Millions of Russians think of Vladimir Putin as a patriotic son of Russia who rose to the heights by talent and effort and who lifted up his country with him. He occupied the presidency for the first time at the start of the millennium and won his fourth term by an electoral landslide in March 2018. His United Russia has a majority in the upper and lower houses of the Federal Assembly – the Federation Council and the State Duma. He controls the government, security agencies and armed forces. And he is internationally recognized, too, Forbes magazine having named him the world’s most powerful man in 2017 and again in 2018.
The Russian authorities have created a political cult in his honour and at his behest. A Moscow pre-school primer tells children about the great figures in Russian history, starting with the founder of the Romanov dynasty Tsar Mikhail. Peter the Great is highlighted as well as Nicholas II, who abdicated in March 1917. The little book alludes to no other leader since the early twentieth century leader until it reaches Putin. Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachëv pass without comment. Putin is celebrated as someone whom Russians should admire as one of the country’s great rulers.1 Wherever you go in Moscow, there are pictures of him. Newspaper kiosks sell his posters. TV daily news programmes carry items about him to the exclusion of all other politicians. The opposition press contributes to the phenomenon by reporting on his latest pronouncements. No other Russian political leader comes near to attracting the same amount of attention. Public life orbits round him.
Putin emphasizes the ordinariness of his Soviet boyhood in which he learned to look after himself in the back streets of St Petersburg – or Leningrad as it was known from 1924 until 1992. He advertises his university education in the law.2 He is a fitness fanatic who for decades competed as a judo master. He emphasizes his recent passion for playing ice hockey. He speaks warmly of his family; but since 2013, when he and his wife Lyudmila divorced, he has ceased to mention her and focused instead on his late parents and his two daughters. He remains pleased that the KGB chose him as a recruit soon after he graduated from Leningrad State University. He also stresses that his later meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the Russian political elite came as a surprise. He had belonged for a mere two years to the Kremlin’s charmed circle of influence when in July 1998 President Boris Yeltsin made him director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), which was the successor agency to the KGB. In August 1999 he became Yeltsin’s new prime minister and at New Year 2000 Yeltsin shocked the Russian public by stepping down and nominating him as acting president.
It was a vertiginous upward trail. Putin has told of how he havered when Yeltsin offered him the premiership, saying he had him in mind as the next president. Like everyone in Russia, Putin knew how capricious Yeltsin was. In the blinking of an eye, Yeltsin might easily turn around and fire him. How, anyway, was Putin to obtain privacy and security for his family? If he accepted Yeltsin’s invitation, how would he cope with being rocketed into prominence? While life and work were good for him as the FSB director, why take on a new job with such precarious prospects?3
Putin’s uncertainty was understandable. But his tale of diffidence is also part of his act to reinforce the image of a leader who is modest and lacking in personal ambition. At the presidential election in March 2000, he claimed that it was a sense of duty that impelled him to stand. Putin was then an unknown quantity for most Russians, and his backers worked to build his reputation as a young, decisive politician in contrast with the departed Yeltsin. He personally piloted a plane to Chechnya to give credence to the picture. Mostly, however, he left it to others to talk up his virtues. A biography, First Person, quickly appeared, which underscored his humble origins. More details have come from Putin’s subsequent recollections. One of his grandfathers, Spiridon Putin, worked as a cook in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in 1914 to give it a less Germanic image in time of war) before the communists seized power in 1917. Spiridon must have welcomed the October Revolution because he was soon employed in the Kremlin kitchens. Later he got a job at one of Joseph Stalin’s dachas, a coveted position in a period when most people were scraping round to feed themselves.4
It was providential for Spiridon that he stayed on a lowly rung of the ladder of the Soviet order. If he had been any higher, his physical proximity to Stalin might have endangered him in the Great Terror of 1937–8 when most of the regime’s public figures were executed or sent to a labour camp on the dictator’s orders. But nobody bothered about an obscure cook.
