Life in the Kremlin Rules Out Beer Stop

There are moments, speeding around the world’s biggest country in his motorcade, that Vladimir V. Putin secretly yearns to stop the clock and drop into a bar for a beer.

But his entourage is huge and a lot of other people would be kept waiting. No, an impromptu beer for the president of Russia is just not practical.

Putin’s rigid self-discipline rules out the kind of spontaneous gestures that marked the tenure of his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin.

A slick documentary that aired on state television Tuesday marking Russia Day--the anniversary of the 1990 passage of the declaration of Russian sovereignty--seemed designed to show Putin’s informal, human side. Instead it underscored how stiff and controlled the former KGB spy is, never dropping his guard or revealing weakness.

“The people should know that the guy who sits on the very top may make some mistakes, but he is our guy, he acts in our interests, he will not trick us and will not let us down,” runs one typical Putin line in the documentary.

Living like a monarch, Putin says, has its deprivations.

“There is practically no freedom. I cannot go anywhere, I cannot just get out of the car and buy myself a beer,” he complains on film. “It’s the simplest example, but it holds true in all other situations.”

Worthy of Soviet-era propagandists, the film is an adulatory portrait of the Russian president hugging elderly women, drinking champagne with his old German language teacher, sipping juice on his airplane and swimming laps at the end of a long day--then weighing in at 165 pounds.

He was so busy last year, he tells the film crew, that he never once bothered to peek out his Kremlin window to take in the view.

Putin was a shadowy, little-known figure when he was appointed prime minister in the summer of 1999. Even after Yeltsin resigned suddenly that December and named him acting president, the question that arose was “Who is Putin?”

The Kremlin’s public relations machine has answered the question for Russians by churning out images of a judo-chopping, plane-hopping action man--the antithesis of the mercurial, bombastic, unpredictable Yeltsin, who often disappeared from the Kremlin for weeks or months on end.

If Putin tends to come across as dour and humorless, that hasn’t affected his approval ratings, still riding high at more than 70%.

Although the hourlong film is styled as a documentary, all the blunders of Putin’s first year are airbrushed out, including his initial failure to return from vacation when the nuclear submarine Kursk sank last summer, killing all 118 crew members on board.

In the film, his mistakes become virtues: Putin is shown standing on a shore, staring solemnly out to sea, an image juxtaposed with pictures of the Kursk. But if Putin was standing on any beach as the submarine disaster unfolded, it was the shore in the southern Russian resort of Sochi, where he was staying at the time.

The film also covers another mournful day for Russia: the burial in March 2000 of eight of the 84 paratroopers killed in a battle in the separatist republic of Chechnya. The strong suggestion in the film is that Putin attended the service. In fact, he sent a delegation led by then-Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev.

The underlying message of the film is a well-worn Putin theme: the need to push ahead with economic and social changes in order to modernize the country, “otherwise it will cease to exist in its present form.”

Since his election, Putin has curbed the powers of regional governors, pushed through tax changes and waged war in Chechnya, where separatist guerrillas are still fighting an exhausting campaign. He has also pledged military reform, pension changes and land and judicial reforms.

Answering questions for the film team last year, Putin says he has no plans for a second term until he has proved himself to Russians. But at some point, he says, he wants to return to a normal life.

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Alexei Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.