MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin has been surrounded by such a secret fog that it is now unclear where he lives, how many children or lovers he has, whether his health is failing or whether he intends to stay in power.
The secret love of the old KGB has long stimulated rumors and conspiracy theories that would run quietly around Moscow. But 2020 was the year when rumors got out of hand. Encouraged by the omnipotence of the online rumor mill, the Russian press now dares to hire them for publication.
This year’s tabloids mingled with stories that the Russian president was ill and ready to give up the Kremlin. After Putin, 68, coughed at a meeting with the government on November 19, gossip went into excess.
Some claimed that the president was suffering from cancer, others diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease. A video of Putin absently playing with a file in October fueled rumors that he was suffering from some kind of degenerative condition.
As pro-Putin ideologues often point out “Russia is Putin,” media reports have analyzed Putin’s health as a vital issue for Russia’s future.
All this without a piece of evidence. The closest thing you get to an official Kremlin health report is the occasional shirtless photo shoot.
Professor Valery Solovey, who has become one of Moscow’s best-known sensationalists, this year backed YouTube speculation that Putin intends to quit at any time due to “force majeure”.
Speculation about Putin’s long-term health would run counter to his decision to promote legislation that would allow him to remain in power until 2036. Work for this officially began in January last year and he decided to stamp it with a national referendum during the summer, which was not legally necessary, but gave Putin a chance to show that he was still the leader when – as expected – he won the comfortable referendum.
The power movement has failed to stifle speculation in Moscow’s elite, where the names of potential successors are constantly buzzing.
On Echo of Moscow radio, known as the Moscow Ear, editor-in-chief Aleksey Venediktov reports that the first two contenders are former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now vice-president of the Security Council, and Sergei Naryshkin, director of foreign affairs. Intelligence.
Others claim that there will be another Putin after Putin. The president’s nephew, Roman Putin, seems to have great political ambitions – the businessman with the familiar name founded this month a new political party called “Russia without corruption”.
Speculation about Putin’s intentions intensified further in November, when the Duma – the friendly parliament of Russia’s Kremlin – passed the first reading of a bill that would grant Russian presidents and their families immunity from prosecution after leaving the function.
Vladimir Solovyov, a well connected Kommersant The newspaper’s commentator says Putin left Russia with a terribly confusing picture. “This year, he changed the constitution to get more conditions, but now he leaves 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 strong figure behind the scenes, as Nursultan Nazarbayev did in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev resigned after nearly 20 years as president, but retains his position as head of the security council and “the power behind the throne.”
Putin’s gaze, backing Alexander Lukashenko, whose post-Soviet population in Belarus is trying to force him out of office, changed Solovyov’s analysis.
“If before I thought he would choose a peaceful way to transfer power, as in Kazakhstan, now it looks like he will go for the bloody and violent scenario in Belarus,” he said.
Putin has already faced protests this year, ruling that even one-person demonstrations were unacceptable.
The direction of Putin’s strategy has remained unchanged for decades: the Russian president has brought in former KGB officers like him in all key areas of public life management to provide security for what he calls the vertical of power.
More and more public debates in Russia are defined as spy intrigues. Reports, myths, legends about where Putin is, the business life of his associates, his personal life is described by the government as a spy story spy lyrics, and not as a matter of public information, which he should share .
Where, for example, is Putin moving away from the pandemic, which has already beaten his popularity?
Nobody knows. A media report this year claimed that Putin had built an exact replica of his office from the Kremlin to Sochi, so as to keep his location hidden even from the people he spoke to in the room. Officials hinted that the allegation was a misinformation negotiated by foreign intelligence 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 of Siberia considers that he knows the approximate location of Putin’s residence. They say it’s somewhere around the 600-kilometer mark on the Chuisky Highway, and he’s often there. The constant helicopters in the sky create a local belief that Putin spent much of his spring and summer quarantine in the Altai Mountains, although, of course, no one knows for sure.
Putin’s private life has also been hidden for decades, leading to much speculation over the years, but again, it 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 raised curiosity about the life of the teenager involved, but also raised issues of corruption.
How did Putin’s alleged lover – a former cleaner – gain a significant stake in Rossiya Bank, a bank run by some of Putin’s longtime associates?
The US Treasury sanctioned the owners and partners of Rossiya Bank in 2014, the day the Russian parliament passed a law admitting Crimea to the Russian Federation.
Corruption has been a feature of Russian elite circles since Soviet times. “No one is surprised that the top 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 find out the details.”
Navalny’s online exhibitions and on-site political campaigns effectively made him the leader of the Russian opposition.
And here the espionage games come into play again.
Navalny was poisoned with a dose of Novichok while in the east, in Siberia, where anti-Putin demonstrations grew. Navalny survived, but in early September, 77% of the Russian population knew about the assassination attempt.
Bellingcat published a detailed description of the attack, which included specific names of Russian secret service agents who were following the opposition leader when he was poisoned. There seemed to be frightening 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 in the report that Navalny was being tracked and that the cell phone recordings mentioned in the report actually belonged to the Federal Security Service, FSB officers. But espionage games deepened from there.
“The patient of a clinic in Berlin has the support of the American intelligence services,” Putin said, without naming Navalny, who is receiving treatment in Germany. “Therefore, the Russian special services should follow him.”
The Russian president claimed that Bellingcat, CNN, and Insider The mirror the magazine had helped US intelligence agents “legalize” misinformation from foreign spies.
Putin believes he and his intelligence have overtaken Navalny.
The president rejects all efforts to open up, including about 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 increase, especially since the FSB agents do not keep their end either. “Nothing is needed to find out the truth about Putin’s agents – mobile phone call data can be purchased without any problems,” Gudkov told The Daily Beast.
Putin relies on the spy games of his FSB agents to secure his future, but in a world of online reporting and rumors that undermines all authority, his hopes of maintaining his claim are waning day by day.