An iron fist in an iron glove
>From the KGB to cult hero - two books, Inside Putin's Russia and Putin's
Progress, show how Russia's hard-line President has created the cult of
Putinism
Ed Vulliamy Sunday March 14, 2004 The Observer
Inside Putin's Russia by Andrew Jack Granta, £20, pp352 Putin's Progress by Peter Truscott Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp384
The foregone conclusion is a familiar hallmark of Russian elections in any period - communist or post-communist - and today is no exception. Putin, one of the world's canniest and most intriguing heads of state, will be re-elected by a landslide which will guarantee him in office for a further four years. It's a decision that could determined the future of Russia's place in the new world.
This is an opportune moment for a pair of books on Putin as a supposedly benevolent autocrat - one by Andrew Jack, the Financial Times 's Moscow correspondent, the other by Peter Truscott, one of Prime Minister Blair's special envoys to Russia.
Both writers have investigated their subject to produce volumes in the best traditions of Kremlinology, navigating the byzantine mystery of Russian politics and its connections to an invariably corrupt business oligarchy. If anything in missing, it is a sense of this mighty country itself. There is some reportage - Truscott recounts a champagne-soaked meal with Vladimir Bryntsalov, and talks of shopping with his wife (one of those 'New Russian' moments, guaranteed to make you cringe). Jack actually meets Putin and opens most chapters with anecdotal encounters. More from the wide yonder would have been welcome, to wrap around the political narrative.
A serious reader would do well to preface time spent on these Western-friendly books with some context by Russian writers, notably Roy Medvedev, and Moshe Lewin's Russia/USSR/Russia . The American David Remnick has also written a pair of useful books on what led to Putin - Lenin's Tomb and its sequel, Resurrection.
The story these books tell is of a man who emerged from relative obscurity, groomed for power first by the communist machine in Leningrad, and then in Moscow during what Jack calls the 'comedy of errors' presidency of Boris Yeltsin. It is a story of bloody war waged in Chechnya and that of a different battle against a corrupt, Mafia-connected oligarchy (with exceptions for Putin's friends, of course, as demonstrated by Putin's insistence on immunity for his corrupt mentor, former St Petersburg mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and Boris Yeltsin; Putin places loyalty above all other judgments).
It is a story about how a chaotic and corrupt experiment in market capitalism was refined in to one of 'statist capitalism', as Putin wrenched control over the means of information and judiciary and tamed the Duma. It is a story about what the lawyer/President calls 'the dictatorship of law'. There is now a cult of Putin - schoolchildren mark his birthday with laudatory cards and poems; there is a deluge of gifts such as a crystal crocodile from Moldova; youth groups sing hymns to their leader. Putin's favourite judo and ski- wear are advertised as such
That the man committed to piloting a market economy and opening Russia up to the West is also the man whose idea of the dynamics between power and people echoes the psychology and patriotism of both tsarist and Soviet Russia is a dichotomy few Russians find unnatural - the nation exists in a state of ambiguity. As Truscott says in one chapter: 'Question to Russian diplomat: describe the situation in your country in one word. Answer, "Good". And in two words? "Not Good".'
Putin matters not just because he heads what is still a mighty, albeit diminished, power. Putin matters in context, because, although unique in many ways, he is one of a kind in post-modern politics. These authors invoke Putin's term 'managed democracy', but one could speak in a stronger lexicon; about a breed of politician who is indeed chosen by the people, but who does not have a chromosome of democratic DNA in his political biology; to whose head power goes like a drug; and who uses an electoral majority as a mandate to do whatever he wishes.
One could posit that the phenomenon in its latest form began with Margaret Thatcher; a variant would be Silvio Berlusconi; one might consider George Bush or even our Prime Minister - Truscott's old boss - if his megalomania increases further. Truscott's book makes great play of the instinctive friendship between Blair and Putin.
In his autobiography, First Person, Putin admits that he envies the Romanov tsars for not having to fight elections as he does today. During elec tion campaigns, continues Putin, with admirable honesty: 'You have to be insincere and promise something that you cannot fulfil. So you have either to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising or deliberately lie.'
'Putin's whole upbringing and background was instinctively focused on the need for a strong state,' writes Truscott. 'As President-to-be, he felt he epitomised the strength and vitality of the state - l'Etat, c'est moi.' And later: 'Valdimir Putin's presidency has been about the centralisation and the accretion of power. Putin wants to restore the top-down vertical of power which existed under tsarism and during much of the Soviet period'.
Neither Truscott nor Jack uses the word, but if there is such a thing as 'Putinism', it revolves around the notion of derzhavnost: the concept that the state has some quasi-mystical entity, to which every citizen must be bounden. This concept, says the Russian writer Sergei Kovalev, 'corresponds to the political thinking of the former KGB agent who became head of state thanks to political intrigues involving the bloody war in Chechnya'.
Putin has what Russians call a 'Chekist' mentality (after Stalin's secret service, the Cheka). Chekism does not necessarily seek to control people's private lives, but it does insist on controlling public life. Kovalev asks, simply: 'How did it happen that a country in which millions of people quite recently perished as a result of political repression elected a President who worked for the organisation that carried out that repression?'
That was written in August 2001. Today, the Russians are going to do it again, in even greater numbers than before.