Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture

Conclusion: Someone Like Putin

CONCLUSION Someone Like Putin My boyfriend got into trouble again Got into a fight, took some junk. I’m so tired of him, I dumped him. And now I want someone like Putin. Someone like Putin, full of strength, Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink. Someone like Putin, who won’t hurt me. Someone like Putin, who won’t run away. I saw him yesterday on the news. He said that the world was at a crossroads. With someone like him, things are easy, at home and at friends’. And now I want someone like Putin. —Singing T ogether, “Someone Like Putin” “If there’s no obvious breaking news, we start with the president.” —Mikhail Antonov, news anchor on Rossiia In the summer of 2002, an unknown female duo called Singing Together (Poiushchie vmeste) released a surprise hit, literally singing the praises of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the man who became president of the Russian Federation after Boris Yeltsin’s unexpected resignation on the last New Year’s Eve of the 1990s. The group’s name was modeled on that of a patriotic , pro-Putin youth group calling itself Moving Together (Idushchie vmeste), which had recently begun crusading for moral purity and national pride. Even at the height of Yeltsin’s popularity, bolstered by the image of Russia’s leader standing defiantly on top of a tank during the August 1991 coup attempt, a synthopop encomium to the nation’s president would have been unthinkable, and not only because the lumpy and ill-mannered Yeltsin was an unlikely object of desire: one of the most liberating aspects of late- and post-Soviet culture was the freedom not to praise the leader. Readers of the present study will look in vain (and perhaps with disappointment ) for extended discussions of the political situation in the 1990s, and the entry for “Yeltsin” in the index will yield limited, and cursory, results . Culturally, the Yeltsin era was a refreshing change for twentiethcentury Russia precisely because so little of it was about Yeltsin himself. Yet thanks to the persistent negativity and hostility with which the Russian 1990s have been characterized in the first five years of the twenty-first century, Yeltsin retroactively becomes a handy symbol for a now-despised decade. Flabby and weak, he was saved from a near-fatal heart condition only with the help of Western experts. His frequent drunkenness and concomitant clownish behavior held up a troubling mirror to a nation long plagued by alcoholism; his famous attempt to dance the twist may or may not have helped him win reelection in 1996, but it also reinforced the image of an aging, awkward man whose attempts to be “with it” were embarrassing . The decline of the president’s physical and mental state over the course of the decade threatened to morph Yeltsin into a latter-day Brezhnev, slow of speech and limited in wit, while the corruption of his inner circle (the “Family”) was legendary. As centralized authority was dwindling rapidly, Yeltsin incarnated the state perfectly, because by the end of the 1990s he was so often in seclusion: in a country with strong paternalistic traditions, Yeltsin was the absent father. The political handlers who facilitated the new president’s rise to power (“Project Putin”) (Baker and Glasser 55–59), created the image of a tough, no-nonsense “man’s man” who was sober, athletic, and decisive. Though some aspects of the Putin phenomenon suggest an emerging “cult of Putin” (in particular the fawning, hagiographic depiction of the president in textbooks for Russian schoolchildren) (39–40), the plethora of commodified product tie-ins and the proliferation of his image on items meant for sale point to something closer to a “Putin brand.”1 The fact that he was catapulted from near anonymity to dizzying popularity in the space of a year 226 Overkill 1 Putin’s own personal role in his increasing commodification is unclear. His contempt for the marketing and glad-handing involved in electoral politics is well known, thanks to his remark that he did not want to be a product sold to the public “like Tampax” (Baker and Glasser 57). also suggests that there may be unintended wisdom in the title of Singing Together’s song: the new president filled a perceived need not necessarily for Putin himself, but for someone like Putin. The song’s lyrics superficially displace the discourse of...