Posted on September 7, 2010 - by Venik

Vladimir Putin’s iron grip shows signs of rust | David Hearst

Putin presents himself as a tireless Good Tsar, singlehandedly sorting out smalltown Russia’s ills. But can he really deliver?

In the last few weeks since Moscow was released from the choking, cloying grip of brown smoke from forest fires, Vladimir Putin has gone into overdrive.

He has personally put out fires in peat bogs, drilled boreholes in the permafrost, ridden helmetless with bikers in Crimea and driven across Russia in a Lada. He has sung KGB songs with spies returning from New Jersey. While tagging a whale (the sort of thing that prime ministers do before breakfast) he was asked on cue by an ever-attendant journalist whether it was dangerous. Action Man replied: “Life itself is dangerous.”

Easy rider he isn’t. Playing the muzhik, the Russian strongman, has a cold political purpose. These carefully constructed images are familiar to those who know their Russian history. They are those of the Good Tsar, a tireless and omnipresent leader on whom all life depends and without whom nothing will change.

They are not intended for the 50 million who live in big cities but for the other 90 million Russians who live in towns of fewer than 100,000. The majority of these are not connected to the internet and a blogosphere free to rail against the authoritarianism of the regime.

As a group, they are unconcerned about demonstrators being beaten and arrested for “informal” protests in Moscow and St Petersburg. These protests are permitted by the constitution but not by the OMON riot police. Such distinctions are not seen by these people, nor are they overly concerned by the fate of the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovski.

They want stability and strong government but they have not been getting much of that either lately. When Putin’s cortege strayed into a village in Nizhni Novgorod, most of whose houses had been razed in the fires, he was confronted by a crowd of women demanding to know whether their houses would be rebuilt. Within hours, the scene was up on YouTube.

What fired these women was the certain knowledge that local bureaucrats were useless, and would only sign housing contracts if there was something in it for them. These villagers knew that if they did not grab the tsar himself and do it now, nothing would happen. Putin looked uncomfortable and not only promised to rebuild their homes but placed CCTV cameras in the village, so that he could personally ensure the work was done. Evidently he did not trust his local administration either.

The problem is that these rotten, lazy, feckless and corrupt local officials are his, personally appointed by the Kremlin. The executive, all levels of government, are one of the areas of life in Russia over which Putin has established an iron grip. Now it is showing signs of rust.

He put the fire service under his direct control but no amount of rearranging the deck chairs will halt the fact his governance is weak and no one outside a benighted elite trusts it.

President Dmitri Medvedev, the liberal-tinged president in whom most western leaders have unwisely put their faith, is neither here nor there in the agonised domestic debate about how to modernise Russia. Most political observers have all but written him off as an effective force. He makes good speeches but that is about it. The prime minister, not the president, is the man running the show. What will the Good Tsar do next? Put CCTV all around Russia?

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