What coup? Why Vladimir Putin is talking about tourism and taking selfies
Tom Rogan
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Russian President Vladimir Putin is very keen that everyone see everything happening in Russia as absolutely normal. As boring, even.
In numerous events on Wednesday and Thursday, Putin attempted to assure that last week’s coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin is a distant and fleeting memory. Putin wants the Russian people and anyone else watching, which is a lot of people, to know that his authority and confidence remain undiminished. Broadcasting that message, Putin left Moscow for a trip to the Russian Republic of Dagestan. Bordering Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Caspian Sea, Dagestan is a heavily Muslim area that Putin apparently wants to turn into a tourism hot spot.
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In turn, Putin met with leaders of a local mosque and various tourism officials. Putin then relied on his trusty VGTRK state media sidekick Pavel Zarubin to show him in a variety of exciting excursions. These included Putin making a girl’s “dream” come true by taking a selfie with her. Zarubin, who has an odd tendency to pretend he’s hiding from Putin until Putin arrives somewhere, also posted a video of the president’s motorcade arriving at the impressive 6th-century Naryn-Kala fort. Moving from the past to the future, on Thursday, Putin saw what it’s like to play computer games and drew a strange face on a whiteboard.
There’s a serious undertone to this otherwise frivolous series of public events.
The selfie, for example, came as Putin met crowds for the first time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Putin is notoriously health-conscious but evidently now believes he must show a more public-facing persona. It’s an indication of the Russian leader’s concern that the public might lose their high approval ratings for, and associated confidence in, him (although new polls suggest that the coup attempt has had very limited impact so far).
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The challenge for Putin is that his Russian Rubicon has been crossed and crossed without obvious riposte. Prigozhin may or may not (I strongly suspect not) have left the political scene for good. But others will see how close the Wagner Group chief came to reaching Moscow and forcing a bloody showdown. Russian leaders, especially KGB men like Putin, fear that revolutions are always lurking. Putin’s narrative before last week was that a coup attempt was implausible or, at the very least, would be suicidal. That has now changed. The KGB colonel’s veneer of indestructibility has been breached. He knows that history bears ill will to Russian leaders who lack assured strength.
What Putin must now fear, then, is that which Caesar, to his mortal folly, only in a short-term sense, feared. Namely, that the die is cast (or, at least, that it might be).