Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

I recall how this idea amazed me when I was in Versailles – in reality, a vast theatre – where the spectacle of the king’s body in all its guises was played before the nation as represented by the court. Inside the palace the king was effectively deprived of any privacy; everything physiological was as public as it could be: in one place the king slept; in another he appeared as an ordinary man in his nightshirt; in a third he sat on the pot and washed, also in the presence of members of the court. The queen’s birthing room had places reserved for observation. There were chambers for the king’s lovers; his virility, his productivity, his male health: all was a carefully guarded ritual, a guarantee of the political health of the nation. As Michel Foucault wrote: ‘In a society such as that of the seventeenth century, the body of the king was not a mere metaphor but something political: his bodily presence was necessary for the life of the monarchy.’ [2] http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault219.html (in French). And it is no coincidence that, just as in England, the French Revolution announced, via Robespierre’s mouth: ‘Louis must die so that the Republic may live.’ On 21 January 1793, the king was executed, as were, after him, Marie-Antoinette and her sister Elizabeth – the political body of the nation got rid of the physical body of the monarch. A similar act was carried out in Russia in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. But by an irony of fate, having got rid of the body of one sovereign, the nation immediately installed another, which to this day lies unburied in the Mausoleum.

In implementing Putin’s de-modernization programme, Russia has been knocked back into the same political theology of ‘the king’s body’. Medicine first broke into politics with the arrival of Boris Yeltsin: his great size created the effect of a bodily presence. After the decrepit old men of the Kremlin and then the lively Gorbachev, Yeltsin stumbled onto the political scene like a lumbering Siberian bear. His habits, including rumours about his drinking and his love affairs, became the stuff of legends; and his illness and the operation he underwent in his second term (when his Press Secretary, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, explained his absences by saying that the President was ‘working on documents’) became a metaphor for the weakening of the political organism. [3] In June 1996, after the first round of the Russian presidential election and before the decisive run-off vote between Yeltsin and the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin suffered a heart attack. This was kept from public knowledge. After Yeltsin won the second round, it was announced that he had had a heart attack and he subsequently underwent a quintuple heart by-pass operation. Political life in Russia remained in limbo for months. This was the background to Vladimir Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin: young, sporty, with no bad habits and with the halo of a Soviet James Bond.

With Putin’s coming to power the appearance of the body of the leader who emerged from the entourage becomes a subject of carefully thought-out image-making, an object of close attention for society: ambiguous photos are published of a semi-naked man in dark glasses; there’s a blatant demonstration of his torso, a public show of machismo (with his judo, hunting, swimming and horse-riding). At the same time rumours are put out about just how masculine the sovereign is, about his divorcing his wife and his love affair with Alina Kabaeva. This doesn’t seem to fit into the background of an Orthodox renaissance and the propagation of family values, but in the logic of the sovereign, ‘what’s not allowed to an ox, is allowed to Jupiter’. Putin is able to go outside the traditional moral framework in order to demonstrate his extraordinary right to be the alpha male. (It appears likely that the supposed ‘leak’ of this description of Putin as an ‘alpha male’ by Wikileaks may have been organized by Russia in order to create just such an image of the Russian President.) The propaganda machine has created the image of a middle-aged man who says little, doesn’t drink or smoke, who uses the language of the criminal underworld and is a lover of patriotic pop music such as his favourite group, ‘Lyube’: he appeared as the dream guy for the downtrodden Russian woman, who sighed, ‘I want a man like Putin’. The President became the ideal bridegroom for Russian women (as is well known, there’s a shortage of men in Russia); he stepped into the sexual pantheon of the post-Soviet consciousness.

Putin’s body became a glamour object. He is a child of the era of exciting spy stories, the cult of the young body and plastic surgery, when the young-looking, tanned President suddenly sits himself down at a white grand piano and with feeling plays ‘What the Motherland begins with’ and ‘Blueberry Hill’, as happened at a charity concert in St Petersburg in 2010. The first decade of the century, when the country was swimming in oil riches, gave birth to a glossy presidency, based on political pretence and plastic manipulations, on high ratings and Botox. The main thing is to call a halt in time, before he starts to look like his friend Silvio Berlusconi, who, with his dyed hair and desperate attempts to look young, has already turned into a political clown. The body of the sovereign expanded to cover the whole nation. It entered every home; it stares out at us from tee-shirts and the covers of school exercise books; it led the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, to the natural conclusion that ‘Putin exists, therefore Russia exists; there is no Russia today if there is no Putin’. [4] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/no-putin-no-russia-says-kremlin-deputy-chief-of-staff-40702 . ‘“No Putin, No Russia”, Says Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff’, The Moscow Times , 23 October 2014.

Then suddenly there were rumours about the President being ill or possibly even dead; in place of political theology we had political thanatology. [5] The branch of science that deals with death. The body of the nation was shaken to the core; the political system immediately trembled. And even the return to public view of a younger-looking and wrinkle-free Putin was not taken as being back to normal for the political body: observers commented that the Tsar had been replaced, that this was not the same Putin; he smiles in a rather strange way, rather like the little girl whose mother has tied her plait too tightly. The traumatic experience of the President’s ten-day absence and the rumours about his illness presented Russia with a bald medical fact: Putin’s body had become the body of the nation; it had taken the place of politics. Instead of executive power, we now had Putin’s spine; instead of a work schedule, we had his pancreas; instead of parliamentary debates, we had an analysis of the President’s gait. And so the rumours about his illness instantaneously led to political chaos: in Russia there are no institutions apart from the body of the sovereign, and any hope of political change is inextricably linked to this body. We are all hostages to its fortune. This is exactly how it was in March 1953, when all the inhabitants of the USSR were hostages to Stalin’s body, and again in March 1985 when the whole country became a hostage to the decrepit body of Konstantin Chernenko (and before him to the terminally ill General Secretary Yury Andropov, who had been linked up to an artificial kidney apparatus) – and the country fell apart before our very eyes.

In order to break out from this model from the Middle Ages and to tear up our dependence on the body of the king, we have to do what they did in Europe in the early modern period: replace this body with institutions, to divide the person of the ruler from the function of government, so that Russia can finally become a civil nation and the President an ordinary person made of skin and bone, with illnesses and weaknesses and not a receptacle for abstract ideas and sacred thoughts. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves of the periodic necessity to listen out with holy fear for the Cheyne–Stokes respiration.