TIME EUROPE
MARCH 27, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 12
Viewpoint
Father Figures
Russia's current love affair with Putin will likely turn to loathing
By YURI ZARAKHOVICH
The closer it gets to election day, the louder the praise of Vladimir Putin. As Russian journalist Sergei Agafonov wrote last month in Noviye Izvestia, a Moscow-based daily, "Officials and TV will help us realize that we cherish everything He loves, and hate everything He scorns." Concluded Agafonov sarcastically: "This is the key mode of life under a strong state."
But there is more to the propaganda-induced lionization of Putin than meets the eye. It is a very Russian trait: loving the boss just for the virtue of being the boss, for as long as he is the boss. The incumbent Czar or commissar is always supposed to be good and above the fray and beyond reproach--the nation's Little Father, tragically unaware of how shamefully his bad officials treat the people. But once the incumbent is gone, we Russians switch abruptly to a mixture of hatred for him and hope that his successor will finally prove worthy of our love. Each time, we grumble about having been deceived once again, but fail to recognize our own shortcomings. "It is not hard to deceive me, I'm only too happy to be deceived," as Alexander Pushkin wrote about delusions of love.
The Russians loved their Czars for the grandeur of their Empire. They loved Lenin for destroying the hated Czarist Empire. They loved Stalin for restoring the national Empire, and purging the hated Lenin Bolsheviks who had abused Russia for the benefit of the world revolution. They loved Khrushchev for ending the hated Stalinist yoke and mass terror. They loved Brezhnev for ending the hated Khrushchev follies and arbitrariness. They loved Gorbachev for putting an end to the hated Brezhnev stagnation, and replacing totalitarianism with a semblance of freedom. They loved Yeltsin for putting an end to the hated Gorbachev vacillations and for launching long-awaited reforms.
Today, the nation hates Yeltsin for his decade of humiliation, chaos and poverty, and loves Putin for his promise of an orderly strong state to restore wounded national pride. The nation knows nothing about how Putin is going to deliver on his promise, but loves him anyway, just on his say-so, just as the nation has loved all his predecessors--voluntarily and eagerly. This love brings to mind the argument that Leon Trotsky invoked back in 1917 to convince the irresolute Bolshevik Party comrades of the inevitable success of their coming revolution: "The petty bourgeois mass is looking for a force it must submit to. He who does not understand this, does not understand anything at all."
The love for such a force is invariably tainted with fear. Now, fear hangs over St. Petersburg, Putin's home. "I subconsciously control myself, lest I get punished for saying something negative about Putin," explains a local intellectual. This fear is spreading all over the country to complement the popular love. It is not the fear of a rollback to the past. It is the fear of a future that might prove even worse.
Over the last 15 years, the officials who in reality rule Russia have been busy converting their political power into financial and economic clout. The Gulag, the Iron Curtain and state-owned property do not mix with that, and will hardly re-emerge. But now they are busy reconverting their new might into uncontested political power by taking back the few bones they had to toss to the people over the last decade. Free travel has become a joke. They do not need an Iron Curtain now. How can ordinary Russians travel to Paris, if they can't even afford the fare from Suzdal to Moscow?
Free speech is the next victim. No mass reprisals will be needed. Individuals who speak out against the regime will simply get beaten up or jailed or, worst of all, disappear without a trace. A small-scale prototype of a strong state à la Putin has been test-run in the neighboring Belarus for six years now under President Alexander Lukashenko. Run on a Russian scale, this modernized, "enlightened" Stalinism can prove quite appalling. "We did not pay a high enough price for our democratic revolution 10 years ago," muses Yuli Rybakov, one of the few democrats still in the Duma. "We'll have to pay that price now under the emerging oppressive regime."
Rybakov does not, however, believe the regime will last all that long, because it can't be efficient. And once Putin is gone, the hate which inevitably follows will be proportionate to this current love of him--and just as blind. With our illusions once again shattered, we will see the objects of our erstwhile affection for what they really are--cynical, deceitful, ineffectual demagogues. Then, we come to loathe them for the violence, fear and destruction they bring into our lives.
It was none other than Stalin who said knowingly: "The Russians are a Czarist people ... They need a Czar to worship, to live and work for." Only if we give up both our illusions about good Czars as well as our fears of punishment for not having such illusions will we move beyond our need to find yet another con man to deliver us. That will in turn help us avoid the self-loathing which follows from permitting ourselves to be swindled once more. Then, nobody will be able to make us "cherish everything He loves, and hate everything He scorns" ever again.
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