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LONDON – Vladimir Putin will fight for decades to preserve his authoritarian grip on Russia, according to a former Kremlin insider who has unique knowledge of some of the president's closest convictions.
Vitaly Mansky gained unprecedented access to the Kremlin and Putin's initial presidential campaign to make films for public television, which were actually propaganda for Putin. He has now turned against the Russian president by making an extraordinary documentary – using footage filmed from within – that explores Putin's uncompromising desire for power and his quest to restore what he sees as the glory of the world. Soviet era.
Mansky told The Daily Beast that Putin's dictatorial instincts and his Kremlin record meant he "had no choice" but to cling to power forever.
The filmmaker was not only allowed to accompany Putin during the early years of his presidency, but he was also allowed to interrogate him in front of a camera in a way that had not happened. not seen for almost two decades.
This sequence has remained locked until now.
In Putin's Witnesses, who played at the London Film Festival this week, we see the President's unguarded explanation of how he will impose total control over Russia and restore the priority accorded by the Soviet Union to the state. In a frank conversation at the back of his official car, he explores the limits of democratic authority.
In addition to unique images of Putin, Mansky recorded behind the scenes recordings of Putin's predecessors, Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, shedding light on the historical situation facing Putin.
Yeltsin explains to the camera that he has hand selected Putin among 20 candidates to replace him in the last days of the last century. Mansky was at Yeltsin's home on the evening of the election of March 2000, when the Russian people validated his choice by giving Putin the power in the first round of voting, which took place three months after his appointment acting president.
"It's my victory," he said, smiling at his daughter. No sooner had the family enjoyed a glass of champagne than Mansky was wondering why he had not telephoned Putin to celebrate their victory. The former president immediately passed the call.
After much speculation from the family about whether Putin has to travel or maybe take a shower, Yeltsin went to bed that night, still waiting for the call.
Mansky told the Daily Beast: "The day before, Putin would have known that Yeltsin had the power to change the whole situation. After his election, he knew that he was safe. He did not feel the need to return the call. "
On the screen, we had already seen exactly how a former president was treated by his successor. Gorbachev, who had been virtually excluded from public life when Yeltsin settled in the Kremlin, discussed election coverage to vindicate Putin's victory.
A few seconds after his appearance, Yeltsin had seen enough. "I'm fed up, how long are we going to listen to it?" Asked he. His daughter quickly chose another channel.
It was a reminder of why Yeltsin had chosen his own successor so carefully. But even if Putin owed him everything, the power changed as soon as the election results were announced.
Earlier in the day, Mansky had gone to the polling station where Gorbachev had voted. After the vote, he sat in the electoral center with some former colleagues for a glass of vodka.
Gorbachev had been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 1985. Former leaders of the USSR, such as Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph Stalin, had held this post for decades. After establishing the first post-communist Russian presidency in 1990, Gorbachev lasted less than two years.
In the film, one of Gorbachev's former comrades asks why he did not choose a 15-year term for the new presidential system. He answered solemnly, "Because I would then be a fugitive secretary-general."
After years of economic turmoil, Putin did not share Gorbachev's scruples about his return to certain aspects of the Soviet era, whose history he was trying to rewrite. Among his first acts as president, he restored the red flag – with hammer and sickle – to the Kremlin's presidential regiment. At the end of the year, he reintroduced the Soviet national anthem, abandoned in 1990.
Mansky confronted Putin about the decision of the hymn to the inside of the Kremlin.
The director was accompanied by a professional cameraman for most of his sessions, as well as a handheld video camera that he carried everywhere. In this private exchange, which has only been captured on the camcorder, Putin explained that "it is necessary to restore the confidence of the citizen" in the establishment. We should consider the great victory of the Second World War – not just the Gulag – when we think of the Soviet Union, he said.
Putin said he recently spoke to a middle-aged woman during one of his tours in the country, who were begging him: "Give us back our old life, as it was 20 years ago. "
The president said that it must be understood that many citizens felt this nostalgia for the USSR. "We can not take everything from people … why put it in the trash can of history?" He asked.
Shortly after this impromptu discussion, Mansky was called back to Putin's office. "I'm not trying to impose anything," insisted the president, who however insisted that the conversation about the national anthem might not be suitable for the film, which was to be broadcast on national television .
He explained that not everyone understood his controversial decision to bring back the national anthem, which was associated with the brutal reality of the communist regime. The young president said that he should make decisions "in the interest of the state", whether they are popular or not with individuals.
Putin naively stated that he thought he could convince anyone of the anthem if he had the opportunity to talk to them one-on-one. "And you say it's impossible to persuade you?" He asked Mansky.
During the film's narration, the director said: "Was there no one left to convince?" Putin, who came to power promising a "firm hand", had already reorganized his team of advisers to make sure no one questioned his vision; perhaps that explains why he was still trying to persuade Mansky – a lonely voice of disagreement in his inner circle.
Yeltsin was also among those still in need of persuasion. Mansky joined his family on New Year's Eve after Putin's first year in power. It was asked if Putin had reported the anthem without consulting him. He offered a barely perceptible nod. Did he think the new lyrics had saved him? A small nod. Then an answer in one word: "reddish".
He suggested that Putin's gesture had a hint of pure red communism about it.
Of course, Putin was not going to ask Yeltsin's advice any time soon.
Back at the Kremlin, Mansky told the current president: "Do not get angry, but I will not share your opinion on the anthem."
