on his head. The headline: “Rising Tsar.”
That represents a pretty typical Western
view of the Kremlin leader’s huge reelection
victory last month. Mr. Putin has labored
long and hard to portray himself as a nor-
mal, modern president who wins elections
and abides by constitutional rules. Few in
the West are inclined to see him that way.
But Russians, too, seem to increasingly
view their longtime leader as something
much more than a standard politician,
though the image some reach for is not that
of a czar. The word is vozhd, an ancient term
imbued with mythic connotations that sig-
nifies a chieftain who stands above history
and embodies the enduring will of a nation.
The term was embraced by Joseph Sta-
lin as the core of his adulatory “personality
cult” but was eschewed by his successors.
The term’s reemergence may be due to
the sense of ongoing crisis brought about by
the confrontation with the West, which be-
gan in earnest four years ago with Russia’s
annexation of Crimea. It has escalated ever
since. Even as Putin was being reelected
by his biggest margin ever, a war of words
was raging between Moscow and London
over the attempted murder of former double
agent Sergei Skripal with suspected Rus-
sian-made nerve gas.
“Before, he was simply our president,
and it was possible to change him,” tweet-
ed Margarita Simonyan, head of the En-
glish-language RT television network, fol-
lowing the election. “Now he is our vozhd.
And we will not let that be changed.”
A similar thought was voiced earlier by
the Kremlin’s then-deputy chief of staff,
Vyacheslav Volodin, as the current East-
West crisis was heating up. “Today there
is no Russia if there is no Putin,” he told an
assembly of Western scholars and journal-
ists in late 2014. “Any attack on Putin is an
attack on Russia.” There is even a current
popular song by the rock group Rabfak
titled “Putin is Our Vozhd.”
As Putin looks to place Russia on a stable
long-term basis when his fourth and likely
final term ends – perhaps by changing the
Constitution to reinvent his political role- the fact that some of his strongest sup-
porters are adopting the vozhd label must
be a distraction or perhaps a temptation.
Vozhd has benign usages, signifying a
preeminent leader in a field, such as a vozhd
of science or literature. But in the modern
political sense it is inextricably linked with
the mass “personality cult” of Stalin in the
20th century, and its echoes bring back tor-
tured and still very controversial memories
of those times. The Stalinist notion of vozhd
implied an infallible leader, one who navi-
gates the shoals of history on behalf of his
people and who is to be trusted and obeyed.
Though Russians understandably bris-
tle at the comparison, the word is similar
in its meaning, usage, and historical bag-
gage to the German “Führer,” and its return
to political discourse sets off alarm bells.
Ominously, recent opinion polls show that,
for the first time in many decades, Stalin is
viewed positively by a majority of Russians.
“Putin has two dimensions for Russians,”
says Andrei Kolesnikov, an analyst with the
Carnegie Moscow Center. “In one, he is liv-
ing flesh. He is a politician who manages
the executive branch....
“But the second dimension is as a nation-
al symbol. He is the portrait on the wall that
can never be removed. He is an instrument
of self-identification for all Russians. Since
this is essentially an authoritarian regime,
the tendency will always be to view the first
person as vozhd,” he says.- Fred Weir / Correspondent
Why White House
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As past presidents have found,
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COMPARISON, ‘VOZHD’ IS SIMILAR IN
MEANING TO THE GERMAN ‘FÜHRER’V NEXT PAGEYURI KADOBNOV/REUTERSSIX MORE YEARS: Russian President Vladimir
Putin speaks to supporters in Moscow just prior to
his reelection by a landslide last month.