The nickname of a ruler is a title bestowed by the grassroots. It substitutes a pithy and capacious metaphor for the verbose characterization of a personality and his or her (mis)deeds. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, was called “The Goat” for his obstinate nature and sexual exploits. The books and articles on his persona and period of rule will always reveal this abusive nickname because no historical portrait will be complete unless it mentions ordinary people’s attitude to “merits.” In North Korea, the Kim dynasty members know no nicknames – instead, they are called “suns of life,” “geniuses of humankind,” and other imposed epithets. You can get a life sentence for pronouncing informal words about them. But these exalted titles may as well become expressions of scorn in the course of time, as it happened to Nicolae Ceausescu. A professor called him the “Danube of Thought” for various novelties, such as banning condoms to increase the population and prescribing an economical diet for each Romanian. Since then, whenever a Romanian blurted out a stupid thing, he or she has been told: you’re just the “Danube of Thought.”
In olden times, the following adjectives were usually attached to a despot: wise, formidable, benighted, iron-clad… Later, when the authorities came down to earth from sacral heights, rulers began to get a different kind of names. Peter I was dubbed the Tobacconist for cultivating these previously unknown leaves. Nicholas I was called the Whip for his predisposition to corporal punishment. The nickname almost always indicated a vice, a defect, or nasty habits that the entourage had noticed. Yet there were also dictators with plain, almost neutral, aliases because their names became proverbial. And, although Napoleon and Hitler were sometimes called Plon Plon and Adi, respectively, in the inner circles, their childhood nicknames did not fit in with their adult deeds. On the contrary, whenever we place the word “Hitler” or “Napoleon” before a surname, we immediately attach the right coloring to its bearer. History has left behind an impressive number of leaders, fuehrers, duces, conducators, helmsmen, caudillos, fathers of the nations, revolution leaders, general secretaries, Turkmenbashis, and poglavniks, to whom the grassroots have attached the informal labels of butchers, crocodiles, pythons, and other mythical and natural evil creatures. Yet the whole semantic range remains part of the literary vocabulary.
It is the Russian president who has turned out to be the first ruler of a large state in the centuries-long history of despotism, who bears an unprintable definition after his last name. What is more, this definition is not only written on the fence and used in street quarrels. It can be seen as a logo on movie stars’ T-shirts and in Wikipedia, it has begun to be spoken by politicians, chanted at stadiums, and sung by rock stars. “Putin is a huilo (“dickhead”)!” Never before have the bloodiest, the most terrible, sinister and cruel rulers reached this level of contempt. What has happened? Has civilization underestimated Putin’s danger to peace, or is the bearer of an abusive nickname really a “miserable and paltry personality,” as was Balaganov who posed as the son of a rebel?
Like any other phenomenon, this one also has a history. From the very outset of the USSR’s existence, the national leaders’ nicknames ceased to be monosyllabic. While Nicholas II was just called “Bloody,” Vladimir Lenin had a lot of this kind of nicknames – from the Bolshevik-party “Lukich” to the nationwide “Bald.” The collection of Joseph Stalin’s nicknames is still more impressive: “Pockmarked,” “Cockroach,” “Joe the Terrible.” The grassroots attached to Leonid Brezhnev so many epithets and similes that one will need a copybook to write them down. I personally like “Eyebrows in the Dark” and “Lelik,” for they illustrate a dead-end stagnation and the back-slap attitudes typical of his era. As we were moving towards “developed socialism,” every secretary general had more and more nicknames which clearly showed sarcasm and contempt. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Lemonade Joe” was a devastating characteristic of his popularity in the West and his unpopular role on the 1985 “dry law.” Yet it never came to the foul language, although, in the Gorbachev era, people would invent nicknames quite in the open. The fantasy of a hungry and poorly-clothed people brought forth a biting humor. It is Boris Yeltsin who came close to the line of obscenity because his initials formed a not so decent (to a Russian eye and ear) abbreviation EBN (“f…er”). Yeltsin earned this nickname in the democratic camp which saw through the true motives of his behavior before the others did.
Russian and Soviet societies hold a record in the number of tyrants per century. The rule of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, whom historians classify as enemies of humankind, stretched for almost a hundred years. The people were sick and tired with endless tyranny, but the latter was a customary backdrop in the lifetime of many generations. The extolment of and a cynical attitude to the authorities formed a single mass of contradictions that manifested itself in the nicknames of and jokes about despots.
Vladimir Putin came to power as a politician unknown in the world but already famous among the Moscow and St. Petersburg elites. In the very first days of his rule, the newspaper Sovershenno sekretno disclosed the nicknames attached to him in the different periods of his career growth. The past of Mr. Putin as a security officer was associated with such aliases as “Moth,” “Baby Rat,” “Kaputin,” and “Khaputin.” He was known at Anatoly Sobchak’s court as “Stasi” and “Vice-Sobchak,” and after the waste-‘em-all Caucasus operations as “Toilet Putling,” “Ugly Putling,” and “Putler.”
It must be emphasized that, by contrast with Western experts who were tormented with the question “Who is Mr. Putin?” almost until 2009, the witty grassroots saw through him in the very first days of his rule.
A long period of time in power does not, alas, make dictators wiser and softer. On the contrary, each of them becomes more and more suspicious and cruel if he manages to avoid serious maladies. Therefore, the evolution of Putin’s nicknames in fact mirrored his deteriorating moral condition. The unrestrained leader of Russia continued – in his words and actions – to exude loutishness, ignorance, and aggression. He finally began to lie overtly and go back on his own promises. But this kind of behavior is not welcomed even in the dictators’ community. In other words, Putin has overstepped the limits. Accordingly, the public appraisal of his persona has also exceeded the limits of decency in the shape of an unprintable idiom.
In all probability, this is a damning indictment not only to Putin, but also to the whole dictatorial system of rule, as disgraceful as the nickname of an individual who is trying to bring the world in line with his own illusions. He will remain in history with this nickname, and the only question is whether it will be preceded with the word “Bloody.”
