We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 10: Putin Is Just One Guy

In late 2015 and early 2016, I lived for a while in Kotelniki, an outer suburb of south-east Moscow, at the very end of the metro system. It was still being built all around me – the metro station had only opened a few months earlier, and there wasn’t even yet an asphalt path to it – and almost everyone else there seemed to be couples in their late twenties with young children. Typically, they were not well-heeled yuppies, but rather shop and office workers who had needed more space when their first baby came along, yet weren’t able to afford anywhere more central during the time of rocketing property prices. Having bought themselves a slice of high-rise commuter-belt suburbia, they found themselves after 2014 squeezed between their mortgages (many of which had been negotiated in euros, rather than rubles, when the exchange rate was favourable) and falling real wages. They were hurting: hunting for bargains, postponing making repairs to their flats, moonlighting as Uber drivers.

And they were complaining. The mayor’s office was backsliding on promised new amenities for Kotelniki. The banks were being inflexible about their mortgages. Child benefit was too low and the nearest kindergarten wasn’t ready yet. Thugs from the North Caucasus were hanging around the communal garages and the police weren’t doing anything about it. Someone from the next block had had a heart attack last week, and an ambulance had taken almost an hour to get there. They would complain about anyone and everyone – passionately, vitriolically and exhaustively – except for the president, the man notionally on top of this pyramidal ‘power vertical’. When I cautiously broached this, the response was an indifferent shrug. Eh, what could he do?

This is pretty sharply at odds with the usual Western image of Putin as the unchallenged and all-powerful master of his country. Putinism. Putin’s Russia. The temptation – as in this book – is to consider him to be the motive force behind the whole country, all eleven time zones and 144 million people of it. However, Putin is a synecdoche, as much as anything else a symbol, a figurehead for an often-varied collection of people and institutions. Indeed, it is a myth that he contributes to himself – in his autobiography, he wrote that in comparison to his previous jobs, ‘In the Kremlin I have a different position. Nobody controls me here. I control everybody myself.’

However, there is a big difference between being the man in charge, and actually exerting that power. After the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, he went on television and admitted, ‘You know our country is in a difficult situation and that our armed forces are in a difficult situation – but I never imagined that it was in quite such a state.’ Since then, Putin has had to deal with a stream of disasters, both natural and man-made: air crashes, mine explosions, collapsing buildings, fires and floods. What is striking is how similar their causes and his responses. It is not that Putin doesn’t care; eyewitnesses at a meeting he had with the general director of the company that owned the Raspadskaya coal mine after two methane explosions had killed sixty-six people in 2010 saw him fly off the handle, slap him with a folder of documents, and lay into him in such obscene language that even the hardened presidential bodyguards seemed uncomfortable. But the circumstances were almost exactly the same as at a blast in Novokuznetsk in 2007 that killed 106, and one at Vorkuta in 2016 that would kill thirty-five.

In 2009, Putin publicly scolded oligarch Oleg Deripaska for the state of his plant in Pikalevo (‘Why has your factory been so neglected? They’ve turned it into a rubbish dump!’) and demanded that he settle £830,000 of wage arrears by the end of the day. In 2018, though, he was demanding that all ministries take seriously the problem of wage arrears, which had reached a nationwide total of £40 million. The fact that Putin keeps complaining about so many of the same issues, promising solutions, and losing face when they repeat themselves, suggests we should not take the myths of his hyper-presidential power at face value.

Putin is notoriously leery of being managed by his staff, but how can it be otherwise, especially when he is increasingly disengaged from government and his own country? In the early years, he would frequently travel and drop in, often unannounced, on a factory here and a city there. This was a terror for many local officials, as he would generally appear when some problem had emerged, precisely to present the image of the stern tsar defending his subjects from the corrupt or clumsy boyars, the aristocrats. He would give the factory owner, governor or minister a stern, finger-wagging dressing down on television, and money would suddenly be available to address the immediate crisis. Then there were also the marathon annual ‘Direct Line’ television sessions, in which the president would for hours answer calls from members of the public or selected guests. Of course, these were all stage-managed and pre-prepared, so he could avoid nasty surprises and impress the viewers by having all necessary facts and figures at his fingertips, but they had the symbolic function of connecting the shepherd of the nation with his flock.

These days, though, as the Russian proverb has it, ‘God is in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.’ Putin only goes to the Kremlin when he has to, preferring to stay at his palace at Odintsovo outside Moscow. He spends his mornings swimming and working out, and gets round to paperwork in the afternoon. If he wants to talk to anyone, he summons them to his presence. As for ‘Direct Line’, which he once seemed to enjoy, it increasingly appears a painful chore, as he listlessly responds to another question about whether Yelena’s husband Boris should let her have a dog, whether Putin should be cloned or whether it is illegal for Russian farmers to put Chinese-made GPS trackers on cows. (I didn’t make these up, by the way, and the answers were ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘I don’t know’, respectively.)

