The Return of the Russian Leviathan

HYSTERICAL REVISIONISM

Early in the evening on New Year’s Eve, Moscow was blanketed by a huge snowstorm. The city ground to a halt in solid traffic jams. There stood buses with steamed-up windows, delivery vans carrying presents for the holiday, family saloons and official limousines, yellow cabs and nippy Smart cars. Also stuck were the sinister-looking black cars with their blue flashing lights flanked by four-by-fours carrying their guards, helpless before the raging elements. Pot-bellied policemen in their sheepskin coats froze at their posts on the crossroads, like memorials to time, while little mounds of snow grew on their winter hats. Pedestrians laden down with bags full of presents made their way along the pavements, trying to avoid the snowdrifts, and the fairy lights of the New Year markets continued to twinkle. The streetlights shone brightly on the Garden Ring Road, on Gogolevsky Boulevard children were throwing snowballs, and along Tverskaya Street someone had even made ski tracks.

Above all this New Year hustle and bustle, unseen by the pedestrians, by the drivers and even by the air defence radar, high up in a cloud of snow, Santa Claus raced along with his frisky reindeer. He was hurrying to Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, where the grown-up children of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Parliament, were considering rewriting history. In his boundless sack, among the cuddly teddy bears and the Barbie dolls, Santa was bringing them a law that changed the 1954 Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet about the transfer of Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – a transfer from one Soviet republic to another. And Santa Claus also had to get to Okhotny Ryad, to visit the children of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Parliament, who wanted to change the 1989 Decree of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies of the USSR, which condemned the USSR’s war in Afghanistan.[1] Coming lower over the city, Santa’s sleigh circled and Rudolf’s red nose shone out like a landing light through the billowing gusts of the snowstorm…

The Russian political elite was seized by an epidemic of historical revisionism. Desperate to change something in the gloomy present, suffering humiliation after humiliation (even the annexation of Crimea was to prove a foreign policy defeat, leaving Russia with a problem asset on its hands, placed under painful sanctions by the West and having alienated its closest allies and neighbours), Russia’s politicians decided to play around with the past. The past wouldn’t be able to answer back and they could rewrite their own history. The proposal was put forward to reconsider everything, from Russia’s territorial losses – Crimea in 1954 and Alaska in 1867 (a petition to return Alaska was put by Russian activists on the website of the US White House, but failed to receive the 100,000 signatures it needed in order to be considered) – to colonial wars, such as that begun in Afghanistan in 1979. To justify Russia’s claims, the boldest historical analogies were put forward. So as a basis for justifying taking back Crimea, Vladimir Putin quoted the annexation of Texas by America in 1845. If one follows this route, one could use the genocide of the American Indians in order to justify Russia’s war in Chechnya. Or cite the Spanish Inquisition to show that chasing after ‘foreign agents’ in today’s Russia is not so cruel. Indeed, even deeper historical arguments are possible: as is known, in their summing-up of the case against the art group Pussy Riot for singing a punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, experts in all seriousness quoted the decrees of the Church Councils of the fourth and seventh centuries.

These initiatives by Russian law-makers fit in with the general tendency towards history in our country. History is simply the servant of the authorities, yet another resource at the disposal of the state, along with grain, furs, oil and a submissive population. As they say: ‘Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.’ Generation after generation, like some primitive magic, people believe in the ritual of rewriting history. So in Stalin’s times, schoolchildren blotted out names in their text books and cut out photos of politicians and military leaders who had been declared enemies of the people. And in the late 1940s geographers carefully obliterated German names in what had been East Prussia and was now joined to the USSR, and Tatar place names in Crimea, from which all Tatars had been exiled. So it is now, when politicians naively believe, like children, that if they declare that Nikita Khrushchev (who was responsible for transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954) was an enemy of the people, and if they rewrite the Supreme Soviet Decree, then Crimea will become ours and the international community will recognize this. Why not, then, call Yeltsin an enemy of the people and rewrite the Belovezha Accords of December 1991 about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to re-establish the USSR, for which part of the population and the political elite have such nostalgia?

The fantasy of revisionism knows no bounds. We could look once again at the result of the 1986 World Cup Round of Sixteen match, when the USSR lost 3–4 in extra time to Belgium – I still feel in my heart the pain that this defeat brought. Why don’t we also look again at the results of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5? Or the Crimean War of 1853–6? We could also reassess the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre; and call an international tribunal in which Britain could be charged with putting down the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 in China. The wind of history blows through the heads of the revisionists like the crazy December snowstorm.

…After lunch on 31 December, the Federation Council, working at a great pace, passed the laws on changing the 1954 Decree on the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, the 1989 Decree criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1867 Agreement on the sale of Alaska. Warmed up by their very effective work and talking excitedly, the senators pulled on their coats and got out their cigarettes as they hurried to the exits and their cars, which should whisk them home to their heavily laden celebratory tables. But as they came out onto Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, they felt that something in the air had changed. And on the ground, too – there were no cars waiting for them, no bodyguards, no colourful advertisements shining; on the cold, snow-laden street among the two-metre high snowdrifts stood gloomy, unlit houses with strange sloping roofs. The snowstorm had stopped, the frost had deepened, and the moon shone out from under the low dark clouds. In the distance they heard the sound of horses’ hooves and wheezing, and further down the road they saw a patrol on horseback: horsemen in shaggy caps on squat horses were racing along Bolshaya Dmitrovka, sitting up in their saddles with long bows and arrows…

It happened that after visiting Moscow, Santa Claus flew further to the East, to Kazan and Astrakhan, to Kzyl-Orda and Mongolia, to the source of the Onon River, where some other grown-up children, descendants of another great state of the steppe, had asked him to reassess the results of their own geopolitical catastrophe – the collapse of the Mongol Empire of the great Genghis Khan.

With whoops and laughter, the horsemen disappeared in a whirlwind of snow, much to the amazement of the stunned legislators. In their light cashmere overcoats and Italian shoes, and with their silent iPhones in their hands, the senators stood dumbfounded in the frost. Above their heads the twinkling stars of the boundless Eurasian night shone down with indifference.

THE HOLIDAY OF 5 MARCH

Every year at the beginning of March, Russia experiences a traditional folk amusement, as crazy as it is destructive: the burning of dry grass. Never mind the warnings of the authorities or the appeals of the ecologists, the grass-burning season is open. The coastal region is ablaze, soon the South of Russia will start to burn, then the flames will spread towards the Central Region, destroying tens of thousands of hectares of meadows and forests, whole villages and estates, even taking people’s lives.

