How Putin used images to build and hold power

Throughout his time as Russian president, Vladimir Putin has paid close attention to visual imagery.

The first time I interviewed him in 2001, an aide removed the small water glasses on the table before the cameras went live.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"We wouldn't want anyone to think they were for vodka," came the reply. "And anyway, we can't risk a glass spilling live on TV. Television is a nuclear bomb when it comes to publicity."

"Everybody in Russia, but especially Putin, realised that TV was the key to the consolidation of power," says the author and political analyst Peter Pomerantsev.

Over the years, Putin has transformed Russia from a fragile emerging democracy into a largely authoritarian state centered on himself. He has also changed his own public image.

Early photos show him as a slight, reticent figure who seemed wary of the camera. So how did this quiet child and self-effacing bureaucrat become a president who embraced the spotlight?

Created by TV

His interest in the power of image began long before he rose to power. Like most youngsters growing up in the 1960s and 70s, Putin was a child of the television age. His role models were the spy heroes of popular Soviet TV series and movies. By his own account, these strong, silent double agents inspired him to join the KGB.

As a KGB operative and later a government official, he avoided attention. But when he was named acting president in 1999 and then elected president months later, he and his advisers showed they understood the importance of visual imagery.

Part of the image-making was to remove what was unhelpful. Putin came across as a virtual teetotaller. At annual meetings with foreign policy experts at the Valdai Discussion Club, he would drink tea with honey while others received fine wines.

On the rare occasions when he did drink, his staff tried to keep it quiet. I once met the custodian of a local museum who said he had shared Russian pancakes with the president that were smeared with vodka. "But don't tell anyone," he told me. "They were very strict about it. I might get into terrible trouble."

Another goal was to show he was nothing like his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose public displays of inebriation had embarrassed many Russians.

Putin wore a pilot's helmet to fly a fighter jet. His skill at judo was shown in photos. All of it was meant to present him as a vigorous man of action, not an ailing drunkard.

Most striking were the photos that began in 2007 showing him bare-chested, riding a horse, fly fishing, or swimming in a vigorous butterfly stroke.

Was this for real, or was there a kind of knowing humor to the images? Pomerantsev thinks the people in charge of his public relations knew exactly what they were doing.

"For one audience, this is very crass, but we're going to do it in an ironic way, so that it's kind of cool. For another audience, it was that Russia should be led by a traditional hardman hero," he says.

He adds: "Putin was playing this sort of very, very, I suppose, traditional Soviet leadership role, but he was doing it in an era of the reality show, MTV and sugar daddies."

"Putin is the trendsetter," says Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist and adviser to US presidents. "He has shaped the image of the first populist president, the first acclaimed strongman of the 21st Century."

Putin was sending different messages to different audiences. To the outside world, the images signaled that Russia was no longer weak but a power to be reckoned with. A bear with teeth and claws, as he once put it.

Other displays were even more unusual. He scuba dived to "discover" carefully placed relics at the bottom of the Black Sea. He was harnessed into a motorised hang glider to soar high in the sky flanked by endangered cranes. He petted a Siberian tiger cub.

Putin claimed the point of these stunts was to raise environmental and scientific awareness. But questions remain about whether he realized they verged on self-parody.

Repeated reinvention

Early photos of Putin, including his 1985 ID card for the Stasi, the East German secret police, suggest a steely resolve behind the mask. After the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, he recast himself as a government official with a reputation for loyalty and efficiency. He first served the mayor of St Petersburg, then moved to Moscow to work in Yeltsin's presidential administration. In photos from that period, he is usually at the back or side of the frame, never looking into the camera.

Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, said she was told in the 1990s that in KGB circles he was known as "the moth," a man who could hide anywhere, a man in the shadows.

But when he became president, he seemed to welcome the chance to play different roles. A few years later, when he was photographed for Time magazine's Person of the Year award in 2007, he leaned back in his chair and looked straight into the camera, like a tsar on a throne or a menacing mafia boss.

"He was performing power for me," says Platon, the Time photographer who took the picture. "As far as I know, Putin loves these images. Many of his supporters love the pictures. They show him as a tough nationalist."

It was what Pomerantsev calls "a postmodern version of authoritarian propaganda," with Putin playing out all the roles like a performance artist.

The various guises of a strongman he adopted were reflected in his policies. To make Russia strong again, Putin argued there needed to be more order and more oversight from above. Step by step he tightened control over Russian society, reduced the space for free expression and criticism, turned the Duma into a rubber-stamp parliament, marginalized or eliminated political opponents, and lashed out at Western powers for failing to show Russia enough respect.

The man behind the mask

His hyper-macho topless photoshoots have been examined endlessly as a sign of confidence. But maybe these images also reveal something about his insecurities: his desire to reassure everyone, including himself, that he was still the main man, as fit as he had ever been.

After 2008, when he stepped back from the presidency to become prime minister for four years, attention-grabbing photos also signaled that he, rather than President Dmitry Medvedev, was the real power in the land.

In 2011 came a dramatic visual change that also marked a turning point. He suddenly appeared in public with a new fuller, puffier face, more immobile and inexpressive. It was mystifying. Was this a sign of steroid treatment for some illness? Or had he resorted to Botox in his quest to stave off signs of decline and old age?

A few months later he ran for the presidency again. The outcome was never in doubt, but at the open-air rally to declare his victory, his new face could be seen streaked with tears.

I concluded the weeping was genuine. His voice was also hoarse with emotion. It looked like relief that all had gone according to plan, despite widespread protests ahead of the election, when some protestors had dared raise slogans calling for him to go. But some analysts have wondered whether it was yet another contrived performance, designed to evoke the religious imagery of a weeping icon, to suggest he was now Russia's holy saviour.

Whichever it was, it marked a defining moment. His grip on the country had been tightening for years. From this era on, any form of public dissent was not just discouraged but illegal. Putin was becoming increasingly authoritarian and Russia less tolerant of opposition voices.

Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the Pussy Riot feminists who was jailed and declared a foreign agent for her protests, put it this way: "Putin got obsessed with placing himself in history as the saviour, not just of Russia, but of the entire world. And this… is the turning point of him stepping into the Putin we know today."

Now aged 73, Putin is no closer to giving up the reins of power than he was back in 1999, but he is seen less frequently.

Many speculate that in recent years he has become more paranoid, especially since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Now, when he does appear in front of the camera, the occasions are highly orchestrated, as though he is intent on keeping a distance from the outside world.

The war in Ukraine is now central to his image. Mikhail Fishman, a veteran Russian journalist, says: "If we look back at what Putin was after he came back to the Kremlin in 2012, he still did not know what he was, what he's about. But he believes he finally found his mission, what his role is, and it is war."

Yet, more than four years since it started, the full-scale war with Ukraine is also a burden. To continue it looks increasingly challenging, but to end it is also fraught with danger. Putin has created an economic war machine and a system of internal repression which he cannot easily put into reverse without huge risk to himself.

A quarter of a century after assuming power, he comes across as remote and inflexible, as though immobilised in a trap of his own making. It's a far cry from the image of a dynamic sportsman and action hero which he once hoped would define him.