Notes on Putin’s Vanishing Act
And the world breathed a sigh of relief — Vladimir Putin reappeared yesterday after 11 days away from the public eye. His absence inspired a flourishing of wide-eyed theories from Westerners: perhaps a coup d’état? Visiting a Swiss lovechild? Or maybe just a bad flu? As the always-cool Putin remarked: “It would be boring without gossip.”
The Kremlin’s news outlet RT called the bloom of conspiracy theories a symptom of Western media’s hysteria, and scarily, they are probably right. Journalists on both sides of the Atlantic worked themselves into a froth searching for evidence of Putin’s whereabouts, largely because little evidence existed. Many journalists delighted in finding inconsistencies in the official reports on why Putin cancelled meetings with the Kazakh president or the FSB’s top officials, yet none could reach a conclusion on what these cancellations actually meant. A 24/7 news cycle has a high metabolism, and starved of new material, journalists despaired for an explanation of the missing Tsar.
In a March 12th blog post, the private intelligence firm Stratfor explained the ballooning conspiracy theories as the renaissance of a lost art. Rather than seeing hysteria, the Stratfor team forged ahead to compare this kind of analysis with old school Kremlinology, the dubious Cold War science of trying to predict what the Bolsheviks were up to. At the best of times, Kremlinology produced masterworks such as Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” the foundation of U.S. foreign policy with the Soviets for the entire Cold War. At its worst however, Kremlinology was a step removed from astrology or tealeaf readings, obsessing over details like the placement of Soviet leaders in newspaper photos to guess who was really in power.
And it is the tealeaf Kremlinology that Stratfor, and most other Westerners, seem to be advocating. The danger of over-analysis is very real, yielding head-spinning conclusions like: ‘The insistence that Putin was not ill might be intended, along with other evidence, as a signal that he is quite ill.” At that point of absurdity, why not ask if he was just messing with us? With equal evidence for both theories, invoking Kremlinogy only hides a basic fact: we have no idea what Putin is up to.
Embracing this uncertainty is the only way forward for Kremlinology, if the old arts of the Cold War are indeed being revived. The true difficulty is not discerning when officials lie but why they are lying, something that deserves our attention much more than fever dreams like a Putin lovechild. But maybe Putin is right. Without these rumors, wouldn’t it all be boring?
Originally published on The New Russians, newrussians.wordpress.com, on March 18th, 2015
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