Until recently, Vladimir Putin insisted, at least publicly, that he didn’t want a cult of his personality. Not anymore. During the last three years of the war he started in Ukraine, he has embraced it.
At his annual press conference last month, Putin nodded with a serious face and boasted about improving his skills – he enjoyed talking about himself more than ever. His lips pressed in a sour grimace, he described himself: “I joke less now, and I have almost stopped laughing.”
The serious Putin talked about the war even on Orthodox Christmas, which comes in January, at the country’s main church, the Christ the Savior Cathedral. The Kremlin informed Russians that Putin had asked the country’s top priest “to engrave his own initials” on chains for the crosses worn by soldiers.
Putin attends the Christmas Service at the Saint George Church in Moscow. / Getty Images
Patriarch Kirill and Putin were filmed together: “Here are crosses, as well as other pectoral icons, with the image of the holy equal-to-the-apostles Grand Duke Vladimir, the founder of our Rus, our state, the one who defended our Fatherland with a sword in his hands, and who is now also such a symbol of the gathering of the Russian land. But, in addition, he is also your heavenly patron” the priest said, addressing Putin. “So, I think that this will be doubly intelligible and pleasant for all the soldiers who receive these images,” continued Kirill, before consecrating the necklaces.
Russian Kremlinologists were shocked. The president’s initials on crosses for soldiers was definitely a sign of a completely new development. “We could not even imagine anything like that happening before,” Putin’s former speech writer, Abbas Galliamov, told The Daily Beast in an interview on Saturday. “Putin was much more level-headed before, he did not pretend to have a holy status.” Galiamov worked at the Kremlin administration and in the Russian government from 2008 to 2020. It’s true that Putin has changed: Thirteen years ago, he refused to use his face on billboards for his 2012 presidential campaign.
Russian nationalists and ideologists have been pushing and calling for the cult of Putin’s personality for years. The Kremlin’s administrator, Vyacheslav Volodin, declared essentially this line of state policy in October 2014: “If there is Putin, there is Russia; there is no Russia today, if there is no Putin.”
Putin asked the country’s top priest to engrave his own initials on chains for the crosses worn by soldiers. / Getty Images
The Russia Orthodox Union of Cossacks Union installed a monument of Putin, “Russian tsar” in St. Petersburg soon after the annexation of Crimea. The bronze Putin, appearing as a Roman Emperor, has a naked torso and a toga draped over his shoulders. Putin professed modesty, dismissing all the efforts of Russians to proclaim him a new Tsar. “This is not true, someone else could be called a tsar. I work every day, I do not reign,” Putin said in 2020. But that same year, the Russian Orthodox Church formally permitted placing an image of Putin’s face on a wall of the newly-built Cathedral of the Armed Forces. “The more the propaganda and church pushed for his divine qualities, the more he believed he had them – so he must have told himself: Even Jesus Christ did not leave autographs, but I will,” Russian propaganda analyst Ilya Shepelin told The Daily Beast. “We watch closely how the Presidential Administration organize and stage Putin’s visits to the regions, where his fans tell him that everyone loves him. He does not see anything else.”
The Russian political regime is changing to accept a larger, crucial role for the Orthodox Church. Priests and bureaucrats rush forward with new initiatives. Orthodox priests are assigned to work at schools and universities. Earlier this week, Metropolitan Yevgeny of the Russian Orthodox Church suggested assigning priests to work with journalists at all media outlets in the Ural Mountains region. “Why not assign an interesting, smart, deep, kind priest, who would help build this bridge between the life of the church and the lives of those people who consider themselves children of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as one or another media.”
A long time Kremlin observer, Olga Bychkova, says the new turn to hints at divine qualities in Putin is dictated by his desire to stay popular. “He needs to find new points to support himself, to give more new promises not only to the country but also to convince himself,” Bychkova told The Daily Beast in an interview on Saturday. “Both Putin and Trump are very much alike. They turn their obscure ideas into popular points. But more and more people will find Putin’s efforts ridiculous. It will become obvious that this is just an old man’s idiocy.”