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.
