How Putin became master of the image

Throughout his time as Russian President, Vladimir Putin has been alert to the power of visual imagery.

The first time I interviewed him in 2001, an aide swooped in just before the cameras went live and snatched away the small water glasses on the table in front of us.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"We wouldn't want anyone to think they were for vodka," came the reply. "And anyway, we can't risk a glass spilling live on TV. Television is a nuclear bomb when it comes to publicity."

"Everybody in Russia, but especially Putin, realised that TV was the key to the consolidation of power," says the author and political analyst Peter Pomerantsev.

Over the years, Putin has transformed Russia from a fragile emerging democracy into a largely authoritarian state revolving around himself as president. He has also dramatically transformed himself.

Early photos show him as a slight, reticent figure who seemed wary of the camera. So how did this seemingly quiet, retiring child and self-effacing bureaucrat turn into a president who so avidly embraced the limelight?

His keen interest in the power of image far predated his rise to power. Like most youngsters growing up in the 1960s and 70s, Putin was a child of the television age. His role models were the spy heroes of popular Soviet TV series and movies. By his own admission, these strong, silent double agents battling against enemies of the Soviet state were what inspired him to seek a career in the KGB, the Soviet Union's intelligence agency.

As a KGB operative and then an assiduous apparatchik, he avoided attention. But when in 1999 he was catapulted into the role of acting president and a few months later elected president, he and his PR advisers showed themselves acutely aware of the importance of visual imagery in shaping his presidential persona.

Part of the image-making process was to edit out what was unhelpful. So Putin came across as a virtual teetotaller. At annual meetings with foreign policy experts at the Valdai Discussion Club, he would stick to a cup of tea with honey while they were served fine wines.

On occasions when he did have a drink, his minders tried to keep it under wraps. I once met the custodian of a local museum who told me how he had sat down with the president to enjoy some Russian pancakes smeared with vodka to give them an extra kick. "But don't tell anyone," he implored me. "They were very strict about it. I might get into terrible trouble."

Another part of the plan was to drum home the message that he was nothing like his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose public displays of inebriation had dismayed and embarrassed many Russians.

Putin donned a pilot's helmet to fly a fighter jet. His prowess at judo was displayed. All to communicate that this was a vigorous, healthy man of action, not an ailing drunkard.

Most notorious of all, perhaps, were the series of photos starting in 2007 showing him bare-chested, riding a horse like a Russian Marlboro Man, or fly fishing in a river, or flexing his muscles in a vigorous butterfly stroke.

Was this for real? Or was there a kind of knowing humour to the images? Pomerantsev thinks the people in charge of his PR knew exactly what they were doing.

"For one audience, this is very crass, but we're going to do it in an ironic way, so that it's kind of cool. For another audience, it was that Russia should be led by a traditional hardman hero."

He adds: "Putin was playing this sort of very, very, I suppose, traditional Soviet leadership role, but he was doing it in an era of the reality show, MTV and sugar daddies."

"Putin is the trendsetter," says Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist and adviser to US presidents. "He has shaped the image of the first populist president, the first acclaimed strongman of the 21st Century."

Certainly, Putin was sending different messages to different audiences. To the outside world, it was to signal that Russia was no longer weak but a power to be reckoned with. A bear with teeth and claws, as he once put it.

Other extravagant displays were even more incongruous, perhaps reflecting something of the Leningrad schoolboy who was at last able to live out childhood fantasies: scuba diving to "discover" carefully placed relics at the bottom of the Black Sea; being harnessed into a motorised hang glider to soar high in the sky flanked by endangered cranes; and petting a Siberian tiger cub.

Putin himself claimed that the point of all this was to raise environmental and scientific awareness. But did he realise that these stunts verged on self-parody? Or did none of his aides by now dare tell him so? Or did he simply not care anymore what others thought?

Early photos of Putin, like the one in his ID card from 1985 for the Stasi (the East German secret police), suggest a steely resolve behind the mask – a deliberate reticence no doubt well suited for a KGB role and further honed by KGB training.

