The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (32 page)

But what of the parallels, the common denominator that neither Tabak, nor Katya Obraztsova, nor Alisa Kharcheva would admit to, but that continue to exist?

The Bolshevik ideologues who played a role in generating adoration for their leader among the masses did not invent the cult – they channelled widespread social habits for their political ends.
²²⁶

It would be stating the obvious to say that those social habits did not die. But what is interesting is that they have erupted with such full force despite the relatively hands-off way that the current Kremlin has channelled them. Nor has Stalin’s cult, despite being officially condemned – first by Khrushchev then by post-Soviet leaders – disappeared entirely. In fact, opinion polls have reflected a positive trend in the way that Russians have viewed Stalin in the last several years. By 2012, a majority of respondents identified Stalin as the leading figure in Russia’s history.
²²⁷

But there is a more startling parallel that emerges when we return to the content of the actual messages that subjects send when they appeal to Stalin or to Putin.

“Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well,” said a party functionary in 1935. In 2011, Alisa Kharcheva told me the that “we are well off” because of Putin.

The leader is good because his subjects are comfortable, not through any political or institutional affinity. And if this sounds obvious, then a far darker, more primordial element is introduced when we consider him “who fructifies the earth” and him whose mere name drives up retail sales for a completely unrelated product sold on a free market.

If food and profit emerged as one dimension of the power cult,
then sex was another.

Putin’s association with fertility rituals recurred on a regular basis: aside from directly calling on Russians to have more babies, he once asked a female TV anchor how many children she had and indicated she should have more. He repeated the question during a phone-in show in 2013: by that time she had three children. During an appearance at the Lake Seliger youth camp, one girl asked him how many children she would end up having – he said three. It was no wonder that girls like Kharcheva and Obraztsova found themselves expressing support for their leader primarily through a sexual channel.

The entire roster of Putin’s PR “miracles” – from delivering salaries in Pikalevo, to putting out forest fires from a jet – is suggestive not so much of a populist politician, but of a sacred king who navigates the tangled, impossible universe of Russia and becomes himself an elemental force.

We first met Sir James Frazer’s sacred king in
Chapter 3
. It is appropriate to reintroduce him now to distinguish the marketing phenomenon around Putin from those around other celebrities: in contrast to pop cults, death follows the power cult like a shadow. Katya Obraztsova’s ambivalent fantasy was expressed in a mass media context where the leader is frequently accused of involvement in – or at least the tolerance of – political murders. There is no evidence linking Putin to a single political murder. But the fact that organizers of such political murders are rarely, if ever, brought to justice, and the repeated allegations against Putin, have a major effect on the popular imagination. What Putin is
believed
to be capable of doing becomes more important in the public imagination than what he actually does. The cult, thus, is both positive and negative. It is telling that when journalism students responded to the erotic, pro-Putin calendar with their own, critical one, the question “Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?” was one of the captions.

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.

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?

“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

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.

Understanding 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.