Anna Arutunyan : The Putin Mystique

The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2015

When George W. Bush looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, he was, the president famously said, able to get “a sense of his soul.” The president was neither the first nor the last to see what he wanted in this enigmatic, laconic man. According to Anna Arutunyan, the Russian-American author of “The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult,” when Russians look at Mr. Putin they see a leader of a type dreamt up in the distant past. And Russia’s president, she concludes, “has allowed society to mold him into a sort of sacred king.”

In Ms. Arutunyan’s view, the Russian people have given up their powers “in exchange for order, abundance and justice.” If so, they have been swindled. Nevertheless, for the author, the thinking behind that exchange is key: To understand Mr. Putin’s dominance, she argues, it is necessary not only to consider his own will to power, but also “the will of millions to follow.” Theirs is a consent born over the centuries of Russian autocracy. The turbulence of the early post-Soviet years throttled the country’s transition to anything akin to a law-based, Western model, a failure that has led Russia to revert to its default position: the “patrimonial state.”

To make this argument, Ms. Arutunyan, who has been living and reporting in Moscow since 2002, closely examines the expectations that Russians have of their leader. Her description of how Russians at different levels of the social hierarchy interact with the country’s current power structure borrows the caste terminology of the 16th century. Thus the book is divided into four sections: “The Subjects,” which focuses on ordinary citizens; “The Oprichniki,” the name given to Ivan the Terrible’s secret police, which discusses the security apparatus; “The Boyars,” which deals with those contemporary barons we call oligarchs; and “The Sovereign as God,” which sets out to describe the “mythical, psychological and ideological packaging” in which state power is encased.

Conscious that her thesis could read as if she is making the Russian people take the rap for Mr. Putin, Ms. Arutunyan emphasizes how their leader has “cunningly taken advantage of social phenomena that predate him,” most notably the space for authoritarianism created by Russians’ belief in a state “beyond influence, beyond logic.”

This fascinating book is an examination of a dance between ruler and ruled, swirling on amid the ruins the Soviets left behind. Like all the best dances, it has room for the erotic: In just one manifestation of the curiously sexualized cult that has sprung up around Mr. Putin, Ms. Arutunyan relates how a calendar featuring lingerie-clad students given to him as a birthday present became a best-seller. That they were journalism students added a wink characteristic of a regime that uses the games of postmodernism to conceal the reality of what lurks behind the remains of the democratic facade. It’s a country of political puppetry and all too real thuggery ruled by Mr. Putin “as a patrimonial dominion to be partitioned at the pleasure of the sovereign, and only among those who could be entrusted with ‘managing’ the assets,” a trust that could be lost as the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, plunging from corporate jet to prison camp, was to discover.

Russia is an “impossible country,” Ms. Arutunyan writes—a society where many basic institutions of government do not function or are riddled with corruption. She illustrates this with examples that include officials “privatizing” duties on cellphones imported through Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, and an operation allegedly run by the FSB (the successor to the KGB) in the early 2000s, in which it smuggled “thousands of tons of cheap Chinese shoes and underwear,” facilitating an off-the-books retail business with a turnover that reportedly exceeded $1 billion a year. The corruption is so pervasive as to undermine the state that so many of the crooks in charge profess to be restoring. That contradiction can be explained, by those who bother to do so, either by an immense sense of entitlement (a former intelligence officer tells the author that some of the security elite see themselves as a new nobility) or a cynical acceptance that graft, and the network of mutual advantage, dependence and vulnerability that comes with it, is the one structure that works in Russia.

Ms. Arutunyan has a weakness for interpreting modern Russia via the exotic. When Byzantine notions of the harmony of spiritual and temporal power appear it becomes all too easy to suspect that she may have been led a bit astray by the flummery with which Russian rulers buttress their position. To the extent that Mr. Putin has ideological convictions they appear to revolve around a belief in a strong state. What has helped Mr. Putin is the genuine appeal—by no means confined to Russia—of the man on horseback, riding in to restore order. That Mr. Putin was photographed doing so bare-chested was only a reminder that kitsch is often the sidekick of the authoritarian.

Writing about the recent invasion of Ukraine in her concluding chapter, Ms. Arutunyan claims that the conflict constituted a “unifying force strong enough” to keep Russia—and Mr. Putin’s rule—intact. That’s been helpful, but the more immediate causes of the war cited by the author include the fear that Ukraine might join NATO, resentment over the loss of the Crimea and, underlying it all, the conviction that Ukraine simply belongs with Russia.

The forces looking to pull Russia in an alternative direction may be weak, but there was something that rallied behind perestroika, and later behind Boris Yeltsin as he stood on that tank. And then again there were the vast crowds who demonstrated against the regime’s overreach in 2011-12, a metropolitan minority, maybe, but just the latest evidence that there is more to Russia’s political culture than is suggested by the enduring caricature of a largely submissive population. That’s a caricature that Mr. Putin, clearly nervous about dissent, probably does not take too seriously himself.