Putin's Photo Op Flop -The iPINIONS Journal

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has acquired a rather dubious reputation for orchestrating photo ops to burnish his political persona as a virile leader. These have included staging everything from flying in fighter jets to shooting a tiger, reportedly, just as it was about to eat a member of his TV crew, and fly fishing bare-chested in sub-zero temperatures. But his favorite look is clearly that of the judo master tossing compliant sparring partners around like rag dolls.

Of course, one could chalk this all up to an acute Napoleonic complex – with Putin trying in vain to compensate for his diminutive size (he’s only 5’5″). Conspicuously missing from his heroic montage, however, has been images of him as a family man. This is why his appearance on TV this week with his wife stirred such interest, not just in Russia but all over Europe.

The reported reason for this rare look into his family life was Putin’s wish to encourage all Russians to participate in the country’s forthcoming census. Unfortunately, the only message most people seemed to get from this photo op pertained to the long-rumored breakup of his marriage.

Specifically, speculation has been rife in recent years about Putin leaving, perhaps even divorcing, his 52-year-old wife, Ludmilla, to set up home with a 27-year-old former Olympic champion gymnast named Alina Kabayeva. There are even reports that Putin has fathered a child with this other woman.

Therefore, when viewers noticed that Ludmilla was not wearing her wedding ring, this confirmed for many of them that her appearance was nothing more than a PR stunt in which she felt obliged to play along. After all, not even the president of Russia would dare refuse any request to help further Putin’s political ambition. Indeed, so solicitous are all Russians to cater to Putin’s cult of personality that when a newspaper reported on his relationship with Kabayeva, the owner promptly shut it down in self-flagellating deference to Czar Putin.

But the missing ring is not what struck me when I read this story and saw the pictures, which Putin clearly hoped would convey the image of him as a faithful husband and good family man. Notwithstanding that Putin appeared to be showing more affection for his Labrador Retriever, Connie, than for his wife. Rather it was the drab furnishings in their home, which made it look like the Putins were on the set of a movie about the loveless marriage of a typical Russian family from the 1950s.

The reason this feature of his photo op struck me as even more disingenuous than his effort to portray himself as a happily married man is that it’s well known among the world’s ruling elite that Putin is probably the richest man in Europe, if not the entire world.

Here, for the record, is how the London Guardian reported on his personal wealth almost three years ago:

After eight years in power, Putin has secretly accumulated a fortune of more than $40bn. The sum would make him Russia’s (and Europe’s) richest man.

(“Putin, the Kremlin power struggle and the $40bn fortune”, The London Guardian, December 21, 2007)

As for how he acquired this fortune, well, here’s what I wrote about that over three years ago:

I rather suspect that Putin’s appointment of Zubkov [Russia’s financial crime investigator] has more to do with protecting the billions of dollars he siphoned off from the oil companies he nationalized, than with his Stalinist ambition to serve as Russia’s president for life.

(Putin dissolves parliament…, The iPINIONS Journal, September 17, 2007)

So the question Russians should be asking is not why is Putin pretending to be happily married, but why is he pretending to be comfortably poor.