Free The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult by Anna Arutunyan

by Anisimov.
    What this illustrates isn’t the relative popularity of Putin and Medvedev (and Putin has consistently led Medvedev in approval ratings throughout the latter’s presidential term), but the symbolic power of appealing to the supreme, federal government – and the resilience of this habit on a societal level.
    Though Medvedev had struggled to adopt a more legalistic approach, his use of online social networks like Livejournal and Twitter incited a bombardment of similar direct appeals – this time, not from rural residents, but from people who had their own blogs.
    Shortly after Medvedev launched a blog on Livejournal in April 2009, another blogger asked him to help rebuild a dilapidated children’s hospital in the Ryazan region. Two days after the April 23 post, an official-sounding statement proclaimed that Medvedev had told Ryazan Governor Oleg Kovalev to look into the matter. 32
    In an even more widely-publicized incident in January 2011, the father of Yarslav Kolosov, a one-year-old suffering from cystic fibrosis, posted an open letter to Medvedev on Livejournal on behalf of his wife, who complained that medical personnel at the Moscow hospital where her son was being treated were consistently rude and insensitive to her needs. 33 Medvedev reacted to the letter with a Twitter post – when asked by another well-known blogger if the government could do anything, Medvedev tweeted “It can.” He then had children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov check the hospital for violations. As a result, through an official (rather than informal) request to Health Minister Tatyana Golikova, the child was sent to Germany for treatment. 34
    Medvedev’s marathon press conference in May 2011 brought the point home – even Medvedev, a much softer public speaker than Putin and a leader positioned specifically to target the more self-sufficient, modern, and liberal part of Russia’s population, was not above issuing decrees on public request, for example promising a journalist that he would order the simplification of procedures for annual car inspections. The micromanaging role of the president was so clear in the press conference that it led one Western journalist to note that “little happens in this country unless the ruler in the Kremlin decrees it, just as it has always been.” 35 Medvedev the Modernizer was, reluctantly, responding to deep-seated, unspoken traditions regulating interaction between the Russian sovereign and his people. But Putin, by establishing a venue for him to continue this type of intimate interaction after stepping down as president in 2008, was taking this sovereign function with him to the prime minister’s seat.
    Asked how Putin’s reception offices differed from Medvedev’s, Anisimov pointed to Putin’s informal influence.
    “[Medvedev’s] reception offices function within the legal framework, they are limited by the law – article 59, which regulates how long agencies need to take to respond to requests. They have [chains of command], they have officials that work within this framework. But we can go beyond these boundaries using party mechanisms and finance, and, above all, our people. We reach officials from another direction. There is a personal side, other mechanisms are involved.”
    What Anisimov had essentially described was an extralegal process through which the sovereign could help his subjects solve their problems. Vladimir Putin wasn’t acting against the law. He was simply above it.
5.
    On December 4, 2008, during Vladimir Putin’s first live phone-in as prime minister (he had been holding them yearly as president), the voice of nine-year-old Dasha Varfolomeyeva, a third-grader from Buryatia, was broadcast nationwide.
    “Uncle Volodya! New Year is coming soon. We live on Babushka’s pension, there is no work in our village. My sister and I dream of getting new dresses. I want to ask you for a dress like Cinderella’s.”
    Putin, whose voice Dasha would later say she