After the USSR collapsed at the end of 1991, he recast himself as a government official with a reputation for loyalty and efficiency, initially serving the mayor of St Petersburg, then – after a move to Moscow – Yeltsin's presidential administration. In photos of that period, he is usually at the back or side of the picture, never looking into the camera, never centre stage.

Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, said she was told in the 1990s that in KGB circles, he was known as "the moth", a man who could hide anywhere he wanted, a man in the shadows.

But when he became president, it was a different story. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to don different roles.

A few years later, when he was photographed for Time magazine's Person of the Year award in 2007, he instinctively settled back in his chair and looked down the lens of the camera, like a tsar on a throne or a menacing mafia boss.

"He was performing power for me," says Platon, the Time photographer who took the picture. "As far as I know, Putin loves these images. Many of his supporters love the pictures. They show him as a tough nationalist."

It was what Pomerantsev calls "a postmodern version of authoritarian propaganda," with Putin playing out all the roles like a performance artist.

And the various guises of a strongman which he adopted were reflected in his policies. To make Russia strong again, Putin argued there needed to be more order, more oversight from above. So, step by step he tightened control over Russian society, reducing the space for free expression and criticism, turning the Duma into a rubber-stamp parliament, marginalising or eliminating political opponents and lashing out at Western powers for failing to show Russia enough respect.

His hyper-macho topless photoshoots have been picked over endlessly as a reflection of his confidence. But maybe these images also tell us something about his insecurities: his desire to reassure everyone, including himself, that he was still the main man, as fit as he'd ever been.

After 2008 when he stepped back from the presidency to become prime minister for four years, attention-grabbing photos such as these also signalled that he, rather than President Dmitry Medvedev, was the real power in the land.

In 2011 came a dramatic visual change that also marked a pivotal point on his political journey. He suddenly appeared in public with a new fuller, puffier face, more immobile and inexpressive. It was mystifying. Was this a sign of steroid treatment for some illness? Or had he resorted to Botox in his quest to stave off signs of decline and old age?

A few months later he ran for the presidency again. The outcome was never in doubt, but at the open-air rally to declare his victory, his new face could be seen streaked with tears.

I concluded the weeping was genuine. His voice was also hoarse with emotion. It looked like relief that all had gone according to plan, despite widespread protests ahead of the election, when – astonishingly – some protestors had dared raise slogans calling for him to go. But some analysts have wondered whether it was yet another contrived performance, designed to evoke the religious imagery of a weeping icon, to suggest he was now Russia's holy saviour.

Whichever it was, it marked a defining moment. His grip on the country had been tightening for years. From this era on, any form of public dissent was not just discouraged but downright illegal. Putin was becoming increasingly authoritarian and Russia less tolerant of opposition voices.

Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the Pussy Riot feminists who was jailed and declared a foreign agent for her protests, put it this way: "Putin got obsessed with placing himself in history as the saviour, not just of Russia, but of the entire world. And this… is the turning point of him stepping into the Putin we know today."

Now aged 73, Putin is no closer to giving up the reins of power than he was back in 1999, but he is seen less frequently.

Many speculate that in recent years he has become more paranoid, especially since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Now, when he does appear in front of the camera, the occasions are highly orchestrated, as though he is intent on keeping a distance from the outside world.

"He obviously wants to be careful that people can't necessarily track him down. It shows someone who's paranoid about his personal safety – from germs or assassination attempts," says Fiona Hill.

The war in Ukraine is now central to his image. Mikhail Fishman, a veteran Russian journalist, says: "If we look back at what Putin was after he came back to the Kremlin in 2012, he still did not know what he was, what he's about. But he believes he finally found his mission, what his role is, and it is war."

Yet, more than four years since it started, the full-scale war with Ukraine is also a burden. To continue it looks increasingly challenging, but to end it is also fraught with danger. Putin has created an economic war machine and a system of internal repression which he cannot easily put into reverse without huge risk to himself.

A quarter of a century after assuming power, he comes across as remote and inflexible, as though immobilised in a trap of his own making. It's a far cry from the image of a dynamic sportsman and action hero which he once hoped would define him.

Putin: In Ten Pictures is available to watch on iPlayer

Lead image credit: Reuters / Stasi Records Agency Dresden (Public Domain) / Getty Images

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