One can legitimately ask how far Putin’s macho antics reflect not an alpha male in his prime, but a leader using them to mask a lack of confidence, to mask a lack of strength. What, one might wonder, is the man who cannot seem to walk past a fighter plane without a photo opportunity – despite not having completed national service himself – trying to prove? None of this is to say that he is a coward, but rather that he is a rational actor, and even a cautious one. He can, of course, get things wrong, but his aggressive antics and bombastic bluster tend to be carefully judged and calibrated. He has concluded, not without grounds, that Western countries, and especially most European ones, are deeply uncomfortable with confrontation. By playing the role of the unpredictable troublemaker, he hopes that they West will find it easier to make a deal with him than take a stand against him. But that does not mean that his policy comes from below the waist and that we should take his postures and rhetoric at face value.
The odds of popping into a British bookshop and coming out with a framed portrait of the prime minister are, I think it’s fair to say, pretty slim. Yet go to the big
Some of this is for tourists, and some of it is for those who feel they need ostentatiously to demonstrate their loyalty. Yet it also reflects Putin’s very real – but also paradoxical – popularity in his country. As of late 2018, his personal approval ratings have plummeted to a mere 66 per cent because of his lacklustre handling of pension reform, when he had previously been in the eighties. Yet even this ‘low’ figure is the kind of level that Western politicians would kill to achieve: at the same time, for example, British prime minister Theresa May’s is at 25 per cent, French president Emanuel Macron’s is 32 per cent and US president Donald Trump’s is a highly polarised 42 per cent.
So Russians are happy? It’s not quite that simple, as Putin’s personal popularity ratings are only part of the story. Even setting aside the problems of polling in a fairly authoritarian state, Putin is not being benchmarked against any rival. Who, after all, did he stand against in the 2018 presidential elections? Well, there was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the seventy-two-year-old caricature ultranationalist, who has written longingly about an imperial push southwards until ‘Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean’. There was Pavel Grudinin, a millionaire who was standing for the Communist Party, even though he had never been a member. Then there were other candidates who stood no chance of getting onto the second ballot, including Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, Putin’s patron from the St Petersburg days. Best known as a socialite and reality television host, she was standing on an ‘against everyone’ platform.
Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats receive a lot of Kremlin money for advertising, and the Communists still have the remnants of their old organisation and a near-inexhaustible army of Stalinist grannies volunteeering to push leaflets through letterboxes. But the leadership of both parties seem to have effectively accepted their role as the fake opposition. The only figure who might have had the will and ability to give Putin a run for his money, if not beat him, was anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, but thanks to a distinctly dubious court case, he was barred from standing.
Navalny’s boyish charm, quick wit and detailed accounts of the dodgy deals and luxurious homes of the elite have made his Internet-distributed videos popular as devastating indictments of the open-mawed corruption of late Putinism. His 2017 video ‘Don’t Call Him Dimon’ blew away Dmitry Medvedev’s image as a relatively clean member of the government, claiming that he had embezzled almost a billion pounds through fake charities. A 2018 video about the alleged corruption of Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard, provoked him into challenging Navalny to a duel and promising to ‘pound him into a juicy steak’.
