The fantastical myths that swirl around Vladimir Putin
If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal Protection Service officer responsible for ensuring the product of the president’s bathroom breaks return to the Motherland. Foreign powers may, after all, go to extreme lengths to test his health.
When Putin does travel abroad, it is not just with his own food and drink, his own chefs and his array of bodyguards, it is also with his dedicated porta-potty. This allows his numbers ones and twos to be collected, sealed into special bags, and then put in a briefcase, ready to travel home with the boss. Rather than some freakish obsession, this reflects a suspicion that Western intelligence agencies would try to intercept them for medical analysis.
There is an odd mix of mythology, rumour and downright conspiracy theory that swirls around the Russian president
This is not necessarily paranoia. After all, it is what the Soviets did when Mao visited Moscow in 1949, what Israel’s Mossad did in 1999 to confirm just how sick ailing Syrian president Hafez al-Assad really was, and what the CIA is reported to have done when both Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni visited Washington.
Given the continuing speculation about his health one can understand why foreign governments are eager for any potential insights, however they may be acquired. Just this week, ex-MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove asserted ‘that there is something fundamentally wrong with him medically… probably Parkinson’s’. Recent cases of his uncontrolled twitching and odd expressions have only heightened the interest, even we can safely ignore some of the more outré claims, not least that he died back in October, and is being played by a double while his corpse remains stuffed in the deep freeze.
This does highlight the odd mix of mythology, rumour and downright conspiracy theory that swirls around the Russian president. Of course, Putin himself frequently expounds odd and unsustainable claims, not least his assumption that the CIA and MI6 are behind all his woes, but he is just as much their subject – and above all in his own country.
Putin’s overt Christian faith has become the basis for a whole canon of occult rumour. His regular pilgrimages to Mount Athos in northern Greece – one of the holiest sites in Orthodox belief – have been cast in sinister light as attending meetings of some shadowy cabal or rituals to restore his health. As for the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces which was consecrated in 2020, complete with khaki walls and floors cast from melted-down Nazi trophies, one might think it bizarre enough as is, but that has not prevented the rumours of secret altars at which Putin presides over martial sacrifices.
The most exciting stories relate to Putin and shamanism, though. A Siberian shaman, Sasha Gabyshev, tried to march all the way from distant Yakutia to Moscow, 5,000 miles to the west, to conduct an exorcism in Red Square. Yet Gabyshev says that the problem is not Putin so much as Koshchey Bessmertny, Koshchey the Undying, an evil spirit from Russian folklore. Gabyshev claims Koshchey haunts the Kremlin, exerting his baleful influences on the president. Alas, Gabyshev’s efforts to free Putin were foiled when he was arrested and institutionalised.
Valery Solovey, the defrocked academic behind many of the more barking mad theories – including periodic predictions of Putin’s imminent death made over a decade – claimed that he has even enlisted the dark arts in support of his war in Ukraine. By his account, he instructed his own warlocks to conduct the ritual killing of a black dog so that he could drink its blood and thus guarantee victory.
More often the claims are that he turns to shamanic practices to protect himself. In this, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who hails from the Siberian region of Tyva, is portrayed as his guide, for all that he himself claims that he was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church at the age of five. Nonetheless, one account claims that, at Shoigu’s suggestion, Putin bathes in blood extracted from the antlers of Altai red deer. Other suggest that Putin’s regular hiking holidays with Shoigu in the Siberian Altai has nothing to do with the stunning scenery or clean air, and everything to do with the quest for Shambhala, a mystical land supposed to hold secrets of immortality.
There is a deep vein of mysticism, occultism and conspiracy theory in Russian culture (there are more faith healers there than real medics), but there is something more at work here. For all that they have been treated to a regular diet of Putin hagiography, Russians know very little really about their president, whose inner thoughts and personal life remain a closed book. The grey man is a canvas on which any wild story can be projected, just as the Kremlin’s habitual silence about the 71-year-old president’s health allows the West to fantasise about its imminent end.
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