Also at the start of March, we give ourselves over to another national amusement, just as pointless and merciless: discussions about the role of Stalin in Russian history. What’s more, the further we get away from the day of his death (5 March 1953) the louder grow the arguments, with explosions of emotion and people foaming at the mouth. Rather like the burning of the grass, arguments about Stalin are yet another variation of our peculiar Russian masochism, when people take pride in humiliation: it would be difficult to find a nation on this earth more ready to dance on the ashes of their own homeland.

This argument is absurd, endless and completely useless. It’s absurd because discussing the role of Stalin is rather like arguing over whether it is worth washing one’s hands before eating or whether you should steal the silver spoons when you’re at someone’s house. There are things one does not talk about in polite society, ethics that are axiomatic; this is not a question of morals, but of hygiene. The fact that we have not experienced de-Stalinization in the way in which Germany has gone through de-Nazification, and that we regularly return to the question of how we should relate to the figure of Stalin, merely bears witness to the archaic, pre-rational and mystical condition of our national consciousness.

The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, spoke about this in his ‘Philosophical Letters’ of the 1830s, asserting: ‘We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.’[2] According to Chaadaev, Russia has no history, no ‘wonderful memories’ like other nations. Russia lives only in the present, its culture is imported and imitative, which is why there is no point of balance in the country. In Russia, Chaadaev writes, what rules is ‘the pointlessness of life, without experience and vision’. And that is precisely why the arguments about Stalin are endless: they take place in a space where there is no historical memory, indeed, with no historical reflexion, just the absurd endlessness of total amnesia.

Finally, arguments about Stalin are absolutely useless, because they are based on a void. Stalin is a simulacrum, a sign without reference, the smoke of a long-extinguished pipe, empty boots standing on a pedestal. And all the different political forces pour their contents into this void: those who support the state talk about Stalin’s modernization (economists have long ago exposed this myth for what it is, showing that Stalin’s economics produced even worse results than would have been the case under the tsar, and much worse than the Japanese in the same period); and they talk also about the Great Victory of 1945 (another myth, this was achieved by the humongous human sacrifice of the Soviet people in order to cover up Stalin’s strategic blunders). The Eurasians talk about Russia’s ‘special path’, which Stalin embodied in the twentieth century. Liberals speak of the Russians’ ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (when hostages begin to identify their interests with the terrorists who are holding them captive). Each group concentrates on its own interests – but they use Stalin as the final argument. And both supporters and opponents end up using the same words, the very same appeal to 1937, the year that was the peak of Stalin’s repressions. ‘Are you an entrepreneur? In 1937 you would have been shot for that’, say one group. ‘You’re stealing from the budget? They shot people for that in ’37’, retorts another. This discussion is not about Russia’s past, it’s about today’s Russia; but the only arguments and language we have are ‘1937’ and mass executions. The country thinks of itself in past categories: we are unable to tear ourselves away from the discourse of Stalinism – it remains our grammar, the language we use to describe everything. A country that is endlessly going round in circles judging Stalin has no future.

Way back in 1984, on the eve of perestroika, the film Repentance hit our cinema screens from the Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze. Naive and honest, like all films of that period, the subject revolved around a single metaphor: the recently buried corpse of a dictator, bearing the characteristics of both Joseph Stalin and his powerful security minister Lavrentiy Beria, was dug up from its grave every night and taken to the home of his son. This is exactly what is happening to us now: for sixty-five years we have been digging up the corpse and dancing around it, with ritual curtsies, curses and declarations of love.

We ought to bury this corpse, drive a wooden stake through its heart, raise monuments to his victims over the whole of Russia, and declare 5 March as a national holiday, the Day of National Salvation. How many lives were spared because Stalin died? How many people were able to return from the camps? In mid-March 1953 the antisemitic ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was due to start (it is rumoured that Stalin had already prepared a list of Jews who were to be sent to camps in the Far East). There was bound to be a new wave of repressions, a new twist in the Cold War, and the paranoia of the dictator who was rapidly losing his judgement could have resulted in nuclear catastrophe. What a joy it is for mankind that Stalin didn’t live to see the thermo-nuclear bomb! And if a national idea is possible for the Russia of the future, then – albeit with a delay of seventy years – this should be de-Stalinization, just as de-Nazification became the idea of post-Hitler Germany.

THE OBLOMOV AND THE STOLTZ OF SOVIET POWER[3]

Nothing stirs up passion in Russia more than the battle for our own past. Taking down and replacing memorials, renaming streets and towns, retouching photographs and wiping out names from history books: these are all part of the favourite national game. Here’s a current example. In Moscow, on the famous House No. 26 on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, they have reinstated the memorial plaque to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. The plaque was up on the wall for ten years after the leader’s death, but was taken down during the anti-Soviet 1990s, and for a long time all that remained was a dark patch and four holes, before the building was refurbished. Now it has been decided to smooth over this historical injustice.

At about the same time as this became known, we learnt that a group of left-wing activists had put forward a proposal to strip Mikhail Gorbachev of the Order of Andrei Pervozvanny, which he had been awarded by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in honour of his eightieth birthday. Social media exploded with the usual abuse directed at Gorbachev, who ‘sold out the country to the Americans’. Sociology confirms that the people have fond memories of Brezhnev, but they don’t like Gorbachev. According to a poll conducted by the Levada Centre, Russians named Leonid Brezhnev as the best leader of Russia in the twentieth century (56 per cent replied positively, 28 per cent negatively). At the other end of the scale, Gorbachev came out top: 20 per cent considered him positively, 66 per cent negatively. It should be remembered, too, that when Gorbachev stood in the Russian presidential elections in 1996 he received only a humiliating 0.5 per cent of votes.

