Letter from Moscow

May 25, 2010
Prapaganda: Putin uses Russia’s most popular hip-hop TV show as a PR vehicle
Vladimir Putin saunters onstage. His smile is insincere. Wearing a blue zip-up jumper over a beige turtleneck, he looks like he’s come straight from the gym. The tune from MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” announces him; a crowd of teenagers clap and scream as he makes his entrance on the country’s most popular hip-hop show, The Battle for Respect. Standing in front of a giant screen, Putin extols the martial values of rap. For viewers across Russia’s 11 time zones the sight is as striking as seeing Margaret Thatcher on Top of the Pops. There are cries of “Respect, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Respect!” The shaven-headed winner of the rap challenge bellows: “This man is a legend… he is our icon… let’s make some noise so everyone can hear!” And the viewers at home, mostly young people in factory towns far from Moscow, are left feeling that Putin is “with it.” This is how Russia is ruled. Tele-populism is deployed in a relentless, never-ending PR campaign throughout the country’s state-controlled television channels, spinning the prime minister into various guises designed to appeal to different groups across Russia’s fractured society. The image-building has gone into overdrive since the recession. Putin appears on television as the defender of the thrifty housewife: bursting into a supermarket to inspect the prices, then humiliating the chain’s owner over the price of sausages and demanding they be sold for less. For the unemployed, he is cast as the worker’s friend: helicoptering into a town to demand an oligarch reopens a factory. For those nostalgic for the USSR, there are photoshoots of Putin’s holidays: dressed in camouflage and prowling the hinterland, he is the picture of Russia’s strength. Rural Russians can identify with a Putin swimming bare-chested down a river. Military men can connect with images of the leader dressed up as a fighter pilot or a sailor. A selection of calendars devoted to Putin’s judo skills are also available; those who might be tempted by extremism are offered the sight of Putin shooting a Siberian tiger with a sedative dart. Indeed, after the Moscow metro bombings in late March, Putin sought to shore up his image by singlehandedly tagging a polar bear. Meanwhile, the new middle classes are offered the sharp-suited and soft-spoken President Dmitri Medvedev. In jeans and a smart jacket, Medvedev looks like the perfect son-in-law and, to Russian eyes, the consummate European. He appeals to Russians who take foreign holidays, have their own businesses and see themselves as European. He is a harsh critic of the corruption, inefficiency and lawlessness that halt their ambitions and sometimes scupper their plans for enterprise. Medvedev has an approval rating of 82 per cent, almost the same as Putin’s. Yet tele-populism, although successful, has not engineered faith in the state. The national mood is one of alienation: a recent poll found that 94 per cent of Russians feel they have no influence over politics, 68 per cent do not feel protected by the law, and just 4 per cent feel their property is secure. So why is Putin himself such a hit? The truth is that his popularity is both manipulated and genuine. Yes, the state controls all major television news outlets. Critical journalists are hounded by pro-Putin youth groups and occasionally murdered. Opposition activists are repressed, elections rigged. Putin’s tele-populism uses a stripped-down version of the Stalinist toolkit to rule the airwaves like a Slavic Silvio Berlusconi. But he still enjoys the respect of ordinary Russians, in part because supermarkets opened during his reign, and capitalist reforms that brought so much hardship in the 1990s finally began to pay off—average wages have doubled. And Russians admire his command of the language. Yeltsin was a bumbling alcoholic; Gorbachev spoke with a peasant drawl, Brezhnev with a senile lisp, Khrushchev like a hick—and Stalin had such a heavy Georgian accent that he was frightened to address the nation. But Putin and the lawyerly Medvedev are shown to Russians as they would like to see themselves: athletic, healthy and proud—the antithesis of a nation plagued by a demographic crisis, heroin addiction and social rot. The trainee diplomats at the elite academy run by the Russian foreign ministry told me that they found Putin’s appearance on the rap show a little cringeworthy, but far from risible. Masha, who hopes to work in the Russian UN delegation, explained to me: “Men here can expect to live to the age of 59 on average—below the life expectancy of Pakistanis or even Palestinians. The prime minister has to promote health and exercise at any cost. And if that means, bare-chested calendars, swimming shoots, judo or being on a rap show—so be it.” Sacha, whose ambition is to be an ambassador to India one day, said: “The US is in decline, China is rising and, in this dangerous world full of terrorism and emerging powers, I think Putin is the worst of all possible Russian leaders—apart from all the others who are on offer or have been tried from time to time.”