The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (5 page)

To this the priest replied: “Power comes from God, yes. Any people have the ruler that they deserve.”

I saw a glimmer of what this meant in the way that Yelena, a music teacher from the Moscow suburbs who sang in this church on weekends, described her feelings about the Pussy Riot verdict.

“It was disgusting what they did and they needed to be punished,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps not harshly.” What certainly annoyed her was how, with the help of the government, the case had become overblown.

And why was that happening? “I am not privy to it,” she said. “It will be as they decide, it’s not for us simple people to judge what goes on between the church and the state. Only God knows what goes on up there.”

I told Father Boris about the kind of book I was trying to write, looking out of the church window onto the fields, and impatient for a swim in that winding river nearby.

“You have to understand the life of the people you are writing about,” he said, certain that the life of his people had been misunderstood and distorted. “There are things that are nearly impossible to understand.”

I nodded.

He looked at me inquiringly. “You don’t have it easy, do you?”

I closed the window and everything ceased being

Only the sun swam and glimmered, shivering and ringing

No one before me, no one around me, no one before me

Only the sun is against me, and around me and before me

I stare into the fire, it’s burning and shining and glowing

I fall and lie there afraid they will notice me cowering

-
Dmitry Ozersky,
poet and songwriter, “Fell”

“I wanted to call my next book ‘To See Putin and Die,’

but then everyone said that would be a bit too much.”

-
Andrei Kolesnikov
, pool reporter, author of

“I saw Putin” and “Putin saw me,” in an interview with the author.

THERE WAS NO door in our newsroom on that day. Taken off the hinges for the occasion, it revealed the worn-out woodwork of economy-class panelling (“Regulations,” a manager said reverently when asked why this was necessary). After about four hours of queasy anticipation, a woman, wearing a slightly glamorous, low-cut black suit and white frilly blouse (the same one, it seemed, donned at countless protocol events at the White House), leaned in through this opening and told a milling retinue of scrawny security guards,
journalists and staff that “they are on their way.”

The hype had actually started four days ago on Friday, when an ominous memo advised middle managers at the sprawling, government-owned enterprise that “due to a special regime on Tuesday, Feb. 24” guests would not be allowed on the premises of the building. The “movement” of employees outside their offices was to be “minimized” or “limited.” The “movement” of employees on the second floor (where our offices were located) was to be “maximally limited.” It was even suggested that some people not show up for work altogether. And yet the reason for the special measures was never named. Employees passed news of a “visit” to each other in hushed voices, joking about what they would say to the “guest” if they got the chance.

Everyone was told to clean their desks. All photographs and posters were ordered to be removed – including a little postcard one translator had in her cubicle, with a 1950s-style drawing of Putin and the inscription: “I’m watching you, you are not working!”

A janitor, asked why the door was taken off its hinges, was incredulous.

“Don’t you know who’s going to be here tomorrow?” she said. People in the building had been talking like that since Friday – a visit by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was euphemized down to “a VIP guest” or “a special regime,” or, in the case of this janitor, simply “they.”

“They are expected at 11 a.m., if they deign to drop by. They will walk along this corridor, into the archive, and through there, to the press hall.”

The janitor, who only gave her name as Tatyana, knew the itinerary because she had vacuumed these areas three times over the long weekend, when no one was even here. And now she was doing it again – washing every surface of every room the prime minister might or might not cast his eyes on.

“It’s always been like that,” she said. “We’ve had to do the same thing, even under Yeltsin. Then they will kick us out, so that, God forbid, we are not seen by them.”

Worst of all, it could still be all in vain. “And what if he doesn’t even show up?”

But on the afternoon of February 24, after about three hours of
waiting, it was finally clear that yes, they would drop in, and Tatyana’s three days of scrubbing would not go to waste.

After the press representative announced them, leaning in through the opening, a slow procession lumped in through the doorway. Instinctively, I stood up. A cameraman behind hissed for me to sit down.

Milling around, stepping into their midst and slowly sizing up the immediate surroundings, the prime minister walked with a noticeable swagger, like a CEO checking out his business. Grey and bland, benevolent and sinister, he was boring, glorious and terrifying all at once.

He nodded and returned the smile of the first pretty girl in the office, then, slightly aloof, allowed himself to be led towards us.

“They have surpassed [their competitor] in terms of online hits,” the director of the organization he was touring told him gravely. She was showing him the offices of an English-language newspaper, a brand that had recently come under the control of the state-funded news agency, and that, on the prime minister’s orders, had been re-launched anew. He nodded and smiled. He liked what he saw.

“How many people work here?” he asked her in a barely audible voice that was heard all over the room.

“Thirty,” she said. In reality, there were a lot fewer; to fill the empty seats, employees from another department had been told, to their great annoyance, to spend half their workday next to us.

When he reached the middle of the room and stood about six feet away from me, I deemed it appropriate to look him in the eyes, smile, and say “hello”. He answered soundlessly with a nod, looked directly at me for a quarter of a second, blinked once, like a camera, and, having acknowledged my existence, click, he looked at someone else.

After eye-contact was made with all of the staff, he turned to the director, asked her, “That’s it?”, turned around and left.

Two foreigners on the staff, who had sat less than a metre away from where Putin stood, pronounced the whole affair anti-climatic and compared it noisily to an episode of M.A.S.H.. Their disappointment was understandable: as they had waited for the prime minister to appear, they were held for two hours in the office of the top manager, who drilled them on how to pronounce “Vladimir
Vladimirovich,” how to ask for permission to be photographed together, and how to shake his hand most eloquently.

But paralyzed by his proximity less than a metre away, they did none of those things.

