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
The Putin Majority
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’.40 In practice, this meant campaigning like in a democracy, but with all the fraud of an authoritarian regime.
First they had to make Putin sound like his voters – the only social class really present in Russia in the early 2000s, a formless lower middle class – earning a living from payday to payday, dipping in and out of poverty. The tone, gesture and vernacular that made Putin seem as down to earth as possible was systematically prioritized. Putin even occasionally slips into the slang language known as ‘fenya’ – thieves’ slang. This resonated in a brutalized Russian society. According to research by Vladimir Radchenko, the former deputy chairman of the Supreme Court, between 1992 and 2007 over 15 million Russians received a criminal record – over 30 per cent of all adult males – and, in a country of only 142 million citizens, over 5 million have spent at least some time in custody or the prison system, leaving Russia with the second largest prisoner population per capita in the world.41
Watching Putin in the moment that clinched his popularity, threatening to chase Chechen insurgents and ‘waste them in their outhouses’, sends a chill down the spines of those who have read the Gulag Archipelago. There, Solzhenitsyn had warned that the day Gulag slang was heard in Moscow State University would be the day the camps had infected all Russia. Putin’s coarse bar-humour would unsettle Moscow’s diplomatic corps. He once remarked when informed that the former Israeli president, Moshe Katsav, was facing trial for sexual assault: ‘He raped ten women. We never knew he had it in him. We all envy him.’42
Being a real man of the people, even an orator, was essential but not enough. Yeltsin was always, even in his trembling later years, more of a ‘muzhik’ – a peasant, ‘son of the earth’, than his successor – and at his best was always more charismatic than Putin has ever been. So how did the poles of Putin’s big tent hold together for over a decade?
It was not only posturing. Yeltsin had told Russians what he wanted them to hear – that the Soviet Union had been a catastrophe and the lives they had led under it had been a deceit. Putin reversed this. He started telling Russians what the majority of normal people desperately wanted, even needed him to say.43 They had not lived decades of their lives in vain. The sacrifices and cults of the Soviet dream had been cruel, hopelessly flawed, but it had not all been a stupid mistake that could now be mocked. Soviet heroes and Soviet triumphs were still glorious even if the Union was gone. This is why Putin said, ‘Those who do not regret the fall of the USSR have no heart. Those who want to restore it have no brain.’44
The Kremlin was also at last providing them with the payslips they needed most. The Putin majority were simply grateful that their wages and state benefits were paid on time due to the economic upswing and stabilization of government finances. This was something that radically improved the lives of Russians – in a country where over 53 per cent are ‘budgetniki’, or reliant on state salaries, pensions or benefits.45 Within two to three years of Putin taking office, protests against withheld salaries and benefits had dried up. The most critical ‘stability’ Russians needed was provided for. The impact this had for normal people cannot be overestimated – the last time state paychecks and benefits had been stable and secure was in the first few years of Gorbachev.
TV never let them forget it. ‘Generous Putin’ was a propaganda staple. Campaigning for the Putin majority saw the regime consistently resort to high-PR spending campaigns. Here the regime defined itself against the perceived ‘heartlessness’ of Yeltsin. These included consistent efforts to redirect taxes from the energy sector into increased spending. These policies were sold to normal Russians as defending lower-middle-class interests. Starting in the early 2000s there were consistent salary raises for bureaucrats and state employees, pension increases, and rising investment in healthcare and education.