Putin’s father, also Vladimir, was drafted into the Red Army after the USSR entered the war against the Third Reich in 1941. He served with distinction in a forward unit, joining in operations behind German lines on the Leningrad front. President Putin has mentioned the hard times that his parents endured after the war, and he took part in the ‘Immortal Regiment’ parade in 2015 with enthusiasm. This popular annual event is held in the big cities on Victory Day, 9 May, and family members walk in procession holding up photos of parents or grandparents who fought in the Second World War. At the end of 2015 in a publicized meeting, Putin’s political adversary Gennadi Zyuganov, the communist party leader, felt moved to congratulate him, saying, ‘You, moreover, took part holding a portrait of your father, a victorious hero. It seems to me that it would be very important for securing unity in society, and it would then be possible to bring many projects and programmes to fruition.’5
Putin replied warmly. And after he told Zyuganov to ask whatever questions he liked, ‘Mr Zyuganov’ praised Putin for his realistic analysis of international politics and called for ‘solidarity in society’ in the struggle against international terrorism. He also offered friendly advice in advance of the commemoration of the 1917 centennial:
It will soon be the centenary of [the] February [Revolution] and the centenary of [the] Great October [Revolution]. Unfortunately, to much regret, a wave of anti-Sovietism and Russophobia exists which destroyed the USSR and gave birth to great disputes.
We ought to think about this and sign up to some kind of ‘pact’ between ‘Whites’ and ‘Reds’ and between all the state’s patriotic forces which would allow us to come to these dates as a united people, which is what happened recently with Crimea and Sevastopol, whose return had a consolidating effect on society.
Adversaries in the political arena, Zyuganov and Putin momentarily found common cause in their Russian patriotism, and Putin was pleased that his old rival was treating him, if only for this once, as father of the Russian nation.
Putin had snatched some of his guiding ideas from Zyuganov and other political rivals. Russia’s politicians have had to adapt their public messages in the light of the fundamental changes in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union. Every party that seriously sought power had to devise a vision of the future that would appeal to modern Russians. The Communist Party ditched key features of Marxism-Leninism. Abandoning interest in the international labour movement, it became a vehicle of patriotism, military assertion and welfare economics, and Zyuganov seldom uttered the name of the man who founded the USSR: Lenin. Vladimir Zhirinovski, the Liberal-Democratic Party leader, adjusted his thinking with the same flexibility as Zyuganov. But whereas Zyuganov lamented the disintegration of the communist administration, Zhirinovski shed no tears. Instead he highlighted Russian nationalist values and argued for the use of force against any foreign state attempting to demean Russia’s global status.
Putin, however, outflanked them by wrapping himself in the flag of a militant patriot, and by this and other less salubrious means he ensured that they continued to lose every presidential and parliamentary election.
He had resigned from the Communist Party in August 1991 after the coup against President Mikhail Gorbachëv. The conspiracy was led by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and supported by several of the leaders in the party and governmental hierarchy. The plotters fumbled their effort, and Gorbachëv was soon freed from house arrest in Crimea. But he never recovered all his old powers and the USSR collapsed at the end of the year, leaving Yeltsin as president of an independent Russia. By then Putin was working for the St Petersburg mayor and democratic politician Anatoli Sobchak, who had once been his law lecturer. When Sobchak had invited him to join his team, Putin at first demurred on the grounds that it would not help Sobchak if it became known that the team included an officer of seventeen years’ standing in the KGB’s external service. But Sobchak wanted enforcers who could help him run the city, and Putin was not the only person he recruited from a security agency background – indeed the mayor’s office was stuffed with young former secret-service officers.6
Putin later downplayed his past rank of KGB lieutenant colonel:
I . . . wasn’t a top Soviet official, I wasn’t a party functionary, I wasn’t a Politburo member, I didn’t work in the provincial party committees. Essentially, though I worked in the intelligence services, I was an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union to the extent that an intelligence officer can be thought of as ordinary.7
He obviously wanted no taint of the mistakes by the communist leadership to affect his personal reputation.
