MOSCOW – To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Russian president, Alexei Sergienko presented a version of the painting Putin with puppy on a canvas twice as large “in relation to the growth in the scale of the leader’s personality, as well as the territory of the country under his government”. In reality, speaking with Russian sources and experts of that almost divinatory specialty called Kremlinology, the feeling is that the stature of the Kremlin leader has shrunk, surrounded as it is in Ukraine on the ground, isolated in the West by sanctions and besieged. at home by the open invectives of the hawks and by the underground popular discontent.
Once Vladimir Putin he would have celebrated his birthday with a hunting or fishing trip in the Siberian taiga to show himself once again in a plastic macho pose as he ages. Not today. He may not have worn a khaki uniform like his Ukrainian counterpart Zelensky, but he too knows that what is being fought in Ukraine is not just a special military operation as he goes by calling it. He will spend this day “at work”. He will meet CSI leaders in St. Petersburg, his hometown. And, to further spoil the party, according to the forecasts, the Nobel Peace Committee could reward Zelensky or the jailed opponent he never names, Navalny. He wouldn’t care. Such a slap would only reinforce the myth of the “besieged fortress”.
Nato in the then Leningrad, Putin grew up in a modest kommunalka where his pastime was rat hunting. One day he chased one until he was forced into a corner, but the rat surprised him. “He chased me. It was a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word” cornered “,” he wrote in 2000 in his autobiography of him. The other lesson was given to him by the way: “If a fight is inevitable, strike first.” This is what he did by repressing the opposition, gagging TV and the press and turning parliamentarians and judges into puppets of him. And that’s what he did in Ukraine too. It is no coincidence that he continues to insist that the offensive was “inevitable”, because NATO and Kiev were preparing to invade. And, now that he’s in the corner, there are those who fear he might react like that rat to ulitsa Baskova’s 12. “Nobody doubts that Putin identifies with the rat. He is a rat with a nuclear button and a police state at his disposal. If this is the end of his reign, the events that may accompany his fall are chilling to contemplate,” said Masha. Gessen, author of the biography The man without a face. “So far, every time he has felt threatened, Putin has chosen escalation. If he lost to Ukraine, he would lose power and for him it would mean prison. If he had no other way out, he could use nuclear weapons. “, his former speechwriter Abbas Galljamov told us.
Consensus crisis
The elites, reveals the political scientist Tatjana Stanovaja, have begun to contemplate apocalyptic scenarios. At first they continued to be loyal, even though they did not share Putin’s desire to refound the Russky Mir, Russian world, divided by the collapse of the USSR. But in recent weeks “this fragile faith” has been tested. Popular consensus is also beginning to falter. “Putin – Galljamov told us – broke the social pact with the population: he left politics to him in exchange for a comfortable life and the feeling of belonging to a great power. But he failed on both points”. Meanwhile, former councilor Serghej Markov confirms, a battle has begun “between old and young generals” that could soon lead to some “torpedoing”. Even if Markov disputes the vulgate of a Putin “in a parallel reality”. “Anyone who knows the Russian system of power knows that the nomenklatura goes on not thanks to combed relations, but to reports on the dangers. It does not embellish the situation, but dramatize it”.
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However, the question remains whether the Russian elites will be willing to stay with Putin until the end. Among the corridors of power, says Stanovaja, there is hope for the “light at the end of the tunnel”: the end of the conflict. But above all she starts talking about the “post”. The obscure former KGB agent who first became president in 1999 will finish his fourth term in two years, but thanks to the 2020 constitutional reform he will be able to remain in power until 2036. But even the loyalists have started to sift through possible successors.
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“It’s not that they want to overthrow it or are plotting – a Kremlin source told Andrei Pertsev of the think tank Carnegie Politika – but there is an awareness, or desire, that it might not rule in the near future. “An awareness that could also explain Putin’s craving.” Every time he meets a historian, he asks him: “What will be the epitaph of the posterity about me “?” said Mark Galeotti. “He wants to be remembered as the man who saved Russia and reconquered Ukraine. He thinks it’s his last chance for him. “