Superman Putin

The mythology of power is that power should not essentially have human traits. Some attributes of humanity are allowed, others are not. This is what happened with “ Putin’s back .” Reuters reported that several of its sources spoke about the leader’s bad back, due to which Putin faces surgery and several international visits of the Russian president had to be postponed. In particular, visits to India, Pakistan and Turkmenistan.

What is true is that the visit to India, which was supposed to take place this week, has indeed been cancelled. It was being prepared, the preparation group and film crews were already ready to fly out, but it was taken and canceled. Only now the Kremlin says (in the person of Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov) that all this is not true. That is, not everything, but only a sore back. That’s what Peskov said: “this does not correspond to reality.” And he added that everyone can see how Putin holds meetings every day.

There is a question here: would holding meetings and an international visit have the same effect on a sore back? The visit involves a lot of movement and protocol events, a difficult task. And as anyone with back pain knows, the best position in this case is lying down. You can’t conduct a meeting lying down either. But it’s one thing to sit for two hours and quite another to walk several kilometers and then show off in a protocol photograph. So the Kremlin’s denial, as usual, can clarify little.

Another thing is that it is difficult to seriously understand whether there was a back? Or is this all speculation. We have already seen “Putin’s divorce”, “ Putin’s grandson ” and other circumstances related to the current president’s personal life in the media. And each time the impression was created that while Vladimir Putin is in power, the general public is unlikely to receive an answer to the question “is this true?” And when Putin is not in power, no matter in what capacity, the general public is unlikely to care about Siberian Cranes , gymnasts , grandchildren and backs. The general public quickly forgets their favorite heroes. Perhaps she will be excited by Gunvor or the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky, but her back...

Imagine the “trial of the criminal Vladimir Putin.” A state prosecutor (with the rank of Prosecutor General, no less) stands up with a last name, say, Udaltsov and a first name, for example, Sergei, and menacingly asks: “Citizen Putin! Admit it, did your back hurt in October 2012 and was that why you canceled several important international visits?!” I can imagine a similar question, if only there are no more imaginary or real sins behind the current Russian president. That he did not throw the same Udaltsov or the supposed Khodorkovsky into prison, his entourage did not appropriate the lion's share of the national wealth, he did not abolish the democratic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, did not violate that very constitution, and so on and so forth. There was none of this and then questions about Siberian cranes and backs are appropriate.

However, the Kremlin stubbornly denies that this is the personal matter of a particular person. Well, Putin’s back hurts, the tea is not coronary artery bypass surgery, which the whole country was discussing, mocking the phrase “the president is working with documents” (in Peskov’s version, “holding meetings”). And nothing: they survived that, and they would have survived their back. Good health to you, father, if anything happens, we’ll ask you later.

Why deny something that is politically harmless, and in fact can be refuted by providing a medical record, but not by unfounded denials? Probably because the Russian president is in many ways like a medieval monarch. The king, as the American medievalist Ernst Kantorovich concluded in his famous monograph, has two bodies - his own and the sacred. He is both an individual and a sacred being.

And it is not proper for a sacred being to have human weaknesses. He can still afford human strength, cunning or even meanness, but never weakness. Therefore, Putin must be healthy. Show off your torso, kiss boys on the stomach, wet your political opponents until they bleed, but don’t get sick.

A sick person is only a person; not only the Lord, but even the Central Election Commission has power over him.

An autocrat is not a person in the full sense of the word. He is like a superman and has almost no human features. He flew with the birds (by the way, saving the population of the rarest birds) and the whole country - especially if you believe the latest research from the Central Research Center - laughs at him. It is unbecoming for a monarch to behave this way. In this regard, one question arises for Dmitry Peskov - tell me, does Putin poop?