Putin Always Wins

Ya Putina Videl! (I Saw Putin!)
By Andrei Kolesnikov
479 pages, Moscow: EKSMO Press (in Russian)

Menya Putin Videl!
(Putin Saw Me!)
By Andrei Kolesnikov
479 pages, Moscow: EKSMO Press (in Russian)

During his three years as Kremlin correspondent for the liberal business daily Kommersant, Andrei Kolesnikov kept close watch on the everyday doings of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, in a collection of two books of more than 800 pages of his reports from 2001 to 2004, the journalist presents a densely detailed view of the changing definition of what it means to be a modern-day national leader. We watch as Putin banters, eats, interrogates, dutifully hands out awards, meets with boneheaded government officials, schmoozes his peers at world summits, and jawbones with ordinary folk. Throughout Ya Putina Videl! (I Saw Putin!) and Menya Putin Videl! (Putin Saw Me!), Kolesnikov regales us with crushing banality, mindless protocol, and occasional moments of genuine excitement.

To his credit, though, Kolesnikov is the first to assure us that he doesn’t know what’s really going on. All he sees are the president’s public activities, and he can only conjecture about what’s happening behind closed doors. Still, even appearances can be revealing. Accompanying Putin on his travels throughout Russia, Kolesnikov discovers that the Potemkin Village reflex is alive and well: Just before Putin’s arrival in small-town Russia, provincial officials hurry to re-asphalt roads, switch on long-dormant fountains, and supply basic utilities to long-neglected townspeople.

On one of his visits to a regional backwater, Putin makes a point of inviting people from the nearby area to a restaurant for a chat. Kolesnikov is mystified, at first, when the president’s staff explains that the name of the meeting place will be kept secret until the last minute. Why? To prevent the local government from stacking the delegation of "ordinary folk" with local officials. In a meeting with students, Putin confesses that he spends much of his time developing alternate sources of information to circumvent the "information blockade" surrounding him. He doesn’t even have to explain that he means his own government. The kids already understand.

Kolesnikov consistently reports everything — from street-level mishaps to the intrigues of international summitry — with the same tone of bemused irony. He catches Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi making faces at journalists during a press conference, and deftly analyzes the collision of American and Russian notions of "casual dress" at Camp David. (Putin’s aides show up in black business suits, white shirts, and no ties.) Particularly enjoyable is the often-surreal dialogue between the Russian president and his fellow citizens; little snippets of real life that bring the place back to me in all of its chip-on-the-shoulder eccentricity. Putin, paying a visit to the old Russian city of Staraya Ladoga, tours the local archeological museum. His guide, the museum’s director, explains that one of the place’s claims to fame is a burial mound containing the remains of a medieval hero named Oleg the Prophet. That’s not all, of course:

"One of our main sights here is the underground passages beneath the fortress," she says with pride.

"Could we take a look?" the president asks with interest.

"Unfortunately that’s not possible," she explains. "Like Oleg’s grave, they haven’t been found yet."

The president nods sympathetically.

It’s a nice bit of reporting that, among other things, perfectly evokes the shifty quality of modern-day Russia’s effort to fashion a usable past. As Kolesnikov archly notes, Staraya Ladoga, as an ancient epicenter of Russian civilization, makes for a much more convenient source of identity than the traditional alternative of Kiev, which, nowadays, unfortunately happens to be located in a different country.

Kolesnikov also includes a lovely comical piece about an arcane bit of Kremlin protocol that demands that Putin and his interlocutor du jour enter the room at the same moment so that they meet exactly in the center — forcing several leaders into false starts, embarrassed improvisations, and so forth. Putin, of course, has it down pat.

And that happens to be the main problem with this book. Putin always wins. In the vast majority of situations, Putin’s formidable gifts — including a prodigious memory and a fierce sense of focus — enable him to best most of his opponents. Still, that doesn’t mean that Vladimir Vladimirovich is infallible by a long shot. Kolesnikov’s reports unavoidably document some of his greatest blunders — such as Putin’s offer of forcible circumcision to a French journalist who asked a bothersome question about Chechnya, for instance.

It’s not that Kolesnikov doesn’t know how to dish it out. Nearly everyone else in the book (and there must be hundreds of major and minor characters altogether) gets raked over the gently glowing embers of his sarcasm. But Putin scarcely earns a contrary word. Early in the book, for example, Kolesnikov describes Putin’s meeting with the relatives of the ill-fated crew of the Kursk, the nuclear submarine that sank with all hands on board in the Barents Sea in the summer of 2000. (The Kursk account is part of a small quantity of Kolesnikov’s pre-2001 work included in the collection.) Kolesnikov, who was the only print reporter allowed to attend the meeting, portrays the event in terms that could only warm the hearts of the president’s Kremlin handlers. The account ends with the words: "He left as the president of the same people who before the meeting had wanted to tear him to pieces."

Well, my own memories of the Kursk disaster are rather different. I recall ordinary Muscovites bitterly condemning Putin for his dithering reaction to the news of the accident. For days, he refused to leave his Black Sea vacation spot and even made announcements wearing sports clothes, a detail that prompted much cynical commentary at the time. But Kolesnikov basically gives him a pass on all counts. Why? It’s hard to tell, but one is left with the feeling that Kolesnikov is an enthusiastic Putin fan — albeit often alienated by the excesses of the personality cult surrounding the popular leader.

The campaign against the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Yukos oil company, Putin’s policies in Chechnya, and, in particular, the Kremlin’s crackdown on the press and democratic processes — none of it really figures large in this telling. Small wonder that Kolesnikov is said to be one of the Kremlin’s favorite authors.

It’s a deficiency that’s especially revealing considering Kolesnikov’s celebration of one of his Russian journalist colleagues who "dares" to ask U.S. President George W. Bush some critical questions at a press conference. Near the end of Putin Saw Me!, after the Russian president has accompanied the visiting Berlusconi to the opening of an Italian company’s washing machine factory in the Russian boondocks, Kolesnikov gets a chance to put some tough questions to his own president. "I walked up and asked him what washing machine his family uses at home." The Russian leader doesn’t know the answer, of course. The line of questioning continues in much the same vein, with questions about Berlusconi’s claims that he and Putin had a contest to kiss some of the female factory workers. All Putin can muster in response is that Berlusconi is a "big joker.” Exactly. And it’s often hard to take jokers seriously — even when they have something important to say. So it is with Andrei Kolesnikov’s grand comedy of Kremlin manners.