The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (38 page)

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.
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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.”
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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?”
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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…!”

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 invites 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 130,000
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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.

And, much like at a real medieval fair, the top celebrity was the sovereign.

He emerged in a black jacket, a Botoxed rock star. He touched the hands of the women with the paper flowers in their hair, and ascended the stage to deliver a speech about death.

Standing as close to the stage as security would allow, I saw a small, bald man with a strange face wearing a fur-lined parka. I noticed his familiar, bored countenance, how difficult it was for that aging bureaucrat, adept at wearing whatever role his people craved, to play the dictator, the role that seemed to disgust him most of all. Cosmetic surgery dulled the once icy fire of his eyes when he tried to flash them, but he tried, and his people seemed to appreciate the effort.

“I wish I could shake your hands and hug every one of you,” he said in his quiet, office voice.

“But why not, we want you to!” cried the ladies pressing up to the stage.
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He stumbled through an initially awkward speech, pacing the stage so that everyone could see his face. He made one or two embarrassing gaffes.

Trudging through a couple of sentences in his native bureaucratese, he suddenly raised his voice, and the effect, coming from a soft-spoken man, was stirring: “Do we love Russia?” he called out, and he demanded an answer.

He then spoke of childbirth, ordering that his people should multiply. “There are millions of us, but there must be more.”

In a matter of minutes, he worked himself into a carefully-guarded rage, the kind necessary to channel pagan energy from a crowd of 100,000 people.

“We remember these words from our childhood, we remember these warriors who swore an oath of allegiance to their Fatherland, who yearned to die for it,” he cried out, his voice metallic as he pronounced “death.”

And then he recited a poem about the Great War of 1812:

“For Moscow we shall die, Like all the rest in battle slain! We’ll fight and die, we cried again! And there, upon that bloody plain, We kept our pledge to die.”
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Somewhere between a threat and a promise, his speech culminated with a menacing scowl: “The battle for Russia continues. Victory will be ours!”
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Vladimir Putin said “death” exactly four times – and he was referring not to the abstract death of an enemy, but to the past and future death of his people. He was calling on us to die in his name, for Russia personified; a pale, grey man who struggled to show emotion now channelled it, manipulating a primordial yearning to share the fate of one’s sacrificed ancestors.

I stood there petrified, repeating his words in English for some reason – because I sensed the insidious logic of what was happening, of that pale shadow of why people had yearned to die for Stalin. For an exhausted, overworked housewife struggling to keep up with the ignoble minutiae of everyday life, the undarned socks, dripping taps, runny noses, shorted circuits, and other, bigger casualties of spending one’s energies staying warm in a cold country, of the Herculean feat of bringing children into such a world – the prospect of a glorious death could, in fact, be sweetly enticing. Today, she would never admit this to herself, let alone articulate it – but there it was, the pagan instinct that Putin was exploiting, for God only knew what purposes.