Why Does Vladimir Putin Keep Giving His Watches Away to Peasants?

A man, his dog and his watch. (Photo via)

Vladimir Putin is all about the big gesture, the one that lets you know exactly who's in charge. (Full disclosure: Vladimir Putin is in charge.) When he’s not hanging out topless with fish, riding a horse shirtless through the Siberian wilds or taking a crossbow to a whale from a motorboat while stripped to the waist, he’s passing through the provinces doling out luxury watches to delighted peasants. Or, when he's feeling more extravagant, simply throwing them in wet cement or lobbing them off bridges.

Putin officially only pulls in £119,000 a year, which – shamefully – is less than David Cameron, Prime Minister of "small island to which no-one pays any attention", Britain. However, his watch collection alone is valued at over $700,000 (£442,000), meaning those alleged ownership stakes in multiple oil and gas companies must be serving Vlad pretty well.

The sweetest watch in his collection is this $500,000 number from A Lange & Sohne, described by the company as a "peerless masterpiece", just like its celebrated Russian owner. Sitting next to that is the slightly less impressive $15,000 Breguet Marine and a number of Blancpains – throwaway pieces at around $12,000 a pop. The great fish tamer is also a fan of Patek Phillipe (particularly the white gold variety), whose suitably high-end Swiss advertising slogan is, “You never actually own a Patek Phillipe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”

In a country that re-introduced the term "oligarchy" to the wider world, Putin needs to remind his people that he is in charge – that if Russia is a mafia state, he is its Capo di tutti capi.

He uses his watches as props in this pantomime. The Russian opposition made this short video, which at 1:02 shows Putin throwing one of his expensive timepieces into some cement. There it sits, waiting to be swallowed and eventually driven over. At other points, he decides – seemingly on a whim – to give watches to strangers. The lucky serfs shown at the beginning of the video are the son of a shepherd and a metal worker. Both received a Blancpain Aqualung, which retails at over $10,000. The shepherd’s boy was given the watch in an open display of patronage, while the metal worker just came right out and asked Putin for it. In the same way the Russian tsars doled out Faberge eggs to their supporters, Putin hands out watches.

Vlad looking beefy in one of his watches. (Photo via)

This is a perfect expression of the way the Russian President wields his power. As The Bureau of Investigative Journalism outlined last year, Putin is believed to use luxury yachts, hangs out in a £350 million palace overlooking the Black Sea and reportedly owns shares in three major oil and gas companies. The Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky thinks Putin could be worth up to $70 billion, which would make him one of the richest people in the world. All of this is kept hidden slightly out of view, but Putin knows that wealth and power go hand in hand. So, while on the macro level he's carving up his country’s resources between him and his cronies; on a micro level he's demonstrating his power by throwing away objects that are, to him, mere trinkets. “I am immensely wealthy, but wealth has no dominion over me,” he tells us.

The use of wealth to impress, terrify and reinforce power is as old as power, as old as wealth (i.e. OLD). In his essay “The Praise of Folly”, published in 1509, the Dutch philosopher Erasmus writes about noble houses that would use banquets to demonstrate their considerable wealth. Guests would be brought in to stand in front of a fully laid feast, but instead of sitting down to eat, they would watch as that banquet was destroyed in front of them. A second ton of food was then laid out and the guests would eat, possessed by the knowledge that their host was truly wealthy – because he could afford to just throw a bunch of food and wine away – and thus truly powerful; the culinary equivalent of chucking a watch in some cement.

These small demonstrations often speak of larger things, the exercise of POWER, in the kind of all-caps-you-can’t-escape-these-structures way that Foucault wrote about. A friend’s mother once described an encounter – which she insisted was true – with the mass-murdering Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. A Kenyan, she was working in a hotel in Nairobi in the 1970s when the then-leader rolled in with his entourage. During dinner, Amin beckoned to some waiters, who brought a number of cages over to his table. Amin opened his cage, which had a still-breathing monkey inside it. He took the monkey, smashed its head against the table and ate it.

This demonstration of small-scale savagery was indicative of the savagery Amin would inflict on his country as a whole; it was a similar thing to the Viking and Hun kings drinking from the skulls of their defeated enemies. Putin hasn't got quite the same taste for animal cruelty as Amin, but his small demonstrations of power are matched by his larger ones. After all, if you are with him, you will be richly rewarded, but if you threaten him, you will – like his opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky – be sent to prison indefinitely. At all points, the power dynamic is reinforced.

Some more sweet watch action in an uncomfortable three-way handshake with Tayyip Erdogan and Silvio Berlusconi. (Photo via)

Running through all of this is the idea of patronage in its various expressions. If you look after your own people, you will remain in power, and if you show them that you are not to be messed with, you will stop them from rising against you. Of course, history has shown us that the "people" you have to look after don't tend to be the masses. In 6th century France, the Merovingian dynasty was brought to an end because its rulers no longer had the wealth to pay their political supporters. They ran out of bribes. In the US, “pork barrel politics” refers to deals struck between politicians and business people in which votes are given for contracts.

The Bush administration’s carve-up of Iraq and its ties to, among others, Halliburton, are large-scale examples of this, but these things begin on a small scale. The British Prime Minister’s personal patronage is clearly expressed by the fact that he or she can give and take away cabinet jobs at the drop of a hat. We think of this as entirely normal, but in fact it's a worrying concentration of power. It's a way of ensuring loyalty, good behaviour, among the ranks of those who are mutually invested in your authority.

Back in Russia, the price of building roads was recently compared to the average price paid in Germany. The difference was found to be so big that Russia might as well have plated the roads in question with thin sheets of gold. Around the same time, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin decided to re-pave a number of the city’s pavements with bricks to replace the existing asphalt, which reportedly gives off toxic gases when the sun comes out. Fortunately, his billionaire wife Irina was involved with a great brick company that turned out to be perfectly suited to the task, meaning Sobyanin could reward her financially while also protecting his city from an almost certain spate of deaths-by-asphalt, the world's most commonly used road surface.

There is another historical model of how to be a leader, but it's one that is generally ignored and often misrepresented. Cnut, the Danish king who ruled Britain and Scandinavia at the beginning of the 11th century, one day famously taught his fawning courtiers a lesson by taking his throne out onto the beach. The tide came in, as it does, and passed Cnut. When I was told this story in school, the teacher told us that this was the action of an arrogant king who thought he could turn back the tide, when in fact it was the exact opposite. Cnut was showing his people that there were limits to his power and that he should not be treated like a God.

Putin, who recently had a parody painting of him and Dmitry Medvedev wearing women’s underwear seized in a dawn raid, cannot tolerate the idea that his power is limited or that he should ever act with any humility. He can give a peasant a watch, but he can’t give them any real power. His government’s recent decision to demonise homosexuality shows that he will continue to find new groups to oppress, new ways to express his power. In this, he is not alone among world leaders. It’s just a shame that he and so many of his fellow rulers aren’t more like Cnut.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

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