By Will Bland
Source: The Associated Press
When I saw that Vladimir Putin cried last night, I couldn’t help remembering a scene from one of America’s best loved television series, The Sopranos.
A hardened mafia boss is on day release for his daughter’s wedding, and the police guards call time on his visit just as the couple are leaving for their honeymoon. Then he breaks down in tears. For the gang members looking on, this display of emotion shows that the man is too weak to lead.
The parallels between Putin’s emotional celebrations and the 70th episode of the Sopranos ought to be particularly clear for Americans, whose diplomats describe Russia as a “mafia state.”
The judo black-belt, who won an estimated 58% in Sunday’s presidential election, has tranquilized tigers and bonded with polar bears, but never before has he shed a tear live on TV.
I don’t side with the wedding guests from The Sopranos, but there is something transformative about a tough guy crying in public.
The last time I was so taken aback by public tears, they were streaming down the face of the world’s most successful football manager. Until he’d sobbed, José Mourinho was a dispassionate genius whose public outbursts were carefully planned. Since then, his fits of temper make him look impulsive and childish.
Perhaps the next time that Putin makes a remark like his call for Chechens “to be wiped out in the shit house,” he’ll seem more pathetic than terrifying.
Aside from undermining their public image, Putin, Mourinho and Johnny Sack indicated something more significant when they cried in public – the realization that they’d lost something irrevocable: for Mourinho, it was the team that he had inspired; for Johnny Sack, it was his dream of a happy family.
Putin might have felt joy at regaining something – the presidency – that he lost four years ago, but underlying that emotion, there would have been nostalgia for that earlier era and the sense that his bond with the Russian people is broken.
Of course, many commentators would say that bond was based on deceit, but, before last autumn’s protests, Putin could have seen himself as “good tsar,” believing that he was worshipped by every Russian outside Chechyna and a few liberally-inclined newspapers.
It’s easy for westerners to dismiss this self-image as vanity or delusion, especially if they’re familiar with allegations that Putin has enriched himself at his people’s expense, but there remain people all across Russia who admire their president-elect and credit him with restoring order in the country after the chaos of the 1990s.
His influence on Russia has been bigger than Margret Thatcher’s on Great Britain and his legacy will be just as controversial.
Thatcher didn’t cry until the day she left office, whereas Putin is about to embark on a six-year term. His tears mark the beginning of the end.