The reasons why the people love Brezhnev are clear. He falls into that archetype of the kindly old uncle, who lets you get away with mischief and gives you sweets. Brezhnev was the very embodiment of the Russia dream of khalyava:[4] living stress-free, changing nothing and not rocking the boat. That was how the country lived: we squandered the interest from the imperial inheritance and took out credit on the next generation (indeed, so generously, that to this day we are paying for the illusory well-being of the Brezhnev years), tearing off with a certain melancholy the pages of the calendar: Miners’ Day, Militia Day, Day of the Paris Commune.[5]

Brezhnev’s popularity in folklore, and even a certain sympathy brought out by jokes about his weaknesses, forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (for example, there is a joke that he once mistook Margaret Thatcher for Indira Gandhi because it said so in his speaking notes), bears witness to the deep resonance he had with the Russian folk element, with the inescapable entropy of the Russian character. Gorbachev, on the other hand, was very untypical for Russia. It is no surprise that Margaret Thatcher immediately liked him. He didn’t drink, he was charming and loquacious (in Russia, people who speak well automatically make people suspect them of being insincere); and the main thing was that he was unusually alive, in contrast to the iron faces that we were used to seeing in the presidia and on the front pages of the newspapers. Gorbachev smashed the stereotypes and had an inexplicable – and for Russia a totally unusual – desire for change. He could simply have sat tight in his chair, perhaps remaining General Secretary to this very day, receiving delegations and awarding himself medals; but for some reason he felt the need to move this chair, and with it the whole power structure. Perhaps it was because he understood that this throne and the whole palace of Soviet power looked like a ridiculous anachronism in a world that was getting faster and more complex, where change was going to be the only way to survive.

In Ivan Goncharov’s classic novel Oblomov (1859), there are two central characters: the dreamy and inactive landowner, Ilya Ilych Oblomov, and his friend, a German on his father’s side, the practical, strong-willed and active Andrei Stoltz. Brezhnev and Gorbachev: here we have Oblomov and Stoltz, two faces of Russian power, the immovable-patriarchal, and the reform-minded, Peter-the-Great-like, clean-shaven, foreign face. Anthropologists confirm that there are two types of nations: those that adapt to their surroundings and those that change them. The first group includes most of the Asiatic countries and, clearly, Russia. The second type are cultures of the West – Faustian, predominantly Protestant, with a thirst for action and change. Brezhnev responded to the traditionalist aspirations of the population: let’s just leave everything as it was. Gorbachev, like many Russian modernizers, represented the second group, which was why he wasn’t accepted by the people. They don’t love Gorbachev because he was different, because he gave us freedom. But we hadn’t known for such a long time what to do with it, and, as a result, we gave it back to the state.

Once again today we are living in Brezhnev’s kingdom of simulation and self-deception, falling into insanity, allowing the years to slip by, years that have already turned into decades, calling up the ghosts of the Stalinist and late-Soviet eras. Putin the reformer, Putin the German, Putin like Stoltz, who presented himself not as a tsar but as a manager (‘providing services to the people’, as he described his role in the 2002 census): all this came to an end in 2003 when he arrested Khodorkovsky. A typical Russian timelessness settled over the country, with the round Botox face of the state above it, which reflects not even Oblomov’s absent-mindedness, but the indifference of a Chinese Bogd Khan, with a desire to change nothing. As the political scientist, Stanislav Belkovsky, recognized: ‘Putin is the ruler of inertia. You can never demand that such a person should move history onwards.’ Under Putin, just like under Brezhnev, the country is simply standing still, while history moves on. How such a situation ends we know only too well.

Brezhnev probably deserves his plaque on the wall. A whole generation grew up under him, and you can’t wipe out that memory. But Gorbachev also deserves a memorial, as a man who decided to make changes. He was the one who first threw open the windows in that great musty henhouse known as the Soviet Union. In the cold light of day, it turned out that the henhouse was built crookedly and awkwardly, and in the ensuing panic it collapsed. The fact that it fell apart was not Gorbachev’s fault; it was the fault of those who planned and built the henhouse in the first place. But Gorbachev’s merit is that this miserable project, which was not fit for purpose, was closed down, and collapsed into a multitude of national stories with the minimum of victims (if, for example, you compare it to the collapse of Yugoslavia), without major wars, uprisings, starvation or nuclear incidents.

Even more important still is that Gorbachev remained a democrat to the end. He didn’t go down the route of authoritarian changes and didn’t stage a Soviet Tiananmen (although a few individual cases of breaking up protest meetings in Vilnius in January 1991 and before that in Alma-Ata in December 1986 and in Tbilisi in April 1989 occurred during his rule). Tanks were brought onto the streets not by Gorbachev, but against him, in August 1991, but they turned out to be as fake and powerless as the dying system that had sent them. Gorbachev has passed into history not as a reformist dictator such as Pinochet or Park Chung-hee, but as a reform-minded idealist. His attempt to preserve the system, by building ‘socialism with a human face’ in the spirit of the Prague Spring of 1968, failed. But paradoxically, that failure cleared the way for the new institutions that followed and in which we live now; it allowed Russia to get in the last carriage on the train leaving for the twenty-first century. Without Gorbachev, there would have been no Yeltsin, no Putin, no post-Communist Russia. At some point, Russia will realize this and put up a monument to Gorbachev, and name streets, schools and airports after him. But that’s not going to happen any time soon. For now, the majority of my fellow citizens prefer to live with the fairytales of kindly old uncle Brezhnev, under whose bushy eyebrows they slept so sweetly.

A BEAR OF A MAN

He was an awkward fellow. He was too big, too bulky, even the sweep of his arms was too wide. And he remains awkward, even in death: awkward for the current leadership (it’s difficult to separate yourself from someone who personally put you in power), and awkward for the majority of the population, for whom (along with Gorbachev) he is seen as equally responsible for the collapse of the greatest country in the world, the mythical USSR. Boris Yeltsin died more than ten years ago, but he remains a figure who worries us, annoys us and bursts out of the frame. It’s as if he’s an illustration to the words of Dmitry in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Yes, man is broad, too broad indeed. I’d have him narrower.’[6]

Yeltsin always had the capacity to surprise us, such as when he criticized Gorbachev at the Communist Party Central Committee Plenum in October 1987; or when he clambered up onto a tank outside the White House during the coup in August 1991; or when, with a weak heart, he danced on stage at a rock concert before the uncompromising presidential elections in 1996. He had a wide Russian nature the size of his personality, and to match it he had the broad scope of his gestures, the energy of a ram; he was sincere in his delusion – and just as sincere in his very Russian ability to forgive and to ask forgiveness, as he did in his final address to the nation on 31 December 1999, when he announced he was stepping down.

We shall probably never agree about Yeltsin, just as sensible Chinese people officially declare themselves about Mao: 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong. We can’t give such a balanced assessment; we can’t reach a consensus for the sake of calm in society and universal harmony. We don’t know the proportions and the half-tones: Russia is a country with a binary, black-and-white way of thinking. In our social and political structures this binary nature inevitably leads to polarization and clashes, to revolution and explosions. That’s why today we are living in a transformer box, in a humming electric field, where all ideas and historical personalities that come within the focus of public discussion lead to instant polarization. We can’t agree about Crimea, or about Ukraine, or about Lenin, or about Stalin, or about gays, or about migrants. Our arguments instantly divide society, splitting it into two irreconcilable camps; they cause splits in families and among friends and colleagues. ‘The Yeltsin Test’ is just such a marker of irreconcilability, a symptom of social schism.

