14 ★ F I N A N C I A L T I M E S Monday 23 March 2020
arts
Above: Vladimir Putin at a
rally in Moscow in 2012
when he claimed victory in
the presidential election.
Above right: Putin
dances with a classmate in
St Petersburg, 1970
AP Photo/Ivan SekretarevSpring is that spies never have to grow
up. There is this side to him that is per-
manently adolescent.”
Green makes a comment for the
record: “That was Paul Mitchell speak-
ing.” Ahead of broadcast, gallows
humour pervades at the thought of
enraging the Kremlin. Still, Rogan
points out, exiled opposition figures
such as on-screen contributor Vladimir
Kara-Murza remain prepared to speak
out. Mitchell and his colleagues also put
considerable effort into persuading
those who would be seen as insiders to
take part. In the first episode of the
series, Gleb Pavlovsky — adviser to Boris
Yeltsin and, for several years, Putin too
— helps narrate Putin’s 1990s ascent
from redundant Soviet cog to fixer for St
Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak,
and then to director of the FSB, Yeltsin’s
successor to the KGB.
The rising star’s profile was very dif-
ferent from that of conventional career
politicians. That was the point. Pav-
lovsky describes a Russian focus group
he asked to model their ideal president
in the later days of Yeltsin. The most
popular answer was Stierlitz, the double
agent from Seventeen Moments of Spring.
As the decade after the collapse of Soviet
communism wore on, Mitchell says
many Russian power-brokers were
disappointed with the fruits of democ-
racy. “And the only reasonably
democratic election Putin had foughtT
he facial expressions of
Vladimir Putin are typically
so limited — the stern
frown, the knowing smirk
— it is odd to look back to
March 2012 and find the Russian presi-
dent weeping in public. The scene was
his victory speech on reclaiming the
presidency, having stepped aside four
years earlier in line with the constitu-
tional limit on two terms in office. His
candidature had inspired Moscow street
protests. Onstage in Red Square, Putin’s
emotions appeared to spill over. Tears
ran down his face. Then anger filled his
voice: “We showed that no one can
impose anything on us! No one!”
The moment is revisited during the
three-part Channel 4 documentary
Putin: A Russian Spy Story, produced by
Paul Mitchell, whose CV includes the
BBC’s revered The Death of Yugoslavia,
the well-regarded Inside Obama’s White
House and several films on Russian poli-
tics made after living in Moscow during
the 1990s. For all his experience, Mitch-
ell finds himself unsettled by the foot-
age. “It’s scary,” he says, in the dining
room of London’s Union Club. “I see it as
one of the most frightening moments of
his presidency.”
That so many landmarks of Putin’s
reign have played out on television is a
boon for documentary-makers. But if
the series aims to explain how he
became probably the century’s most
influential politician, part of the answer
is sought before the cameras rolled,
when he was just a keen new KGB
recruit. Working alongside Mitchell
have been executive producer James
Rogan and director Nick Green, both
also here at the Union. The interview
Putin gave the FT last summer was,
Rogan says, key to their approach: “His
challenge to the west was so direct [“The
liberal idea has become obsolete”], itThe spy who came in from the quiet
in which the Russian made a point of
showing the deeply religious US presi-
dent the crucifix owned by his mother
that, he said, he later saved from a burn-
ing dacha. Bush famously spoke of hav-
ing seen his peer’s “soul” before the rela-
tionship soured.
More recently, his model of leader-
ship — a stage-managed media pres-
ence, a bedrock of nationalism — has
proved a popular export among western
politicians. Another moment of archive
used in the series finds Donald Trump
praising the Russian leader to TV host
Larry King as early as 2007. “You can see
the lightbulb going off,” Rogan says.
Of course, the popular image of Putin
now is less Stierlitz than Bond villain,
with thick files of kompromat and an
army of bots stealing other country’s
elections. That, the programme-makers
say, risks explaining away the neglect of
our own democracies — and creating
an inflated sense of Russian strategic
genius. “Again,” Rogan says, “what
Putin is very good at is everyday spy-
craft, dealing with what’s in front of
you. The phrase is, ‘You eat the elephant
one bite at a time.’ I’m not sure he’s a
chess grandmaster.”
But what the Putin of the series does
have is an endless capacity for reprisals
towards those he believes have betrayed
him. In the first episode, the new head of
the FSB is visited by a junior officer,
complaining of corruption in the organi-
sation. Putin is said to have listened,
then ordered Alexander Litvinenko to
leave. Litvinenko’s widow Marina takes
part in the series too, 14 years after her
husband’s fatal poisoning at Mayfair’s
Millennium Hotel, a short walk from
where we now sit. “That more than any-
thing is what Putin has taught the 21st
century,” Rogan says. “The sense that
our politicians will spend their time
prosecuting personal grudges.”
“He takes the easiest path,” Nick
Green says. “Someone stronger would
have worked to build an outward-look-
ing Russia with a robust economy, not
recreate this inward-looking security
state. It’s not leadership — it’s survival.”
Among Russia-watchers, talk of how
and when the Putin era may end has
been sport for years. Paul Mitchell
shakes his head. “I’m hesitant to make
forecasts. Every time you do, the next
day they become irrelevant.”
