THE KING’S BODY
On 5 March 2015, the anniversary of the death of Stalin, Russia’s President disappeared. There was nothing unusual in this. Vladimir Putin had gone missing on other occasions, and the television audience were fed what they call ‘preserves’ – recordings of earlier business meetings and speeches. But on this occasion, in the particularly evil atmosphere surrounding the recent murder of Boris Nemtsov, when there was a seething mess of versions concerning who was responsible for this crime, the void in the Kremlin was especially keenly felt. The omnipresent journalists found out about Putin’s disappearance and the broadcasting of old recordings on TV and sounded the alarm.
Ten tension-filled days passed. Commentators talked of ‘Cheyne–Stokes respiration’, the pathological breathing pattern that often accompanies a stroke, which Soviet newspapers had written about shortly before Stalin died, and which has come to be a political term in Russia. By coincidence, it was at the same time of year, in March 1985, that Konstantin Chernenko died, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party, during the period of stagnation,[1] and his demise was also somewhat inopportune. After the subdued growling of the Kremlin’s ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, and after the fantastical suggestions that Putin had been taken away by aliens and the absurd rumours about helicopters over the Kremlin, a medical explanation began to emerge. There was a feeling that Putin’s absence was something pathological, as if the whole nation was writing the story of his illness: there was talk of ’flu and stroke, of back injury and pancreatic cancer; but there was even more talk of rejuvenating medicine: of plastic surgery, or scheduled Botox injections. There were even rumours about a trip to Switzerland, to Canton Ticino, where the gymnast and Duma deputy Alina Kabaeva, whom people called Putin’s common-law wife, had given birth to a son or a daughter. The life and death of Putin, his appearance, his reproductive capabilities, his facial muscles, his spine – all of this became the heart of political discussion; the sole topic of conversation.
Such close attention to the body of the sovereign is an ancient and venerable tradition, born in the late Middle Ages and at the start of the modern era. The well-known German American historian of the medieval period, Ernst Kantorowicz, devoted a book to this subject, The King’s Two Bodies. According to Kantorowicz, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian concept of the dual nature of God (Father and Son) and man (soul and body) was mixed with ancient legal tradition and produced the idea of the two bodies of the king: the physical body, which is perishable and exists in time; and the ‘political body’, which is sacred and lasts for eternity. This political body is the nation; but it is wholly linked to the physical, anatomical body of the king. The king is no longer in charge of his own body: the nation decides its fate. Kantorowicz cites as an example the English Revolution, when in January 1649 Parliament judged and executed Charles I. This was treated at the time not as a popular uprising against the monarch, but as a legal action of the political body of the king (what was known as ‘the King in Parliament’) against his physical body.
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 politicaclass="underline" his bodily presence was necessary for the life of the monarchy.’[2] 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] 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]
1
The later years of Leonid Brezhnev’s time as General Secretary of the Party, and thus ruler of the Soviet Union, were marked by a lack of economic and political progress. As a result, this period was dubbed ‘the era of stagnation’. Little changed after Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was replaced by Yury Andropov; nor when Andropov died and was replaced by Chernenko in February 1984. It took the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 for the era of stagnation to end.
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.
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’,