MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin has surrounded himself with such a fog of secrecy that it is now unclear where he lives, how many children or loved ones he has, whether his health is deteriorating or whether he intends to remain in power.
The old KGB man’s love of secrecy has long fueled rumors and conspiracy theories that would quietly race across Moscow. But 2020 was the year when the rumors got out of hand. Encouraged by the omnipotence of the online rumor mill, the Russian media now dare to bind them to publication.
Tabloids floated in stories this year that the Russian president was sick and ready to leave the Kremlin. After Putin, who is 68, coughed during a meeting with the government on Nov. 19, the gossip took off.
Some claimed the president had cancer, others said he had Parkinson’s disease. A video of Putin absent-mindedly with a map in October fueled rumors that he was suffering from some degenerative disease.
As pro-Putin ideologues often emphasize “Russia is Putin,” media reports analyzed Putin’s health as a vital issue for Russia’s future.
All without any evidence. The closest thing to an official Kremlin health report comes an occasional shirtless photo shoot.
Professor Valery Solovey, who has become one of Moscow’s most notorious sensationalists, has fueled speculation on YouTube this year, claiming that Putin was planning to quit due to some “force majeure”.
The speculation about Putin’s long-term health seems to run counter to his decision to push through legislation that will allow him to remain in power until 2036. Work for that formally began last January, and he decided to stamp it with a nationwide referendum over the summer that was not legally necessary, but it offered Putin a chance to show that he was still in charge when he – as expected – the referendum comfortably won.
The power movement failed to stifle speculation among Moscow’s elite, with names of potential successors scurrying around incessantly.
On Moscow Radio Echo, known as Moscow’s ear, editor-in-chief Aleksey Venediktov reports that the two best contenders are ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of the Security Council, and Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Foreign Affairs. Intelligence.
Others argue that there will be another Putin after Putin. The president’s cousin, Roman Putin, appears to have great political ambitions – the businessman of the famous name founded a new political party this month called “Russia without corruption”.
Speculation about Putin’s intentions was further fueled in November when the Duma – Russia’s Kremlin-friendly parliament – approved the first reading of a bill that would grant Russian presidents and their families immunity from prosecution after they left office.
Vladimir Solovyov, a well-connected Kommersant According to the newspaper commentator, Putin has left Russia with a terribly confused image. “This year he changed the constitution to get more conditions, but now he is letting in more fog and says he doesn’t know if he will run again in 2024,” he said.
Solovyov told The Daily Beast that he – and many others – had assumed that Putin would try to hand over power to a close ally and remain a powerful figure behind the scenes, as Nursultan Nazarbayev has done in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev stepped down after nearly 20 years as president, but retains his position as head of the security council and “power behind the throne”.
Seeing Putin backing Alexander Lukashenko, whose post-Soviet population in Belarus is trying to force him out of office, has changed Soloviev’s analysis.
“If we previously thought he would choose a peaceful way to hand over power, as in Kazakhstan, now it looks like he will go for the Belarusian bloody and violent scenario,” he said.
Putin has already quelled the protests this year and decided that even one-person demonstrations were unacceptable.
The thrust of Putin’s strategy has remained unchanged for decades: the Russian president has brought former KGB officers like him into all major management areas of public life to provide security for what he calls the vertical force.
An increasing public debate in Russia is defined as espionage intrigues. Reports, myths, legends about Putin’s whereabouts, the business of his associates, his personal life are described by the government as a spy verse spy story, and not as a matter of public information they should share.
For instance, where is Putin riding the pandemic, which has already eroded his popularity?
Nobody knows. A media report this year claimed that Putin built an exact replica of his Kremlin office in Sochi to keep his location hidden, even from people he speaks to on camera. Officials hinted that the claim was misinformation disseminated by foreign spy agencies.
Putin is also said to have a secret hideout in the remote Altai Mountains, close to the Mongolian border.
Every taxi driver in the Republic of Altai, in Siberia, estimates that they know the approximate location of Putin’s hometown. They say it’s somewhere around 600 miles on the Chuisky Highway, and he’s there a lot. The constant helicopters in the sky spark the local belief that Putin spent much of his spring and summer quarantine in the mountains of Altai, although of course no one knows for sure.
Putin’s private life has also been hidden for decades, sparking much speculation over the years, but that has accelerated again in recent months.
In November, several media reports suggested that Putin had a secret daughter in St. Petersburg with Svetlana Krivonogikh. The story aroused curiosity about the life of the involved teenager, but also raised questions about corruption.
How had Putin’s alleged lover – a former cleaning lady – acquired a significant stake in Bank Rossiya, a bank run by some of Putin’s longtime associates?
The US Treasury sanctioned the owners and partners of Bank Rossiya in 2014, on the day the Russian Parliament passed a law allowing Crimea to enter the Russian Federation.
Corruption has been a hallmark of Russia’s elite circles since the Soviet era. “No one is more surprised that top people in power are corrupt,” Boris Vishnevsky, deputy of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly told The Daily Beast. “But more and more millions of people are looking to Alexey Navalny’s independent studies to hear the details.”
Navalny’s online exposés and his political campaigns on the ground have, in fact, made him the leader of Russia’s opposition.
And this is where the spy games come into play again.
Navalny was poisoned with a dose of Novichok while in the east, in Siberia, where anti-Putin demonstrations are growing. Navalny survived, but by the beginning of September, 77 percent of the Russian population knew about the attempted murder.
Bellingcat published a meticulously detailed account of the attack, with specific names of Russian intelligence agents who pursued the opposition leader when he was poisoned. It looked like damning evidence that the security forces were to blame.
When Putin was confronted with this report at his annual press conference, he did not deny the main points in the report that Navalny was outdated and that the cell phone records mentioned in the report actually belonged to the Federal Security Service, FSB officers. But the spy games were deepened from there.
“That patient from a Berlin clinic has the support of US intelligence,” said Putin, without mentioning Navalny, who is being treated in Germany. “That’s why the Russian special services have to track him down.”
The Russian president claimed that Bellingcat, CNN, the Insider and The mirror the magazine had helped American intelligence agents “legalize” misinformation from foreign spies.
Putin thinks he and his secret services are outsmarting Navalny.
The president dismisses all attempts to open up, including about his own family life, as “tricks” in the information war.
A former MP, Dmitry Gudkov, is convinced that public frustration with Putin will only increase, especially as even the FSB agents are not holding their end. “It doesn’t take anything to find out the truth about Putin’s agents – the data from cell phone calls can be bought without any problems,” Gudkov told The Daily Beast.
Putin relies on his FSB agents’ spy games to secure his future, but in a world of online reporting and swirling rumors that undermine all of their authority, his hopes of keeping up appearances are diminishing by the day.