A symbol of this eternal Russian binary nature is the memorial to Nikita Khrushchev in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The work of the sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny, it has black tiles clashing with white tiles. This is exactly how we look at Yeltsin: black and white, no room for grey. For some, he is Judas and an agent of American imperialism; for others, the grave-digger of a rotten state that was ridiculed by the world. For some, like Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the USSR was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’; for others, it was the breakthrough to freedom. There is no middle view.

No one loves grave-diggers, but ultimately we can’t avoid them. By the end of the 1980s an explosion was building up in the Soviet Union; the atmosphere was stifling and fraught with thunderstorms. The thunder roared and the turbulent flow of the nineties cleaned out the Soviet stables and threw us forward onto the banks of the twenty-first century. Yeltsin was that explosion of a man who broke the bounds of the possible. It is no coincidence that one of the nicknames that stuck with him from the time he was First Secretary of the Reginal Committee of the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg was then called) was ‘the Bulldozer’. In reality, he reminded one more of a bear – not the caricature of the Russian bear, but a real beast from the Taiga, clever, threatening, but ultimately the eternally good hero of Russian folktales. There is an almost certainly apocryphal story about how, one summer, the fifteen-year-old Yeltsin became lost in the Taiga with a pair of younger schoolboys, how they wandered around lost for a month, living on berries and roots, before eventually Yeltsin brought them out to their people. He was a powerful beast with a natural instinct for survival, a true ‘political animal’, zoon politikon, in Aristotle’s terms, a mythical totem of the Russian forests.

And even if the victory achieved by Yeltsin over the dying USSR in August 1991 turned out to be only temporary, it did at least give us a breathing space for almost two decades, when we could live with the air of freedom in our lungs. The atmosphere in Russia today is once more stuffy and fraught with thunder, like in the 1980s, but there’s no new Yeltsin visible on the horizon ready to burst out like a ram and break this rotting system; there are no demonstrations of almost a million people on the streets of Moscow, as there were in 1990–1, no nationalist ferment on the edges of the empire. But even if Yeltsin’s energy for change is largely forgotten, we can always remember two of his characteristics which can forgive much: his ability to ask for our pardon, and his ability to leave on time. These are, sadly, lacking among the present leadership.

MAIDAN IN MOSCOW

Unmentioned in official propaganda and half-forgotten by the people, yet another anniversary passed of the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which was carried out by the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP in Russian, made up of certain members of the Soviet government) in August 1991. The only ones to remember it were the liberal media and a couple of dozen of the old democrats, who laid flowers at the monument to the three young men who died under an armoured personnel carrier on the Garden Ring Road in Moscow on the night of 20–21 August 1991. In fact, this event could have become the main holiday for modern Russia – the day of its founding and independence, our Fourth of July or Bastille Day, but the total oblivion surrounding it these days is no less significant.

According to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (Chapter 1, Article 3): ‘The bearer of sovereignty and the sole source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.’ What happened in August 1991 was an act of people’s sovereignty, when tens of thousands of people stood up to the tanks of the coup plotters, took the weakened power into their own hands and handed it to the nascent Russian state. The principal actors here were not those playing at being plotters in the GKChP, who were simply frightened men, nor was it Gorbachev or even Yeltsin. The most important participants were the people, who constituted the real power and legitimized its passing from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. It was the classic scenario of a national-liberation and bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The events of August 1991 and the collapse of the USSR became the basis for a new Russian statehood, and it is exactly from there that the current Russian elite have their beginnings, having received power and property in the post-Soviet collapse. If those August events hadn’t taken place, Putin would now be a retired KGB colonel, living in his three-roomed flat with his dacha and ‘Volga’ car, and today’s oligarchs would have lived out their time in state scientific research institutes, or would have spent long periods in prison for economic crimes. It’s no coincidence that today they all stubbornly criticize the collapse of the USSR and the 1990s, the decade of changes, yet they all got everything thanks to that period, and they are all children of August 1991, products of the semi-collapse of empire.

That August I was in Moscow and spent three days and two nights on the barricades around the White House, the seat of the Russian Supreme Soviet (Parliament), which had become the centre of resistance to the coup. There are two feelings that remain with me from those incredible days. The first is the feeling of the implausibility of all that was going on; it was as if I was taking part in a huge dramatization. I remember feeling this from the first moments of the coup, when I heard the strains of Swan Lake playing on every TV channel (this classic performance by the Bolshoi Ballet was always broadcast at moments of crisis, instead of normal programming), and when I saw the tanks on Manezh Square near the Kremlin to where I hurried from home. The tanks stood around uncertainly, awaiting further orders, and here and there soldiers started to crawl out of the hatches, looking to bum a cigarette off passers-by. Already at that stage I began to feel that this wasn’t for real. On the one hand, there was alarm, tanks, the Manezh, the silent Kremlin towers: in a word, a Soviet Tiananmen. On the other, the tankmen were curious to know what was going on, there was a holiday crowd, children climbing on the tanks: a typical family day out, a real carnival atmosphere.

Then there was the absurd press conference by the GKChP, where some of their leaders were clearly drunk –the Vice-President of the USSR, Gennady Yanayev, sat there with his hands shaking – and the Vremya news programme, where they slipped in a report about what world leaders were saying about the coup and the total confusion in the army and militia. The Soviet Union was falling apart like the cardboard decoration at the end of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Invitation to a Beheading; like Tsarist Russia did in October 1917, which was described so exactly by the philosopher, Vasily Rozanov, in his diary, The Apocalypse of Our Time:

It was made of cardboard, it was false; it didn’t even frighten anyone any more – neither the Lithuanians nor the Americans. Standing on its sanctimonious morality and its cheap vodka, the Soviet Union was dying, just as it deserved, looking ridiculous and funny, in the end not even capable of carrying out a military coup. It was the end of the world as described by T S Eliot: ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’, and it left a sense of absurdity.

