Putin, man of the people

I’ve always been a little suspect when a leader is described as a man of the people. It implies this person has the sanction of a nation. That he is their dreams and desires embodied in a man. It says: he is one of us. But so often it seems the more dubious a leader is, the more likely this epithet will be attached to him. Look at George “shucks y’all, I’m just like you” Bush. He was a man of the people. A guy you could have a beer with. Mugabe, Fidel, Chávez, Reagan, Thatcher. All men of the people.

You begin to wonder: if they are men of the people, what type of people are they representing? If they are the face of the everyday man, the everyday man is not such a cool guy.

This week Putin released another batch of his famous holiday snaps. You may have seen some, the ones that look like Rambo posters. A solid strong man with no shirt and a gun. Putin fishing with a knife strapped to his belt. When I first saw the original photos, I couldn’t believe it. Did the average Russian really identify with this man? When Russians looked at photos of this ex-KGB hard man, did they really see themselves? I thought surely not. There must be a mistake. Someone’s crooking the books. But over and over again his ratings proved me wrong — this guy had ratings like no other leader in the world — 80%-90% approval. The Russian people loved him. No matter what the human-rights activists or the democracies of the West said, they saw Putin as one of them.

Last year, I got to spend some time in Russia and the answers to my questions became clearer. Not clear, because nothing is clear with Russia, but definitely clearer. While I was there I got to meet some of Putin’s biggest supporters. The “people” in “man of the people”. The Young Guard of United Russia. They are one of several groups that make up the Putinjugend or Putin Youth — a wordplay on another leader and his youth movement. They are pro-Kremlin super-patriots. Like Young Republicans on steroids. Their critics have described them as a personality cult whose main function is to intimidate and bully rivals or anyone who stands up against Putin and the Kremlin. They have been accused of all sorts of things from cyber-warfare on Estonia to a campaign of intimidation against the British ambassador in Moscow. But when you go to their office, it is nice. Lots of energetic good-looking young people. Big smiles. All dressed very well. It felt more like a law firm than a hardcore youth brigade. We were given a tour by their media person. A Russian version of Reese Witherspoon. Young, dynamic, confident and totally hot. She took us to a meeting room where we could all sit and talk. Hanging on the walls of the room were these large photographed portraits of the main youth leaders. Each portrait done in a different pose. They explained to us that they represented the different virtues of their movement — strength, honour, honesty and so forth. The strangest one was a shot of the Reese Witherspoon lookalike posing with a white ferret. It apparently represented wiliness or cunning. Or deception if you want to be more cynical in your symbolism. But that is a little unfair on ferrets. We spent the next hour or two with her and another Young Guard discussing Russia. Needless to say they spoke highly of Putin. Did they call him a man of the people? No, not in those words, but they did show us charts of his approval ratings. The red bar for Putin almost pushed off the page.

Taken at face value, everything they said sounded good. It made it feel like Putin was a reasonable guy, just misunderstood. But there was one thing that left me feeling unsettled the entire time we were there. The one detail that suggested a more sinister side to their politics. It was the receptionist. Now if you’re imagining her as yet another hot Russian blonde, don’t. She was actually a he. And a really big he at that. A large teenage thug in all black combat gear. A younger but less pretty version of Ivan Drago. He never once smiled and his eyes were always fixed on us wherever we were in the office. When Putin is described as a man of the people, this was more the guy I had imagined. I could definitely see him with Putin fishing or invading a small country.

We left the youth guard and went off to do some sightseeing. I felt like I had been in a David Lynch movie or had been hanging out at the Branch Davidian ranch in Waco, Texas. If I had left Russia that night, my opinion would have been cemented. Russians are all crazy and their president is the biggest nutter of the lot of them. But I didn’t.

The thing is it is not these youth groups who are keeping Putin and his buddy, Medvedev in power. It is the average Joe on the street who keeps him there. And our translator was exactly one of those people. Not super political, not radical in any sense. We spent a lot of time stuck in a van in Moscow traffic. Which gave us a chance to speak. Just like the nutters at the Putin Youth, she praised Putin and the good work he had done in Russia. But she also gave me a new angle on it. A real simple human story. She told me about what it had been like when she was a kid growing up in St Petersburg during the Yeltsin years. The bad years as she called it. She told me how her dad (an engineer) would work for food because money was worthless. That one month he was paid in just pickles because that was all there was left. Her family was reduced to nothing. They went from being okay under communism to dirt poor under Yeltsin. Them and thousands like them felt a great shame. The shame that comes with the loss of dignity. So when Putin came into power and the economy stabilised, it really meant something to people like her. Putin gave them back their lives. He put food on their tables and money in their pockets. But most importantly he gave them back their dignity.

What I discovered was Russians are proud people. They are willing to trade a few personal liberties for a better life. To not be looked down upon. They will look the other way when the odd journalist gets shot dead or the occasional dissident gets poisoned with polonium-210. As long as they have a job and some food on the table. As long as they can stand on their own two feet and look the world in the eye and say: I’m doing all right. And right or wrong, when they look at photos of Putin out hunting, that’s probably what they see. A man who can stand on his two feet.