The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult Read Online Free
Author: Anna Arutunyan
pedantic. After sizing up the student with his serpentine gaze, Nicholas handed him a notebook with his poem. “Read it out loud,” he ordered, but Polezhayev, feeling the Tsar’s eyes on him, was too petrified.
“I can’t,” he said. This was not just terror of the Tsar, who had clearly already read the poem: Polezhayev’s work contained words that, in those times, were considered indecent; and he could hardly bring himself to utter something dirty in that sacred presence.
“Read!” the Tsar ordered. Polezhayev read. The Tsar lectured him for a moment, then suggested that the young poet join the armyas a soldier, recommending that he use the opportunity of military service to cleanse his soul. As they parted, the Tsar kissed him. 9 Polezhayev would spend the rest of his life as a soldier; at the age of 34 he died in a military hospital from tuberculosis.
Like Nicholas facing an upper class revolt, Putin seemed to have found himself suddenly becoming a guarantor not just of the Constitution, but of the moral norms that often contradicted it. He was privatizing God, he was proclaiming his rights to the souls of his subjects, and he hadn’t the strength to conceal it any longer.
It was as though a façade had cracked: with the jailing of three women for dancing in a church, something that had lain dormant underneath, that we had thought we’d outgrown, was spilling out onto the surface, to ours, and to Vladimir Putin’s dismay, amid haphazard efforts to patch up the hole with repressive measures that only made it grow. It was as though the unmitigated relationship between a human being and his government was laid bare, along with the underlying mandate of Russian governance: a mystical mandate that preceded democratic institutions by thousands of years, a mandate that came down to something as simple as strength versus weakness, food or death, master or God. That an unlikely, poker-faced former KGB officer found himself at the apex of this primordial chaos and had initially tried to suppress it only accentuated its resilience.
It had started with the Dmitry Medvedev conundrum. For four years, Vladimir Putin had ruled from the seat of the prime minister, to where he had withdrawn in 2008 to preserve the letter of the Constitution, which forbade more than two consecutive presidential terms. For president, he handpicked a lawyer he had worked with for decades. And while Russians implicitly understood who the real boss was, there was an eagerness to play the political game, to bet on the soft-spoken liberal, to speculate whether he would run for a second term. Indeed, until the very end, the question of whether Dmitry Medvedev was merely a placeholder or a true successor remained shrouded in intrigue. Most importantly, even Putin – known to make decisions at the last minute – seemed eager to give him a chance, to test whether institutional – rather than personal – authority was strong enough to survive.
For months running up to the 2012 decision, rumours of a rift between the two men festered, fuelled, deliberately, by the Kremlinitself. The suspense seemed necessary to uphold a façade of politics, as if getting politicians to take part in the rehearsal would eventually usher in the real thing. Then, sometime during the summer of 2011, the decision was quietly made between Putin, Medvedev and a few key insiders: the president was not going to run for a second term, and Putin would return to the Kremlin.
When Putin and Medvedev finally announced their decision in September 2011, admitting that they had reached it privately “years ago,” it came as a demoralizing blow to a whole swathe of society that had got used to the motions of democratic process, even if they understood that those motions were flawed. No one was surprised that Putin was returning to the Kremlin – they were shocked that he had admitted, so nonchalantly, that it wasn’t any of their business and never had been. It was as if,
“I can’t,” he said. This was not just terror of the Tsar, who had clearly already read the poem: Polezhayev’s work contained words that, in those times, were considered indecent; and he could hardly bring himself to utter something dirty in that sacred presence.
“Read!” the Tsar ordered. Polezhayev read. The Tsar lectured him for a moment, then suggested that the young poet join the armyas a soldier, recommending that he use the opportunity of military service to cleanse his soul. As they parted, the Tsar kissed him. 9 Polezhayev would spend the rest of his life as a soldier; at the age of 34 he died in a military hospital from tuberculosis.
Like Nicholas facing an upper class revolt, Putin seemed to have found himself suddenly becoming a guarantor not just of the Constitution, but of the moral norms that often contradicted it. He was privatizing God, he was proclaiming his rights to the souls of his subjects, and he hadn’t the strength to conceal it any longer.
It was as though a façade had cracked: with the jailing of three women for dancing in a church, something that had lain dormant underneath, that we had thought we’d outgrown, was spilling out onto the surface, to ours, and to Vladimir Putin’s dismay, amid haphazard efforts to patch up the hole with repressive measures that only made it grow. It was as though the unmitigated relationship between a human being and his government was laid bare, along with the underlying mandate of Russian governance: a mystical mandate that preceded democratic institutions by thousands of years, a mandate that came down to something as simple as strength versus weakness, food or death, master or God. That an unlikely, poker-faced former KGB officer found himself at the apex of this primordial chaos and had initially tried to suppress it only accentuated its resilience.
It had started with the Dmitry Medvedev conundrum. For four years, Vladimir Putin had ruled from the seat of the prime minister, to where he had withdrawn in 2008 to preserve the letter of the Constitution, which forbade more than two consecutive presidential terms. For president, he handpicked a lawyer he had worked with for decades. And while Russians implicitly understood who the real boss was, there was an eagerness to play the political game, to bet on the soft-spoken liberal, to speculate whether he would run for a second term. Indeed, until the very end, the question of whether Dmitry Medvedev was merely a placeholder or a true successor remained shrouded in intrigue. Most importantly, even Putin – known to make decisions at the last minute – seemed eager to give him a chance, to test whether institutional – rather than personal – authority was strong enough to survive.
For months running up to the 2012 decision, rumours of a rift between the two men festered, fuelled, deliberately, by the Kremlinitself. The suspense seemed necessary to uphold a façade of politics, as if getting politicians to take part in the rehearsal would eventually usher in the real thing. Then, sometime during the summer of 2011, the decision was quietly made between Putin, Medvedev and a few key insiders: the president was not going to run for a second term, and Putin would return to the Kremlin.
When Putin and Medvedev finally announced their decision in September 2011, admitting that they had reached it privately “years ago,” it came as a demoralizing blow to a whole swathe of society that had got used to the motions of democratic process, even if they understood that those motions were flawed. No one was surprised that Putin was returning to the Kremlin – they were shocked that he had admitted, so nonchalantly, that it wasn’t any of their business and never had been. It was as if,
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