Vladimir Putin’s message to the world: you are just as bad

Peter Pomerantsev

"It’s possible the US is behind it all,” claimed the head of the Russian Duma Sports Committee as the World Anti-Doping Agency found Kremlin state agencies guilty of concealing hundreds of Russian doping tests during the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, called the investigation “political”. This is “part of the policy of sanctions against Russia”, said the Soviet Sport newspaper. “It’s some sort of sporting Nazism,” argued boxer-turned-politician Nikolai Valuev, saying other teams could be trying to get rid of Russian competition. Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister, called doping “not just a Russian but a global problem”.

As the Kremlin reacts to what the International Olympic Committee has called “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games”, it falls back on tropes and techniques that are essential to Mr Putin’s hold on power.

The first is to convince Russians there is no alternative to Mr Putin. The Soviet Union tried to claim superiority over the west. Putinism, by contrast, argues that everywhere is just as rotten as Russia. Over the past few months Russian television has been running stories about doping problems in the US. It is the same tactic that the Kremlin adopts when accused of propaganda or corruption: the west is as bad.

As Ivan Krastev, the Bulgarian political scientist, has pointed out, when Mr Putin went on international TV in 2014 and insisted that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea when anyone could see that there were, he was provoking western leaders to blurt out “hey, you’re lying”, so he could point back and say: “Well, you lie too!”

The second trope is conspiracy. Conspiracy is emotionally seductive, explaining away not only the Kremlin’s failures but also those of the public: if the whole world is a conspiracy then it is not your fault your business failed or your wife left you.

Simultaneously, it saps citizens’ sense that they could ever change anything in Russia: what could one little person possibly achieve in the face of vast conspiracies?

Daily life in Russia is full of small humiliations inflicted by the state. On the way to work you get pulled over by traffic cops who demand bribes for fictitious parking misdemeanours. Then you sit in a jam while bureaucrats drive past you down the middle of the road. But when you return home and switch on the TV, it turns out it is not the Kremlin who has been humiliating you all day — it is the perfidious west.

The conspiratorial world view also legitimises the Kremlin’s methods. In a crooked world, the Kremlin has no choice but to use covert forces and disinformation to take Crimea or to feed its athletes steroids. Here Mr Putin is ­subtly channelling a Russian’s daily experiences. In the Russian system, ordinary people often have to break the rules to survive. It is a badge of honour to find a way round the law. Mr Putin positions himself as doing the same in relation to international law.

When the whole world is against you it is OK to lose your temper. Many countries have football hooligans, and usually officials are ashamed of them. But as Russian hooligans indulged in ultra­violence during the recent European Championships in France, Igor Lebedev, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament, tweeted: “I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the opposite: well done lads, keep it up!”

Once violence is officially sanctioned, the audience can finally release all its viciousness. If, during the Putin boom years, the “contract” with Russia was the exchange of economic prosperity for the ceding of political power to the Kremlin, the new deal is far more emotionally manipulative.

The writer is author of ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia’, winner of the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

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