As the videocracy took shape, the teams around the deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, and the spin doctor Pavlovsky created Putin as a symbol very different from Vladimir Vladimirovich, the grey man from St Petersburg. The idealization of the leader as the nation’s father, friend, fighter and pride echoed disturbingly with the past. The opposition screamed that Russia was returning to a Stalinist leader cult. But they were creating an embodiment of the state, as much as glorifying a man, for exactly the same reasons as the 1930s developers of ‘agitprop’. By glorifying the state as a leader they covered up its shortcomings. There were also unnerving echoes to the cult of personality in the 1930s. As the historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore recounts:
His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. ‘But I’m Stalin too’, said Vasily. ‘No, you’re not’, said Stalin. ‘You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me.46
Looking back at what Pavlovsky and Surkov had done, Boris Mezhuev, the pale and piercing-eyed conservative philosopher from Moscow State University, only sighed. A decade later, with a cheap whisky in his hand in a grubby chain cafe frequented by his students in a rundown mall above the metro station, Mezhuev tried to half sum up and half excuse what had happened to them: ‘You see for a man of my generation, the 1990s left us with only two routes – one, to the border to Europe, the other to become a character out of Generation P.’
Generation P – which in Russian alludes to both ‘Generation Lost’, or ‘Generation Fucked’, is the book by the reclusive writer Victor Pelevin. It comes up again and again when normal Russians try to explain what the post-Soviet period was like to live through. It is seen in Russia as a self-portrait of the generation that went from perestroika idealists dreaming of democracy to Putinist cynics thinking everything is only PR. For them, the new regime was the end point of their failure and loss of faith. These were the same people that had gathered in their hundreds of thousands on Red Square against communism. Now they barely stood up for independent TV as disorientated, exhausted and disappointed by their dreams – they had lost the will to fight. What for?
Generation P is about an everyman called Babylen Tatarsky, who fell in love with Pasternak poems one summer in the countryside and enrolled in a Moscow literary institute, but whom the collapse has turned not into a poet but an impoverished shop assistant. Chance throws him into his true calling – tuning Western advertising to fit Soviet tastes. Grilled by his first boss to come up with a way to promote a cigarette brand called ‘Parliament’ he suddenly realizes that his whole diploma on Russian parliamentarianism was just a prelude for the chaos of post-communist consumerism:
Tatarsky had realized quite clearly that the entire history of parliamentarianism in Russia amounted to one simple fact – the only thing the word was good for was advertising Parliament cigarettes, and even there you actually could get by quite well without any parliamentarianism at all.47
He is a cipher for the burnt-out Moscow media men that began as Berezovsky’s hacks and ended up putting the make-up on Putin. But certainly, what Mezhuev meant was not that he and Pavlovsky had turned into drug-fuelled wrecks, gorging on vodka and cocaine like Pelevin’s Tatarsky, who discovers that all Russian politicians are just 3D holograms made by advertising executives who kill each other for contracts. Neither of them tried to have a conversation with Che Guevara on a Ouija board or (to our knowledge) stumbled around on LSD coming up with branding strategies to make more money. What Mezhuev meant, what made Putin’s TV coup so easy, was that the 1990s left men his age living by the book’s morality, by these two phrases:
Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland. But then, Tatarsky had never been a great moral thinker, so he was less concerned with the analysis of events (what was actually going on) than with the problem of surviving them.48
CHAPTER THREE
THE GREAT TURN
RUSSIAN HISTORY beats to the years in which the leader makes a great turn. Stalin overhauled his agenda in 1929 and set the party on a road to super-industrialization and terror. Gorbachev came out as a radical in 1988 when he announced ‘glasnost’ – the openness the system could not survive. Yeltsin the ‘impeccable democrat’ turned in 1993, when he ordered the Alfa commando force to storm the same parliament he had barricaded himself within – in the name of ‘democracy’ – from these same commandoes in 1991.
The year that Putin made his great turn was 2003. It closed the era where he ruled like Yeltsin’s heir. It was the moment when Russia lurched decisively into an authoritarian regime. This was the year that those who had gone along with ‘the Russian Pinochet’ first got a taste of what that meant, the year when those who trusted in Yeltsin’s judgement first sat up in shock. Even Boris Nemtsov was stunned. ‘At first I thought because he was a Yeltsin man – he was a man like me! I had no idea what he would turn into.’
The Conservative Thug
Putin is not an intellectual and not a romantic. He does not, like many Russian politicians, come from the ranks of the intelligentsia. His family home in a Leningrad komunalka was not a home to books, hushed conversations about repression or whispers of doubt. His mother was a janitor. Once describing his childhood, he mentioned an orthodox Jew who would read the Talmud in the communal apartment, but said, ‘I am not interested in such things.’1 His eldest brother died in infancy, and his second older brother died of diphtheria in the war. His father survived the conflagration but with extensive wounds. Putin brawled in the streets; summing up his childhood, he recalls, ‘I was a real thug.’2
Putin has a harsh, uncompromising view of the world. Those close to the German intelligence agency, which watched his time in Dresden, claim that he beat his wife.3 From time to time, his disdain for the doctrinaire thinking of Soviet communists or Russian liberals seeps out, neither of whom he sees as genuine problem-solvers but blames for the double disaster. Putin thinks he is a practical man.
He is obsessed by history and considers himself a Russian conservative. He is fond of recalling the words of the reformist authoritarian minister between 1906 and 1911, Pyotr Stolypin: ‘Give the government twenty years of stability and you will no longer recognize Russia.’ Stolypin brooked no dissent and in the slang of the day the hangman’s noose was known as ‘Stolypin’s tie’. Putin has built a statue to him in Moscow. After a century of passionate commissars and dissidents, cosmonauts and novelists, his hero is an unemotional bureaucrat whose mission in life was to keep Russia’s ideological, animal spirits down, so that it could get on with its development. In a reversion to tsarist conservatism, rejecting the revolutionary spirit of 1917 and 1991, stability is sacred.
Putin’s tone is close to that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the inheritor of the Russian conservative tradition beloved of the West. Towards the end of the writer’s life, a stroke left his right hand paralyzed and his hand gnarled, but he had found a ruler he could praise. He had spent the 1990s with a biweekly talk show with a lot of screaming – ‘it’s a nightmare!’, ‘this is terrible!’, ‘outrageous!’. This enemy of the Soviets, with a low opinion of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the West, admired Putin despite his KGB past. For Solzhenitsyn, under his leadership Russia was ‘re-discovering what it meant to be Russian’.4 He had returned to the motherland in 1994 from his Soviet-imposed exile in the United States, embarking on a journey, or perhaps a pilgrimage, from the Pacific to Europe. Meeting with anxious families and the hungry he found a ‘poor and demoralized country,’ which he did not consider suited to Western democracy.5 Like Putin, he came to believe that only a long-term, distinctively Russian form of liberal authoritarianism, where Church and state are partners, could restore the nation. ‘Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country,’ said Solzhenitsyn, ‘and he started to do with it what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration.’6