Surreal Politik

It’s been a busy summer in Russia, electorally speaking. The malaise and tea-leaf reading of the spring have started to dissipate as the December parliamentary elections and the March presidential elections draw near. Powerful constituencies have emerged, and they’ve been lobbying hard for their interests and their candidates. Best of all? They are really, really hot.

First came Putin’s Army. It was led by Diana, a self-proclaimed college student in vertiginous heels and cleavage to match, a girl who claimed to have "lost my mind for a person who has changed the life of our country. He’s a good politician and a fabulous man." That man, shockingly, was Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and decider of the question of the year: Will he change his status from "basically in charge" back to "officially in charge"? While Putin spends his time deciding whether he or current President Dmitry Medvedev will become president (for six years) in 2012, Putin’s Army has not shied from making its feelings very clear. Last month, Diana and the girls of Putin’s Army announced a contest to "Tear it up for Putin!" — "it" being, say, your shirt — a contest in which you can win an iPad, even if you can’t win Putin’s election for him. Putin’s Army even had an official draft day in the center of Moscow, where two dozen young ladies, wearing teensy undershirts printed with Putin’s face in pop-art pink, gathered to parade on a makeshift catwalk and draft other soldiers to their cause.

Medvedev’s supporters, however, were not to be left behind. They formed an army, too — an army of three — called it Medvedev’s Girls, and came out to another square in central Moscow with a different gimmick. In support of Medvedev’s anti-beer initiative, they asked the strollers-by: "Choose beer or us!" What this meant in practice was that people could dump their beers into waiting buckets, and, for each beer dumped, Medvedev’s Girls would dump an article of clothing.

Then there’s "I Really Do Like Putin," which staged a bikini car wash in Moscow to support the premier. If that didn’t convince undecided Russian voters, the group’s next event definitely didn’t. On Monday, it held a Tandem Ride with Medvedev’s Girls. They paired off on tandem bikes and cycled around Moscow. (This, mind you, was not in order to express support for the two-man tandem presidency of Putin and Medvedev, but because Putin promised Nashi, the Kremlin-made youth group, that he would lose a pound and learn how to ride a tandem bike with Medvedev.)

And then there’s my personal favorite, a music video by the group Girls for Putin. The video ends with a bang — the smashing of a watermelon with a baseball bat — but it’s more a pastiche of black panties, Jack Daniels, and tears of heartbreak, fitting for a raging rock ballad called "I Want to be Your Koni."

"I want to be your Koni / on the table and on the balcony," the girls sing. Koni, in case you’re wondering, is Putin’s beloved black Labrador.

It’s funny, this stuff, and yet it betrays something deeper even than the predominance of sex in Russian public life or in Russian youth politics. That part is obvious: Sex sells. More important is what this says about the current incarnation of the Russian political system.

When the Kremlin created Nashi, the first of its youth groups, in 2005, Russia — rightly or wrongly — felt under attack. The so-called Color Revolutions had swept through one former Soviet republic after another, bringing — in Russia’s perception — American influence right into its backyard. George W. Bush had started a war with Iraq, Russia’s long-time, lucrative ally, and lectured Moscow on democracy and human rights.

Russia itself, although no longer the hobbled post-Soviet country of just a few years before, was still in transition. The power vertical — the political system in which all power flows to and from Vladimir Putin — was still under construction, a relatively easy task given Russians’ bewilderment at the version of democracy they experienced in the 1990s. Any real opposition in parliament had been routed in the previous two election cycles, and yet there were still burblings of discontent.

Hence, Nashi. Formed to engage an otherwise apathetic youth luxuriating in new oil profits, the group protested and agitated, it spoke of "sovereign democracy" and Russia’s territorial integrity, it terrorized opposition journalists. Its members were brainwashed, yes, and they certainly weren’t going to do anything — the Kremlin guards the levers of power closely — but they were well-trained and they were keenly political. Even though the Kremlin was just gesturing at issues politics, in other words, at least they were gesturing.

Six years later, the country has far more on its plate than a sanctimonious U.S. president: monumental corruption, creeping stagnation, mounting ethnic tensions, a breakdown of safety oversight for civilian transportation systems, a stumbling reform of the rapidly decaying military, continued insurgency in the North Caucasus, continued dependence on resource extraction, an atrophied industrial sector, moribund and corrupt education and health systems. There is a lot of work to be done, and therefore, a lot to talk about.

And yet, somehow, with only four months to go until the Duma elections, and seven months until Russians elect a president, we are not hearing anything about it. All we get from the two supposed candidates for president is how and when they will make the decision to even run. Since they haven’t announced even that, speculating on the issue is the only issue this election season. Even at this year’s Nashi youth retreat — not perhaps a bastion of substance, but at least, in past years, a chance to bang on about solving the country’s problems — the emphasis was on things accomplished, not on future tasks. And youth politics more generally have devolved into a parody of a latter-day Britney Spears video. One would be a fool to even suggest a comparison between Russia and the United States, but shouldn’t even a simulacrum campaign season have at least simulacrum campaign issues?

We don’t even have those. Instead it’s a fake party here, a staged election stunt there, and all around the ceaseless chatter of anonymous sources "tipping off" journalists that Putin has finally made up his mind one way or the other.

Until Putin announces his historic decision and some level of reality on this very unreal question enters the campaign, we can either spend our time tearing our hair out guessing and twisting — or we can relax, forget about the mess that is the Russian economy and political system, and enjoy the fluff that has come to replace even the mirage of an election campaign. Because there is lots to be done. We can, for example, ogle the nubile young loyalists, we can watch in amazement as Putin, on his third scuba dive ever, magically pulls up a sixth-century Greek urn (and happens to have an archaeological expert right there to identify it), and we can marvel at the refreshing honesty, the release in acknowledging that, much to the relief of Russians rattled by their brief, post-Soviet taste of democracy, that finally, there are no more politics in Russia.