In Putin's Footsteps

^EPILOGUE THE PAST OF THE RUSSIAN FUTURE

Rising from his orderly desk in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin picked up his navy blue suit jacket from the back of his chair and put it on. Ready for his fourth inauguration, he strode out of his office and down the long white corridors of the Senate Palace, occasionally glancing at paintings of Russia’s vast landscapes hung on the walls. He descended a red-carpeted, marble staircase under a magnificent chandelier and soaring ceilings adorned with gold trim. High oaken doors opened before him and he passed out into a courtyard, where he boarded the Russian-made Cortege limousine (instead of a Mercedes-Benz of previous, more Western years) that would take him, surrounded by motorcycles with flashing lights, across the Kremlin grounds to the Grand Kremlin Palace.

Arriving at the Grand Palace as the Kremlin bells struck noon, he exited the Cortege and entered the lavishly decorated halls, where a six-thousand-strong audience of ministers, top businessmen, Orthodox Church leaders, and other members of the country’s elite applauded the sixty-six-year-old president as he set off down the red carpet toward Andreyevsky Hall, where the Supreme Soviet once met and where he himself had thrice taken his oath of office. The hall was also the site of festivities for the coronation of three czars. Every channel in Russia was broadcasting these momentous, thoroughly choreographed moments, some set to a song from Mikhail Glinka’s patriotic opera, A Life for the Czar.

Amid such palatial grandeur the newly reelected president looked small but by no means humble. He certainly looked in charge. Before his previous inaugurations—in 2000 and 2004—Putin, dressed in a leather jacket, had traversed the Red Square, the very image of a young leader destined to modernize Russia. In 2012, following widespread demonstrations against his return to the presidency, his large motorcade (“like Stalin’s,” some commented at the time) sped through a downtown Moscow blocked off and emptied of pedestrians, presumably to thwart protests.

The inauguration that Russia’s state-controlled television stations broadcast aimed to display the lavish traditions and continuity of Putin’s presidency. Clever web enthusiasts set the president’s walk to the Bee Gees’ song “Staying Alive,” showing Putin was more of a survivor than a savior, anxiously maneuvering among the pitfalls and perils of Russian politics.

Indeed, Putin’s next term, scheduled to last until 2024, could be a dangerous one for him. Segments of the economic elite, hit hard by multiplying Western sanctions, have been grumbling louder than ever, although Putin might find ways to appease or undermine them, as he has before. So far, the 2014 drop in oil prices and the sanctions have not shaken the system, but they may, especially if the economy slides. After all, growth has only twice approached three percent since 2008.

For now, the president’s control over politics, the economy, and increasingly society appears secure. However, his growing reliance on authoritarian measures and propaganda may begin to diminish the public mandate he has enjoyed almost since coming to power. State control of television, from where most Russians get their news, has given him an air of omnipotence—he is, truly, as television would have it, the Russian Santa Claus, the miracle worker who has “raised Russia off its knees.” Although the Kremlin has failed to prevent tragedies—tragic fires and plane crashes, among other things, show this—the president has certainly restored Russians’ sense that they belong to a great world power. The public perception, enhanced by the news reporting, is that the governors, mayors, and other regional authorities, and not the president, should answer for calamities.

Notwithstanding the quasicoronation described at the epilogue’s opening, Putin’s grip on power might weaken. He has so adeptly manipulated the country’s political and economic oligarchs that this hasn’t happened—at least openly. Who might replace him, if he gets ousted or quits because he’s tired or just plain bored? The names of defense minister Sergei Shoigu or Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin have been mooted, although equally as potential candidates for losing their jobs instead—both may have gotten too much power and visibility for Putin’s liking. Dmitry Medvedev, the 2008 Putin pick for president and now the prime minister, may be a safe choice that Putin would favor as a replacement once again.

The Russian constitution bars Putin from seeking another, fifth term in office, and no one has talked seriously—so far—about amending it so that he could run again. In any case, should Putin choose to leave the presidency voluntarily, without installing an obedient replacement, he may find himself in jeopardy. He certainly knows the fate of previous KGB leaders. Stalin’s dreaded secret police chief Lavrenty Beria found himself, after the dictator suddenly died of a stroke in 1953, sentenced to death for “spying against the state.” (Stalin’s other two secret police heads met similar ends.) With the exceptions of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, all Soviet leaders died in office; Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, survived by handing power over to Putin.

In his years in power the Russian president has consolidated and strengthened the security forces, intimidated and jailed opponents, and muzzled the media and courts. If he steps down, the system he has created may turn against him, using his own methods.

