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 plans to stay in power.
The love for the secret of the old KGB has long driven rumors and conspiracy theories that would run quietly through Moscow. But 2020 was the year when rumors went out of control. Encouraged by the omnipotence of the online rumor factory, the Russian media now dare to engage them with the publication.
This year, the tabloids chatted with stories that the Russian president was ill and was about to leave the Kremlin. After Putin, 68, coughed at a meeting with the government on November 19, gossip went over.
Some claimed the president was suffering from cancer, others diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease. A video of Putin absently playing with a folder in October fueled rumors that he was suffering from some sort of degenerative condition.
As pro-Putin ideologues often stress that “Russia is Putin,” media reports analyzed Putin’s health as a vital issue for Russia’s future.
All this without any evidence. The closest thing to an official Kremlin health report is some occasional shirtless photo shoot.
Professor Valery Solovey, who has become one of Moscow’s most famous sensationalists, this year aired speculation on YouTube claiming that Putin planned to quit smoking at any time as a result of some “force majeure”.
Putin’s long-term health speculation appears to be at odds with his decision to promote legislation that would allow him to stay in power until 2036. Work to do so formally began last January and he decided to stamp out. with a national referendum over the summer that was not legally necessary, but offered Putin the chance to prove he was still the leader when, as expected, he won the referendum comfortably.
The power movement failed to stifle speculation among the Moscow elite, where the names of possible successors were boiling non-stop.
On Echo of Moscow radio, known as the Moscow Ear, editor-in-chief Aleksey Venediktov reports that the two main candidates are former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of the Security Council, and Sergei Naryshkin, the director of ‘Exteriors. Intelligence.
Others claim there will be another Putin after Putin. The president’s nephew, Roman Putin, seems to have great political ambitions: the businessman with the well-known name founded a new political party called “Russia without Corruption” this month.
Speculation about Putin’s intentions was further inflamed in November when the duma – Russia’s Kremlin-friendly parliament – passed the first reading of a bill that would grant Russian presidents and their families immunity from be prosecuted after leaving office.
Vladimir Solovyov, a well-connected man Kommersant newspaper commentator says Putin has left Russia with a terribly confusing picture. “This year, he changed the constitution to get more terms, but now he lets in 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 cede 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 retired after nearly 20 years as president, but retains 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 to step down, has changed Solovyov’s analysis.
“If before we thought he would choose a peaceful way to transfer power, like in Kazakhstan, now it seems that he will bet on the bloody and violent Belarusian scenario,” he said.
Putin has already curbed protests this year and decided that even one person’s demonstrations were unacceptable.
The focus of Putin’s strategy has remained unchanged for decades: the Russian president has brought former KGB officials like him to all key areas of public life management to provide security for what he calls the vertical of the power.
Increasingly public debate in Russia is defined as spy intrigue. Reports, myths, legends about Putin’s whereabouts, the business life of his associates, and his personal life are described by the government as a spy story and not as a matter of public information, which they should share.
Where, for example, is Putin emerging from the pandemic, which has already marked his popularity?
Nobody knows. A report released this year claimed that Putin built an exact replica of his Kremlin office in Sochi to keep his location hidden even from people speaking on camera. Officials hinted that the claim was misinformation sent 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, believes he knows the approximate location of Putin’s residence. It is said to be about 600 miles from Chuisky Road, and is often there. The constant helicopters in the sky create the local belief that Putin spent much of his spring and summer forties in the Altai Mountains, although of course no one knows for sure.
Putin’s private life has also been hidden for decades, which has sparked much speculation over the years, but has accelerated again 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 issues of corruption.
How had Putin’s alleged lover – a former cleaner – acquired a significant stake in Bank Rossiya, a bank run by some of Putin’s former associates?
The U.S. 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 elite Russian circles since the Soviet era. “No one is surprised that the best men in power are corrupt,” Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, told The Daily Beast. “But there are more and more millions of people who see Alexey Navalny’s independent investigations just to know the details.”
Navalny’s online exhibitions and his political campaigns on the ground have effectively made him the leader of Russia’s opposition.
And here the spy games are playing again.
Navalny was poisoned with a dose of Novichok while in the east, in Siberia, where anti-Putin demonstrations have been growing. Navalny survived, but in early September, 77 percent of the Russian population knew about the assassination attempt.
Bellingcat published a detailed account of the attack, which included specific names of Russian secret service agents who were pursuing the opposition leader at the time he was poisoned. It seemed a convicting test of the culprits of the security services.
When Putin confronted this report at the annual press conference, he did not deny the main points of the report that Navalny had been tracked and that the cell phone records mentioned in the report belonged to the Federal Security Service, officials of the FSB. But espionage games deepened from there.
“This patient from a clinic in Berlin has the support of the US intelligence services,” said Putin, without naming Navalny, who is receiving treatment in Germany. “Therefore, the Russian special services should track him down.”
The Russian president claimed that Bellingcat, CNN, Insider and The mirror the magazine had helped U.S. intelligence agents “legalize” the misinformation of foreign spies.
Putin believes he and his secret services have outnumbered Navalny.
The president rejects all openness efforts, including his own family life, as “tricks” in the information war.
A former parliamentarian, Dmitry Gudkov, is convinced that public frustration with Putin will only increase, mostly because even FSB agents are not keeping their end. “Nothing is needed to find out the truth about Putin’s agents: data from mobile phone calls can be bought 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 reports and swirling rumors that undermine all his authority, his hopes of maintaining the claim diminish every day.