Fifty years ago this week, Khrushchev shook the Soviet Union to its foundations with his secret speech at the 20^th annual congress of the Communist Party, which he used to attack the actions and behaviour of the recently deceased Stalin, and the ‘cult of personality’ which he had built up.

The bicentennial of this momentous event has prompted a degree of soul-searching in the Russian media, both looking back at the era of the ‘thaw’, and asking if the cult of personality still exists, perhaps even stronger than in Khrushchev’s time.

This week’s edition of Russian Newsweek, which is flourishing under the editorship of Leonid Parfyonov, takes the boldest line. Its cover shows a painting of Stalin and Putin walking side by side in Red Square, with the headline, ‘50 Years of the Cult of Personality’. Inside the magazine, a long feature looks at the Cult of Putin, and asks how strong it is, how dangerous.

It picks up on what is to western eyes the most striking aspect of the cult – the ubiquitous portraits of Putin one sees in stores and offices. As Newsweek points out, every bureaucrat has a picture of Putin hanging on the wall, and many private businesses do as well. My own Russian office has a Putin calendar, with pictures of the president riding, judo-fighting, jet-flying, or staring soulfully at the camera.

This is rather strange to Westerners but we shouldn’t be quick to see it as evidence of some Asiatic religious awe of Putin among Russians. For my colleagues in the office, the calendar is there half-ironically. They are slightly mocking the cult, while also enjoying the fact that their young president actually does all the activities he is pictured doing.

This is the point about the cult of Putin – it is quite pragmatic, not some fever of patriotic intoxication. Newsweek interviews one government bureaucrat, who says that bureaucrats put pictures of Putin up to illustrate their respect for loyalty and discipline to their immediate superiors: “If you don’t have a picture of Putin up, it means you don’t respect the power vertical, so you don’t respect your immediate boss.”

Among both bureaucrats and civilians, the cult of Putin is not so much a wild deification of the man, as a down-to-earth respect for his ability to perform his job well, and thus represent Russia as a civilized, business-like place – everything it wasn’t in the 1990s, in other words.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the cult of Putin is that he is not Yeltsin.  This is what the pop song ‘A Man Like Putin’ cleverly emphasized in 2001. It went: “'If only I could find a man like Putin, full of strength. A man like Putin, who does not drink. A man like Putin, who does not insult. A man like Putin, who does not run away.” In short, a man unlike Yeltsin.

Putin is not a drunkard, he doesn’t make a spectacle of himself, and Russia, on foreign visits, he’s not permanently in hospital, he’s capable of being smart and witty on television, of schmoozing or occasionally standing up to the leaders of the world. He’s absolutely not some charismatic, Romantic prophet figure, as say Ataturk, Hitler, Stalin, Mandela or Gandhi were. These people were certainly objects of quasi-religious cults. Putin, by contrast, is simply calm and competent.

Placed next to the longer tradition of Russian leaders, the contrast is even more obvious. He’s not old, as almost all recent leaders were. He’s not dosed to the eyeballs in tranquilizers (as Brezhnev was), he doesn’t hit tables with shoes and confuse his ministers with wild policy shifts (as Khrushchev did) he hasn’t ordered the killing of, or driven to suicide, any close relatives (as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander I and Stalin all did). He is an unusually sane Russian leader.

So Russians’ respect for Putin is in large part founded on relief. As the historian Roy Medvedev told Newsweek: “People are grateful to Putin, but not for anything special that he has done. Society is simply calmer. People can go to sleep at night and know they will wake up in the same country.”

Of course, what cult there is, is to some extent artfully manipulated by the many highly-paid image consultants the Kremlin employs – the Surkovs and Pavlovskys of this world. The Putin pop song, by the group ‘Singing Together’, was probably cooked up by Surkov’s department, as was ‘Moving Together’, the pro-Putin youth group who used to march in T-shirts bearing the president’s smiling portrait.

Russia, and the outside world, believed that everyone loved Putin partly because we were told so repeatedly that everybody loved Putin. Boris Kagarlitsky wrote about this back in 2001: “Vladimir Putin was followed by declamations of popular love from his first day in office. Without having done anything, without making even slightly creative promises, the president was declared a national hero. It was explained to each of us that everybody loves the president. The majority believed.”

He continues: “A graduate student in sociology complained to me recently about a completely confounding experience. She organized a focus group for some research and polled 60 people. Only one of them supported Putin. But each of the remaining 59 was convinced that he or she was the only oppositionist in the group. The biggest success of the Kremlin's propaganda is not that people have come to love the president, but that they have bought into the myth of his all-encompassing popularity.”

The manipulation of the myth is obvious above all on state TV news, where Putin is presented very positively. I have lived in Russia coming up for three years, and I’ve never seen a Russian TV news story criticize the president. That’s remarkable.

Instead, the leading story of the news, particularly on Channel One and Rossiya, is of the president looking statesmanlike on a foreign trip, even if nothing of actual substance emerged from the trip. And potential rivals to Putin’s appeal – Kasyanov, Rogozin, Ryzhkov, Khloponin, Khordorkovsky – are starved of media oxygen. So no real alternatives are allowed to exist. Instead, the politician we see most on our screens after Putin is Mikhail Fradkov, a black hole of anti-charisma. And this is no mistake – the flip-side of the cult of Putin is the anti-cult of Fradkov.

While we never see Putin criticized, we do often see Putin criticizing his cabinet. He does it very well – frowning down his nose, treating them “like mischievous children”, as Evgeny Kiselov puts it. If something bad happens, it’s always the fault of his cabinet, never him.

And that’s another important part of the cult of Putin, one that is inherent in the position of Russian leader, and goes back many centuries in the country’s history. The leader is revered by the bureaucracy because he is the top of the power vertical, he is their champion. But he is also revered by the wider population because he is their champion against the bureaucracy. He is the one who will defend the people from the terrors of the boyars / bureaucrats / oligarchs. He is the big guy on the side of the little people, and anything bad that happens is the fault of those around him, not him. This is something about which Sergei Roy has written well.

To me this belief that the Tsar is always right, and mistakes are due to his corrupt advisors, is an illusion. A leader must ultimately be held responsible for the ministers he picks. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it should stop with him. But it’s a fact of the Russian mentality, it goes extremely deep into the darker layers of the Russian mind, and Putin has learnt well how to work with it.

We should note, in conclusion, that it’s not just Russians who go a little misty-eyed about Putin. I interviewed several foreign experts who met with Putin for three hours of close-quarter interview in September last year, as part of the ‘Valdai Club’, and they were all very complimentary about him. I remember Marshall Goldman, Harvard professor and no Kremlin-o-phile, saying how overwhelmed he was by Putin’s poise and command of detail. “You have to be impressed by the man, you just have to!” he said.

He is an impressive president, it’s a fact. I used to worry that the problem with his strengthening of the power vertical was that whoever came after him might be far less balanced than he is, and might go crazy with the power. But I think it’s clear now what will happen. A loyalist to Putin will be appointed president for four years, and then Putin will return. For better or worse, we are in the era of Putin.

For the future, I think Putin’s foreign policy is going to get bolder and bolder, as he becomes a wise old hand on the international stage, and the presidents and prime ministers visiting him become the young nobodies. But I worry that domestic policy will become more and more flat, because of the absence of any tension from opposition. We shall see!

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow

February 17, 2006