Russia’s presidential election in March will not be an election, in the sense of a genuinely competitive contest, at all. Every Russian voter knows in advance that President Vladimir Putin will win. This ritual will nonetheless throw useful light on four aspects of the country’s political system — sycophancy, persecution, vulgarity and conspiracy theories.
Another six-year presidential term will mean that by 2030, if he is still alive and in office, Putin will have led Russia for 30 years, longer than dictator Joseph Stalin’s 1924-1953 rule. But the election’s purpose is not simply to demonstrate that Putin, who turned 71 in October, is in total control, or even to legitimise his war of attempted conquest in Ukraine. By making Russians participate in a vote whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, the apparatus of power aims to show that Putin’s autocracy rests on the acquiescence or, better, the active support of the people.
As in Soviet times, this support often takes the form of servile flattery of the leader. Heydar Aliyev, the late Azerbaijani strongman, earned a dubious immortality in 1981 by praising his patron Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, 13 times in 15 minutes at a Communist party congress. In like fashion, when Putin announced his re-election bid in December, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Russian parliament’s speaker, said fawningly: “Mr Putin possesses unique qualities such as humanity, integrity, kindness and, of course, productivity.”
Along with sycophancy comes repression. The best-known example is Alexei Navalny, the jailed anti-corruption campaigner who disappeared from public view for several weeks late last year before resurfacing in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle. But every week produces fresh cases. In December, Viktor Pivovarov, an 86-year-old dissenting Orthodox prelate, was charged with discrediting the armed forces. A month earlier, Alexandra Skochilenko, a St Petersburg artist, was jailed for seven years for protesting against the war in Ukraine.
Under Putin, a third feature of Russia’s political culture is the defiant, norm-breaking use in official circles of obscene language and imagery. In tsarist Russia, and for most of the Soviet period, censorship and puritanism were the order of the day — even though, on some books he read, Stalin used to scribble outbursts such as “bastards”, “scumbag” and “piss off”.
Putin set the new tone in 1999, shortly before he assumed the presidency, when he vowed to destroy Chechen rebels: “If we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.”
Maria Zakharova, Putin’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, took matters a whole lot further in 2020 when she posted on Facebook a photo of Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić in the White House and, below it, an image of actress Sharon Stone’s legs from the film Basic Instinct. The sincerity of the subsequent Russian apology remains of uncertain value.
Lastly, Putin’s Russia is awash in conspiracy theories, some embedded in popular culture and others promoted by the authorities. One of the strangest was aired last year by Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s hardline secretary of Russia’s Security Council. He contended that the US sought Russia’s defeat in Ukraine because Americans feared an eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera supervolcano in Wyoming and would try to resettle in eastern Europe and Siberia.
Another conspiracy theory involves the “golden billion” — the idea that western elites want to seize control of the world’s resources, including those of Russia. This theory emerged just before the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, but Putin himself has referred to it in public speeches.
Common to all such notions is the allegation that the west is out to break up Russia as a country. This is certainly not official western policy. But some conservative thinkers in the US, and in central and eastern Europe, are indeed predicting Russia’s disintegration — the third act, so they say, of a process that began with the tsarist empire’s downfall in 1917 and the Soviet Union’s disappearance in 1991.
Such forecasts are sinister in Russian eyes because they draw to some extent on a movement, active in Poland between the two world wars, known as Prometheanism. This project sought to undermine Moscow’s power by supporting the independence of non-Russian nationalities.
Not every quirk of Russia’s political culture has staying power. In 2011, a Moscow tabloid published a picture of Lyudmila Putin, then the president’s wife, with the caption “my husband is a vampire”. Slavic folklore is rich in vampire themes, but this particular theory seems to have been laid to rest.
tony.barber@ft.com
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