Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

Telepopulism was deployed in a relentless, never-ending PR campaign throughout the country’s state-controlled television channels, spinning the ‘national leader’ into various guises designed to appeal to different groups across Russia’s fractured society. Putin appeared on television as the defender of the thrifty housewife: bursting into a supermarket to inspect the prices, then humiliating the chain’s owner over the price of sausages and demanding they be sold for less. For the unemployed, he was cast as the worker’s friend: helicoptering into town to demand an oligarch reopens a factory. For those nostalgic for the USSR, there were photo-shoots of Putin’s holidays: dressed in camouflage and prowling the hinterland, he was the picture of Russia’s strength. Rural Russians were encouraged to identify with Putin swimming bare-chested in a river. Military men could connect with images of the leader dressed up as a fighter pilot or a sailor. Selections of calendars devoted to Putin’s judo skills were made widely available, whilst those who might have been tempted by extremism were offered the sight of Putin shooting a Siberian tiger with a sedative dart. Characteristically, after one Moscow metro bombing, Putin sought to shore up his image by tagging a polar bear.

But why was Putin’s posturing such a hit? The truth was that his popularity in the 2000s was both manipulated but also – it must not be forgotten – genuine. Yes, the state influenced all major television news outlets. Critical journalists were hounded by pro-Putin youth groups and occasionally murdered. Opposition activists were repressed and elections rigged, but in the 2000s Putin genuinely enjoyed the respect of ordinary Russians. They admired his command of the language. Yeltsin was a bumbling alcoholic, Gorbachev spoke with a peasant drawl, Brezhnev with a senile lisp, Khrushchev like a hick – and Stalin had such a heavy Georgian accent that he was frightened to address the nation. 35

Telepopulism worked because Putin reflected a wounded Russia just as it would like to see itself: athletic, healthy and proud – the antithesis of a nation plagued by a demographic crisis, heroin addiction and social rot. It was a Russian version of the Berlusconi popularity trick, which drew force on ‘Il Cavaliere’ being the Italian that many of his compatriots wished they were. In Britain, this is why Boris Johnson, the bumptious mayor of London, is the nation’s favourite politician – he is the TV sensation everyone wishes was their friend. Crowning this were Putin’s live marathon annual ‘phone-ins’. Building on the legacy of Russians writing letters to the tsars, or to Stalin, this show implicitly projected Putin as listening to each and every Russian, if only they got their question in on time. Pavlovsky gushed that in the media world Putin created, ‘TV news smelled of incense, holy oil poured on the work of the government and its leader.’ 36

After the ‘wild 1990s’ Russia wanted to believe in heroes. This was one of the reasons why Putin’s popularity astounded opinion pollsters, staying above 60 per cent for twelve years. This was the kind of majority that his contemporaries such as Blair, Berlusconi or Bush could only dream of. Even the golden youth at the elite MGIMO University in Moscow told me that they had found Putin’s appearance on the rap show a little cringeworthy, but far from risible. When I smirked that Putin ‘the Kremlin action hero’ was ridiculous, one A-grade student snapped back, ‘Men here can expect to live to the age of fifty-nine on average – below the life expectancy of Pakistanis! The president has to promote health and exercise at any cost. And if that means bare-chested calendars, swimming shoots, judo or being on a rap show – so be it.’

The other side of his popularity was that Putin has always been what the opposition calls ‘the great promiser’. In a manner at times reminiscent of Soviet propaganda that offered up a ‘radiant future’, Putin said his mission was nothing less than ‘an effective state capable of guaranteeing the rules of the game translated into rules for everyone’. In his three ‘state of the nation’ addresses in 2003, 2007 and 2012, closing down each four-year political cycle, Putin made almost verbatim promises: these included a pledge to double GDP, transform the military, strengthen civil society, build an efficient state, battle corruption and construct a country where democracy, competition with fully protected property and human rights would all flourish. He promised everything that Russians could have wanted and more. This is what his party called for in 2003:

Russia must become an equal member of the international community. This entails a minimal acceptable standard of living for the entire population of Russia, which should be, on average, as it is in the countries of the EU. We are talking not just about European wage levels, but also to have on the same level as the EU provisions for housing, healthcare and social protection. 37

For those waiting for payday in Siberian auto-cities or Arctic mining colonies, this constant barrage of propaganda and promise calmed them, and coaxed them for ten years into playing the part of Putin’s people. The Kremlin did not realize it at the time but this overreliance on the leader’s personality was leaving the regime extremely vulnerable to the ‘Putin trick’ no longer working. Strutting around as the ‘alpha male’, he sold himself as nothing short of a superhero. It was only a matter of time before the image would boomerang. But, of course, those in the Kremlin at the time never saw him that way. ‘No, no, the alpha male – it’s all a load of crap,’ admitted Pavlovsky, ‘It was important against Yeltsin. He was weak, sick and old, but he was – young, a sportsman and so on.’ 38

Though as a child Putin had dreamed of being something like the Soviet James Bond, this propaganda was not only about vanity – but sociology. His Kremlin was using telepopulism to turn Russia into the ‘Putin majority’. They looked over their shoulders, many of them simply onto their previous jobs, and saw Yeltsin. They believed he had been deserted by the masses and been manipulated by the oligarchs, the IMF and the West. Russia, like the Soviet Union, had to have ‘an absolute majority’.

Telepopulism was to serve it up perfectly cooked, as Pavlovsky remembers. Jewish from Odessa, he had been a dissident but cracked under interrogation and grassed up others to the KGB, before being exiled for three years in the Arctic land of Komi, where he wrote frenzied letters to the authorities, but which were read only by the local alcoholic police detective. Having lost his faith in democracy, he was certain Putin had to become the president of the wounded:

What made it possible for us to create such a long-fixed Putin majority? The victorious majority of the 2000s was built on vengeful losers – state employees, pensioners, workers, and the unanimously cursed and universally despised bureaucratic power structures. And most importantly, the democrats had neglected women – who became the most faithful part of the Putin coalition. The losers of the 1990s would become winners; the zeroes and the socially worthless would ascend the pillars of statehood. This is how the Putin majority merged yesterday’s outcasts and losers. The memory of nothingness made their teeth grab onto the new status quo. We called this stitch-up stability. 39

To secure the ‘Putin majority’, they deployed all the techniques of subterfuge and monopoly that officials liked to call ‘managed democracy’. What this meant, to quote the regime ideologist Sergey Markov, is a system where: ‘all problems that can be solved through democratic means, are solved through democratic means, but those that cannot are solved by other means’. 40In practice, this meant campaigning like in a democracy, but with all the fraud of an authoritarian regime.