The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult Read Online Free Page A

standing before 11,000 delegates of his majority United Russia party, he had admitted that it was all just a game used to bewilder his subjects, but that it had become too confusing, arcane, and risky to carry on with.
    It took about two months for the frustrations in that swathe of society to boil over. The December 4 parliamentary elections became the tipping point. It did not matter that Putin’s United Russia party, though still winning, garnered far fewer votes than in the previous elections, nor that the vote rigging alleged was about the same – if not less – than last time. The damage had already been done, the gauze curtain had been punctured, and thousands of people began spilling into the streets in protest.
    For the Putin generation, come of age under the high oil prices of his pseudo-autocracy, it was like a form of psychotherapy as they began articulating their attitudes in an attempt to desanctify state power. “You are not a Tsar, not a God,” a group of veteran paratroopers sang at rallies, joining an urban, professional class. After the president ridiculed their white ribbons and compared them to condoms, the protesters turned up with all sorts of creative descriptions for the president as a used condom. Sex – which, under Putin, emerged for the first time as an explicit feature of a personality cult around a Russian leader – proved an easy target. At one rally, a girl boldly proclaimed “I do not want you,” in a country where a fifth of the female population did. 10 She may have not meant it, but she seemed to be suggesting that sexual willingness was a keycondition of political loyalty. “A president who is not doing it with his wife is doing it to his country,” a protest leader proclaimed from the stage at the same rally. A day after Putin won the presidential vote in the first round, another leader proclaimed from the stage that the rigged elections had been tantamount to rape.
    The Kremlin’s initial response to the protests was to act as though this was a normal part of the democratic process. When rallies broke out in early December, as people feared bloody clashes, city authorities took a consistent line on allowing mass demonstrations. A top government official praised the upper class demonstrators as “the best part of our society” and Putin proclaimed that he was “pleased” to see them protesting – it meant that the civil society he was so eager to foster was taking root.
    To demonstrate just how serious he was about democracy, he invited them for dialogue – and even designated liberals in his government as potential mediators.
    But within two months of the first protests, in early February 2012, it was already clear that the dialogue just didn’t seem to be happening – as one of the mediators told me then.
    It may have been that Putin never wanted genuine dialogue, or maybe he didn’t immediately recognize that by being open to dialogue he must be open to giving up the reins of power. Maybe he earnestly believed that the kind of democratic façade he had instituted was indeed the real thing, just like those gadgets they had in Europe that he was so keen to import. Maybe dialogue, to him, meant something on his own terms, a recognition of token concessions from him in order to bring the dissenters back into the fold.
    But the opposition, too, had little experience in political activity – in a country where, as they said themselves, politics did not yet exist. The most charismatic voice to emerge from the movement, lawyer and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, initially refused to run for office in a campaign that he did not recognize as real. When he finally ran for Moscow mayor in the summer of 2013, as we shall see later in this book, it was a forced decision. With Navalny facing a conviction that would bar him from public office, the liberal Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin eagerly backed him as a contender to ensure a competitive election, knowing full well