Only Putin is everywhere and ubiquitous. Only Putin with his retinue and his jet is in every region at once. The TV tells a never-ending story: his hand is kissed by a monk in northern Karelia; he is visiting the tank factories in Nizhny Tagil; he is swimming in the rivers of Tuva; and opening the summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vladivostok. This is one of the secrets of Putinism as telepopulism. He has the most punishing travel schedule of any Russian leader in history. It is a permanent campaign – but it does not bring him any closer to the people. The scene is set (faked, cleaned-up, choreographed) before his every appearance. Insulated from any dissenting comment or unpleasant sight, Putin spends his life visiting a Potemkin Russia. The last time this man went for an unescorted walk or took public transport was the last time he had a job without maximum security – as far back as 1998, before he became head of the FSB.
Managed democracy is insulting to provincials in a way snide comments from the opposition could never be. It does not bemoan them as idiots; it classifies them as cattle, not adult enough to vote. Nor is Putin anymore connected in Moscow, increasingly ‘working from home’ in his palace off the Rublevka as much as possible. He drives from the Kremlin to this palace in an escort that resembles the visits of Western leaders to occupied Baghdad. For Putin to pass, the roads must close. For Putin to spin round the Kremlin, the traffic must stop. On the day of his inauguration in 2012 there was no need for Muscovites. The streets were emptied and sealed. As the black ZIL limousine neared the gates of the power castle, it looked as if Putin was not the tsar, beloved by his people, but the Khan who had conquered Moscow.
While the rest of Russia dreams of Moscow – of the yellow stone Stalin towers lit up like casinos, of the shopping streets that slope towards the Kremlin – Moscow is dreaming of London, New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. No topic is more popular than emigration. No one is cool unless he has spent time and shopped abroad. To see this as a political act is a mistake. For some it is – but for many it is a consumer act. There is nothing trendy about the Urals, and ‘Siberian’ is positively an insult. The only places elite Muscovites want to go to are St Petersburg (for the weekend), the beach at Sochi on the Black Sea or the resort islands of Solovki in the Arctic.
‘Moscow without Putin’, read a placard held by a pretty girl at the protest in June 2012. It meant something. This free city of Moscow, having unmoored itself from Putinism culturally during the 2000s – rejecting Nashi, sneering at members of United Russia and sniggering at photos of Medvedev – has found itself feeling caught. Moscow had shown it was unhappy. The protest movement had brought its cultural elites to the podium, rallied 100,000 of its best-paid and best-informed consumers and shown that Putin no longer had a majority in his capital. It had started a culture war – but Moscow was trapped in Russia.
Putin Riot
To stay in power Putin must divide the nation. He realized that he must box the opposition into Moscow and make Russia see them as a bunch of elitist sexual deviants, led by a Yale-educated American spy, a gaggle of mink-coat-wearing hipsters with criminal intent. Kremlin telepopulism was overhauled – to turn the working class against this bourgeoisie. The Putin consensus, the leader as all things to all Russians, was buried. The Kremlin fought back with a conservative culture war.
The seemingly looped TV footage of the Medvedev years that had shown the official ‘president’ ordering an iPad 2, visiting Twitter’s Californian headquarters, opening Davos 2011, was all dropped. Putin dressed up as a working-class hero. On one broadcast he was wearing a bomber jacket on the factory floor, on another channel he was screeching out lines from Molotov in a puffer jacket in front of thousands of pensioners, whilst on the evening news he was attending mass with the Patriarch. His slogans were nostalgic – ‘Russia must restore the aristocracy of labour’, Russia needed to ‘carry out the same powerful, all embracing leap forward of the defence industry as the one carried out in the 1930s’.13
Quietly, Vladislav Surkov was brought back in after his dismissal as Kremlin deputy chief of staff at the height of the protest movement. For a while, the new deputy prime minister, whose responsibilities included modernization, demographics and religious affairs, was mocked by those who once feared him for having such a vague portfolio. Then the campaign of religious anger started. To quote Deacon Alexander Volkov, spokesman for the Patriarch: ‘From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok the real Russia, supports stability and is against the agitation of the creative classes.’ In a country sickened by high rates of TB and HIV, alcoholism and aggression, where people have been turning to the Church for guidance – they now found the Kremlin.
Hipster Moscow fell into a trap. On 21 February 2012 a bunch of women dressed in brightly coloured balaclavas stormed into the unlovely white marble Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Bulldozed by Stalin, its resurrection under a glinting golden-leaf dome is for the Orthodox Church their banner on the Moscow skyline. It incarnates their resurgence to power and grace. The women rushed to its altar, terrified a priest and began gyrating up and down with guitars. They called it a ‘punk prayer’:
Maria, Mother, Virgin,
Drive Putin away, drive Putin away!
Black robes and epaulettes of gold,
Parishioners are crawling and bowing.
The spirit of liberty is up in Heaven,
Gay Pride’s been sent to Siberia, chained.
Their chief saint is the head of the KGB,
Who sends protesters under escort to prison!14
Three of the women were arrested and charged with ‘hooliganism’. They thought they had made a wonderful art attack. In fact they had handed Surkov something very precious. He could not have concocted a video more riling. The Kremlin political technologists threw themselves with relish into whipping up the Orthodox Church into a frenzy of anti-protester fury. Putin was painted as a defender of the faith; installing chapels in some Moscow metro stations, making sure even ‘missionaries’ were on site in the underground. This turned the religious into their anti-protester faithful, where all their youth movements had failed over the winter. This also snapped any chance of the Patriarch playing the role of negotiator between the Kremlin and the protesters he had flirted with, the role of the Church in Central Europe in the imploding Eastern bloc. This tugged back Orthodox believers from following an opposition anticorruption agenda for a ‘purer Russia’.
The Pussy Riot show trial caught everything that was wrong with the Moscow opposition cultural elites and everything that was dangerous and inflammatory about the Kremlin game. The opposition rushed to give endless speeches, write op-eds and make court appearances defending the girls. Putin’s men laughingly edited them into nightly TV packages. Their verbose performances suggested the opposition were in fact just a Pussy Riot. Putin’s propagandists were overjoyed, mixing in images of protesters shouting ‘Free Pussy Riot’ with informative clips on how the Voina art-group they had split from, which means war, had staged a public orgy in a botanical museum, extensively photographed bits of a raw chicken being shoved up a vagina in a supermarket and hung an effigy of a dead Uzbek in the aisle of a food store.