MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin has surrounded himself with a fog so thick of secrecy that it is now unclear where he is living, how many children or lovers he has, whether his health is getting worse or whether he plans to remain in power.
The love for the secrecy of the old KGB has long fueled rumors and conspiracy theories that quietly run through Moscow. But 2020 was the year that rumors got out of hand. Encouraged by the omnipotence of the online rumor, the Russian media now dares to send them for publication.
The tabloids this year were involved in stories that the Russian president was ill and about to leave the Kremlin. After Putin, 68, coughed at a meeting with the government on November 19, gossip skyrocketed.
Some claimed that the president was suffering from cancer, others diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease. A video of Putin absentmindedly playing with a briefcase in October fueled rumors that he was suffering from some form of degenerative disease.
As pro-Putin ideologues often emphasize “Russia is Putin”, media reports have analyzed Putin’s health as a vital issue for Russia’s future.
All of this without any trace of evidence. The closest thing you get to an official Kremlin health report is an occasional shirtless photo shoot.
Professor Valery Solovey, who has become one of Moscow’s most notorious sensationalists, this year has fueled speculation on YouTube, claiming that Putin planned to withdraw at any time due to some “force majeure”.
Speculation about Putin’s long-term health appears to be at odds with his decision to pass legislation that allows him to remain in power until 2036. Work on this formally began last January, and he decided to stamp it with a referendum. national campaign during the summer that was not legally necessary, but offered Putin the chance to show that he was still the chief when – as expected – he comfortably won the referendum.
The shift in power has failed to quell speculation among the Moscow elite, where names of potential successors buzz incessantly.
On radio Echo of Moscow, known as Moscow’s ear, editor-in-chief Aleksey Venediktov reports that the two main candidates are former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is now vice president of the Security Council, and Sergei Naryshkin, director of Foreign Intelligence .
Others say there will be another Putin after Putin. President Roman Putin’s nephew seems to have great political ambitions – the businessman with the familiar name founded a new political party this month called “Russia without corruption”.
Speculation about Putin’s intentions increased further in November, when the Duma – the Russian parliament in favor of the Kremlin – passed the first reading of a bill that would grant Russian presidents and their families immunity from prosecution after leaving office.
Vladimir Solovyov, a well-connected Kommersant newspaper commentator, says Putin left Russia with a terribly confused image. “This year, he changed the constitution to guarantee more terms, but now he lets more fog in 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 – assumed that Putin would try to hand over power to a close ally and remain a powerful figure behind the scenes, as Nursultan Nazarbayev did in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev stepped down after almost 20 years as president, but maintains his position as head of the security council and “power behind the throne”.
Seeing Putin support Alexander Lukashenko, whose post-Soviet population in Belarus is trying to force him out of office, changed Solovyov’s analysis.
“If before we thought he would choose a peaceful way to transfer power, as in Kazakhstan, now it looks like he will go to the bloody and violent scene in Belarus,” he said.
Putin has already suppressed protests this year, deciding that even one person’s demonstrations were unacceptable.
The momentum of Putin’s strategy has remained unchanged for decades: the Russian president has brought former KGB officers like him into all major areas of public life management, in order to provide security for what he calls the vertical of power.
Increasingly, public debate in Russia is being defined as espionage intrigue. Reports, myths, legends about Putin’s whereabouts, the business life of his associates, his personal life are described by the government as a spy talking about an espionage story, and not as a matter of public information, which they should share.
Where, for example, is Putin facing the pandemic, which has already affected his popularity?
Nobody knows. A media report this year said Putin had built an exact replica of his Kremlin office in Sochi to keep his location hidden even from the people he talks to on camera. The authorities suggested that the claim was misinformation sold by foreign spy agencies.
Putin is also believed to have a secret hiding place in the remote Altai Mountains, near the border with Mongolia.
Any taxi driver in the Altai Republic, Siberia, thinks he knows the approximate location of Putin’s residence. It is said to be around the 600 kilometer mark on the Chuisky Highway, and he is there frequently. The constant helicopters in the sky create a local belief that Putin has spent much of his spring and summer quarantine in the Altai Mountains, although no one knows for sure.
Putin’s private life has also been hidden for decades, which has sparked much speculation over the years, but again this has accelerated 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 teenager involved, but it also raised questions of corruption.
How did Putin’s alleged lover – a former janitor – acquire a significant stake in Banco Rossiya, a bank run by some of Putin’s longtime associates?
The US Treasury sanctioned the owners and partners of Banco Rossiya in 2014, the day the Russian parliament passed a law admitting Crimea to the Russian Federation.
Corruption has been a feature of elite Russian circles since the Soviet era. “Nobody else is surprised that the men in power are corrupt,” Boris Vishnevsky, a deputy in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, told The Daily Beast. “But more and more millions of people are watching Alexey Navalny’s independent investigations just to get the details.”
Navalny’s online complaints and his local political campaign have effectively made him the leader of the opposition in Russia.
And here, spy games come into play once again.
Navalny was poisoned with a dose of Novichok while in the east, in Siberia, where anti-Putin demonstrations have grown. Navalny survived, but in early September, 77 percent of the Russian population knew of the assassination attempt.
Bellingcat published a meticulously detailed account of the attack, which included specific names of Russian secret service agents who were tracking the opposition leader at the time he was poisoned. It seemed overwhelming evidence that the security services were to blame.
When Putin was confronted with this report at his annual press conference, he did not deny the main points of the report that Navalny had been tracked and the cell phone records mentioned in the report actually belonged to the Federal Security Service, FSB officials. But the spy games have deepened since then.
“That patient at a Berlin clinic has the support of the US intelligence services,” said Putin, without mentioning Navalny, who is receiving treatment in Germany. “Therefore, Russian special services must track it.”
The Russian president stated that Bellingcat, CNN, the Insider and Der Spiegel The magazine helped American intelligence agents to “legalize” the misinformation of foreign spies.
Putin believes he and his secret services were smarter than Navalny.
The president dismisses all openness efforts, including his own family life, as “tricks” in the information war.
A former member of parliament, Dmitry Gudkov, is convinced that public frustration with Putin will only increase, especially since even FSB agents are not keeping their share. “It takes nothing to find out the truth about Putin’s agents – data from cell calls can be acquired without any problems,” Gudkov told The Daily Beast.
Putin is relying on the spy games of his FSB agents to secure his future, but in a world of online reporting and rumors that undermine all of their authority, his hopes of keeping up the pretension are dwindling by the day.