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
‘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’.