What we saw during our travels through Russia’s eleven time zones gave us little reason to predict doom for Putin, or for the country, at least in the immediate term. People are, as a rule, living better than ever before, freer than ever before, and—where public finances allow—local governments are overhauling infrastructure and bettering life for their citizens. In any case, more than twenty-five years of capitalism and, roughly, a decade of prosperity under Putin have done much to transform Russia from the broken-down, chaotic wreck of a country it was during Yeltsin’s time. The people we met criticized Putin or praised him to us, in most places without apparent fear of being monitored by the authorities. (Broadcasting such opinions via the media would probably be another story.) Almost all seemed resigned to Putin’s domination of the political scene; in fact, politics, unless we brought it up, was not on people’s minds, as it often is in Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

But tentative harbingers of change are appearing—namely, the many anticorruption opposition centers Alexey Navalny has managed to establish around Russia in recent years. Traumatic memories of economic hardship and international humiliation suffered during the Yeltsin years once mobilized people in support of Putin, but they have, naturally, faded with time; his success abroad, such as in Syria, and his much-lauded annexation of Crimea will eventually lose their capacity to inspire.

Despite Putin’s lasting popularity, the Kremlin has certainly recognized the emergence of discontent and its potential for the negative consequences to his power. Hence growing restrictions on the internet and attempts to block social media sites whose traffic the security systems cannot monitor. The police, in curtailing unauthorized demonstrations, have used violence and arrests far more frequently than they did in 2011–2012, when far more protesters turned out. In the last decade, the young in particular have begun to believe that society has not changed in accordance with their expectations, which led to disappointment. In recent years applications for immigration to the United States alone have tripled in number; the American Embassy has received more than 2,500 in 2017, the highest number since the early post-Soviet years.[54] Whether to stay or leave Russia is a frequent topic among members of the middle class, especially in Moscow and other big cities. Even some of those accepting of Putin’s policies seem to be yearning for fresh faces. We heard this in Omsk, we heard this in Magadan.

In his brief inauguration speech the president offered the young “a new quality of life, well-being, security, and health.”[55] He even ordered the government’s youth agency Rosmolodezh to report directly to him so as to court this youth away from Navalny. That move has further disclosed the Kremlin’s hypocrisy. During his swearing-in ceremony when thousands of those young came out to protest the president’s more years in power, they were brutally beaten by the Cossacks. These descendants of the militant conquerors, who once served the czars in defense of the throne and imperial expansion east, today have no formalized role but are used by the Kremlin as a historic militia of sorts. The Cossacks claim a role of policing patriotism, performing the violent jingoistic pro-Putin duties when the actual police are still restricted by law.

At the same time, Putin’s vision of a Great Russia remains enormously popular. If he were to disappear, his policies would likely survive. Russians have long believed in the “great man” theory of history; they remain convinced that individuals at the top more than circumstances or trends below determine the course of events. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which describes how the Russian empire repelled Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, typifies this kind of imperial thinking.

The well-known Russian tolerance for repression has baffled Western journalists, economists, and political consultants for decades. As they suffered through tyranny inflicted on them by some of the worst despots in world history, Russians, one can say, developed an almost apocalyptic fear of change—and especially changes of power. A regime’s demise births not hope but dread. Among Russia’s ruling class, this has encouraged, almost more than anywhere else, a reliance on inertia—just the right environment for autocracy. Stalin could count on this; this was also the secret behind the reelection of Boris Yeltsin, despite his abysmal popularity ratings. “Better the devil you know” may be a cliché, but it applies to Russian voters.

If Russian rulers are expected to act in the interests of the country, the Russian people, too, bear a responsibility—to serve their God and their czar. In this, Russia has followed the Byzantine tradition, in which there was only the ruler and his serfs. The ruler provides not guarantees or laws, but gives amnesty, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins. The de facto absence of the rule of law in Russia and the overwhelming influence of the Supreme Leader over one’s freedom or lack thereof—even, in extreme cases, over whether one lives or dies—has left Russians ever in search of the Good Czar, whose reign would usher in, if not paradise, then prosperity and justice for all. Yet, with the state unrestrained by institutions, with civil liberties weak and the czar presiding over all, the result of such an approach to governance is often less than paradisiacal.

Should Russia be classed as European, as Western? Based on our travels from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka we have come to three conclusions. Russia is “coherently incoherent”—in other words, suffering from a split personality disorder. It is driven by its history. It is, for the most part, homogeneous politically, despite its geographic and even ethnic diversity.

