Luzhniki Stadium on February 23, 2012, a national holiday commemorating the armed forces, a total of 130,000270 people showed up. Dozens of buses had parked along the blocked-off highway ramp, with one driver telling me he was recruited and paid by the Presidential Administration.

  But if the demonstration at Luzhniki was trying to be a political convention, in reality it looked more like an enormous medieval fair. The people came to eat the free food and listen to the concerts, and if the contingent at the protest rallies was blatantly cosmopolitan – the hipsters with their scarves and shabby coats, Indian skirts and trousers, the right people, as they liked to call each other – then the crowds that filled Luzhniki Stadium consisted of the grey, rugged faces of women and men living out hand-to-mouth lives, scurrying between a job that earned little and produced even less and the cramped home with the broken pipes to fix. Exhausted by the daily effort of life, they looked resigned to the idea that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. They were not there for politics, because politics seemed to irritate many of them if it existed for them at all. They were there for a nice day out, for a chance to see a few celebrities on stage.