Who knows if the Russian president is sick. With the restoration of Soviet political culture on Putin's watch, there could also only be a return to secrecy about our leader's health.
MOSCOW — If you type “Putin” on Yandex, the most popular search engine in the Russian language, a drop-down list appears: “Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” “Putin stroke,” “Putin Wikipedia,” “Putin biography” and “Putin is ill.” In other words, the top five options include two regarding the Russian president’s rumored ill health. Even Putin’s ostensible longtime mistress is only No. 7 on this list of things that Russians want to know. The big question now is, What’s wrong with the president?
Officially, nothing. Nothing at all. We have now heard not one but two rounds of denials from Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. On Nov. 1,
Peskov issued some remarkable non-denial denials, saying that Putin’s back injury was “not an injury” but “just a mismovement” and that it was not getting in the way of Putin’s continued athletics. Whatever the problem, however, it was very much getting in the way of the president’s travel schedule, which had been scrapped. Putin had not left his dacha in weeks.
A month passed. Last week, with Putin still dacha-bound, the leaders of all the parliamentary factions had to travel outside of Moscow
to meet with him. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarussia complained to a reporter that Putin had canceled a hockey match in which they were planning to take part because,
he said, Putin had hurt his back while practicing judo. This was a better story than one that had been circulating: that Putin had sustained the injury while
hang-gliding with Siberian cranes in an unsuccessful environmental mission. Still, Lukashenko apparently regretted his remark: According to the Russian news agency Interfax, it was
removed from the interview transcript posted on President Lukashenko’s official Web site.
Whoever told Lukashenko that Putin’s health was not a topic for discussion must have said the same thing to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan, who said it to Shunsuke Hasegawa, the mayor of the city of Nemuro, who transmitted the message to two Japanese news agencies,
which reported that Noda had had to cancel a planned visit to Moscow because of Putin’s ill health.
This disclosure necessitated a new round of denials from Peskov, who told the newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda that Putin “is working like he has always worked and plans to continue working at the same rate. At the same time he has no intention of giving up sports, and like every athlete he might have a slight backache or an arm or a leg ache — this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”
Putin has been running Russia for 13 years. In all this time, he has never tried to disguise his nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Nor has he tried to mask his intentions of reviving as much of the Soviet system as contemporary Russia can bear — beginning with the melody of the old anthem, which he brought back during his first year in office. That said, the restoration of Soviet political culture would not be complete without the return to secrecy and endless rumors surrounding our leader’s health.
Back then, the need for secrecy rested on two key assumptions: that Soviet leaders were, or should be, immortal, and that if the current leader nonetheless died, disaster would strike the country. Neither assumption, however, and no amount of secrecy could keep the aging Soviet leaders from dying. When Putin was in his early 30s, three general secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in a row died suddenly — without, if the official media were to be believed, ever having been ill. The joke at the time was that each had died “without gaining consciousness.”
Putin is much younger than the party bosses of his youth, and his ailment, whatever it is, may well be of the non-life-threatening variety. But for Russians who, over the last 13 years, have seen the their Soviet past re-enacted, associations with the mortal Communists of the 1980s are what the non-story of Putin’s health calls to mind.
Masha Gessen is the director of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service and the author of “The Man Without a Face,” a biography of Vladimir Putin.
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