But there was another, even stronger feeling across those three days. It was a feeling of happiness, which I experienced in the human chains around the White House, the joy of freedom and recognition. Never again in my life would I come across so many people I knew all in one place: people I’d been at school and at university with; friends and relatives; neighbours and work colleagues; and not only from Moscow, either. It was an evening for meeting people, a gathering place for the Soviet middle class; for people who had grasped the idea of perestroika and who didn’t want at the first shout to go back to Sovok,[8] as they contemptuously called the Soviet Union, back to ill-fitting Soviet suits and communal flats. We still didn’t know at that point what we stood for or who we were with, but we had tasted freedom and we didn’t want a return to the past.

Towards the end of the second night outside the White House, the carnival atmosphere disappeared and was replaced by a sense of alarm. Rumours began to spread that planes had landed at Kubinka military airfield, just outside Moscow, carrying the Pskov Airborne Division, and that they were on their way into Moscow to break up the defence of the White House. There was a call for volunteers to form a human shield across the Novy Arbat Bridge on the further approaches to the White House, and thirty men stepped forward. We stood on the bridge alongside the Ukraine Hotel. It was a chilly, starry night; a light mist rose from the river. We stood tensely looking down the empty Kutuzovsky Prospekt, expecting that any moment we would see the lights of the military trucks carrying the paratroopers. And it was at that moment on the bridge, in the area where I was born and where I grew up, just a hundred metres from my primary school, shivering from the damp or from something else, linked elbow to elbow with my fellows in the chain, that I felt myself to be a citizen of this country. The memory of the place and the feeling of the small Motherland came together with the sensation of history and human solidarity. In the years which have passed since I have never again had this feeling. People who stood on the Maidan, Independence Square, in Kiev in 2004 and 2014 have also spoken about this sensation. August 1991 was truly Russia’s Maidan, where Russian civil society was born, and which gave legitimacy to the authorities at that time.

Morning came. The paratroopers had been stopped by order on the outskirts of Moscow. The mist disappeared, the GKChP members were arrested. On Lubyanka Square, in front of the KGB Headquarters, they pulled down ‘Iron Felix’ – the statue of the founder of the Soviet repressive organizations, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The empty Soviet cartons were carried away by the wind and a real, tough, but free life began. More than a quarter of a century on, it all seems like some ancient fable. The spring of history, pressed down as far as it could be in those days, has sprung back and returned to its normal position. Today it seems that, as a result, it wasn’t Yeltsin who triumphed, but the GKChP: all the democratic gains that were made in the country have been turned back. In effect, a one-party system has been reinstated with the lifelong rule of one man. The economy and society are being militarized, and the country is run by Chekists. All that remains for history to come full circle is to return the statue of Dzerzhinsky – which has been well preserved in the ‘Muzeon’ Moscow sculpture park – to its plinth on Lubyanka Square. Little has remained of that heady sense of freedom from those August days, apart from an internal freedom which it is difficult to take away. But even so, the sense of the absurd and of falsehood has only strengthened.

Falseness is the main thing produced by the actions of the authorities in August 1991 and today. Today’s Russian state is, in essence, as empty and illusory as its hopeless predecessors in the GKChP, who couldn’t even organize a coup d’état. Incapable of carrying out reforms, or even mass repression, all they can do is carry out media shows, like making nuclear threats to the West, simulacra, such as the pirate ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk, and lies, which they throw out onto social networks in the West.

From the point of view of the big picture of history, what is going on today is simply a continuation of August 1991, yet another stage in the long process of the end of empire, which is happening in a nonlinear fashion, through fevers, collapses, amputations and remissions. In the past, it happened by breaking up demonstrations in Alma-Ata in 1986, in Tbilisi in 1989, Vilnius and Riga in 1991 and by a peaceful rally around the White House in August 1991. Today, it is in South Ossetia, a part of Georgia that has been occupied by Russia, and Crimea, which has been annexed by Russia: the empire is dying, painfully and awkwardly. Eventually, a Russian national state should emerge from these transformations, which, like France and Britain, has lived through its post-imperial trauma and is able to live at peace with its neighbours and remember its own roots, including how it was born on the barricades around the White House in August 1991.

A HOLIDAY WITHOUT TEARS

One of my earliest childhood memories is linked to 9 May: I’m drawing tiny leaves on a laurel branch. It was a card for my grandfather in honour of Victory Day. These were Brezhnev’s times, when they started to set in bronze the cult of Victory Day, covering it with decorations, orders and laurel wreaths, hence the branch in my picture. I probably also drew the sun, a red star, and maybe a rather clumsy dove of peace – but I never drew a tank.

I remember marking Victory Day during my student life, the time of perestroika. After 1 May, the city was empty and clean, the lilac was in bloom, the trolleybuses seemed to smile and my feet carried me of their own accord to the Bolshoi Theatre, where they hadn’t yet dug up the old square in front of the building and they were playing wartime music. You could wander among the people gathered there in their parade uniforms, some celebrating, some sad, who each year would get together in ever-diminishing groups beside a board bearing the name of their military unit. It was indeed the ‘holiday with tears in their eyes’, as Victory Day was painfully and accurately described in a well-known Soviet song; we all understood that this was nature passing on its way and we tried hard to preserve in our memory this place and this mood, like distant music, like the fading scent of the lilac.

Over the years the holiday grew bigger, yet there were fewer veterans and fewer tears; until there came a moment, some ten years ago, when I realized that 9 May had ceased to exist for me as a national holiday and had become simply a time for private reflection, of a tatty photograph of a young grandpa in his uniform as a Signals Major, and of his grave in the Khimki Cemetery, just outside Moscow; of a few nostalgic wartime songs by Mark Bernes and Klavdiya Shulzhenko[9] or the film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, about the shooting up of a Belarusian village by the fascists. Probably the point that caused my personal split with the holiday was the St George ribbon (the orange and black ribbon handed out to people on the streets on the eve of 9 May, in the colours of the medal ribbon of the Order of the St George Cross, a Russian military award); or, more accurately, it’s not the ribbon itself but the cult surrounding it, poured out in a flood of banality and jingoism. So today I want to ask the question that the film director Michael Moore asked once of George Bush Jr: ‘Dude, where’s my country?’ And I want to know: ‘Where’s my Victory?’

For Russia, 9 May is the fulcrum of the twentieth century. At one edge there was the War of 1914 and the year of revolutions, 1917, and at the other, 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. But the culmination of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century, the huge sacrifice, the peak of the Soviet Union’s might, from where it began its inexorable decline, was 1945. Victory Day is incontestably the single true memorial day in our modern calendar, as opposed to the newly invented Day of National Unity on 4 November, or Russia Day on 12 June. It is a day that was not invented by the propagandists, but came through suffering, and was paid for in blood. That is why the 9 May celebration is the most exact indicator of the age, the mirror that reflects the history of every postwar generation.

