In the early 2000s the new men in the Kremlin had every reason to feel pleased with themselves. To their satisfaction, the public appeared to agree, with 50 per cent of those polled believing that the TV channels belonging to the exiled oligarchs were attacking Putin, due to their owners’ financial interests.30 Without much fuss or the need for any of the clumsy censorship of the Soviet Union, they had their message coming out of the airwaves. Their position looked sophisticated, almost unassailable. In March 2000, as many as 83 per cent of Russians had learnt about the election campaign through TV compared to just 19 per cent in the national press.31 With less than 2 per cent of the country having either access to satellite TV or the Internet the Kremlin seemed to have done the impossible: it had provided censorship for the masses and media freedom for the intelligentsia. This meant it never needed to lock up many people.32 Putin has never imprisoned as many journalists as his contemporary Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Technology, however, never stands still.
The Cult of Personality
The Kremlin seized the airwaves by creating a TV tsar, through telepopulism. Putin was not ‘born’ but ‘made’. As the doyen of Russian journalism, Leonid Parfyonov puts it:
Putin is really a collective product of the key spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky, the deputy Kremlin chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, the press team, editors of national TV, which insulate him from the world – the defining image of which is Putin under HD cameras directing a minister to get into action – it’s a complete creation.
It was not always so slick. In some of his earliest television appearances with Yeltsin, Putin seemed nauseous and mousey. It was his lack of charisma, his ‘greyness’ that meant the PR ‘political technologists’ had to go into overdrive to create an action figure image out of him. After some initial fluffs, it was wildly successful. Parfyonov thinks the hidden ingredient was Putin’s endlessly changing costumes:
The success of Putin was that he never repeated the mistake of Brezhnev who was there ageing on TV, the same static image capturing the decay of the state. He understood that he had to be multiple Putins – Putin diving into the sea to rescue amphorae, Putin driving a yellow car through Siberia, Putin racing a sports car. It was about not being Brezhnev, not being Yeltsin. Not having the image stuck.
The infamous Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky himself recalled: ‘Putin, of course spoiled us. Rather, we used Putin to spoil ourselves. The Presidency was so quickly filled with the gas of absolute charisma that the answer to any question quickly became – like Putin.’33 What Pavlovsky means by spoiled, is the increasingly extravagant acts of media-blitz that he invented, infecting almost all aspects of Russian TV. Moments that gradually made Putin seem almost absurd, just like this: Putin saunters onstage. His smile is insincere. Wearing a blue zip-up jumper over a beige turtleneck, Pavlovsky’s agents have made it look like he has come straight from the gym. The tune from MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’ announces him; a crowd of teenagers clap and scream as he makes his entrance on the country’s most popular hip-hop show, The Battle for Respect. Standing in front of a giant screen, Putin extols the martial values of rap. For viewers across Russia’s nine time zones, the sight is as striking as seeing Margaret Thatcher on Top of the Pops. There are cries of ‘Respect, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Respect!’ The shaven-headed winner of the rap challenge bellows: ‘This man is a legend… he is our icon… let’s make some noise so everyone can hear!’34 And the viewers at home, mostly young people in factory towns far from Moscow, are left feeling that Putin is ‘with it’.
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: