Putin

Mikhailov’s arrest may also have been a message to the United States—the DNC break-in was a high-level rogue operation, not one approved and directed from the very top. The Kremlin wants the United States to buy this version of events so that diplomatic relations can improve. The United States may pretend to be mollified by this version, but hackers might not.

A member of Humpty Dumpty said the following in a 2015 interview:

INT: So, the only thing you won’t publish is personal data?

HD: And we’ll never publish state secrets.

INT: What if you had data like Snowden’s? Would you leak that?

HD: Most likely not. Not everything needs to be released.

INT: What if the data revealed crimes by the state?

HD: Then we’d release it.

The question that was not asked during that interview was—what sorts of information might you threaten to release if members of your group were arrested?

All such caveats and dangers aside, sometime between Guccifer and Guccifer 2.0 Putin switched from viewing the Internet solely as a threat to understanding it as a weapon that can be adapted and deployed for specifically Russian aims. It could damage political enemies, smear those who would testify against you, even destabilize an opponent’s political system. It was almost untraceable, utterly deniable, and wonderfully cheap. Who wouldn’t love such a thing?

PART SEVEN THE END AND AFTER

Russia is the only country in the world whose government (its nucleus) is located in a medieval fortress.

—EDUARD LIMONOV

11 RUSSIA WITHOUT PUTIN, PUTIN WITHOUT RUSSIA

Putin will die in the Kremlin, but when and how nobody knows.

—GARRY KASPAROV, CHESS CHAMPION

An eerie void formed when President Putin went missing for eleven days in March 2015, a void of both power and information. Not only was the leader nowhere to be seen, but his staff used cheesy, easily challengeable tricks like airing old video footage to make it appear that Putin was still diligently at work. In fact he had cancelled two quite important meetings—one with the president of Kazakhstan, the other with officials from the FSB, his power base and “alma mater.”

When it became clear that the government would not be forthcoming with information, rumors streamed into the void, little prompting ever needed for that. In operatic Russian style they ran the gamut from amour to murder—Putin was attending the birth of his love child with champion gymnast Alina Kabayeva, for whom he had left his wife of many years, or else he had been discreetly poisoned in the Kremlin.

It had to be something out of the ordinary. If it was the flu, his press secretary could just announce that fact and not becloud a situation already murky with the war in Ukraine, plunging oil prices, sanctions, and the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov one week before Putin’s seclusion. But Russian leaders don’t like their health discussed in public. It can only reduce their larger-than-life image. One Russian woman told me that Stalin’s spell had broken for her when during his final illness in 1953 she began reading reports about his urine in Pravda. “Gods don’t pass urine,” she said with a crooked grin.

Contrary to some Western opinion, Putin cultivates his macho image not because he never outgrew an adolescent fascination with pecs, pistols, and espionage, but because in a Darwinian society strength is everything. In the entourage of every godfather, there’s always one man who thinks he can do a better job. Stalin, in his later years, was very aware of those in his retinue checking the spring in his step, his quickness of mind.

It is also possible that the reason behind Putin’s disappearance was not so primitive, but very much up-to-date. His media and image consultants may have advised him to change the Russian narrative from “Opposition leader murdered in front of Kremlin” to “Putin has disappeared.” In any case, his vanishing did precisely that. Domination through absence, domination through presence, but domination at all costs.