Peter Pomerantsev · Putin’s Rasputin · LRB 20 October 2011. The next act of Russian history is about to begin: Putin and Medvedev will pop off-stage into the Moscow green room, switch costumes, and re-emerge to play each other’s roles.
Putin as president, again, Medvedev as PM. It’s the apotheosis of what has become known as ‘managed democracy’, and the ultimate triumph of the show’s writer-director, Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains. There is something cherubic in Surkov’s soft, smooth face, something demonic in his stare.
In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. ‘I would never go to something like that,’ a well-known journalist told me in the ‘democratic’ bar. In search of Putin's money - People & Power. On March 4, 2012, Vladimir Putin was elected to serve as Russia's president for another six years, and he is set to take up office following his inauguration on May 7.
To his supporters, such as those we encountered celebrating at an election night government rally in Moscow, Putin is a hero, the strong man who brought order to Russia after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. They love his carefully cultivated image: the horse-riding, judo black-belted, stand-for-no-nonsense action man who has taken the country back to its rightful place on the world's stage. But elsewhere in Moscow that night, under the watchful eye of state security and police, Putin's political opponents gathered to express their disapproval. Their language was far from diplomatic. "Putin, thief! " So is there any substance to these stories?
For this edition of People & Power, reporter Sarah Spiller and a team from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism set off to find out. Vladimir’s Tale by Anne Applebaum. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen Riverhead, 314 pp., $27.95 On November 20, 1998, Galina Starovoitova, a member of the Russian parliament, was murdered in the stairwell of her St. Petersburg apartment building. In the weeks that followed, obituaries, articles, and tributes to her life poured forth from all over the world.
To many Russians at the time, Starovoitova’s murder also seemed like an ill omen, maybe even a major turning point in Russian politics. It was therefore not for reasons of sentiment that Masha Gessen chose to begin The Man Without a Face, her book about Putinism—the system both created by Vladimir Putin and embodied by him—with the death of Starovoitova. In a country where political role models ran from leather-jacketed commissar to decrepit apparatchik, Galina was trying to be an entirely new creature, a politician who was also a human. In rigged elections, 65% is the new 99%