He was not reticent about his past employment. When summarizing his thinking, he showed distinctly greater fondness for the security agency than for the party:
I did not join the party only because I had to, and I can’t say that I was such a communist in my ideas, but nevertheless I was very careful in my attitude to it . . . Unlike many functionaries, I did not throw away my membership card, I did not burn it. I don’t want to criticize anyone now – people could have various motives and their behaviour is their own business. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union fell apart; I still have my membership card somewhere or other.8
To this day he uses the lexicon that he learned in the secret service. For instance, when addressing ministers and others who were obstructing an official economic plan, he lost his temper with them and spat out the remark that ‘the saboteurs are sitting in this very room’.9 On other occasions he has spoken with affection about his time in the KGB. One of his boasts was that he had an underdeveloped sense of danger – the official file on him noted this as a defect.10 Quite how nostalgic Putin feels about his intelligence agency days is exemplified by his surprise visit to his old boss Lazar Matveev on his ninetieth birthday in May 2017. Matveev, living in quiet retirement in south-east Moscow, was the KGB rezident in Dresden where Putin was posted in the second half of the 1980s. Putin brought gifts of a presidential watch and a copy of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda issued on the day of Matveev’s birth in 1927.11
He used to avoid appearing sentimental for fear of giving the impression of weakness. Over the years, he has unfrozen somewhat. Revealing recently that his father died two months before he became prime minister in September 1999, he recalled how the old man on his hospital bed said to the medical staff, ‘Look, here comes my president.’12 While acknowledging that he has risen high in public life, Putin frequently stresses his ordinary upbringing. Since first occupying the presidency he has also identified with the Orthodox Christian faith. The sincerity of his belief has been called into question because he has sometimes fumbled his words and gestures during church services. Nevertheless he affirms the religious pulse inside himself and recounts how his mother had him baptized in Leningrad in defiance of the communist authorities and their policy of militant atheism. The act of baptism turned out to involve an astonishing coincidence. The priest conducting the ceremony was a certain Father Nikolai. Years later, in conversation with Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, Putin ascertained that Kirill was the son of that very same priest.13
Putin is protective of the privacy of his daughters Maria and Yekaterina. In 2013 foreign reports identified Maria as living in the Netherlands. Putin countered that none of his family was resident abroad. (Reportedly Maria had returned to Russia in the interim.) Both daughters, he insisted, are Moscow residents pursuing a ‘normal life’ without involvement in politics.14 He stated that he made time to see each of his children at least once a month.15 Describing them as ‘ordinary’ individuals with jobs in education and science, he denies they would ever behave like ‘princes of the blood’. In June 2017 he let slip that he has two grandchildren, one of whom was at kindergarten while the other was a babe in arms.16
One aspect of Putin’s character is unusual for a son of Russia. He rarely drinks alcohol and when he accepts a glass of wine at official occasions, he sips rather than gulps. Tea is Putin’s favoured beverage.17 When Yeltsin was filmed sitting at a table that was laid with a teacup and saucer, people laughed because he had a well-known weakness for vodka. With Putin, it is no charade and his rejection of alcoholic spirits has won him wide approval, especially with Russian women, many of whom have suffered at the hands of hard-drinking husbands. In 2002 the female electronic-dance duo Singing Together (Poyushchie Vmeste) had a hit single with ‘A Man Like Putin’, a song that contained the chorus,
Someone like Putin who’ll be a tower of strength,
Someone like Putin who won’t take to the drink,
Someone like Putin who won’t disrespect me,
Someone like Putin who won’t walk out on me.
For many Russian women, he was the kind of man with whom they would like to share their homes.
In 2015, after stories spread of illness, his spokesman Dmitri Peskov assured everyone that the president was so strong that he risked damaging people’s hands when offering his greeting.18 Though there were credible rumours that Putin had back problems, he has generally kept himself fit with daily workouts on the exercise equipment at his official residences. When he took up ice hockey at the age of sixty, he enjoyed competing on the rink in front of a cheering crowd.19 For his summer vacations, he flew to picturesque parts of the Russian Federation, where he was filmed riding and fishing, sometimes stripped to the waist for the benefit of the cameras. In 2011 his aides arranged for him to try scuba diving in a Black Sea archaeological resort, but his reported discovery of some ancient remains was a set-up job that even Peskov had difficulty in laughing off. But it is all part of a public relations campaign to show Russians that their leader is in blooming health, unlike his predecessor, who was a medical wreck during his later years in power, and even Gorbachëv succumbed to exhaustion. Putin has no intention of tumbling into a situation where his subjects want rid of him because of ill health.
