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

Navalny could never pose a real threat.
    In early 2012, without a clear political platform, and with demands that were clearly fixated on Putin’s personal removal from power, the protest rallies bore all the marks of a carnival – at once hopeful, enlightening, and cathartic – but harbouring something darker underneath. If the rallies were a carnival, a true carnival carries the threat of death. 11
    Inadvertently, an underlying current in the protest movement seemed intent on provoking Putin to reveal himself as a true autocrat, a feudal sovereign who would respond to revolt with physical repression, jailings and torture – either subduing his people, or giving them a pretext to depose him.
    For lack of an alternative, the confrontation between the “best part of society” and its ruler began to turn into a mirroring process, a game of chicken between two thugs of clearly unequal strength, staring at each other, waiting to see who would budge. It wasn’t about politics, it was about something that predated politics: sheer, brute force, and who had more self-confidence.
    When dialogue didn’t happen, the Kremlin stopped pretending. Out went the Kremlin official who praised the “best part of society,” and in came Soviet-style propaganda. To rival the carnival-like protests, the administration began rallying masses from all over the country – with a gentle mix of financial enticement and coercion. Teachers, accountants, nurses, clerks on the state budget, when given tickets to attend pro-Putin rallies in Moscow, didn’t really see it as much of a choice: When your boss tells you it’s voluntary, then it’s mandatory.
    If the inadvertent temptation of the protesting opposition had been to bring out the feudal sovereign in a bureaucrat struggling to play the game of democracy, then they succeeded. With the elections a week away, he wasn’t asking for their votes, he was asking them to lease their bodies and souls as the price of economic stability.
    Implicit in the role of feudal sovereign were the repressions – and they had already begun. Activists had been detained for a few weeks at the first unauthorized rallies, in early December 2011. But by 2013, nearly thirty people were in custody for taking part in a rally that had turned violent, some of them simply for standing next to a skirmish between police and protesters; opposition leaders were facing up to ten years in jail, and an activist had been snatched infront of a UN office in the Ukraine 12 and taken to Russia, where he claimed to have been kept in a basement without food until he confessed to planning a mass revolt. 13 (The authorities would deny the activist’s claim, saying he turned himself in voluntarily.)
    Just as repression was implicit in the role of a feudal sovereign, a sacrificial victim was implicit at a carnival.
    * * *
    Vadim Takmenev’s documentary aired on national television on Putin’s 60th birthday on October 7, 2012, and for the first time, fear emerged as a normal part of an interview – something that no longer needed to be concealed, an ironic allusion in a conversation set to tinkling, comic music.
    “When someone’s sitting in front of you like this, can you sense… if he’s afraid of you… if he’s embarrassed?” Takmenev asked Putin.
    “Of course. It’s visible.”
    “With me?” the journalist laughed nervously.
    “With you it’s less,” Putin said dispassionately, after considering him for a moment. “But you’re used to it.”
3.
    Yekaterina Samutsevich didn’t really feel anything when, on February 21, 2012, she climbed to the altar steps of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the holiest section of Russia’s biggest church, forbidden, by church canon, to anyone but priests.
    “I had to act quickly, clearly, it’s very easy for something to go wrong and for everything to fall apart,” she described shortly after her release from prison in October 2012. “So it was a desire to do everything right,