The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (7 page)

When Putin came to power in 2000, contemporaries described it as a spontaneous surrender. Not a single weapon was brandished, not a shot was fired – there was no skirmish, no struggle.

Looking back with horror at the mess that resulted when society was left to its own devices in the wake of a revolution, the sheer despair that one is overtaken with when faced with the futility of organizing infrastructure between communities separated by thousands of kilometres, some people surrendered, others gave up, still others criticized, resignedly, just for the record.

Oligarchs and regional leaders were “stumb[ling] over each other in trying to show their support for Putin,”
²⁵
according to scholar Nikolai Petrov. Alexander Oslon, a pollster for the Kremlin, described people eager to stop swimming against the tide, to let the river have its way, and to revert to habits of subservience that had, over centuries, developed as a coping mechanism for subjects otherwise faced with the vast, flourishing chaos that was one sixth of the world’s landmass.
²⁶

And so, what emerged with the beginning of the millennium in Russia was part Tsar, part General Secretary, part CEO, part patrimonial lord. A guarantor of stability when he could satisfy yearnings for order and profit – and an impotent, corrupt oprichnik when he could not. To understand why that is the case, one needs to move away from Putin, and look at the people he rules – the quotidian scurrying of living in their harsh environments.

“It is important to use all means to help a single specific individual resolve his issues, his problems, perhaps even his tragedies.”
- Vladimir Putin

“Jah will give us everything. We have no more problems.”

-
Boris Grebenshikov
,

leader of the rock band Aquarium

A GROUP OF three women – one middle-aged and two quite visibly old – were seated on a plush, blue, faux leather couch, where, having met in the central reception office for Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, former president, and current chairman of the United Russia party, they shared their woes with each other, as they would at a water cooler.

The older one was trying to keep back tears. It was not a life-and-death issue; but she was visibly upset: having survived German captivity during the War – a victory that was still celebrated with the pious intensity of the nation’s only truly religious holiday – she couldn’t convince local authorities to provide her with anything better than fourteen metres of living space.

But Sergei Kvitko sat separately; sat and waited patiently, clutching a small suitcase. He did not appear destitute, he was not
a pensioner. He was not a middle-aged woman. Looking slightly older than forty-one, he had the self- sufficient posture of a man who supported a family of four on less than £300 a month.

A mine worker, he would wake up each morning, and, shivering in the cold, load the furnace with firewood to start heating his home. “You know how hard that is with two children?” he complained. “And we don’t have electricity all the time.”
²⁷

Like many rural homes – and Kvitko lived in a mining settlement just outside of Novomoskovsk, a small town in the Tula region – his had no central heating, but it had a television set. And the evening news showed a repeated image that filled him with hope: his cold-eyed sovereign talking incessantly about the one thing he owns a lot of, when Kvitko has none: gas.

On closer inspection, Kvitko’s somewhat sunburnt face (it was a frigid February) looked rustic and tired. There was a scar on his right cheek.

The moment he saw a fellow human being waiting to listen to him, recorder poised, all the grievances started pouring out.

“I had to pay for my own way to help out in the rescue efforts at Lubyanka.” It turns out that Sergei Kvitko was contracted in March 2010 to aid rescuers in the tunnels of the Moscow subway, where two suicide bombers detonated themselves just half an hour apart on Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations, killing forty. He had to pay for the trip himself, and now he feels jilted: he helped his government look for dead bodies in subway tunnels, and now his government won’t even bring the gas that it promised his settlement in 2007.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich always says that money is being spent on gasification. I think he will help. And if he doesn’t, then no one else will bring gas [to our homes].”

Alexei Anisimov, the director of the Central Reception Office for United Russia party chairman Vladimir Putin, made himself comfortable behind his huge, enamelled desk, with a single portrait behind him (and in those days of diarchy, two portraits – not one – was the norm).

“I just hope you’re mindful of what you print,” he said with a disarming grin, “because when it’s about a person of such…” he didn’t finish, and motioned vaguely with his hand towards the portrait. “Well, you either say good things or…” He meant to say “or nothing at all,” in accordance with the Russian maxim about talking of the dead, but just waved it off cheerily.

That warning made sense later in our conversation, because Anisimov directed a very peculiar socio-political institution. On the one hand, here was a perfectly normal – democratic, even – venue for citizens to share their everyday problems with elected officials, the United Russia deputies, either municipal, regional, or federal, who headed these reception offices.

But unlike functioning Western democracies, these deputies did not seem to be catering directly to their petitioners – and Anisimov’s post did not depend on whether he was re-elected by the voters he would receive with their requests. Instead, he had another client – Vladimir Putin. And his motive for doing his job well – solving the problems of these half-destitute citizens – was to seek not votes but the approval of his boss. That approval would come in the form of several subsequent promotions. About a year after we met, Anisimov would go on to serve as deputy campaign manager during Putin’s re-election in 2012. Shortly after that, he would be appointed to head a department in Putin’s Presidential Administration.

Like many party initiatives, linking these reception offices to its chairman came directly from Putin, who touted them as an effective means to communicate with his citizens. But Anisimov seemed to be struggling as he described Putin’s exact role in these reception offices.

“We know how great… er, not great, but how big…”, here he stumbled again, self-consciously trying to avoid sounding too Soviet in describing Russia’s National Leader, “how big the potential, the rating of the chairman of the party is among the population. And how great his authority is on all official levels.”

In other words, having potential voters complaining that their social rights were being violated wasn’t enough of a stimulus for local deputies to make sure that regulations were being followed and that people were getting their allotted apartments, gas, electricity and social benefits. Instead, the deputies needed the direct oversight of the national leader to motivate them.

“All party resources were involved, and not just party resources, since the status of the chairman of the party facilitates this [mobilization].”