Over the course of seventy years, this holiday has changed radically, depending on the times. Stalin was afraid of the Victory, just as he was afraid of those who had served at the front, the victors. He was terrified that they would reveal his criminal cowardliness in June 1941 (after his faint-hearted disappearance for a week at the outbreak of war, when Politburo members Beria and Malenkov turned up at his dacha, Stalin was convinced that they had come to arrest him); his strategic failures; and the unacceptably high cost of victory. It is no coincidence that at the celebratory banquet on 24 May 1945, in a rush of unexpected openness, he turned down the eulogy being paid to him and instead proposed his famous toast, ‘to the health of the Russian people’, and to their patience, which allowed them to forgive the mistakes and mismanagement by the government and not to overthrow Soviet power. Eight million frontline soldiers, five million Ostarbeiter (Soviet people relocated for work in Germany) and almost seventy million people who lived in territory that had been occupied by the Germans were a dangerous and uncontrollable force for Stalin, especially the frontline soldiers, who feared neither the NKVD nor the Gestapo, and on whom the magic of Stalin’s power – the magic of fear – had no effect. From 1947, 9 May was no longer a public holiday (they made the 1 January a holiday instead), and a new fierce wave of terror was rolled out across the country, from repeated arrests and deportations of whole peoples to a cultural reaction known as zhdanovshchina[10] and a battle against ‘cosmopolitanism’, which simply covered up a campaign of state-sponsored antisemitism. Many victorious frontline soldiers, partisans and people who had been in German prisoner-of-war camps were simply shipped off to the East without even the chance to catch their breath, sent to camps or deported. Once again, just as after the Polish invasion in 1612 and Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the Russian people had risen up and saved their pathetic leaders from defeat – and yet again, they submissively returned to the yoke of slavery.

During Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, many of these people returned, and with them a different, more human memory of the war developed. Moreover, Khrushchev himself was not particularly complimentary of the General Staff, starting with Marshal Zhukov. It is in this period that ‘the Lieutenants’ prose’ appeared, by writers who had been at the front, such as Vasil Bykov, Daniil Granin, Grigory Baklanov and Viktor Astafiev; and the most perceptive films were made about the War, like Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (winners, respectively, at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals). A little later, at the start of the 1970s, the classic Soviet films about the war were made: The Belorussian Station and The Dawns Here Are Quiet. Along with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, Babiy Yar, and everyone’s favourite song, Do the Russians Want War?, based on the words of the same poet, these books and films created a new canon of understanding of the Great Patriotic War, in which two Soviet generations of the 1960s and the 1980s grew up: full of pride and bitterness, humane and peace-loving. For many decades, the Soviet people were repeating like a spell or a prayer: ‘As long as there’s no war.’

With the coming to power of Brezhnev, the 9 May holiday underwent yet another transformation. From the time of the twentieth anniversary in 1965, when for the first time since 1945 there was a military parade on Red Square and a reception in the Kremlin Palace, 9 May began to take on the trappings of a semi-official state cult. Once again, the day was declared a holiday. Memorials were unveiled (in 1967 Brezhnev opened the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beside the Kremlin Wall); veterans found their place in the Party-Soviet system; multi-tome generals’ memoirs began to be published (including those of Zhukov, having been brought back from disgrace); and epic films were made: the genre of memory moved from the lyrical to the epic. According to the historian, Nikita Sokolov, the idea to turn around the popular memory of the war and show it not so much as a victory for the people as a victory for the Soviet system, to show the effectiveness of socialism, came from the chief Communist Party ideologue, Mikhail Suslov. The living memory of the Victory was carefully painted in rosy hues, pouring on the balm of speeches and the concrete of monumental sculptures, such as the intimidating memorial complex at Malaya Zemlya near the city of Novorossisk on the Black Sea, where Brezhnev himself fought in 1943. The whole cult of Malaya Zemlya, puffed up in the 1970s and crowned by the General Secretary’s book, is a good illustration of the talentless propaganda and the folk cynicism it provoked, such as in the well-known joke of the time: ‘Where were you during the war? Did you fight at Malaya Zemlya, or were you just sitting around in the trenches at Stalingrad?’

This dualism of the people’s memory and concrete officialdom carried on through the years of perestroika and into the 1990s. On the one hand, the time of glasnost revealed new facts about the carelessness and lack of talent of the Soviet military leadership. New evidence came to light about pointless sacrifices, and alternative interpretations appeared about the Second World War (such as by the revisionist writer, Viktor Suvorov), which cast doubts on the glittering image of the USSR as an innocent victim of fascism and a defender of peace. On the other hand, the bronze myth grew and strengthened, definitively formed in 1995 by the megalomaniacal and ridiculous Victory Memorial on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow, for the sake of which the hill itself and the park already there had to be razed, thus destroying a legendary place of memory in the capital.

Then Putin’s time began, in which the Victory has been well and truly taken over by the state. In the era of the redesigning of the vertical of power, the Victory has been employed to legitimize the ruling regime. Putin considers himself to be the direct descendant of Stalin’s USSR circa 1945, which held a thirteen-million-strong army in Europe, redrew the map of the world and decided the fate of countries and peoples. The same myth becomes embedded in the consciousness of the population, which feels the burden of post-Soviet ressentiment and experiences the phantom pains of lost empire. The myth about the Victory gives them the opportunity to feel the illusion of greatness, to give themselves a merit to which today’s Russia bears no relation. This is where the endless ‘T-34’ signs come from in honour of the legendary wartime tank, the order of Victory and the slogan in the windows of cars, ‘On to Berlin!’ These are magical runes, which call up the ghosts of the past and give an illusion of strength.

Despite Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which does not allow for any state ideology, the Victory has in reality become just such an ideology, the thought axis of the Putin regime. It is the universal lens that justifies any actions by the state, from repressive laws about ‘the falsification of history’ and ‘insult to the memory’, which block out any public discussion on the topic of the Second World War, to the granting of budgetary resources under the excuse of the anniversary. The seventieth anniversary of the Victory became a repressive mechanism for the state, a means of fighting anyone who has different opinions, a way of mobilizing and indoctrinating the population. This holiday has become its own logic of sovereignty in its higher, exclusive appearance: it is done not for the people but for the state; or, to be more accurate, for a solitary individual.