The double-headed eagle symbolizes Russia’s coherent incoherency. Putin, no fan of revolutions, has kept alive, at least in bronze effigy on squares across the country, Vladimir Lenin, the Father of Revolutions. (Nostalgia felt by the older generation, as well as a justifiable reluctance to destroy historical monuments, have also helped to keep these statues intact.) Devoid of political value today, the Lenin statues stand for continuity, for the century during which Russia, in its Soviet incarnation, was a strong country, a superpower that made the world tremble. Some Stalin images and statues—the bust in Yakutsk, for example—have been thrown in, to firm the memory and aspiration of that superpower status. Then there are the two monuments to Prince Vladimir we saw. The old one in Kiev, commemorating the Ukrainians’ own Prince Volodymyr. Another one in Moscow—the new statue, erected in 2016 on Putin’s orders and designed to stick it to the Slavic, formerly fraternal country to the south. Even Ivan the Terrible (who famously “gathered”—or retook—Russian lands occupied by the Mongols in the Middle Ages) has been memorialized, with a statue of him raised in Oryol, a town about three hundred miles south of Moscow.

These statues may well be understood as monuments to Putin himself—they represent strong leaders, leaders gathering age-old Russian territories and standing against enemies foreign and domestic. Stalin enjoyed a cult of personality that saw monuments to him built around the USSR during his lifetime. Putin’s cult of personality has taken a more creative approach, expressing itself through the publicly displayed likenesses of other “greats” such as Peter, Catherine, and even Ivan the Terrible.

Russians, we saw, generally accept all these manifestations of power and the contradictory messages they send, picking and choosing from the patriotic kasha in which they dwell. Perhaps this is a survival mechanism. Russians, as we have noted, resemble snowdrop flowers, durable and adaptive. Shaken by crises coming almost as regularly as the seasons, they manage to survive, steering their individual lives across the turbulent sea that is their country, Great Russia.

Russia lives in the past and offers its citizens a less than rosy future; the growing power of the outdated Cossacks is just one example. Russia’s frames of reference are old victories or involve settling old scores such as winning World War II or retaking the Crimean Peninsula. The authorities attempt to mold the past to fit the present, with the future also presented as reflecting the past. At the inauguration, the president promised his people a new future, not because it is time for change but because, he said, he felt “responsibility toward Russia, a country of magnificent victories and accomplishments, toward the history of the Russian state that goes back centuries, and toward our ancestors.[56]

“The country’s security and defense capabilities are reliably ensured,”[57] Putin stated, his victory parades getting more and more elaborate and symbolically grand with every passing year. In 2017, to public cheers, a new Christmas decoration graced store shelves in GUM, Moscow’s Red Square department store—a collection of glass balls titled “Our Heritage,” with tanks and fighter jets painted as a theme.

Putin may not believe that war with the West is imminent, but the possibility that it might happen at all only helps him. He certainly gets help from the United States, the former Cold War foe that has now developed its own obsession with Russia. Indeed, Putin possesses a fascinating ability to bring extremely diverse yearnings together—yearnings for monarchy, for the Soviet past, for Russian military glory, for a revived Russian national spirit.

In 2017, by Moscow’s main thoroughfare, Sadovoe Koltso—the Garden Ring Road—the Russian Military History Society sponsored the building of a monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47. From his pedestal overlooking the road Kalashnikov seems to be ready to shoot at anyone who comes near—yet another striking example of Russia’s militant national pride. Part of this composition is an image of the globe, displaying a bas-relief of the Kalashnikov rifle, on top of which stands Archangel Michael slaying a dragon, backset by an imposing Stalinist skyscraper—another sign of Russia’s split personality, of Soviet and saintly military greatness aligned.

Russia is largely a homogeneous country, despite its demographic and geographic diversity. Russia does not constitute a separate civilization—it has borrowed too much from the West for that—but in its own way, it seems a world of its own. The multitudinous peoples and cultures composing the country dissolve in a sort of imperial homogeneity. Non-Russians—from the Chechens in the Northern Caucasus to Buryats of Ulan-Ude to the Yakuts of Sakha—make it a diverse land, but they do not influence politics or drive social changes. We saw this from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.

On the whole, what one experiences does seem imperial, be it in monuments to the many coexisting Vladimirs of the Russian conflicting history. You can sense it in a church, in the Ural Mountains dividing Europe and Asia, where the Bolsheviks brutally murdered the Romanovs, Russia’s last royals; or in Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk, where a newly built cathedral stands on the site once occupied by the local Supreme Soviet. You can discern it in Russia’s coat of arms with its double-headed eagle, whether depicted in amber in Kaliningrad or carved from rare red marble in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. You can even perceive it in a Buddhist temple in Buryatia, when a monk declares with all seriousness that Russia has two thrones, one for the chief lama here and another for Putin in the Kremlin.

This is the Russia of the twenty-first century, so very different from what it was during the communist decades, yet in some way ever the same, unchanging. From the White, the Baltic, and the Black Seas all the way to the Pacific Ocean, the president presides over a neo-Eastern Christian empire—a new Byzantium, if you will—and the majority of Russians continue to applaud his sweeping imperial ambitions.