In Vladimir Putin’s chaotic, haphazardly ruled “jazz state”, Gleb Pavlovsky — a spin doctor who helped build the Russian president’s all-conquering macho image — was the ensemble’s rhythm section, accompanying the maestro as he improvised a new nation.
“It was one big keyboard, and I had a feeling that I was playing,” Pavlovsky, who has died aged 71, reflected in 2017. Gradually, however, he realised his creation had taken on a life of its own, as Putin sank deeper into paranoia.
As one of the architects of the new Russia, Pavlovsky became an indispensable guide to it in the decade after the Kremlin fired him in 2011 — he objected to Putin’s plan to return as president over liberal stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. Watching from the sidelines as Putin dismantled Russia’s civil society and became convinced a hostile west was bent on destroying him — a process that culminated in last year’s invasion of Ukraine — Pavlovsky found it hard to shake off his guilt.
“It’s like those who work on designing a weapon,” he said. “These weapons can end up in the wrong hands or be used the wrong way. Are you responsible because you made the weapon?”
Born in 1951 in Odesa, then a mostly Russian-speaking imperial outpost on the Black Sea in Soviet Ukraine, Pavlovsky’s formative years were shaped by banned literature in samizdat, handwritten manuscripts, and western radio broadcasts. At university, he fell in with a commune that sold wooden handicrafts to tourists and spent the proceeds on banned books. That brought Pavlovsky under the eye of the KGB, which demanded he inform on the group’s leader. Pavlovsky gave a statement but retracted it during the trial, then moved to Moscow to edit a journal, Searches.
During the trial of a fellow editor, he smashed the courthouse window with a brick in a “fit of madness” and broke his leg fleeing across the rooftops. Arrested for “anti-Soviet activity” in 1982, a now-disillusioned Pavlovsky pleaded guilty — a taboo for political prisoners — and gave evidence against friends. Renouncing his dissident views earned him a relatively light sentence: three years “internal exile” in Komi, a remote region straddling the Arctic Circle. He described it as “mental torment.”
Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Pavlovsky became a star “political technologist”. The Kremlin’s spin doctors married American concepts such as polling, political advertising and the campaign trail with a postmodern sensibility and KGB dirty tricks.
Bankrolled by oligarchs, Pavlovsky helped mastermind the ailing, unpopular president Boris Yeltsin’s long-shot re-election campaign in 1996, then turned to finding a successor. Focus groups said they wanted a leader in the style of Max Otto von Stierlitz — a Soviet spy deep in the Nazi hierarchy in the classic Soviet TV series 17 Moments of Spring.
Pavlovsky and the Kremlin’s mandarins thought they had found that man in Putin, himself a former KGB officer. An unknown, he proved an ideal figure for Pavlovsky to place at the centre of what he called the “Putin majority” — people who felt they had been left out in the capitalist bacchanal of the 1990s. After a landslide victory in 2000, Pavlovsky worked with Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s political impresario, to build “managed democracy” — a smoke-and-mirrors system of fake politics where even the opposition parties were run by the Kremlin.
He played a lead role in Russia’s efforts to export the system during a furious, failed attempt by the Kremlin to elect a pro-Moscow candidate in Ukraine in 2004. Pavlovsky then became a character in the fictional TV drama of Russian politics himself, hosting a debate show (ironically called “Real Politics”) on a state-run channel. “Everything you see — the image that Putin decides everything in the country — we’re the ones that built it,” he said in 2018.
When Putin stepped aside for Medvedev in 2008, Pavlovsky helped build the image of a younger, fresh-faced, liberal president even as Putin still called the shots as prime minister. But when Putin decided to stage his return it could no longer hold. “I didn’t want his presidency to become a caricature of itself. I had to leave,” Pavlovsky later said.
In his wilderness years, watching the delirious drumbeat of propaganda on TV, Pavlovsky realised how much deeper Russia’s problems stretched than Putin’s personality and lamented his role in it.
“He’s not just the frontman of the system, but a mutant,” he told the FT on the day Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. “The system draws everyone in. Putin’s as much a victim of the system as anything else.”
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