One of the silver linings running through the dark clouds of their history is that Russians have developed a strong line in subversive political humour. In one joke that has recently been doing the rounds, Putin asks Stalin: “Why is everything here so bad? What should I do?” “Execute the entire government and paint the Kremlin blue,” says Stalin. “Why blue?” asks a perplexed Putin. “I had a feeling you would only want to discuss the second part,” Stalin says.
The truth is that Putin does not have the powers of a real dictator; he cannot execute the government or even manage without the myriad officials, oligarchs and fake opposition parties on which his authority and ability to govern depend. And yet far too much western commentary on Putin invokes parallels with the Soviet era when highlighting his suffocation of independent media, his demonisation of internal enemies, his crackdown on protest movements and his hostility towards the west. These two books both offer nuanced and persuasive accounts that demolish this vision of Putin’s dictatorship as the latest incarnation of totalitarianism in Russia.
Mark Galeotti, in We Need to Talk About Putin, has distilled a great deal of research and thought into a slim and engaging volume that reads like a primer for anyone poised to enter a negotiation with the Russian president. What makes Putin tick? It’s not money, Galeotti says. Apparently, Putin doesn’t even know where his own money is stashed or how much he has. Tacit understandings governing the issue of state contracts lead to oligarchs and businessmen falling over themselves to set up investment opportunities that will benefit Putin’s close associates and family. One senior official explains that “Putin doesn’t go looking for money – money goes looking for him.”
Neither is he motivated by ideology. In fact, Galeotti insists, “Putin has no ideological commitment to anything, really.” Sure, he occasionally spices up his political rhetoric by quoting nationalist demagogues such as Ivan Ilyin, but he does not really share their worldview. His interventions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were opportunistic and pragmatic rather than expressions of a principled commitment to reconstituting the Soviet Union or pursuing dreams of a new Orthodox Christian empire. Putin is, however, a “gut-level patriot who believes that Russia should be considered a great power … because it’s Russia”. Convinced that he has “raised Russia up from its knees”, he sees relations with the west as a zero-sum game in which the country’s own interests can only be advanced by obstructing and subverting western agendas.
But as he approaches his third decade in power, Putin appears to have lost his appetite for the cut and thrust of governing. Unable to manage a stable succession that will not imperil the system over which he presides, he now listlessly goes through the motions in televised meetings with ministers and marathon phone-ins that feature selected (and suitably loyal) voters – more than one sometimes played by the same actor – lavishing the president with praise. Unable to deal with the real challenges confronting the country (declining living standards, rampant corruption, an unwieldy state bureaucracy, creaking national infrastructure), Putin has instead opted for theatrics, from carefully staged demonstrations of his own physical prowess to the primetime pyrotechnics of Russia’s intervention in Syria. He has opted for painting the Kremlin blue.
In Putin v the People, Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson argue that power in Russia is in fact “co-constructed”, the result not so much of coercion as of consensus. The power generally ascribed to Putin in fact flows from the millions of Russian citizens who act as the Kremlin’s everyday enforcers. A minority take part in pro-regime demonstrations or volunteer to fight the Kremlin’s dirty war in eastern Ukraine. Most, though, engage in banal demonstrations of support: business owners encourage their staff to vote for Putin; schoolteachers serve up official stories of Putin’s exploits; people confuse patriotism with support for the president.
Plenty of journalists, political scientists and sociologists have acknowledged that Putin enjoys real popularity; that his regime does not live by repression alone. But none have subjected that popularity to such thoughtful and persuasive analysis. Mining an extensive body of polling data, interviews and social media traffic, the authors show how the Kremlin and its allies used their dominance of the airwaves and internet campaigns to forge popular consent for the regime. They exploited “wedge issues” such as homosexuality and blasphemy to turn a sizable chunk of the population against western values and fashion an image for Putin as the defender of Russian culture.
The watershed in this story is Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Leonid Volkov, a leading opposition activist, likens Crimea to the “magic bean” that a player in a computer game might grab in order to prolong his life and powers. But Crimea did more than just give Putin a bump in the polls when his popularity had begun to slide; it created new identities and a new sense of belonging that have outlasted the immediate euphoria surrounding the annexation – in April 2018 Putin’s approval ratings were still running at 82%. Greene and Robertson marshal surveys and interviews to show that Crimea reset the basic contract between state and voters: support for Putin would henceforth be based “not on the fortunes of the economy or the successes of this or that policy but rather on emotions, on pride and on a rekindled sense of Russian identity”.
Putin v the People wrestles with perhaps the central conundrum of contemporary Russia: the endurance of support for Putin amid deepening disillusionment with the present and pessimism about the future. Marina, a 54-year-old office worker from St Petersburg, told the authors that “prices have gone up for everything … what I paid for my [utilities] five years ago was a fraction of what I’m paying now. And naturally my salary hasn’t grown by anything like that much.” She hoped things would not get worse and did not think they would get any better. But as the presidential elections loomed in March 2018, she was still planning to vote for Putin.
The authors insist that the key to the paradox does not lie in Russia’s past; they reject the claim that “Russia – having no history of democratic governance – is doomed to eternal autocracy”. Instead, the problem is political. They agree with Volkov that the opposition’s “biggest enemy is the lack of belief that something can be changed”; the idea that it cannot “has been beaten into people for 20 years”. They argue, though, that there will come a tipping point.
Cracks in the fragile consensus have started to appear. The Kremlin was forced to water down proposed pension reforms that brought tens of thousands of angry pensioners on to the streets. Housing demolitions in Russian cities and the introduction of motorway tolls, both designed to feather the nests of Putin’s cronies, have similarly galvanised thousands who would never have thought of themselves as oppositionists. Even in his adventurism abroad, Putin is trapped between disenchanted nationalists, who believe the Kremlin has betrayed their vision for Russian expansion into the “near abroad”, and alienated liberals in government ministries and corporations, who are aghast at the regime’s isolation of Russia from the world economy.
Václav Havel famously wrote of “the power of the powerless” under communism: the maintenance of the facade of unanimity relies on many people playing their role. But when minds change, as the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union illustrates, events can quickly spiral out of the regime’s control. Ironically, Russia’s history might after all be the best guide to its future.
• We Need to Talk About Putin is published by Ebury (£9.99); Putin v the People is published by Yale (£20). To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