Although, like some of the tsars, he encourages Russians to tell him of their local grievances, there is an unwritten rule that they refrain from criticizing any general defects in current governance. In a TV phone-in show in April 2016, women working in the Ostrovnoi fish-processing plant on an island off the east coast of Siberia complained about not having received their wages since the previous October. A shocking story of corruption and exploitation emerged. Shikotan is an isolated place where the labour force felt like slaves. Putin’s face expressed horror, as if he had never imagined that such things could arise in Russia. Within minutes a caption appeared on the screen to the effect that a criminal case had been started.20 Next day the enterprise director appeared on site clutching a bagful of wages and blaming the bad fishing season for the delay. Sakhalin Province Governor Oleg Kozhemyako flew to the island to allay any notion that the authorities would try and hush up the situation.21
The clear inference was that if anyone could improve the lives of ordinary Russians, it was their president. In October 2014 Vyacheslav Volodin, then serving as Putin’s first Deputy Chief of Staff, declared his motto: ‘While there’s Putin, there is Russia. Without Putin, there’s no Russia.’22 Two years later Putin gave a show of modesty by diverting attention to the annals of European history, ‘It was the famous French “Sun King” Louis XIV who said that he was France, but this of course is an incorrect thesis.’23 Countries, he explained, were bigger than their rulers – and Putin sensibly denied that he and Russia were one and the same. He returned to the topic a few weeks later when he remarked that he only attracted attention because he was an elected national leader and that his experience in Russia was something that occurred in other countries.24 Volodin had probably tried to prepare the scene so that his president could enjoy warm applause without appearing to have invited flattery. But flattery is precisely what Volodin and others were organizing for him. They wanted him to receive public reverence, which he strove to accept with regal impassivity.
Though he is self-possessed when appearing on television, he can become cantankerous when faced with any journalist he senses is hostile or incompetent. Megyn Kelly, NBC’s star presenter, looked forward to a gentle reaction after she had showered him with compliments in hosting one of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum sessions in June 2017. She had misjudged him. As soon as she put awkward questions in the TV interview, he snarled about her elementary ignorance.
Sometimes reporters go too far in the opposite direction. Overexcited young Russian television presenters in particular have shown a propensity for sycophancy. In 2015 an exchange with Maria Sittel that went as follows was broadcast on television:
Sittel: Vladimir Vladimirovich, wouldn’t you like to clone yourself or assemble an army of lookalikes?
Putin: No.
Sittel: . . . Ah, but our bureaucrats in Russia won’t acknowledge anyone else but you.
Putin: I’ve already answered. Let’s move on.25
This was enough to make at least some of the audience squirm with embarrassment, and Putin showed he agreed by brushing aside Sittel’s flattery. His brusqueness was a clever ploy. He rightly assumed it would serve to enhance his aura of power and dignity.
It was the same when a TASS news agency reporter, Andrei Vandenko, tried to wheedle him into agreeing to places to be named after him:
Vandenko: It’s not necessary to proclaim an autocracy. You only have to point your finger and tomorrow it would be possible to bring back the Gulag. Or, for example, [we could have] a cult of the individual so that there would be a Vladimir Putin Street. A group has recently been formed [in the Urals] to rename a road as Sacco and Vanzetti Street, after the Italian anarchists who were sent to the electric chair in America. They surely have nothing to do with the Urals. But Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] does. He didn’t deliver the country over to ruin in the 1990s but instead brought a halt to the excesses of the bandits and the oligarchs, and so on and so forth . . . What do you reckon about all this?
Putin: I think that people are doing this for good and decent motives.
