The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (41 page)

The second concerned a uniquely Russian brand of feudalism. If in Europe the service of a vassal to a lord was dictated by a mutual contract that sprang up over generations of such service, then in Russia the contract was one-sided. The vassal came to serve the lord exclusively on the lord’s terms. How could such a situation sustain itself? According to a very simplified scenario, if the vassal found the service too burdensome, he moved to another land – he was free to do so. But precisely because he was free to do so, no mutual contract bound his lord to any obligation – and if it was this contract that would lead to institutions like independent courts and the rule of law in Europe, the very idea of a contract, a mutual agreement, was not internalized in Russia.
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The Soviet critic Iurii Lotman took this a step further – identifying “agreement” (magical) and “self-giving” (religious) as two models of social culture and interaction, one based on contract, the other on submission. He traced how the later predominated in medieval Russia, where the very idea of a contract governing relations was looked down upon. Under this religious model, one submitted fully to power without the constraints of a contract. “The concept of government service that arose in these conditions presumed an absence of agreements between the two sides: from one side there was the full and unconditional giving of the self, and from the other there was grace.” A medieval literary character would not be ashamed to call himself a “dog” in demonstrating his loyalty to his prince.
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Utter freedom and utter despotism, thus, arose from economic conditions early on, and there could not be one without the other. There would be few of the “networks of mutual dependence” described by Pipes that, while constraining the
individual freedom of Western vassals, also protected them from the tyranny of their lord. The Russian boyar was either free to go where he pleased, for the land was vast, or he was an utter slave, a “dog” to his sovereign, “on the table, and on the balcony.”

In the absence of functioning laws and “networks of mutual dependence,” the legitimacy of the crown came from within. This form of legitimization had its own, particular appeal. The 4th century courtier Themistius, somewhat cynically, described this appeal in regard to Emperor Theodosius I: “For he is the animate law, not merely a law laid down in permanent and unchangeable terms… God sent kings on earth to serve men as a refuge from an immovable law to the safety of the animate and living law.”
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It is easy to see how businessmen like William Browder could be drawn to that living law, without immediately seeing how quickly one could also wind up “on the table and on the balcony.”

But a self-sustaining living law also needed an idea, some form of New Jerusalem to justify its implicitly quasi-divine nature. Russia’s manifest destiny would be used by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Joseph Stalin to justify whatever blood they needed to spill on the way to achieving their holy mission – be that a New Jerusalem in the case of Ivan, a window into Europe in the case of Peter, and industrialization in the case of Stalin.

Vladimir Putin, born just seven years after the last heroic exploit of Russia’s manifest destiny – the victory in World War II – came from a generation that had no more strength for heroic feats. After rising to the apex of the state, he paid only marginal dues to the legal rational state that struggled to legitimize his rule, and could not be held accountable to it. But if his predecessors answered only to God and a divinely-inspired mission, he didn’t have the faith or the strength to be a messiah-prince. So he just pretended to be Chuck Norris.

As he aged, however, he was beginning to fail at that. His appearance in a hang-glider in August 2012, leading a flock of storks in migration, drew little but irritation from many Russians (seeing him on TV and not in a moment of supplication). Vague reports of a back injury morphed via Facebook into rumours of a sarcoma (that few took seriously). Attempts to continue looking young at sixty through evident plastic surgery (which was never admitted) only drew ridicule.

The mass protests of 2011-2012 can be seen as a reaction of the middle classes to that lack of mission, the notion that they were being ruled by a corrupt opportunist, or even a false Tsar. It was not surprising that to remedy this, Putin’s government resorted to the latent caesaropapism of Russia’s past, drawing on the legitimizing force of the only other institution with a modicum of trust, the church. In the words of sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh, Putin was trying to privatize God.