An even more surprising transformation of the holiday is that the Russian aggression in Ukraine is justified in the name of the Victory: the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbass, and now the Cold War with the West, right up to nuclear threats – in other words, everything against which the Soviet Union fought in 1945. From a symbol of sorrow and memory, the St George ribbon has become the symbol of a fratricidal war, the sign by which the separatists in the East of Ukraine can be recognized. Propaganda has created in peoples’ minds a virtual continuation of the Great Patriotic War in the shape of the war in the Donbass, where the Ukrainians have been given the role of ‘the fascists’; crooks like the field commander nicknamed ‘Motorola’ play the part of the hero-liberators wearing their medals; and the ‘taking’ of the town of Debaltsevo in the Donetsk Region in April 2015 is compared to military operations of the Second World War. Fighters in Donetsk now carry out their own victory parade. The Victory has changed its sign to the opposite side: now it brings not ploughshares but the sword; the incantation, ‘As long as there’s no war’ no longer applies, and the answer to Yevtushenko’s question, ‘do the Russians want war?’ is now affirmative: yes, they do, with Ukraine, America, the West – and to the finish. Thousands of cars are now driving around Russia with a sickening sticker in their rear windows, where the hammer and sickle is assaulting the swastika and with the slogan: ‘1941–1945: Let’s repeat it.’

But behind all these rituals there is emptiness. The principal virtue of Putin’s era is not even the vertical of power, it is not in the repressions or the corruption or the Orthodox renaissance; it is in the imitation of all the institutions, history, memory, power itself. It is in the symbolic order over reality and the individual. And the 9 May holiday has also become a victim of this gigantic falsification. False veterans with fake medals parade the streets – some of them are not war veterans, but veterans of the Communist Party or the NKVD-KGB. The average age of the ‘veterans’ who were invited to Moscow from all over Russia to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Victory was – seventy-three! False posters gaze down from the walls and the billboards, where ignorant designers have illustrated slogans marking Victory Day with pictures from photo collections showing American soldiers, Israeli tanks and even Luftwaffe pilots. On television, they showed coloured-in war films; on the radio, they played songs of the war years being sung under a recording of Russian pop music. The mincing-machine of Putin’s postmodern society has ground down 9 May and produced a sad, half-finished product.

Even the main symbol of victory, the St George ribbon, has become a universal trade mark, which they stick on anything that comes to hand, from sandals to underpants, from bottles of vodka to German beer. The St George ribbon has today become something like New Year tinsel, which decorates everything you can think of in December because the soul simply wants a holiday. Now people also want a holiday, but all they get is an empty gesture, the place for memory becomes a place of contempt. This is probably the harshest accusation one can make against the current regime, which produces only simulations – of democracy, of modernization, of empire, and now a simulation of the Victory. We wanted a historical policy and an imperial myth, but we got banality and pop songs, the slogan ‘On to Berlin’ in the rear window of a Mercedes and ‘veterans of the Donbass’ on the TV screen.

But here’s the paradox: my 9 May hasn’t gone away; it’s always with me. Behind the noise of the holiday, everything becomes clearer: that the Victory is greater than Stalin, Putin, the Kremlin, the Soviet Union; that this huge existential act of suffering and triumph cannot be privatized, neither by the state, nor by its lying propagandists. It belongs to the people, not the state; it’s no wonder that Stalin was so scared of it. We should return the Victory to ourselves as a people’s holiday, a secular Easter – a day of spring and freedom, of pride and dignity, a day to remember the victims and despise those who sent them to the slaughter. This is our day, which nobody has the right to take from us, nor spoil, because it takes place not on Red Square but in the hearts of the people.

WALTZ OF THE URALS CHEKISTS

The corporate New Year party was in full swing. The ‘Soviet champagne’ corks were popping, on the tables there were bottles of Georgian ‘Saperavi’ wine and vintage Armenian brandy, dishes of roast suckling pig and stuffed pike, red caviar in crystal bowls, bunches of grapes hung in baroque fashion over the sides of fruit bowls. From the gramophone came the voice of the legendary 1930s singer Pyotr Leshchenko, and couples swung round the floor in the pre-war dance, the Rio-Rita foxtrot. The Kronos-M creative agency was holding a retro ‘New Year 1937’ themed party in the club on Tverskaya Street in the centre of Moscow. On the invitation, printed on rough cardboard, there were portraits of Stalin and the Chairman of the Soviet government Mikhail Kalinin, a steam engine with a red star, the Spassky Tower in the Kremlin, and four skaters, each with one of four numbers emblazoned on their chest: 1, 9, 3 and 7.

The dress code matched the occasion: the women, with permed curly hair, were in tight-waisted dresses with puffed sleeves; the men had short haircuts, formal jackets and bell-bottom trousers with turn-ups, or they wore the stylized 1930s military uniform. The young account manager, Gennady, looked particularly dashing as an NKVD major: in navy blue jodhpurs with a maroon stripe, his soldier’s shirt with its collar-tabs, and cap with navy blue cap-band, pulled down tightly on his shaven head. With his squeaky Sam Browne belt and his new box calf boots, Gena was the centre of attention. He proposed jokey toasts to ‘vigilance’ and sang in karaoke the popular song ‘The Waltz of the Urals Chekists’; when he popped out for a smoke, he opened his cigarette case and offered everyone genuine ‘Belomorkanal’ papirosi, in a packet the design of which hadn’t changed since the 1930s.

Throwing a rough army greatcoat over his shoulders, he stood in the porch of the club watching the flow of New Year’s Eve revellers going along Tverskaya, lit up by the flashes of the lights from advertisements and traffic lights. Gena’s head was spinning from the mix of brandy and champagne he had been drinking and from the unfamiliarly strong papirosi, and he wandered out onto the pavement under the large snowflakes. The pedestrians were not at all surprised by the sight of a man in jodhpurs, and hurried on their New Year way. A couple of times, taxis stopped, the drivers threw questioning glances at him and then drove off. Unexpectedly, a retro-automobile, a GAZ M-1, pulled over from the flow of traffic, a famous pre-war ‘M-car’, with grilles on the sides of the long bonnet. With a cursory gesture, the driver called him over and Gena, driven by curiosity, wandered over to the curb and sat in the back seat.

‘Where to?’ asked the driver.

‘To see Father Christmas’, Gena joked, ‘in the High North.’

‘As you wish,’ replied the driver, and with a crunch put the car in gear.

