Boris Yeltsin did not look healthy. The face was like a squint, the movement pattern stiff, the eyes glassy. He spoke straight into the air, incoherent, without caring about the questions.
The place was the Blue Hall in Stockholm City Hall, the year 1997 in December. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was on a state visit to Sweden, a full line-up with a king and a procession. But the question is whether Yeltsin knew in which country he was. Suddenly he began to worry about the Finnish Winter War.
Scenes like the one above sit like a thorn in the Russian consciousness. How a sick and confused head of state mocks an entire country.
When the brain trust around Yeltsin tried to wash out his successor, it did not happen so long after the debacle in Stockholm, it was not insignificant that it would be a person with good vigor.
Shortly before the turn of the century, Vladimir Putin took office, first as Prime Minister, then as Acting after Yeltsin’s resignation on New Year’s Eve 1999, and finally as President after the March 2000 elections.
Putin was then quite anonymous to the Russian people. A bland spy bureaucrat, a thief in the corridors of the FSB and the Kremlin.
Now the cult around Vladimir Putin began to take shape. The man exposing his hairless chest, sitting on horseback, throwing for precious fish in Siberian streams. Or in action on the judo mat with the black belt wrapped around the muscular torso.
Putin’s physical resilience and focused behavior in official contexts became a restoration for the Russians. Eventually also a propaganda weapon in foreign policy.
Not least when Russia’s arch-rival the United States elected presidents who were anything but freshmen. First the coil-shaped Donald Trump with his confused outbursts, then Joe Biden who is hated for his fragility and unaccustomed to nodding in official contexts.
This year I interviewed Russia’s Stockholm Ambassador, Viktor Tatarintsev. The conversation revolved around Russia changing its constitution in a controversial referendum, the result of which means that Vladimir Putin could remain president until 2036.
– If Putin stays as long as he wants and can, it is a great advantage for Russia. Maybe not only for Russia but also for Europe and for the world, Tatarintsev said then.
But what will happen nowwhen the outside world only talks about Putin’s physical decay and not about his resilience?
After all, Vladimir Putin has turned 69, which is one year more than the life expectancy of Russian men. He is now as old as Yeltsin was when he decided to leave the presidency, for health reasons.
Read more: Putin condemns “Western Russians” – but his own daughter commuted to Munich for years