But if those attempts – coupled with a repressive crackdown (which helps bring out the government’s quasi-sacred nature) – succeeded partially in disorienting a marginal opposition that itself lacked any ideology or political programme, they had not succeeded in guaranteeing legitimacy. Putin was drawing on a traditional force, on church-state harmony, even as he tried to uphold a legal-rational state. By meandering back and forth between the two, he risked exposing himself as a false Tsar, and further awakening the need for a real one.

Vladimir Putin had probably heard me say his name, just as he had heard a few others. He continued answering a question about corruption – it consumed him. “Look at me, I’m talking to you,” he told a journalist standing next to me. He had not turned in my direction, each was supposed to wait her turn (I had realized with some dismay that, aside from nervous security guards, mostly women had encircled the president). Since I had mustered the courage to say his name to him once, I could easily say it again, I should have said it again, I was a journalist, the fear of irritating him, the unpredictable consequences of his answers, should not have stayed me. But what would I say once he turned to me? Ask him to consider the statistical likelihood of more dead orphans before signing the bill? He knew this already, just as he already knew that he would sign the bill. I could only elicit his annoyance or his favour, depending on what he saw in me. I also suspected that, by looking at me, he could discern even better than I whether I was in real opposition to him or not. And somehow, I didn’t want him to know it, because I didn’t want to know it myself. But there was something else that stopped me
from continuing, that allowed me to just let it go and walk away: it was the sudden sense that what we were engaging in was not exactly a press conference, and we were not exactly journalists anymore. It was a more ancient exchange that I realized I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to ask him for anything.

“I believe that power originates from the impenetrable depths of the human psyche. From the same place as love.”

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Vladislav Surkov

“Freedom is a religious problem. The insolubility of the soul. The inevitability of the separation of everything from everything.”

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Vladislav Surkov

I WANTED THE leader to decree how to live, what to think, how to fight, and what to want. I heard his quiet, metallic voice unravel and expand from the stage, drawing, dividing, abusing, uniting the crowd on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.

“Do you trust me? Do you trust ME?” he intoned.

“Daaaaaaa!” the crowd roared desperately, with a hint of a wail as their cries dissolved in the September chill.

His name did not consist of a quiet, two-syllable, blue-grey word; hearing the crowd chant it, it was expansive, burning yellow like the sun: Naa-VAAAAHL-ny. Naa-VAAAAAHL-ny. Naa-VAAAAAAHL-ny.

The previous night, he had done the unthinkable. A charismatic activist who openly and publicly called Vladimir Putin a thief, who managed to rally tens of thousands from around the country to volunteer for his cause, was not only not in jail, but had been allowed
to take part in the Moscow mayoral election.

When his campaign kicked off in June, he had less than 10 percent of support. By the time Muscovites went to the polls on September 8, he had 18 percent. But when the final votes were counted, Alexei Navalny, a blogger and anti-corruption crusader who had emerged as an opposition leader on a wave of popular protest and had never run for office, garnered over 27 percent. It was no victory, of course, but it had nearly forced the incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, who had barely edged past 51 percent, to face a runoff.

On September 9, 2013, speaking before a crowd of about 10,000 people, Navalny tentatively took the microphone.

“If you want to know what a rock-star feels like, then first of all, it’s really scary,” he began. “They say, throw yourself into the crowd, but I can’t jump that far. I am at a rally of tired people.” Towards the end of his speech, he would say something very much in the vein of his foe, Vladimir Putin: “I love you all very much.”

The election had seemed, at least for the most part, to be conducted according to the letter of the law. Navalny’s campaign, meanwhile, was as modern as anyone could have hoped for, built from the grass roots up. His campaign videos had matched and exceeded the sleekest political ads on American television. Through crowdsourcing, he had managed to raise $1 million, and draw over 14,000
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volunteers, many of them activists from the region who were determined to put their newly-acquired organizational know-how to local use. Stickers, posters, and 1,000 cloth “cubes” bearing Navalny’s photograph dotted the city; a red circle with Navalny’s name in the middle, the mayoral candidate had become an easily recognizable brand. He had everything: the organizational skills, the door-to-door activism, the picture-perfect wife and family, and the presidential smile.

