Happy birthday, Mr President? With Vladimir Putin turning 72 on Monday, this has become an opportunity for the Kremlin’s spin doctors to present their ideal notion of the septuagenarian sovereign. Ambitious courtiers have been competitively performing their sycophancy, as if in an over-the-top production of King Lear.
Posters were anonymously pasted up in Kyiv, vowing that ‘Putin will come and restore order’
The ponderous official paper of record, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, offered up a portrait of the diligent chief executive:
‘Russian President Vladimir Putin will celebrate his birthday in a working environment. On October 7, the head of state will meet with CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States‘) leaders who will arrive in Moscow to participate in a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of State Council, and will also hold a number of working meetings.‘
It made a point of enumerating all the other birthdays Putin – who once described himself as a ‘galley slave’ labouring away for the good of the country – had spent working. In 2023, he ‘launched the supply of Russian gas to Uzbekistan via Kazakhstan; in 2022, friendly leaders from CIS countries attended an informal summit in St. Petersburg, Tajik leader Emomali Rahmon bringing watermelons and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko his beloved potatoes. In 2021, while Russian forces were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Putin held an operational meeting with the permanent members of the national Security Council.
This is, of course, all in keeping with a current effort to counter all the tales of an ageing and self-indulgent autocrat indulging himself in one palace or another with the narrative of the devoted and ascetic steward of the nation.
At the same time, Russians are being reassured that even if the president himself isn’t making much of his birthday, the rest of the world is. The days when he could be serenaded with a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ by the Indonesian president, as happened when he was in Bali for the 2013 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit – or presented with a hand-embroidered duvet cover showing him alongside Italy’s then-president Silvio Berlusconi, surely a highlight of 2017 – are long gone.
Nonetheless, Russians were told how, in both Genoa and Turin, Italian fans unveiled a banner wishing him happy birthday and distributed leaflets. (This may well have been a genuine, spontaneous act, but it is worth remembering how trollmaster-turned-mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin’s staff once arranged, as a flattering act of homage, for an American to stand in front of the White House and hold a sign reading ‘Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss,’ unaware of quite whom they were celebrating.)
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, admitting that ‘there won’t be anything particularly festive’ on his schedule, added that he ‘does not consider his birthday and other holidays a reason for increased attention to him personally.’ Yet you’ll have to look hard to see any sign of such ‘increased attention’ being discouraged. Public hearings on the budget in the upper house of the legislature began with congratulations to Putin, with speaker Valentina Matviyenko pledging that the entire chamber was ‘behind him like a stone wall,’ to what was reported, in fine Stalinist style, as ‘stormy and prolonged applause.’
Mayors and governors chimed in with their greetings, and thousands of activists from the youth wing of the pro-Putin United Russia party were bussed into Moscow and St Petersburg to hold carefully-choreographed flash mobs, holding up red umbrellas and red, white and blue signs (the colours of the Russian flag) to spell out birthday greetings. By midday, more than 30 schools across the country had published on the Vkontakte social media site, videos of students doing the same. Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church offered his ‘heartfelt congratulations’ for the way Putin stood as ‘an inspiring example…for all caring people who wish prosperity to our Motherland.’
This was relatively sedate compared with the language of those with more to gain, though. Mikhail Razvozhayev, governor of the Crimean city of Sevastopol, who has been facing questions over his management of the city, called the day ‘the birthday of the main person of our country. The man who made Russia a truly powerful state.’ Nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, who never misses an opportunity to try to regain the Kremlin’s favour, simply said ‘God save the Tsar,’ while to make the point more evident, Konstantin Malofeyev, the businessman behind the Tsargrad Russian Orthodox media empire, asserted that Putin had risen ‘by divine providence.’
Perhaps the most sinister greetings, though, came from the war zone. ‘We are ready to carry out any of your orders and all of your tasks, and our mission for a complete victory over the Nazi regime,’ affirmed one military unit. Meanwhile, in what was likely part psychological warfare, part some spook agency’s present to the boss, posters were anonymously pasted up in Kyiv, vowing that ‘Putin will come and restore order.’
This is the point: Putin wants to have his birthday cake and eat it. He wants to be portrayed as the sober public servant, uninterested in pomp or praise, but at the same time clearly has no problem basking in real and manufactured adulation. The question is how far he is also seduced by it, unwilling or unable to register that behind the genuine patriotism and appreciation of his past successes in dragging Russia back from the brink of anarchy, dissatisfaction is growing.
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