Still, these foreigners and the Russian top manager would never quite understand each other; for the foreigners, Putin’s visit was an inconvenient disruption to their working day. For the general director, it was obviously something more: when I asked him hours in advance if Putin was actually going to pass through our office, he nodded wordlessly with a look of childlike rapture that I was startled to see on the face of an otherwise intelligent, grown man.

Aside from the memo, no one had instructed me on how to behave in the presence of the prime minister and former president of Russia. Neither to stand when he entered our office, nor to worry about the fact that I was busy writing an article about the trial of his foe, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, widely seen as politically motivated.

Indeed, no one told the director general to have his employees approach Putin to shake his hand. If anything, we were specifically told to “relax” by the head of the organization during her final inspection of the premises prior to the arrival.

And while we were told to clean our desks before his visit, no one even hinted that I remove a pile of books with titles like
Putin’s Russia: the Ruins of the Opposition.
Growing up in America, I had once prided myself on refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance in high school, thinking it servile and totalitarian. But here in Moscow, half an hour away from meeting the
de facto
ruler of Russia, I removed the books from my desk myself. Why?

Dmitry Ryabov,
¹⁵
a rookie reporter with an independent weekly, aligned himself with a row of cameramen near the grand stairwell of the State Duma building on Okhotny Ryad, just across the street from the Kremlin, and stood waiting on his tiptoes for about an hour in a setting clearly heralding the appearance of a celebrity. “It was like Cannes,” he recalled later, casting his eyes down in a timid disgust. But it was also nothing like it: for to applaud a movie star
was not regrettable, but to applaud inadvertently the appearance of Vladimir Putin was.

It was the first time that Ryabov, who identified himself with a democratic intelligentsia that was deeply opposed to a government it had no means to change, had ever seen Putin. And when – either from the pressure of waiting, or at the surprise of suddenly seeing him so close – he applauded, the act of clapping his hands so irritated him that he felt he had to mention it on Facebook the next day. “I hate myself,” he wrote, as if by the acknowledgement he made himself clean.

Ryabov’s inadvertent applause reflected all the contradictions inherent in a Byzantine regime that kind of wanted to be democratic but could not be for lack of real democratic institutions – and it cut right through the elaborate façade of democracy that was being enacted that April 20, 2011. Constitutionally, Putin was a subordinate to President Dmitry Medvedev – a close colleague he had personally handpicked as his successor in 2008 – and yet, regardless of their political preferences, most government officials intuitively sensed who wielded real power. Constitutionally, it was Putin who was reporting to his Parliament – but aside from the perfunctory criticism coming from three emasculated opposition parties, a whole army of deputies from the United Russia party gave him standing ovations and called him, without even the slightest hint of irony, “our leader.” Constitutionally, Putin was to provide a progress report in this annual address – but in reality, everyone knew that the coming speech was a chance for the supreme leader to give a blueprint, a set of instructions for life in this enormous, impossible country. It was five months before Putin would unequivocally announce that he would be returning to the presidency in 2012 – describing the decision as having been made “years ago” – but by April 2011 most people already sensed that Medvedev was merely a placeholder and that Russia’s sovereign ruler was the prime minister, who staunchly insisted on paying lip service to all the formalities of democracy.

The reality of what was happening on the grand stairwell and the makeshift panel partition that separated us from them reflected all those kaleidoscopic contradictions. The very act of waiting, normally for hours – standing on aching feet, with your camera equipment
or your laptop, sometimes allowing a colleague you’ve never seen before to perch her notebook on your shoulder – established the stardom of the moment, enhancing metaphysics of power that not even the American president could match.

The murmur around me intensified, then quieted. Ministers began to appear one by one; Igor Sechin, the dreaded energy chief in Putin’s cabinet who was believed to have helped orchestrate the imprisonment and induced bankruptcy of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, walked darkly past; followed by Alexei Kudrin, the liberal finance minister who would leave his post in September and start making overtures to the opposition. Then, flanked by United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov (the bureaucrat who referred to the prime minister as “our leader”), Vladimir Putin, looking more confident than usual, emerged and rushed down the stairs, cast a glance and smiled warmly to greet the press, and disappeared through the doorway.

The appearance couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but it drew a strange reaction from the crowd of lesser officials and onlookers who had congregated along the grand stairwell. Where a rockstar or a popular president would be greeted with cheers – possibly of adulation – the sound that came from the stairwell behind us recalled more of a quiet wail, a sigh of relief and desperation, mingled with weak, inadvertent applause that wasn’t even supposed to happen. The sound did not seem to express so much the popularity of the star as it did the fear and deference that surrounded him.

That suppressed wail encapsulated an internal confusion about how we were supposed to relate to the national leader. Do we applaud his appearance on the parapet, or do we fall to our knees? What about those, like Ryabov, who do not like him? As it was, everyone was making an effort to pretend that this small, bland, agile man in his late 50s was merely a popular prime minister who had arrived to address his parliament. But if that was really the case, there would be no need to applaud his seconds-long passage along a balcony. In reality, what many felt and what most could not articulate was the presence of a power far more primordial than the highest elected office: for in the absence of rule of law, this was no president or prime minister, but a sovereign who had the power of life and death over you.

Something strange had happened to Ryabov, and he didn’t notice the applause or the wail behind him. He wasn’t even looking around to make mental notes of his surroundings, but stood instead aloof, concentrating on whoever was supposed to emerge on the stairwell. And when Putin finally appeared and deigned to look in his direction, Ryabov, a journalist who had always opposed this regime, who disliked most of Putin’s policies, to his own horror found himself applauding. And he was so irritated by his unconscious behaviour that he eagerly deconstructed it, as if by his awareness he could somehow escape it.