Putin's Day Off

MOSCOW—It’s a cool Sunday night on the Kremlin, and Vladimir is Putin on the ritz. An attaché enters the gilded office with pink wine—the vodka’s just for the cameras—and a television remote.

“Mad Men” comes on. Smoking, terribly mustachioed oligarchs drinking themselves to death—it’s a transatlantic tale. Like all episodes, this one is self-consciously opaque, and Putin is uneasy, despite the perfectly timed delivery of an old fashioned by the keen attaché.

Donald Draper, the show’s disturbed center who deserted the army and mostly concerns himself with wallowing in self-pity, has never been a favorite of Putin’s. But the upstart junior account man Pete Campbell hardly makes an appearance in the premiere.

It’s 1970s America, and the millionaire characters strut about wearing Hans Hofmann paintings, shuttling between the cloistered enclaves of New York and Los Angeles in embarrassing luxury. Putin remembers that Matt Weiner said that the series will end in the present day, and wonders what events of history will make the bubble pop: Afghanistan, Reagan, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, me.

Brezhnev had control then. Then Brezhnev died, and Chairman Andropov succeeded him. And when they asked Andropov whether the Russian people followed him, Andropov replied they can either follow me, or they can follow Brezhnev.

The mood darkens and the channel flips. “The Americans,” FX’s series about two deeply embedded KGB spies, comes on. But the frown didn’t disappear, the attaché notes, as the offer for another drink is waved away.

What was once exciting has gone the way of all American television nowadays, Putin thinks. Elizabeth and Philips’ espionage have become less important than Elizabeth and Phillip’s personal struggles, the ends are lost sight of in meaningless moral kerfuffles over the means. And who gives a damn about Paige, anyway.

Berlin, Putin remembers. When the wall fell, he stood outside the KGB offices and kept the incensed East German crowd from ransacking the files with nothing but a pistol and his fluent German. The files were destroyed, and the Soviet state secrets were left to be entombed in their unopened archives. Now that's service for one’s country, back when that meant something.

Something impersonal and geopolitical is needed. Ale is brought. “Game Of Thrones” is put on. Putin brightens.

Silly Starks, he thinks, as the scattered shards of that once proud family are displayed—they were always putting honor ahead of family, ahead of self-preservation. He remembers how the unsuspecting Robb Stark was betrayed by Roose Bolton, just like his unsuspecting father was betrayed by Lord Baelish. And his favorite words of Baelish’s echo:

“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods…illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late.”

Baelish’s cunning is highly respectable, his irresistible rise from the mediocre Fingers to the highest posts in Westeros admirable and not unlike his own, but Putin will never root for him. Aside from his debilitating weakness for Catelyn Stark-resembling objects, Littlefinger, just like Varys, only hatches his plans from the shadows.

But that’s not power. To be able to declare one’s intentions openly and to hear no dissent echoing—that is power.

No one grasps this better than Tywin Lannister. But now Putin remembers his unfortunate toilet incident last season, and hopes that the best has come for this most admirable of characters.

Alas! Tywin’s not well at all, and the kingdoms of Westeros splinter. The spine of the kingdom is broken, and the subjects hurriedly depart from its orbit. He’s seen it with his own eyes, and wonder whether Russia will see it too after he’s gone.

Putin’s evening isn’t going well. But then a thought comes, and he remembers something he watched during one of the 10 days he took off from being president to watch Netflix.

The attaché puts on the third episode of the third season of House of Cards, sets down a golden bottle and glass, and takes his leave for the evening. On screen, a gloriously churlish President Petrov talks with his American counterpart President Frank Underwood of outlasting his two predecessors, outdrinks everyone at the state dinner, manages to deface the White House, and even gets away with kissing the First Lady.

“За тебя!” Putin shouts as he empties the shot.

For the first time of the night, Putin smiles.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.