Soon after we met, the president
endorsed proposals that would leave
him free to seek two more six-year
terms, and remain in power until 2036.
Arriving at the Duma to address law-
makers, Putin smiled broadly.‘Putin: A Russian Spy Story’ starts today
9pm on Channel 4A new TV documentary
series about Vladimir Putin
reveals a man who at firstseemed ill-equipped for power.
Danny Leigh meets its makersIf you’re going stir-crazy and longing to
be outside during self-isolation, do not
despair, as the new podcast Field
Recordings brings the outdoors indoors.
Dreamt up by Eleanor McDowall, the
British producer behind such gems as
the BBC Radio’s Short Cuts and the
international documentary strand
Radio Atlas, the series asks audio
creators and sounds artists to go out into
the world and record what they hear.
There are no introductions and there is
no narration — in fact, there are no
words at all. It’s just gentle, everyday
outdoor noise.
That McDowall has assembled her
ode to the outside world just as we have
retreated indoors is a coincidence, but
it’s exactly what we need right now. I
have been listening in the dead of night,
awake and twitching with anxiety, and
have found the series soothing,
medicinal even. In these testing times,
the sound of life happening outside
really is a balm for the soul.
The opening episode, recorded by
Camilla Hannan, comes from Golden
Gully in Australia and was recorded at
dusk. About nine minutes in, against the
gentle hiss of cicadas, a pair of
kookaburras suddenly erupt out ofnowhere, cackling at each other like
elderly smokers after a night on the
tiles. In Puerto Rico, Ariana Martinez
has recorded on the shore of El
Combate, a beach on the Boquerón area
of Cabo Rojo. It was empty at the time of
recording, so all we hear is the sound of
lapping water as vividly as if we were
right there dipping our toes in the sea.
These slices of ambient sound aren’t
entirely devoid of human life — fittingly,
given the podcast’s title, the third
instalment is recorded in the middle of a
field, in this case St John’s Park in
Brooklyn where buses swish past,
teenagers chatter and helicopters
sometimes buzz overhead.
Elsewhere there are atmospheric
sound dispatches from rainy South
Africa; from a woody — and windy —
cross-country ski trail in Quebec; and a
tropical rainforest in Sri Lanka recorded
just as the insects and birds are wakingup, their calls taking on the rhythms of
electronic music.
Particularly poignant is the episode
recorded recently in Rome by Daria
Corrias, with the city in lockdown.
There are church bells, barking dogs,
occasional car horns and the sound
of people singing raucously and
somewhat tunelessly on their balconies.
There can be joy, it tells us, even in the
midst of a pandemic.
Jon Mooallem, the American writer
behind The Walking Podcast, during
which he goes for long and mostly silent
walks around the Pacific Northwest, is
either a genius or a joker. Having spent
several hours in his company listening
to little more than the sound of his boots
crunching on leaves — “No talking; just
walking” goes the tagline — I still
haven’t decided which. Right now,
however, his recordings make a strange
kind of sense.‘Field
Recordings’
features the
sounds of
locations
around the
world — AlamyGentle sounds that are balm for the soul
podcasts
Fiona
Sturges
was shocking. It made us consider
the whole story through the lens of
‘Wait, how did we get here? How did he
get here?’”
Even before Putin’s time as a secret
policeman in 1980s Dresden, Mitchell,
Rogan and Green pick out a particular
milestone: the vastly popular Soviet TV
spy series Seventeen Moments of
Spring, with its laconic hero Stierlitz
undercover in Nazi Germany. Putin was
21 when the series aired in 1973. Two
years later, he joined the KGB. The show
made impression enough that decades
later, Putin was willingly filmed for a
Russian documentary with the theme
tune as his accompaniment. It was, the
series suggests, a heady lesson in the
power of television and the mystique
of the spy.
Mitchell smiles. “Maybe the other les-
son he takes from Seventeen Moments ofMarina
Litvinenko
outside a
hearing at the
High Court in
London in 2015
into the death
of her husband
Alexander
Carl Court/Getty Imageswas in 1996 when Sobchak stood for re-
election in St Petersburg, and they lost.”
“He always had particular skills,”
Rogan says, “which come from the KGB.
It isn’t the skillset you would pick out to
help nurture democracy.”
The election campaign that would
first see him claim the presidency was
notable for a lack of debate between the
candidate and his rivals. Instead, what
emerges in the series’ first episoderesembles a bizarre echo of 1960s pop
group The Monkees — a quartet of
actors cast to play a band in a TV series,
who learned their instruments for real
after the fact. Arriving on the world
stage, Putin initially cut an awkward fig-
ure in comparison with Tony Blair or
Bill Clinton, politicians who traded on
their ability to work a room. Putin, the
programme notes, could sometimes be
in a room for several minutes before
anyone realised he was there.
But the story of the series is that of a
quick learner. In London, Green retells
the tale of Putin’s first meeting with the
newly elected George Bush in June 2001,He always had particular
skills. It isn’t the skillset
you would pick out to
help nurture democracy
MARCH 23 2020 Section:Features Time: 22/3/2020 - 16:39 User: neil.way Page Name: ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition: EUR, 14, 1