Over the past few days, a theory has appeared in Russian-language and Western media and has become the dominant one. It explains Putin’s insane remark about orcas eating polar bears. Its point is that Putin became a victim of AI-generated clips in which orcas chase polar bears.
The mere existence of such clips does not yet tell us that Putin saw them. Between public content and Putin’s information circuit there are intermediaries. It is not possible to establish the degree of Putin’s access to the internet. Both Putin himself and his press secretary have repeatedly denied that Putin uses a smartphone. Peskov did not deny the use of the internet, but he stressed the digest character of the materials that Putin looks at.
The case of the orcas and the polar bears is nothing unique in Putin’s narrative. When Putin starts improvising instead of reading a prepared text or repeating a prompter through a hidden earpiece, his remarks become a display of the consciousness of a feeble-minded person, or of the consciousness of a child. In terms of frequency, the leaders here are absurd and artificial “anecdotes”, which he brings up whether they fit or not, crude and ambiguous sayings, and an equally crude and equally unreliable story about the syphilis of the composer Schubert (2017), as unreliable as the orcas.
With the anecdotes it is hard, or even impossible, to establish the source of Putin’s narrative. In the case of the orcas, and especially of Schubert, there are not so many options.
What becomes the source of Putin’s non-official knowledge is, with a high degree of probability: 1) printed matter, 2) printed matter selected by the people around him, 3) low-grade printed matter.
That is, collections of anecdotes, a significant part of which are of artificial, commercial origin and are not folk folklore at all; entertainment literature, as we shall see in the case of Schubert; and children’s literature, in the case of the orcas and the polar bears.
The trail of the Schubert story is the easiest one to find. It is an “ironic detective novel” by Tatyana Lugantseva, published under two titles, “Куку Шинель” and “Сто грамм для белочки” (in colloquial Russian “белочка” means both a squirrel and a fit of delirium tremens, so the second title reads as “A Hundred Grams Towards the DTs”). A myth about Schubert’s illness is built into the plot, and Putin retells it briefly in 2017. What matters here is the coincidence of the whole false causal chain: failure with women, prostitutes, a venereal disease, death at thirty one. A single mention of syphilis would mean little. Other texts that have been found supply separate elements of this story, but they do not assemble them into the same sequence.
As for the orcas, here we can trace the influence of a literary project for children (Erin Hunter is not a person but a collective label of the London packager Working Partners, best known for the Warriors series, under which a team of authors writes to order). One of its books is devoted to a family of polar bears, and in the plot the bears first hunt seals, and then the mother bear becomes the victim of a pack of orcas. That is, the very food chain, part of which Putin set out, leaving out the obvious moment of the polar bears’ own predation.
Of course, this is only a hypothesis. One can build a whole series of counter-hypotheses. For example, that the source of his strange and insane metaphors is his Soviet-era experience. That Putin in fact has access to the internet and looks at marginal resources, from which he draws his information. That the source is his servants and his bodyguards, and so on. Lugantseva and Hunter as sources of Putin’s narrative do have competitors. But all of them lose to them in the match of details and in the availability of literature of this kind to Putin, while the influence on Putin of the internet and of his everyday entourage remains in the sphere of the unknowable.
And if anyone thinks that Putin reading a children’s book is too bold an assumption, then simply listen to his remark about the orcas and the bears in the original. This is the speech of a child who still puts thoughts together with difficulty and who is strange to the adult world. There is the sound imitation here, and the delight, and the direct instruction that this should be told to others (to children).
Below are quotations from Putin himself and from the two books that could have become the source of his insane remarks.
“Here it is important to speak not only about the music, it is very important to speak about the people who created the works, about the composers who did this, about the conditions in which it was created, and not only our own, but foreign as well. Very many stories, they are so useful, especially for young people. You know Schubert’s fate, don’t you? Schubert. Well, he was quite a young man, he died when he was thirty something, I think. (…)
31 years old. And things did not work out for him with women. So one day he went into the professional female environment, fell ill with a bad disease, and died.”
Lugantseva (2008):
“The time came, and Schubert met his muse, fell in love with the daughter of a rich miller, and came to ask her father for her hand. Do you know what the miller answered the talented young man? That his daughter was rich and Schubert was poor, and that because of the young men who gathered in his house there were rumours that Schubert himself was a man of non-traditional orientation. And the fellow really had had no women, because before the miller’s daughter he had loved no one and had not wasted himself on trifles. After the refusal of his beloved’s father, and by the way she returned Schubert’s feelings but did not dare to disobey her parent, Schubert decided to prove that the rumours about his orientation were only stupid gossip and that he was a real man. He went to a brothel, in those days this was a common thing, and many men frequented such an establishment. There he caught syphilis and died at the age of thirty one.”
V. Putin: Imagine, there are orcas living right nearby, they eat these bears like small fry. They just attack as a pack, boom, and tear them to pieces. It is all very interesting. Yes, yes, such a food chain. Children should be told about this too, so that they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation.
Erin Hunter, The Quest Begins (2010)
“Nisa swam in a circle around Kallik, clawing at the killer whales… the orca smashed into Nisa with their massive heads… their tails slammed into her mother’s body and spun her around… Nisa ducked under the surface and shoved Kallik upward… Her mother was falling, falling away from her… and the fins were closing in… Nisa was still fighting, her claws leaving long gashes in the sides of the killer whales, but there were too many of them. The water that sloshed over the ice was pink now, staining Kallik’s paws, smelling of salt and blood and fear… An orca tail flicked out of the water and slammed into her… Beneath the ice, there was a hollow knocking sound, a roar cut off, the snap of teeth.”
Lugantseva is the stronger source of a ready-made false construction. Hunter is the stronger literary predecessor of the scene and of the food chain built around it. In both cases the direct channel to Putin remains unknown.
Possible competing sources of the narrative are given in two tables.
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