Putin pondered this rare moment of insubordination, offered an amused half smile and said, "You should."
Although the images have probably never been broadcast, these exchanges raise the question: why did Putin allow the filmmaker to talk to him like this?
"It's hard to answer," Mansky told the Daily Beast. "I must admit that I have never seen any footage of Putin in the last 18 years in which he would allow this type of communication with him.
"There is this recent movie from Oliver Stone and it was very strange to watch it because Oliver Stone has an Oscar and that he has an American passport, we do not really know. what he might be afraid of, but he absolutely disagreed with everything Putin said. "
"When that happens, I'm just trying to tell him to leave, because I want to feel free, and I do not want to think twice about touching a doorknob and worrying about what might happen."
There is no legal doubt about the intimate film because the copyright belongs to the production company Mansky, but politically it takes a huge risk in breaking Putin's trust. He left Russia in 2014, but his home in Latvia offers no realistic protection against the wrath of the Russian president.
Mansky was speaking at the Daily Beast in a five-star hotel in London, right across from where Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by a cup of tea containing radioactive polonium 210.
Intimidated by his own tea, Mansky said that he was trying to forget the consequences that his actions could possibly entail on him. Putin's regime recently targeted a series of dissidents in Britain, including former double agent Sergei Skripal, who was struck by an attack of Novichok's neurotoxic agent that contaminated the drug's door. his home in Salisbury earlier this year.
"I'm trying to expel or completely remove this issue without thinking about it," Mansky said. "When that happens, I'm just trying to tell him to leave, because I want to feel free, and I do not want to think twice before touching a doorknob and worrying about that. that could happen. "
Towards the end, Mansky pondered the title that he had chosen for the film. He was not directly employed by the Kremlin, but working on an insider film for public television meant that he was far from being an unbiased journalist. "There was always the price I had to pay," he said. "The witnesses become accomplices."
He explained that the film was a form of excuse for his role in spreading Putin's propaganda. "I would not call that an excuse exactly, but the realization of your own guilt," he said. "This awareness is not enough. I would like the film's audience, especially the Russians, to reflect and reflect on all the mistakes that have been made in the past so that in the future we will not do them in such numbers. "
Placing Putin in its historical context is one of Mansky's masterpieces. The film focuses on the fact that Yeltsin and Gorbachev are stricken from public discourse, but most of the former Russian leaders have also been exorcised from public memory. "This applies to virtually all Russian leaders, with the possible exception of the Romanov dynasty," Mansky said.
The imperial family remained etched in memory, but it came to an infamous end during a mass execution in 1918, which inspired Amazon's current television series. The Romanoffs.
"Putin has very well studied the life and history of his predecessors," said Mansky, suggesting that he would try to stay in power for 20 or 30 years. "He has no choice now."
"Not only would he not want to follow in the footsteps of Ceauşescu and Milosevic, but he would not even want to follow the fate of Pinochet who could have faced the courts of his own country."
Putin's authoritarian impulses were evident even before he became president. Mansky was on the scene of Chechen bombings that allegedly killed hundreds of people in buildings in Moscow in September 1999, when Prime Minister Putin arrived on the scene.
He said categorically: "We can only counter it by force." Putin's Witnesses presents the family video of the Mansky family. On the day of Putin's inauguration as president, the director's daughter said, "It's like Mao Zedong; he was also a dictator. "
More specifically, Mao was a communist dictator – and Putin would soon show similar impulses. "It's the spirit of any society that is not free and is governed by a dictator," Mansky said. "The film as a whole gives us a good idea of what Putin really thinks, especially of the country's future and the role of the state in building that future."
Mansky said the Soviet mentality had been confirmed when Putin reacted to the hostage taking in a theater in Moscow in 2002 and at the Beslan school headquarters two years later by sending armed commandos to harmful gases, grenades and flamethrowers to kill terrorists despite the risks to the lives of civilians. Hundreds of innocent men, women and children were killed on both occasions.
"It was very clear to him that the fate of those involved was absolutely irrelevant compared to the goals he had set for the state," Mansky said.
The power and limits of democratic authority were one of the philosophical issues debated by Putin and Mansky. At one point, the filmmaker questioned himself about "the global unity" that his leadership had brought to Russia. "I can feel a slight irony in your question," said Putin.
In another exchange at the back of his official car, Putin has been ruminating on succession, imperial power, and autocracy.
"I've met monarchs, their destiny does not inspire me," he said.
Putin argued that it was a good discipline to remember that everything you did as a president would have to face one day as a citizen. That's why he preferred democracy to autocracy.
In an amazing moment of chutzpah, Mansky replied, "fingers crossed."
As a comfort, Putin replied: "Well done."
In the 18 years since Mansky made these immodest but ultimately futile remarks, Putin has been faced with diminishing responsibility. It is virtually impossible for this film to be screened in public in Russia while Putin is president. Each individual screening – even in independent film festivals – must be authorized by the government.
"There is a famous poet, Alexander Pushkin – a Russian Shakespeare – he wrote this piece Boris Godunov, which deals with an illegal takeover and establishment of the Romanov dynasty, "Mansky said.
"The last line of the game when Boris takes power illegally is this: the people were silent."
"It's very sad to see that almost 500 years have passed since it has not changed much in Russia."
The 62nd edition of the BFI London Film Festival will take place from October 10 to 21. Tickets now available from www.bfi.org.uk/lff
