Conspiracy theories, repression and sycophancy define Putin’s Russia

Russia’s presidential election in March will not be an election, in the sense of a genuinely competitive contest, at all. Every Russian voter knows in advance that President Vladimir Putin will win. This ritual will nonetheless throw useful light on four aspects of the country’s political system — sycophancy, persecution, vulgarity and conspiracy theories.

Another six-year presidential term will mean that by 2030, if he is still alive and in office, Putin will have led Russia for 30 years, longer than dictator Joseph Stalin’s 1924-1953 rule. But the election’s purpose is not simply to demonstrate that Putin, who turned 71 in October, is in total control, or even to legitimise his war of attempted conquest in Ukraine. By making Russians participate in a vote whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, the apparatus of power aims to show that Putin’s autocracy rests on the acquiescence or, better, the active support of the people.

As in Soviet times, this support often takes the form of servile flattery of the leader. Heydar Aliyev, the late Azerbaijani strongman, earned a dubious immortality in 1981 by praising his patron Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, 13 times in 15 minutes at a Communist party congress. In like fashion, when Putin announced his re-election bid in December, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Russian parliament’s speaker, said fawningly: “Mr Putin possesses unique qualities such as humanity, integrity, kindness and, of course, productivity.”

Along with sycophancy comes repression. The best-known example is Alexei Navalny, the jailed anti-corruption campaigner who disappeared from public view for several weeks late last year before resurfacing in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle. But every week produces fresh cases. In December, Viktor Pivovarov, an 86-year-old dissenting Orthodox prelate, was charged with discrediting the armed forces. A month earlier, Alexandra Skochilenko, a St Petersburg artist, was jailed for seven years for…