EVEN TO a casual observer, some of the eight goals that Vladimir Putin scored for an all-stars team in an ice hockey match in Sochi last weekend looked a little easy. To be sure, Mr Putin is nifty on the ice, particularly for a 62-year-old, but the opposing goalkeeper seemed less than desperate to save the president’s shots, as even his most loyal supporters must have noticed. Something similar goes for the other macho stunts that, over the 15 years of his leadership, have showcased Mr Putin’s virility: the tiger-shooting, the bare-chested fishing and horseriding, the encounter with a snow leopard, the aerial firefighting and serendipitous discovery of ancient amphorae while scuba-diving in the Black Sea. Most are so obviously staged and fake as to undercut their propaganda benefits—or so it might appear. What is really going on with these preposterous photo-ops?
The superficial explanation is that they are part of the increasingly sinister personality cult the Kremlin has cultivated around Mr Putin, especially since he reassumed the presidency in 2012, after the four-year stint as prime minister that constitutional niceties required. This effort includes sycophantic documentaries, dedicated youth groups, adoring pop songs, statues, posters—and those snaps of him handgliding with migratory cranes and manhandling polar bears. In this reading, the stunts cater to a hardwired yearning for strong leadership, binding Russians to Mr Putin and helping to blind them to his regime’s many failings: icons of autocracy for the entertainment age.
But the real meaning and purpose of these images is less straightforward. After all, bombarded though they are by West-bashing, Putin-worshipping disinformation, most Russians are much too sophisticated and instinctively sceptical to be taken in; witness the satirical jokes and derogatory memes that intermittently well up on the internet, most strikingly during the anti-Putin street protests of 2011. Russians can see as clearly as Westerners that the goalie isn’t trying, that the frontier heroics have been choreographed. It is better, therefore, to think of these skits less as instances of the president hoodwinking the people than as collaborations between the two. In them, Mr Putin is pantomiming a brave, beneficent tsar, patriotic and incorruptible, rather than merely presenting himself as one. In a country with a male population that is plagued by alcoholism and ill-health, his daredevil antics also embody an idealised version of manhood (as well as reassuring Russians that they need not fret about the succession—a structural weakness in his highly personalised system). Considered in this way, Mr Putin is less the subject of a cult than its high priest; less the focus of the nation’s yearning than a channel for its hopes of a better life.
These images represent another source of power, too: the coercive power of lies. Lying—and obliging people, whether his own citizens or foreign diplomats, to swallow the lies—has become one of Mr Putin’s main tools of statecraft. The bogusness of the charges laid against critical activists, and the brazen dishonesty about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are not incidental aspects of his approach to government. They are central to it—demonstrating the Kremlin’s ability to disregard the truth if it so chooses, just as it has the ability to incarcerate opponents or invade foreign countries. Those ice-hockey goals fit into this strategy of weaponised chutzpah: Vladimir Vladimirovich may not really have the athletic prowess to boss an ice-hockey rink, but, behold, he certainly has the power to make everyone pretend that he does.
