Love songs for Uncle Vova

Putin pop ballads and the accuracy of approval ratings in Russia

I recently came across this song by Mashany (Машани) titled "My Putin," featuring the singer dressed in Russian flag colors as she walks across a warm summery field and, later, dressed in Ukrainian flag colors as she struggles to escape a dank basement, begging for Putin to take her with him.

You are Putin! I wanna be with you! I cry to you, ‘My sweet Putin, take me with you! I wanna be with you!’ … You threw down a challenge and took back Crimea, and afterwards, you’ll restore the Union!

You may be thinking, who’s this for exactly? What Russians are gonna see this and actually consider it a good song? More to the point, just how popular is Putin that stuff like this is even being produced in the first place?

There’s a good FiveThirtyEight podcast on this question, but the basic answer is, as of February, Putin has a 71% approval rating, according to the Russian polling firm the Levada Center. Not super surprising, as dictators tend to enjoy high approval ratings. For example, in a 2014 survey review, Tony Saich, the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, noted that Xi Jinping was the world’s most popular leader among domestic respondents, followed by Putin, India’s Narendra Modi and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.

The Levada Center itself is an independent polling firm founded by one of Russia’s most prominent sociologists, the late Yuri Levada, who founded the group, back when it was known as the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), to better understand the lasting impact of totalitarianism on the human psyche. Similar work has been done by others, notably Polish writer and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz’s 1953 book The Captive Mind, which tries to understand what makes Stalinism attractive to intellectuals.

As a brief aside, you may be familiar with the term “tankie,” a pejorative for pro-authoritarian communists. It comes from party members who actually supported the Soviet use of tanks to crush the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in which up to 3,000 civilians were murdered. Since then, the term has been applied to regular pro-Kremlin and pro-CCP types, but it’s been a minute since the term embodied its original meaning as a foaming-at-the-mouth communist who supports violence.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with armored columns provides a new opportunity for actual tankies to step forward, and they have. As such, I think The Captive Mind is essential reading. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve run into otherwise seemingly intelligent individuals who espouse Stalinist thinking, adore the CCP or support Putin’s war on Ukraine. For Miłosz, much of the appeal came down to aesthetics, as is often the case with Nazi chic among white supremacists.

But this is not the only such study. There’s also Czech writer and the last Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which understands how living in a totalitarian society, not unlike living in a concentration camp, often causes people to make inhuman moral compromises for the sake of survival. And yet it manages to be, as Havel ever was himself, optimistic about the human condition.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

Anyway, like Miłosz and Havel, Levada was interested in the broken soul of the Soviet man, or Homo sovieticus. In fact, that was the subject of VTsIOM’s first project. Today, VTsIOM is known as the Levada Center, and it’s a well-respected state enterprise, but even still, Russia is a repressive regime that controls the media and punishes dissent. Ditto China. So just how reliable are polls like these in countries like those?

This is an important question because too often when a leader does something immoral, people blame the citizens of that nation. But if Putin invades Ukraine and the Levada Center measures his approval rating going up six percentage points to 70%, or if a group of independent research organizations find that only 23% of Russians oppose the invasion, suddenly it doesn’t feel quite as wrongheaded to point a finger at the overwhelmingly supportive Russian public.

But again we have to ask, just how supportive is the Russian public? To be precise, how reliable are these polls? One answer comes by way of Columbia University professor of political science Timothy Frye, who conducted a series of experiments in 2015 to estimate support for Putin. His findings were published in the journal Post-Soviet Affairs, which he edits. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract.

We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is within 10 percentage points of that implied by direct questioning. We find little evidence that these estimates are positively biased due to the presence of floor effects. In contrast, our analysis of placebo experiments suggests that there may be a small negative bias due to artificial deflation. We conclude that Putin’s approval ratings largely reflect the attitudes of Russian citizens.

What did Frye and his team do, specifically? They used a method that’s been employed elsewhere to examine issues such as racism or corruption, issues where respondents are unlikely to be forthcoming. Namely, they provided a list of three political leaders and asked respondents NOT to identify the ones they supported but merely to say how many of them they supported.

On average, respondents answered 1. Next, respondents were shown a list of the same three leaders, but this time Putin’s name was added to the list as a fourth. On average, respondents answered 1.8. So you subtract 1 from 1.8 and you’re left with 0.8—or 80% support for Putin, which matches what survey companies like Levada have also found.

With this in mind, songs like the one above don’t seem so bizarre. Democratic leaders, of course, quite often suffer very low approval ratings. But with 80%, it’s no wonder you might see love ballads to Uncle Vova. To cite another example, check out this one by Russian R&B artist Timati titled "My Best Friend."

All our country supports him. You know he’s a cool superhero. Today I’m a player and my friend [Putin] is with me. He’s the boss, so you know everything will go according to plan.

Of course, probably the most famous Putin love song is the 2002 hit by Poyushchie Vmeste (Поющие вместе) titled "A man like Putin" (Такого как Путин), which topped the Russian charts that year.

I want one like Putin who is so strong. One like Putin who will not drink alcohol. One like Putin who will not offend me. One like Putin who will not run away.

And for extra credit, I have to mention the 2011 hit by singer Tolibjon Kurbankhanov, which celebrates VVP (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin) for defending his people.

VVP saved the country. VVP defends. VVP has lifted Russia up and developed it. VVP saved the people.

I have no grand argument here. But before you go, let me leave you with a few more Putin songs to make up for polluting your ears with these trash ballads just now. The next few are satirical, so crack a beer and enjoy. The first one features Putin dancing with Stevan Segal, holding baby Trump, facing down a polar bear and teaming up with Greta Thunberg to save the world. I mean, what more can you ask for?

This one’s a pretty good send-up too, minus the homophobia, and came out two months after the February 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine.

Finally, there’s this by Slovene comedian Klemen Slakonja.

P.S. Slakonja also does a pretty good impersonation of Slovene communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, available here.