Vandenko: And such impulses will exist in every Russian town if you were merely to twitch an eyebrow.
Putin: I understand. But it’s too early [for leaders] to raise up monuments to each other. And I have myself in mind. What’s necessary is to keep on working and it will be for future generations to evaluate the contribution of each individual to Russia’s development.26
Then, emotion took over:
It’s completely obvious that Russia, for me, is my entire life. Not for a single second can I imagine myself without Russia. I’ve previously talked about how they traced my family’s genealogy in the archives. They came from a village not far from Moscow, 120 kilometres away, where my forebears lived from the seventeenth century and throughout all those centuries went to one and the same church. And I feel my own connection with the Russian soil and the Russian people, and I could never live anywhere else but Russia – but Russia of course can get by without people like me. Russia has a lot of people.27
It was a display of modesty and patriotism intended to enhance his status among fellow Russians.
He stresses how hard he works for them. On one rare occasion he even claimed that this involved a life of some personal danger. He spoke about the risk of assassination in the course of a series of interviews with American film director Oliver Stone between 2015 and 2017, which were broadcast on both American and Russian television. Stone, a veteran critic of United States administrations, uses the roundabout methods of interrogation of the 1970s American fictional TV detective Columbo, which was how he inveigled Putin into discussing the incidence of violent attacks on politicians. Stone remarked that Cuban leader Fidel Castro – another of Stone’s famous interviewees – claimed to have avoided death fifty times through keeping direct personal control of his bodyguard. Putin surprisingly failed to repudiate Stone’s comment that five attempts had reportedly been made on his life. When Stone commented that plots against the lives of politicians have tended to succeed if the killer was infiltrated into the guard unit, Putin looked straight at the camera and stated that he had confidence in the men who looked after his safety and that he was not minded to interfere as Castro had done.28
Whether or not there really were five attempts to kill Putin, at least one incident is well attested. It took place in February 2012 when Adam Osmaev, a Chechen ‘volunteer’, led a plot to bomb the motorcade in which Putin was travelling. Osmaev escaped across the border into Ukraine. Russian security forces tracked him down and made two unsuccessful efforts to shoot him in Kyiv, which is the only reason his activity became public knowledge.29 Russia’s authorities continue to avoid discussion of assassination attempts, presumably in order to discourage ideas about mounting any more. In saying this to Stone, perhaps Putin was dropping his guard for a moment – or maybe he felt like piquing the world’s curiosity. Or he could have made the story up in the interest of accentuating his importance.
Such was his grip on the country’s politics that in December 2017, when announcing his intention to stand in the following year’s presidential election, he did not allow his name to go forward as candidate for United Russia; nor did he attend the ceremony to register his candidacy. This nonchalance continued. As when he stood for the presidency in 2000, 2004 and 2012, he behaved as if it was beneath his dignity to engage in political campaigning. In his few campaign speeches he spoke in airy terms about what he would do to secure Russia’s future. He made no reference to opposing contenders by name. He wished to convey the message that he had a country to run and no time to waste on politicking. He totally ignored the barbs that Russian critics threw at him. If anything, moreover, he liked being denounced by foreigners because it served to increase his popularity among Russians. He gave no sign of considering a change of direction in policies. What he had done, he implied, was a source of pride for him. He performed as father to the nation and left it to others to deliver the plaudits. Throughout the ‘campaign’ he knew that he would win the election in a landslide.
Those of his opponents who might have constituted a competitive threat had already been eliminated from the contest. In particular, crowd orator and media activist Alexei Navalny was barred from standing after a conviction for embezzlement. When challenged about this at a press conference, Putin snapped back:
I assure you that the authorities have been afraid of nobody and are still afraid of nobody. But the authorities must not be like a bearded peasant idly picking out bits of cabbage from his beard and watching the state turn into some muddy pool where oligarchs go fishing and pull out the goldfish for themselves, as was the case in the 1990s or as still happens in Ukraine today. Do we want Russia to become a copy of present-day Ukraine? No, we do not want that and we won’t allow it!30
This is a president who takes pride in his efforts to clean up the polluted pool of Russian politics. He dismisses Navalny as belonging to the type of politician who can only cause chaos.