And yet, despite all that, whatever had taken place at the polling stations on September 8 still defied the spirit of elections. In the patrimonial state, power begets power, and power originates from the Kremlin.

It is possible that the people Navalny had managed to unite, not around a cause but around himself, understood this on some level, understood that he would never be mayor and that the only reason he was allowed to run was that the authorities knew he could never win.

Could these people see Navalny, who had united a splintered opposition, as their future president?

“If he doesn’t make any major mistakes,” said Oksana Savchenko, a doctor in her 40s. “He’s still young, he has yet to grow. He still needs to do a lot to be a people’s president. There’s a lot more people that recognize him now, but there is still a lot of distrust.”

Petr Bakulov, a businessman in his 30s, said he wanted to see Navalny become mayor first. “Not yet,” he said of Navalny’s presidential potential.

But as the euphoria of the elections wore off, the reckoning began. If Navalny represented the future, then what kind of future was it?

“This future will come not as the result of a revolution by the creative masses,” one of Navalny’s prominent supporters, journalist Oleg Kashin, wrote the day after the rally. “It will be a future that results from the continuation of the Kremlin’s strange game, the strangest episode of which were the Moscow elections.”
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Kashin wasn’t being pessimistic, he was simply stating a perennial truth: “when our President Navalny thanks us for our patience, it will no longer be possible to trust him.” Not because he was Navalny, but because you could not trust any president.

If Kashin and many others were reconciling themselves to that kind of future, then what kind of present was it?

Who was Alexei Navalny? And was he the kind of leader that would eventually come to replace Vladimir Putin?

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The story of the Moscow mayoral elections is a story in which Alexei Navalny played only a supporting role. This pragmatic, often abrasive debater, a lawyer and a minority shareholder in a number of Russian companies who had rallied a following by launching a successful anti-corruption crusade, had been appropriated as a cog in a political game the government was playing as it juggled several different objectives at once.

In June 2013, Navalny was about to be handed down a sentence on embezzlement charges that would put him behind bars for five years. The investigation and trial had dragged on for well over two
years – the charges, which amounted to Navalny advising Kirov regional governor Nikita Belykh on what turned out to be a money-losing lumber contract, had surfaced soon after Navalny launched his anti-corruption campaign in late 2010. As he was pushed to the helm of the popular street protests that broke out in late 2011, it seemed that the government wasn’t quite sure what to do with him: jail him like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and risk galvanizing the opposition, or let him stay free in hopes that he would grow tired of the battle and be forgotten?

Whatever the decision about his fate, it could not have been unilaterally political. In 2012, Navalny had angered the powerful head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, by revealing that he had founded a real estate firm in the Czech Republic. It was then that Bastrykin’s agency relaunched a case against Navalny based on the old embezzlement allegations. It was widely assumed, thus, that the persecution of Navalny was based as much on Bastrykin’s personal revenge as it was on political expediency.

By 2013, the opposition rallies had largely dwindled and Navalny didn’t seem to represent much of a political threat anymore, at least in the short term. The authorities seemed to be taking the careful approach: keep him free and let the trial take as long as possible, then, perhaps, hand down a suspended sentence that would, by law, bar him from public office but also let him stay out of jail. But in June, it was not clear what course the authorities would take.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally and an apparent liberal, suddenly called a snap election for the coming September. The move appeared baffling, but given several conflicting strategies the Kremlin was pursuing, it made political sense: that year, direct elections for governor had been reintroduced for the first time since 2004 – in an apparent liberal concession to the protesting classes. Running for mayor prematurely (for Sobyanin’s term wouldn’t expire until 2014) and winning (for there was no doubt he would win) would help bolster Sobyanin’s legitimacy and help deflate the opposition’s claims that elections in Russia were rigged.