Kremlin spin doctors engineered Vladimir Putin's public image by running focus groups that asked Russians what an ideal leader should look like, and the surprising answer was a fictional Soviet superspy rather than any real politician, according to a review of Marc Bennetts's new book "The Descent" published by "The Economist".
As "Hvylya" reports, the British magazine draws on Bennetts's conversations with Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the earliest political technologists around the Kremlin, who helped orchestrate the handover from Boris Yeltsin to his handpicked successor in 2000. Read the full review on The Economist website.
Pavlovsky told Bennetts that the focus groups returned a single, unusual composite: Max Otto von Stierlitz, the codename of a fictional Soviet-era spy from the cult television series "Seventeen Moments of Spring". Putin, himself a former KGB officer, "swiftly learned to play the part of an ex-spook who projected strength but was on the side of the people", the review says.
Bennetts argues that Kremlin handlers then worked to insulate Putin from any association with failure. That, Pavlovsky said, is why the president never visited the scene of the Kursk tragedy in 2000, when a Russian submarine sank and 118 sailors died. Over time, the same team turned Putin into the one figure Russians believed stood above the system.
"The Economist" captures the paradox with an anecdote from the book: asked by opposition politician Ilya Yashin whether he believed state television's claim that Ukraine was "full of Nazis", a fellow prisoner snorted, "What am I, a fool? The telly's full of lies!" - and then repeated the Nazi line anyway. Bennetts writes that Russians have surrendered to a shared unreality akin to a medieval witch hunt. Earlier, "Hvylya" reported how Putin now forces Russian oligarchs to bankroll the war through a list of named "sponsors".