MOSCOW: Tsar, love object, marketing gimmick — there seems to be no limit to President Vladimir Putin’s popularity among Russians less than a year before he is due to leave the Kremlin.
Western critics accuse Putin of everything from crushing the free media to bullying neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine. Some blame him for frosty Russian-US relations they see leading to a new Cold War.
But at home, Putin, 54, can do no wrong.
A poll released on Thursday by the respected Yury Levada centre found that 79 per cent of Russians are happy with Putin’s performance.
They are so happy, according to another poll this week, that two-thirds want Putin to remain in office for a third term, instead of quitting after the March 2008 presidential election, as the constitution requires.
The former KGB officer has repeatedly promised to step down at the end of his second term, but the adulation feeds rumours that he will find a way to retain power.
“Springtime love for Putin flares,” read a front page headline in the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia on Wednesday.
According to Izvestia, a local publishing house is preparing a golden DVD for Putin containing professions of love from his fellow citizens.
Minor officials and provincial governments show their devotion with regular appeals for Putin to revise the constitution and remain in office.
On Tuesday, 50 young members of the Putin Fan Club went to Red Square to repeat that call. They wore T-shirts reading “I want to see (Putin)” and demonstratively gazed through binoculars at the Kremlin.
Others are using Putin mania to boost their bank accounts.
Following the marketing success of a vodka named Putinka, a preserved foods company in the southern province of Astrakhan has found a way to capitalise on the president’s popularity while skirting a law that forbids using people’s names for marketing purposes without permission.
The Astrakhan company named its products PUIN, Vedomosti business daily reported on Thursday. It prints the name with a sword through it that takes the place of the T. Incidentally, the sword closely resembles the historic symbol for the KGB.
Sales have been quick since the brand launch in December, allowing the Russian Canning Company to break into national supermarket chains, company director Sergei Sokolov was quoted as saying.
The tabloid newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno got into the game earlier this month, running a billboard advertisement in Moscow showing a man reading the newspaper.
Only the nearly-bald crown of his head is visible, but the similarity to Putin is unmistakable.
Analysts say that with state control over nearly all broadcast media and much of the written press, Putin’s spin doctors have an easy task.
A marketing expert, who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivities, compared Putin mania to personality cults in repressive countries.
“You had that in Soviet times, this adulation of leaders, and it’s continuing,” he told reporters. “This has happened in lots of places, like China and North Korea.” At the same time, there is no doubting Putin’s success in bringing order and better living standards to a country traumatised by the 1991 Soviet collapse and the turbulent years that followed.
“These are reasons that would make any leader popular,” said Masha Lipman at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Putin “is a ruler of Russia who made a greater proportion of Russians with high living standards than ever before.”
For many in Russia, which has an almost unbroken history of undemocratic rule, the idea that Putin should step down in 2008 is “stupid,” Lipman said.—AFP
