ABSTRACT
The success of the Putin Project was predicated on controlling the media. The question of ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ was genuinely perplexing, since he was brought into the limelight only when Yeltsin announced him as his successor, which was no more than seven months before he became president. The public knew less about Putin’s pre-history than about any other leader, including Chernenko. The project went with the potentially dangerous reversal of policy from Yeltsin’s free and open society, supposed to be in transition to a western liberal democracy, to an unclear system that was packaged as authoritarian democracy. In time, this hybrid became steadily more regressive as it moved from soft to harder authoritarianism and its sham democracy changed titles from ‘managed’ to ‘sovereign’ to ‘majority’ democracy. Initially, however, Putin was no more than a transitional figure. The point of the ‘project’ was to turn him into an unbeatable presidential candidate. The rebuilt Kremlin media machine was put into motion to secure a
smooth succession and retain the entrenched privileges of oligarchic capitalism. The top-down action, as the state sought once again to impose its project on an unwitting society, flouted the Yeltsin ethos where obstructive state power had been restrained. The Kremlin project would still use the ballot box but, whereas in 1996 Yeltsin felt it his duty to energetically campaign for office and dance for his supper, despite his heart condition, the young judomaster Putin would be given a dignified passage to power through the newly refined arts of image-making. The project required delicate handling and the professional expertise of the so-called ‘political technologists’. The concept of ‘political technology’ has a drama to it absent in the West.
We talk of public relations and media consultancy without any sense of the magical frisson Russians attribute to the art of persuasion, which they tend to apply according to Machiavelli’s tractatus on power. Nor do they seem to see
anything unethical in his realpolitik. One of the first PR companies in Russia proudly called itself ‘Niccolo M’. According to Putin’s initial spin doctor, Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin would be promoted by virtue of the politics of ‘nonpolitical power’ – ‘power without representation or the consideration of the interests of those being governed’.1 The idea was to distance the leader from those to whom power is delegated on the tsar-boyar model, where peasants rebelled against the boyars while the tsar remained sacrosanct (tsar’ khochet, boyare ne dayut). For the leader to maintain this aura, Pavlovsky applied his ‘no alternative’ strategy. He had been one of the bright young things Malashenko had brought into the team during Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign, and it was there that he learned the value of stirring up ‘mythological fears’ about the communists – fear of hunger, civil war, instability – so that people could be manipulated into thinking there was no alternative to Yeltsin. Pavlovsky’s strategy for the Putin regime was not to trample openly on
freedoms, but to find more sophisticated ways of subjugating society to the state. In this way the myth of democracy could be retained, while changing the thrust of Yeltsin’s liberal policies. In his 1996 ‘scenarios and technologies’, Pavlovsky began to develop his art of persuasion influenced by the obscure language of French philosophy and postmodernism, hugely fashionable with the educated urban elite. Propaganda methods which ‘fetishise’ television no longer work, he said. The idea of ‘information dramaturgy’ was a more effective way of influencing the consciousness of the masses by transforming events into ‘interesting and accessible plots (anecdote, scenario, myth – all these being aspects of socio-political dramaturgy)’:
