8
“RUSSIA HAS BEEN LIFTED
BACK OFF ITS KNEES”
Timeline
| 1991 | End of the Soviet Union |
| 1993 | Yeltsin forcibly dissolves parliament |
| 1994–6 | First Chechen War |
| 1998 | Financial crisis |
| 1999–2009 | Second Chechen War |
| 2000 | Putin becomes president |
| 2003 | Arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky |
| 2008–12 | Medvedev interregnum |
| 2014 | Annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas; worsening relations with West |
| 2024 | End of Putin’s fourth presidential term? |
Monument to The Defenders of the Russian Soil, Moscow, 1995
© Mark Galeott
Victory Park, in Moscow’s western suburbs, epitomizes how modern Russia is trying to stitch together an identity from the scraps and swathes of its history that it chooses to remember and retain. This monument, for example, unites a medieval warrior of the kind who fought with Dmitry Donskoi against the Mongol-Tatars at Kulikovo, with one of the infantryman who ground away at Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, and a Soviet soldier of the Great Patriotic War. Three moments of national glory, united. And why not? What country doesn’t highlight its triumphs more than its miseries? The reason why it is worth dwelling a little on these three gallant defenders of the Motherland is the ideology for which they stand, which has come to define Russia in its post-Soviet days, a mix of prickly defensiveness and an inclusive nationalist myth of a unique historical mission.
The Soviets never managed to square the circle of how to “out-West the West” without surrendering the ideological myths that had become central to the Party’s rule. Time and again, this held back progress, whether all the research into genetics wasted because the charlatan Trofim Lysenko managed to convince Stalin it was a “bourgeois pseudo-science,” or the KGB’s paranoias about the free flow of information meaning that for years photocopiers were deemed a security risk, or the way that a dogmatic insistence on central planning stifled initiative and innovation. When Gorbachev began to question the established ways, he brought the whole system down. In the process, the carefully curated—which often meant essentially falsified—recent and distant histories were suddenly open to question. Horrific details of Stalinist Terror challenged the heroic narrative of Soviet industrialization, and even the triumph in the Second World War was undermined by accounts of bad generalship and a callous disregard for the lives of soldiers. If anything, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and a tide of recovered truth, debatable opinion and outright conspiracy theory washed away any certainties. Was Lenin really a German agent? Was Stalin a pedophile? Did a UFO crash in the Russian Far East in 1986? Did Gorbachev bring down the USSR as part of a Zionist–Masonic conspiracy?
In the 1990s, Western markets and memes crashed into a Russia that was looking for new truths. Everyone bought into the idea that Russia was finally part of Europe, where it belonged. It did not take long for this assumption to become questioned; Russians who eagerly embraced Western lifestyles (when they could afford it) nonetheless began to regard themselves and their nation as being pushed down and held at arm’s length by a Europe that was happy to welcome Balts and Bulgarians, Slovaks and Slovenes, but not Russians. From this came the postimperial backlash that ultimately brought Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin and in due course Russian “little green men” into Crimea and southeastern Ukraine. It also led to a new effort to construct an identity for the country, to find some meaning in its bloody, wandering journey, and from that a sense of where it should be going.
The Wild Nineties
On midnight, 31 December 1991, the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 new nations, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian Federation. But what was the new Russia? The other states had the advantage of being able to define themselves in terms of what they were not: they were no longer subjects of Moscow. The Russian Federation spanned 11 time zones; its population of some 149 million was 80 percent ethnic Russian but included minorities from Armenians to Ukrainians, Tatars to Karelian Finns. Could it lay claim to the legacies of the Soviet state? Was it a successor to the tsarist empire?
Was this a palimpsest, dense with the half-erased texts of past times, or a true blank sheet of paper? Now was a time for a visionary, a leader with the passion, determination and energy to create a new Russia and bind Russians to this dream. What they had was Boris Yeltsin.
It is easy to be dismissive of Yeltsin, especially as through the 1990s he seemed increasingly to succumb to drink, painkillers, health problems and self-indulgence, presiding over a crash transition to the free market that largely swapped state monopolies for private ones. In a wholesale plunder of the country, entire industries were privatized, for kopeks on the ruble, into the back pockets of selected crooks and cronies. This was the Yeltsin who played the spoons on the head of the president of fellow ex-Soviet state Kyrgyzstan in 1992, who slept through a state visit to Dublin in 1994, and whom the US Secret Service found drunk, in his underwear, looking for pizza on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1995. However, this was also the Yeltsin who had been the face of resistance to the hardliners’ 1991 coup, who had blocked Gorbachev’s efforts to reconstitute the USSR and who, when faced with a recalcitrant Soviet-legacy parliament in 1993, shelled it into submission. That was against the constitution, so he simply had the constitution revised retroactively to make it legal. Then, in 1996, when it looked like the resurgent Communist Party might actually win the presidency, he turned to the oligarchs, the new mega-rich business magnates who had so profited from his free-for-all economic policies, to support him—or, as some would say, rig the election for him.
For most Russians, this was a decade of despair, uncertainty and hardship. While a handful of Russians were becoming immensely rich, most were coping with an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression of 1930s America. More than half were living below the poverty line, a bankrupt health system meant mortality skyrocketed and organized crime ran seemingly unchecked. I remember the shocking sight of lines of pensioners outside metro stations, selling anything they could find to scrape together a few rubles: an old medal, a single shoe, a half-used tube of toothpaste.
When Yeltsin had an enemy, he could be focused, ruthless, energetic; when the state-breaker had the chance to be state-maker, though, it was clear he had no real plan. There was a growing sense that this anarchy could not be allowed to continue. The country was being patronized and ignored internationally, and no wonder when it was so weak. Moscow couldn’t even defeat the rebellion in its southern region of Chechnya, just fight it to an inconclusive draw. By the end of the decade, there were people in and around the Kremlin looking for a successor to Yeltsin. It had to be someone loyal and efficient (and ideally healthy and sober), someone with the determination to reestablish the power of the state, someone who could articulate some kind of vision for Russia. And they found him.
Enter the New Tsar
They settled on a relatively unknown figure, a certain Vladimir Putin. In the 1980s, he had been a KGB officer, albeit not a very distinguished one, but in the 1990s he had returned to his home city of St. Petersburg (the name Leningrad didn’t survive the end of the USSR long) and in due course became deputy mayor. He began to make a name for himself as the henchman of choice, the self-effacing and efficient subordinate who had his boss’s back. When mayor Anatoly Sobchak was about to be arrested on corruption charges, it was Putin who put him on a plane to France. In 1996, Putin moved to Moscow and became deputy head of the Presidential Administration’s Property Management Department, where again he played a key role in keeping everything running and stamping on rumors of official embezzlement.
At this point, his career turned meteoric and, after stints as Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and head of the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB), on 9 August 1999, Yeltsin appointed him first deputy prime minister and, later that same day, acting prime minister. At the end of that year, Yeltsin resigned, making Putin acting president, so that he could campaign in the election that was to follow with all the advantages of incumbency. Putin repaid his debts, though: the very first decree he signed enshrined guarantees for Yeltsin, not least granting him immunity from potential corruption charges, a perk informally extended to his whole family.
Who was Putin, though? A mysterious (mysteriously convenient, some suggest) spate of apartment-building bombings across Russia in late 1999 and the eruption of a new war in Chechnya allowed him to position himself as a tough defender of security and national interests. He offered no clear program but his promise of a “dictatorship of the law” appealed to those tired of the lawlessness of the past decade. He was also, like Yeltsin in 1996, backed blatantly by state and private media alike, and duly won in the first round of the election with 53.4 percent of the vote.
He set about making it clear that the years of drift were over. The oligarchs were faced with a simple choice: accept that they no longer could dictate politics and enjoy their wealth, or pick a fight with the Kremlin and lose. Some left Russia, but the richest oil magnate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, dared to back opposition candidates and complain about corruption. In 2003, he was arrested, charged with fraud and tax evasion and sent to prison, not least as an effective warning to the rest. The Chechens were subdued in a brutal campaign that saw their capital city, Grozny, leveled and a thuggish new local regime imposed. The Kremlin was back in business.
Putin was lucky. The Russian people were desperate for an end to the misery of the 1990s and now they had a leader who was not only sharp and energetic, he had the resources to begin to rebuild the country. The 2000s were marked by dramatic economic recovery: oil and gas accounted for almost three-quarters of Russia’s exports and about half the state budget, and prices were high through the decade. Putin had the money to invest in rebuilding the country’s military, to turn a blind eye to the embezzlement of his own cronies, and enough to spare for ordinary Russians, who got to enjoy an unprecedented level of comfort and security. In essence, he offered a new social contract: keep quiet and stay out of politics and I will guarantee you a steadily improving quality of life. After the shabby decay and spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union and the “Wild Nineties,” this was a deal most were willing to accept.
That said, Putin would not rely on his subjects’ gratitude. Russian democracy, never robust, increasingly became political theater, fake opposition parties and leaders playing their roles without hope or expectation of victory, just to keep up appearances. In Soviet times, the mass media and artists alike had been considered “engineers of the human soul,” as Stalin put it: agents of the Party there to condition the masses into ideological correctness. Under Putin, instead of engineers, the media became the Kremlin’s advertising executives. TV in particular (almost all eventually state-controlled or state-dominated) became the shouty, glitzy, tabloid cheerleader for his regime. In 2004, he romped home with 71 percent of the vote, and although the constitution barred him from a third consecutive term, in 2008 he simply set up his pliant prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, as his proxy president. Putin moved from the presidential offices in the Kremlin to the prime minister’s in the so-called White House, but real power moved there with him. When Medvedev’s term was nearing its end, he dutifully endorsed Putin for president again and in 2012 the two men swapped offices.
Putinism on the Warpath
Meanwhile, Putin’s relationship with the West had been changing. He was always an avowed Russian patriot who believed great power status was his country’s birthright. At first, though, he was willing to be a partner, thinking that so long as he encouraged foreign business into Russia, and backed the USA’s “Global War on Terror,” then the West would treat Russia as a serious player and turn a blind eye to what went on within its borders. Soon, though, he would come to feel betrayed on both counts, and in 2007 delivered a blistering attack on Western policy in Munich, criticizing the emergence of a “unipolar”—US-dominated—world order.
Exacerbated by real and perceived Western slights and challenges, he adopted an increasingly confrontational, nationalist line. In part this was likely with an eye to his historical legacy, as the man who first saved Russia from disintegration and then, as he put it, ensured that “Russia has been lifted back off its knees.” During his reign, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia (2008), annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine (2014), stirred up a civil war in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region (2014–) and intervened in the Syrian Civil War (2015–). It also launched an aggressive campaign of intelligence operations and covert interventions, from a massive cyberattack against Estonia (2007) to the assassinations of enemies and defectors abroad.
To Putin, though, these were essentially defensive responses to Western attempts to isolate and marginalize his country and deny it global status. Support for pro-democracy and anticorruption activists in Russia, criticism of the deaths of outspoken journalists and politicians, and a series of risings against Moscow-friendly regimes in the Arab world and the post-Soviet states—especially the “Euromaidan” protests that brought down a corrupt regime in Ukraine in 2013–4—were all thrown together as evidence of a Western strategy to this effect. While the West became worried about Russian “hybrid war”—the use of subversion and disinformation to spread division and undermine political institutions—Moscow was equally concerned about facing a similar threat of its own.
© Helen Stirling
This nationalist turn made it easier for Putin to articulate a vision for his Russia, and one that he presumably hoped would inspire a people who, since his return to the presidency in 2012, had become increasingly disenchanted, tiring of fake politics, entrenched corruption and a stagnant economy that could no longer buy their tolerance. He plundered all his country’s history freely to create a historical pedigree that also embodied a future trajectory. One of the best representations of this is in the Russia—My History exhibition that was launched in Moscow and then duplicated across the country. In a lively and colorful multimedia display, tsars and commissars, twelfth-century princes and twenty-first-century diplomats, are interchangeably deployed in unsubtle presentation of certain primordial perspectives. Russia, for a start, is strong when it is united, prey when it is divided. A strong state is a moral, patriotic responsibility, and that means subjecting the boyars—or commissars, or oligarchs—to its undivided authority.
Secondly, Russia is no aggressor but a formidable defender—the remorseless spread eastward across Asia, its many conflicts (of all the countries Russia borders, Norway is the only one with which it has not fought a war—yet), the imperial interventions from Nicholas I’s suppressions of European revolutions in the nineteenth century, to the crushing of the liberal Prague Spring in 1968, were simply necessities of defending the Motherland and the natural order. When it pushes back against the West, it is defending the status quo against US-led efforts to force a “unipolar” hegemony over the world. Even the toxic propaganda on state TV, the growing suppression of independent watchdogs and the rejection of international human rights norms and monitors became spun as means of defending the Motherland against foreign interference and the “information war.”
Finally, Russia is not an Asiatic country, nor yet—even though some used the term—a “Eurasian” hybrid. It is European, but proper European. It was Russians who defended Europe time and again, sometimes from enemies without, such as the Golden Horde, at others those within, whether would-be conquerors such as Napoleon or Hitler, or forces of chaos and deviance. In other words, the line is that Russia holds to the true European values at a time when the nations to its west have abandoned them. Its Orthodox faith is the genuine form of Christianity, just as its social conservatism is simply a refusal to cater to degenerate fads and postmodern moral subjectivism.
Putin and History
Of course, one could say much more about Putin. About the sometimes perversely macho public persona, about the distinctive mix of extreme (and sometimes fatal) suppression of some opposition forces and a willingness to permit and even pander to others, about whether or not, when his fourth presidential term ends in 2024, he will retire, find another constitutional workaround to retain power or pick a successor. Yet in the grand sweep of Russia’s extraordinary history, ought he not be treated as just another tsar or general secretary, deserving of a section or two, but no more? To be sure, he deserves full credit for stabilizing the country at home and restoring to it a role, an antagonistic and sometimes petulant one, on the world stage. Yet he has not been as murderous as Ivan (the Terrible) or Stalin (the much more terrible), not as (quite literally) larger than life as Peter the Great. He lacks the coldly ruthless intellect of a Lenin or an Andropov, or the delicate political instincts of a Catherine the Great or Dmitry Donskoi.
That is not to minimize Putin, but to put him in his place. He has certainly tried to shape Russia’s understanding of its history. Increasingly, school textbooks and university courses must cleave to an official version that maximizes the triumphs, and minimizes the tragedies. Stalin becomes a necessary modernizer and a war leader, with the Gulags relegated to the margins. Putin demanded that this new, official story of the country should be something “free of internal contradictions and double interpretation”—as if true history was ever so neat.
He’s not the first to try to dictate Russia’s image and historical record. Dmitry Donskoi had his tame chroniclers, Catherine the Great carefully curated her country’s profile in Europe, and the cult of “Official Nationality” under Alexander III was accompanied by a campaign to muzzle and housetrain pesky scholars who insisted on challenging its precepts. Most strikingly of all, the official History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course, edited by Stalin and released in 1938, was an attempt to reframe events even in living memory. In the next 20 years, more than 42 million copies of the Short Course were printed and distributed, in 67 languages, possibly making it the most widely read book after the Bible.
The point is that none of these attempts worked, not in their true intent of being able to shape the Russians’ understanding of themselves. A palimpsest people and a country with no sharp geographic, cultural or ethnic borders may be all the more eager for national myths that help unite and define them, but they are also that much harder to confine in any one story, “free of internal contradictions and double interpretation.”
Putin absolutely fits within the wider patterns of Russian history, although probably as an essentially transitional figure, neither Soviet nor truly post-Soviet. The USSR was clearly falling behind the West, unable to compete in a new arms race, and its international position was thus increasingly vulnerable. Gorbachev ushered in an attempt to modernize the Soviet Union, which necessarily involved liberalization, and this brought unrest and eventual collapse. To Putin, this was “a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century”—though to be fair, that does not mean he wants to restore the USSR—and it reflected weakness on the part of the government. After the new “Time of Troubles” of the Yeltsin era, Putin has come to see the greater threat coming from domestic weakness—possibly supported by hostile foreign powers—and thus, for all the investment in drones for the military and rockets for orbit, as well as his adventurism abroad, his regime is essentially conservative. He is Nicholas I, holding the line against disorder; Patriarch Nikon, restoring older orthodoxies; perhaps at most Peter the Great, happy to adopt technologies from the West to arm the state and control the elite, but not to reform from below.
Hypertext Palimpsest and Its Ironies
Meanwhile, the palimpsest gains more and more layers of superimposed script. Putin’s own generation, of the Homo sovieticus who was not only born and raised in Soviet times but also had a formative early career years before 1991, is dominant, but it is being challenged by new generations, some shaped by the wild 1990s, some who have not even known a Russia as adults in which Putin wasn’t in charge. There are those who rebel, joining a beleaguered but vibrant civil society, looking West for inspiration and ambitions. Others blend the orthodoxies of Putinism with a hipster cynicism, embracing Russia’s new global status as the international bad boy and putting it on a T-shirt. “Putin: the most polite of people,” reads one, riffing off the Russian name for what the West called the “little green men,” the commandos who seized Crimea. “Isolate us? Yes please!” reads another, along with a McDonald’s logo, LGBT symbol and protest placard, all crossed out with red X’s.
At the same time, things are getting more complex, not less. There is a new, huge mosque in Moscow, near the Olympic stadium, as Muslims from the North Caucasus and Central Asia arrive as both citizens and—especially the latter—temporary guest workers. With them come new influences, from Caucasian restaurants to the vertical Afghan bazaar that has largely taken over the Soviet-era Hotel Sevastopol. Putin had a huge statue of St. Vladimir—Grand Prince Vladimir the Great—erected outside the Kremlin, but he was Vladimir of Kiev, and just as Kiev is now Kyiv, Ukraine is not just an independent country, it is one increasingly looking west, not east. Is Vladimir still Russia’s cultural property? Or is he truly Ukraine’s Volodymyr now? In Moscow’s airports, there are now special passport lanes for Chinese package tourists, and more and more signs are in Chinese as well as English. In the Russian Far East, a flood of Chinese money is reshaping whole cities and regional economies. As one Russian scholar told me of his students, “They learn English because of the heart, Chinese because of the head.”
Nor are all the influences played out in the physical geographies of Russia. The palimpsest is acquiring hypertext, links into cyberspace in which information and cultural influence flow freely back and forth. Three-quarters of Russians regularly use the internet, and they use it as much as the average American. Many get their news online from foreign sources, watch videos from abroad and, as importantly, form online communities that cross borders. From discussion boards to gaming clans, Russians are not just trolls and troublemakers, they are actively engaging in new, virtual fellowships and movements.
The irony is that by defining “his” Russia in many ways in opposition to Europe and the West—challenging everything from its international order to its social values—Putin is, like so many Russian leaders before him, letting the outside world define him and the country. That’s a very commonplace characteristic, though, true of almost every Russian ruler since Ivan Grozny brought Russia into Nordic politics and offered England’s “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I his bloody hand in marriage.
The greater irony is in Putin’s efforts actively to mobilize myths of every kind in support of Russian exceptionalism, the notion that its history grants it a special and heroic role in the world. In this, he is tapping everything from the status of Moscow as the “Third Rome” to Kulikovo. Yet the very effort the Kremlin’s “political technologists” and compliant historians have to put in to trying to persuade Russians that they are a special people, apart from Europe and embattled by its malign cultural and geopolitical forces, demonstrates that they are swimming against the tide.
After all, even the Russians who still revere Putin and quite literally wear the T-shirt eagerly learn English, devour Western films and TV programs, and seek also in their own cultural creations to fit into this mainstream. We should remember that this is a country in which on one side of a street one can see a huge mural dominating a whole facade of a tower block, exalting some great Russian general, and on the other—a surreal experience I had myself—an equally huge mural advertising the release of a Hollywood blockbuster; and not just any blockbuster, but Captain America. Much is made of the transformation of Moscow into a lively, vibrant and beautiful city, but just as St. Petersburg was designed by Europeans, a great deal of this is thanks to Western architects. From the Dutch team remodeling Tverskaya, the city’s premier avenue, to the American DS+R design bureau, creators of New York’s wonderful High Line public park, which defined a huge new green space at Zaryadye, right next to Red Square, the Russian capital is being rebuilt by Westerners as a European city.
Thanks to shared historical experiences and growing cross-national trade, to the internet and Hollywood blockbusters, to cheap package holidays in Spain and Cyprus, and mutual concerns about the rise of China, Russia really is closer to Europe than at any point in its history. Technically, Europe ends at the Ural Mountains, halfway across Russia, but the Europe of the mind rolls all the way to Vladivostok on the Pacific. When surveyed, most Russians agreed with the statement “Russians are Europeans”—but some of the highest figures for this came precisely from the distant east of the country, where “Asian” is not just an abstract concept but an immediate reality.
This is a country with a rich heritage and still vast untapped human potential. It is all too easy to see today’s Russia simply in terms of TV news video grabs: the warplanes over Syria, the riot police in the streets, the self-satisfied fat cats on their top-of-the-range yachts, and Putin, the solitary figurehead of this again-menacing nation. Yet there is vastly more to it than that. Of course, there is the rich cultural legacy, of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, Battleship Potemkin and the Bolshoi, just as its history, for all its goriness, has more than its share of triumphs, heroism and generosities glittering in the darkness. But in many ways, these are the raw materials of the old Russian tradition of seeking the future from the past.
Besides, how many times, after all, can a palimpsest be written over, erased and emended, before you simply have to start with a new page? To quote Marx one last time, “Traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” (Writing as a non-Marxist, it is striking how Russia-relevant so much of his gloomy pronouncements turn out to be.) When does one wake up from the nightmare and move on? This is a country that is far more than the sum of its historical achievements. A new generation of activists and entrepreneurs, scientists and artists, thinkers and dreamers, are consciously trying to find new paths for Russia, not just choosing which old one to walk again. More substantially, when Russians are polled about what they want for their future, their country’s great power status and fear for its security come far down the list. Instead, they crave not just a decent life, but freedoms to speak, organize and protest, an end to corruption and a chance to feel they can have some meaningful impact on how their society is organized—all the freedoms we take for granted in the West. Perhaps, after centuries torn between a desperate desire to be accepted by the rest of Europe and a defiant determination to stand alone, Russia has a chance simply to be itself. After all, the irony of “Europe” is that the centripetal pressures brought about by the European Union, its expansion east and south, and Brexit, all demand a growing awareness that there is no one “Europe.” There is the Europe of Sweden and Germany, but also the Europe of Italy and Greece, that of Hungary, that of the Balkans, and that of the UK. There is room for Russia, if the Russians are feeling willing to come to terms with themselves. Putin and his cohorts may try to persuade themselves—and their people—otherwise, but the notion that they are not becoming more European is the final myth of all.
Further reading: Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (Abacus, 2005) tells the story of the 1990s well through the financial shenanigans of the time. The best takes on Putin are Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings, 2015), on the man, and Anna Arutunyan, The Putin Mystique (Skyscraper, 2014), on the country that bred him. For my own take, We Need to Talk about Putin (Ebury, 2019) distils my thinking about the man into a slim volume. Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (PublicAffairs, 2016) is a brilliant look at all the other people around the new tsar.