Even if the reception offices had turned into a populist gimmick for a former president intent on maintaining control of all spheres of public life after stepping down to the rank of prime minister, they seemed to have a perfectly institutional base.

Indeed, the very idea of a reception office for the party came out of sincere attempts at democracy building. In Russia, every political institution has had reception offices since Soviet times. By 2005, after five years in existence, the United Russia party established its own network, with offices directed by either regional or municipal deputies from United Russia – party functionaries who usually headed committees in their local parliaments that were responsible for the social sphere.

Even local deputies from the opposition Communist and Liberal Democratic parties had a budget of anywhere between £6,000 and £22,000 to spend on social issues in their electoral district, depending on the scale of the community they represented, whether regional, local, or municipal. The funds were set aside for help, such as with buying new homes for the poor, or paying medical bills, but ultimately it was up to the speaker of the regional parliament to approve each request.
²⁸

But by 2008, several factors converged to mark these sleepy institutions for a convenient overhaul. The President of the Russian Federation, who every year held televised phone-in shows where citizens could ask him directly to sort out their pension problems and their broken pipes, was stepping down from his post, and would hence be known as: Prime Minister, Chairman of the United Russia party, and National Leader.

Politically, the move to establish personalized reception offices fortified Putin’s image as a hands-on man of the people, sending a powerful signal that, no matter who was in the Kremlin, Putin was still very much in charge. For United Russia, the reception offices offered a role that the Soviet-era Communist Party used to wield: as an organizer of civil initiative where there was none. Putin’s party, as was his wont, was pre-empting and co-opting civil society by reaching out into places where it did not exist

But examined from a social perspective rather than a political one, the move actually revealed a staggering lack of functioning local institutions that were accountable to the citizens of their district.

In other words, the chances that a request to such an office would have any meaningful rate of success was dim – the papers would be filed away under the glass covering the desk of any official a citizen happened to appeal to.

Linking the reception offices to the national leader ensured direct manual control of how each and every request was being handled. “The very algorithm of the reception office changed,” Anisimov said.

“Deputies and their aides were involved in helping ordinary citizens on the orders of the chairman of the party – on the direct orders of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

Deputies and their aides, in other words, are authorized to telephone local officials responsible for red tape, and, by dropping the name of the prime minister, pulling strings on behalf of the citizen. Vladimir Putin, in other words, is brought in to mediate between the residents and their direct, elected municipal officials – the ones in direct proximity to the people making the requests.

Inevitably, the establishment of direct reception offices for the national leader attracted a whole slew of petitioners, some even described by reception officials as mentally deficient. An elderly woman at a Moscow reception office once asked a journalist if Putin would be receiving her in person.

But Sergei Kvitko’s case seemed perfectly sound – moreover, it reflected Russia’s perennial gap between a self-sufficient, educated elite and a large majority systemically dependant on a paternalistic government. Unfairly written off as destitute, backward, or even crazy, these “average citizens” from the provinces simply could not find a common language with their better-off peers. And the misunderstanding appeared to be mutual.

Had Sergei Kvitko been to “his senator” – his direct, elected representative? He had. But the local deputies in his town proved useless.

“I went to local United Russia deputies. They told me that [my home] was already supposed to have gas,” he said. But they would go no further. “‘We don’t want to fight with the town administration,’ they told me. ‘We have to live and work with them.’”

The local legislative branch, in other words, was more afraid of the local executive branch than of its voters.

But if that was one reason that Kvitko still didn’t have gas in his home, it certainly wasn’t the main one. Rather, local parliamentarians answered to local administrative officials because they were powerless to do much in this vast terrain.

And the problem of gasification illustrated this vastness perfectly – and demonstrated the dire limitations of local governance.

Kvitko’s case seems to have fallen through the cracks of a local gasification drive that began in 2007. That April, municipal representatives of the Shekino district in the Tula region launched a three-year programme to bring gas to all rural settlements in the area.

On April 27, the state-run Vesti channel was “pleased to announce” that the long-awaited “blue fuel” had finally arrived at the Shakhty-22 settlement – the same one where Sergei Kvitko lived. The news report identified the settlement as part of the Shekino district, and noted that 27 homes – and over 70 residents – were already connected to the new gas pipe infrastructure.

But somehow, Kvitko wasn’t one of them. By the end of 2010 – when the 163 million rouble programme was supposed to be complete
²⁹
– there was no sign of any gas.

“They kept telling me I was supposed to get gas. But there were only promises,” he said. “Vladimir Vladimirovich is always saying that money is being spent on gas. But where does this money go?”

Kvitko earned just 13,000 roubles (£250) a month as a mine worker, and it would take him several years and a number of loans to save up enough money to modernize his home without government help. But the possibility of uniting with his neighbours was an option that Kvitko seemed to discard at once.

“In Tula [the regional capital] deputies were surprised to hear that we don’t have gas yet,” he said. “But local authorities tell us to do this ourselves, to collect 800,000 roubles from our town, and the gas will be installed. How can we do that when our settlement consists
of veteran miners and pensioners? Old women can contribute about 200 roubles each.”

The 800,000 roubles (about £15,500) that Kvitko speaks of is far less than the 4.5 million roubles that the Shekino administration, using part federal, part regional and part local funds, set aside to gasify a district that neighboured Shakhty-22. The problem is often one of income disparity. In one case observed by the author, the elected chairman of a dacha cooperative outside the town of Dubna said that residents could pitch in for a new water pipe network. After hours of vocal debates, the issue was stalled – wealthier residents who relied on their own, autonomous, networks did not want to pitch in because they did not intend to use the new system, and pensioners did not want to pay anything unless the wealthier residents paid. In the end, the pipe network remained the same.