There are also whole areas of policy about which he doesn’t really care any more, instead largely leaving them to be handled by others, if they get handled at all. This may have been the case with the recent pensions issue that aroused such public anger. Similarly, I heard from someone in the Health Ministry that while Putin had clearly never been that engaged in health care (why should he, when he has the elite Central Clinical Hospital of the Presidential Administration at his disposal?), in his first two terms he had at least been dutiful – he would take the meetings, have read his briefing materials and ask good questions. These days, he is simply not interested, and if the minister himself wants a one-to-one meeting with the president, it can take months to schedule. Russia, meanwhile, has been rated as having the least efficient national health care system of any developed country, and its budget has actually fallen.

There are three questions that are worth asking here. The first is, has Putin run out of ideas? To the West, he looks active, assertive, aggressive, a warrior-tsar at the top of his game; we may see many of his gambits and adventures as failing, but we very much feel on the defensive. But if one steps back slightly, it is much harder to see any real endgame. Does he really believe that the West will cave in and give Russia the kind of status he craves, or even that it will implode? Or is it rather that he has no way back that would not mean, in effect, admitting defeat, something he is politically and personally unable to do? Besides, how much of this activity comes directly from his office and how much is generated by the political entrepreneurs who think it’s what he wants? One could almost see this as a science-fiction scenario in which the robots continue the war long after their builders are gone. Certainly my reading of the current mood in Moscow is that everyone is glumly digging in for the long haul, feeling that they face neither victory nor defeat, but a long and miserable geopolitical winter.

This sense of gloomy hopelessness applies as much to domestic as foreign policy. Just as Russia has long mastered the theatre of fake politics, with Kremlin loyalists jostling with a Kremlin-run opposition in empty ritual, so too is there increasingly a feel of fake government. Ministers minister, advisers advise, spin doctors spin, decrees are decreed and memos are minuted. The television news excitedly reports the latest law, the coming debate, but what actually gets done, beyond coping with the day’s crises? In some ways this is unfair, as there has been real progress in some areas, from the measures applied to minimise the impact of Western sanctions to the reconstruction of Moscow into a glittering hipster capital. However, in most spheres of policy, there is much more bark than bite, form not substance. Action for its own sake is not governance, but there is nonetheless a sense that this is the best that Russia can expect these days.

The Russians have a strong tradition of subversive political humour that dates back to Soviet times. A more modern one of these anekdoty has Stalin appearing to Putin in a dream and asking him whether there is anything he can do to help. Putin replies, ‘Why is everything here so bad? What should I do?’

‘Execute the entire government and paint the Kremlin blue.’

‘Why blue?’ replies a perplexed Putin.

‘I had a feeling you would only want to discuss the second part.’

Joking apart, Putin cannot ‘execute the government’, or, in less dramatic terms, do without the oppos, officials and oligarchs with whom he has surrounded himself. So maybe all that is left is spectacle and pageantry – or ‘painting the Kremlin blue’.

In some ways there is a parallel with Leonid Brezhnev, the bushy-eyebrowed General Secretary of the Communist Party between 1964 and 1982. If he is remembered at all these days, it is of how he was in his final years when, almost senile, he slurred scarcely understood speeches that had been written for him, as his country slid towards economic, social and political collapse. The irony is that he had originally risen to power as a tough, effective manager, and the first half of his reign was full of significant achievement, from matching America’s nuclear might to seeing the economy grow. Over time, though, things got harder and his only answer seems to have been adventurism abroad – including embroiling the USSR in a ten-year war in Afghanistan – to distract from stagnation at home. Does this sound at all familiar?

Brezhnev was ill and dying, but is Putin tired? In 2008, he said that he had ‘worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work’. Despite recurring rumours about back problems (and a personal vanity that seems at the very least to have led to his using Botox), he seems in good health physically, but what about emotionally? For his fascinating book Fragile Empire, Ben Judah spoke to people who had worked on Putin’s staff; one of his interpreters painted a picture of a man now entombed in his position and his legend: ‘He looks emotionless, as if nothing really touches him, as if he is hardly aware of what happens around him. As if he is paying little attention to these people. As if he is worn out… He has spent so long as an icon he is not used to anyone penetrating… He is isolated, trapped.’ The real question is thus whether he still wants the job – and that deserves a chapter all of its own.