Ever since emerging on the highest public stage, Putin has been convenienced by the removal of real and potential rivals. Back in 2000, when he offered himself for election for the first time, leading opponents such as Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and ex-prime minister Yevgeni Primakov were undone by televised revelations about their financial trickery and poor health respectively. The charismatic liberal Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015. Mikhail Kasyanov, who left the premiership in 2004, had his reputation shredded in 2016 when a video was shown on television showing him having extramarital sex with a female political assistant.
The approved list of candidates in 2018 included socialite and TV chat-show presenter Xenia Sobchak, who was the daughter of Putin’s late mentor in St Petersburg, Anatoli Sobchak. Standing for the Civic Initiative Party, she censured Putin’s policies, reserving her barbs for criticism of the Syrian military intervention. She knew that she could never beat Putin on election day. As she neatly put it, the casino always wins against the gambler.31 The Communist Party fielded a fresh candidate, Pavel Grudinin, who was general director of the Lenin State Farm. Its usual nominee, Zyuganov, had lost so many elections that he decided that it was time for someone else to stand. Grudinin performed impressively enough for the worried authorities to leak information that he had a Swiss bank account and that his son owned property in Latvia. Against all of them stood Vladimir Zhirinovski, who represented the Liberal Democratic Party in the presidential polls for a record seventh time. While Sobchak was young and glamorous and Grudinin a suave communicator, Zhirinovski was his antique buffoonish self. TV coverage inordinately favoured Putin. In the candidates’ televised debates, from which Putin absented himself, the squabbling exchanges enhanced no one’s reputation.32
The disqualified Navalny called on his supporters to boycott the ballot booths, but this appeal had little impact. The authorities took no chances and organized a campaign about the duty of all citizens to cast their votes. Although Putin was coasting to a certain triumph, he wanted to avoid a low turnout and the accompanying adverse publicity.
On 3 March 2018, in a nod to electoral normality, he appeared at a Saturday rally in the Luzhniki stadium. When, six years earlier, he had stood forth as a presidential candidate, he had recited stanzas from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem on the battle of Borodino in 1812 between the Russians and Napoleon’s Grande Armée before asking the crowd whether they loved Russia. He now repeated this patriotic ploy but with a different question: ‘We are a team, right?’ A tidal surge of cries – ‘Da! Da! Da!’ – came back at him. Though some in his audience had been paid to attend and others were put under pressure by their employers, there was no denying the collective response on the day. Putin started a chant of ‘Rossiya! Rossiya!’ and then led the way in singing the national anthem with the vast crowd. Nobody failed to notice his delight.33
Speaking to the Federal Assembly on 1 March 2018, Putin continued to focus on raising national morale. There were few policy initiatives except for a promise to introduce a minimum wage to lift millions out of poverty. He painted a vista of continual general improvement in health care, housing and transport during his years in power. He skipped over the need to deepen the rule of law, to widen political freedom or to lessen social inequality. Putin dedicated the longest part of his speech to the armed forces – he seldom misses a chance to emphasize his position as commander-in-chief. When announcing Russia’s new nuclear missiles that could hit any global target, he invited viewers to suggest names for them. When he waved to signal the order for screens to display the pictures of each new weapon, he was a picture of glee.34 His performance combined menace with a distinct lack of taste but he had – rightly – calculated that army drumbeats would appeal to the parts of Russia’s electorate that he was courting.
Putin is presented by the TV channels and the loyal sections of press and radio as embodying the best features of life in Russia. His instinct as a ruler is to be simultaneously distant from and near to his people, both exceptional and ordinary. He is the public face of the Kremlin’s ruling elite. In the eyes of most foreigners, he embodies all things Russian. He presides with aplomb over political life. He delivers speeches, grants interviews and takes part in television phone-ins. He invites Russian reporters to follow him around. He is the focus of the great official ceremonies. As head of state he confers awards for outstanding services and achievements. He is a walking, talking national cult.