Putin, Gone Fishing

(Moscow News – Anna Arutunyan, Editor and Correspondent at themoscownews.com – July 29, 2013) It’s late July, and that can only mean one thing: Potemkin Tales takes on its favorite subject – primordial myth. When it’s warm outside, the Russian president never fails to give fodder for armchair anthropology.

The idea that is central both to politics and the Potemkin villages of yore is that there’s always a mythical package concealing a less appetizing reality. As your resident armchair anthropologist, I’m here to explode that. The medium is the message, and the myth doesn’t conceal reality; it’s part of it.

This summer, Vladimir Putin caught a fish. Recall that in 2007, he was photographed fishing shirtless (the catch back then didn’t get nearly as much publicity as this month’s 21-kilo northern pike); then again in 2009, shirtless on horseback in what is apparently his favorite vacation spot in the Siberian republic of Tuva. In 2011, he went diving in the Black Sea to emerge with some suspiciously clean-looking Greek amphorae that the blogosphere immediately pounced on for being planted (they were). In 2012, Putin, clad in white and strapped to a hang-glider, symbolically played leader to a flock of endangered cranes.

Observers often read these stunts for signs of what the Kremlin wants us to think – like reinforcing Putin’s masculine image, or trying to draw conclusions from the public’s usually negative reaction. I’ve written before that the flying stunt wasn’t intended to present a positive image, but to send a very simple message: that Putin did whatever he did because he could.

Now, footage and photographs from a mountain lake in Tuva revealed the president wrestling with a pike on a boat with an aide warning that the fish could bite. “I’ll bite it myself,” Putin replied, because he’s Putin. With the said fish subdued and neutralized by an aide, the president held it up and kissed it on the head before dropping it into a plastic container. According to the presidential spokesman, the fish weighed in at 21 kilos and was later turned into a meal of fish balls.

There are two myths this episode appears to be channeling. The first is the sacred tribal leader who, according to social anthropologist George Frazer, is tasked by his people with finding life-giving water/food, i.e. catching the biggest fish. As comedian Eddie Izzard would put it, if Steve caught a really big fish, that’s basically an excuse for everyone else to accept Steve’s lordship. Once he loses the ability to catch really big fish, then it’s time to kill Steve in order to please the gods, who are actually all predecessors of Steve who went down in history as catching really big fish.

The second myth is a Russian fairytale about Emelya and the pike. Emelya, a good-for-nothing younger son, is sent to get some water by his sisters while his brothers are out being productive. After cutting a hole in the ice, Emelya lucks out and catches a pike. He’s about to take it home and make dinner out of it, but the fish pleads, “Let me go, and I’ll do anything you wish.” Emelya lets the fish go, and, armed with the words “By will of the pike, do as I like!” eventually manages to get himself a kingdom. It’s an inspiring story.

Amid the buzz over the weekend, some were confused about why Putin didn’t release the pike, but kissed it and had it killed instead.

Why indeed? If the president is tapping into the mythology of tribal rulers catching big fish, then the response breaks with tradition. I haven’t come across anyone saying, “Wow, Putin caught a big fish! That must make him powerful!” Instead, grown men were posting pictures of big fish they had caught and alleging that Putin’s pike couldn’t have possibly weighed 21 kilos. Conspiracy theorists meanwhile suggested the photos were from 2007.

But the president is also deliberately breaking with the Russian fairytale. That means that Putin is defying mythic narrative to create his own myth. Or, you know, he’s just a guy who went fishing.

It doesn’t matter what we read into Putin’s vacation. It’s our interest in it that’s effectively turned a mundane act into myth.