Inside the car there was the sickly smell of cheap petrol, like in the country buses of Gena’s childhood, and the young man became carsick. The driver remained silent as the car slowly made its way through the New Year’s Eve traffic on Tverskaya, heading down towards Manezh Square, past the Moscow City Council building and the Central Telegraph. Gena closed his eyes and forgot where he was, but opened them when he heard the clanking of gates. The ‘M-car’ drove through the gates of the huge dark NKVD building on Lubyanka Square. ‘What’s going on?’ he muttered in his half-awake state, but strong hands had already pulled open the door from outside, dragged him out of the car and pushed him into the entrance of the internal courtyard. In front of him, as if in a dream, there flashed past doors, bars, corridors, and featureless grey faces with fish-like eyes. A lieutenant of state security sitting in an office under portraits of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky indifferently wrote down his garbled explanation. On the tear-off calendar, Gena noticed the date: 29 December 1936. They started to search him. When they found his wallet and his documents, the lieutenant let out a whistle and called the captain. For a long time, the two of them examined his Russian passport with the two-headed eagle and the credit cards, the five-thousand-rouble banknote (‘Tsarist money’, said the captain knowingly), and, coming across the three one-hundred-dollar bills, muttered satisfyingly: ‘A spy!’ Next followed the degrading process of a strip search, the examination of the foreign labels on his shirt and underwear, and the first – not yet hard – punch in the face, which made Gena feel as if a salty wave had washed over him.

After thirty-five hours of endless interrogation, beaten, with a broken ring finger from having it shut in the door, sobbing, he signed a confession that he was an agent of a White emigrants’ organization who had been sent into the USSR for the purpose of espionage and to carry out counterrevolutionary terrorist activity. He was sentenced under Article 58, Section 6, to ten years in a labour camp. And in the middle of January 1937, under a hard frost, he travelled in a cold, barred ‘Stolypin’ railway car[11] past Veliky Ustyug, the homeland of Father Christmas, through the Kotlass transit camp, and was handed over to the Ukhta-Pechora corrective labour camps in the Northern Urals.

When he arrived, he was put into a logging brigade. Unaccustomed as he was to physical labour, he was unable to fulfil his daily norm, for which he was regularly beaten by the brigade leader and other prisoners. His fashionable boots were taken from him by the criminals and in return he received ‘seasonal footwear’: foot-cloths and a scrap of a car tyre with a piece of wire to keep it attached to his foot. In the spring he went down with dystrophy and pellagra. He lay for a while in the hospital, and having survived through the summer with the help of vitamins from pine needles and wild onions, Gena returned to the barrack block. He turned into a classic camp ‘wick’ (as they were known, like in a candle), with an unshaven face, a mad look, with the padding falling out of his jacket – his appearance said, ‘just light me now’. The criminals reckoned he had gone mad, so they left him alone. He found it difficult himself to think who he was and who he had been in the past and he simply lived the life of the camp from day to day: from his morning ration of bread with hot water, until his evening skilly, watery soup with soya; his daily bread ration was cut back from eight hundred grams to six hundred, because he didn’t fulfil his norm.

Almost a year passed. It was December 1938. In the camp they prepared for the New Year by putting up a banner that read: ‘In the USSR labour is a matter of honour, a matter of glory, a matter of valour and heroism.’ In honour of the holiday, they turned the dining room into a club, decorating the doors with fir twigs and putting up a poster for a lecture, ‘To the Victory of Communism! The USSR in Eighty Years’ Time’, which was to be delivered by a political officer from Ukhta. On the eve of the holiday, Gena was returning with a group of convicts to the camp through a pathway in the snow that they had cleared by logging; they were dragging through the forest brushwood and kindling for the stove in the barrack block. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but it was already getting dark and the crimson sunset was burning low; as evening approached, the frost was biting sharper. Even after a year, Gena couldn’t get used to the cold, but now to the usual shivering was added weakness and indifference. He looked around and sat down on a large spruce on the edge of the path. The convoy guard was still some way off and before he could run up and strike him with his rifle butt Gena could take a short break.

Gena looked up. Above the tops of the fir trees in the darkening sky shone the colourless, indifferent disc of the moon. He closed his eyes and suddenly he could imagine life under Communism eighty years hence. He saw a huge, well-lit city, spread out like an electric blot, towards which he was slowly descending, as if he were on a parachute. The city came closer and soon filled his whole field of vision. In its arteries there flowed an endless stream of cars, huge coloured billboards twinkled, there were clusters of tall towers with lit windows and, looking closely, he could see crowds of people on the streets and boulevards and strings of lights on the trees. The convoy guard must be close; any second now he would be hit in the stomach, and Gena curled up ever tighter.

‘Get up!’ He felt a careful hand on his shoulder. Gena remained still.

‘Get up, you’ll freeze to death!’ repeated a woman’s voice. Gena opened his eyes and saw two girls bending over him. He was sitting on a frozen bench on Tverskoi Boulevard, under an old lime tree. All around there were trees hung with lights. Gena looked around in amazement. The girls burst out laughing and ran off. All around there was a fairytale light, there were figures of angels and butterflies standing in the snow, Father Christmas and his reindeer, made of strings of lights and being lit up by the flashlights of cameras, as dozens of people were having their photos taken among these models. Gena scooped up a handful of fresh snow and swallowed a few fistfuls. His head was aching, the lights were swimming in front of his eyes, his broken ring finger was throbbing. He got up from the bench and slowly made his way along the boulevard in the direction of the square where the holiday music was playing, the huge numbers 2017 glowed, and it seemed as if Communism had finally arrived.

THE RETURN OF THE GHOSTS

Banknotes sometimes have hidden meanings. If you look at the Russian five-hundred-rouble bill, you’ll see on it a picture of the famous Solovetsky Monastery, a prison monastery with a history going back over many centuries, situated on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, in the North of Russia. And if it’s an older banknote, issued before 2011, then you will see rising over the churches not cupolas but wooden boards. This indicates that it is not the monastery that is shown, but the Solovetsky Special Designation Prison Camp, one of the most terrifying Soviet labour camps, a predecessor of the GULAG[12] system and, indeed, of the Nazi concentration camps, where the inmates were ordered at the end of the 1920s to cover up the cupolas with wooden boards. These bills are still in circulation, knocking around in our hands, our pockets and our wallets, these symbols of the GULAG that hardly anyone recognizes, like ghosts come to visit us from a different reality, from the black hole of our history and our collective memory.

This image is shown in the book by the literary critic and historian Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, translated into Russian from English. A psychologist, literary critic and cultural historian, and the author of such intellectual bestsellers as Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia; Whip: Sects, Literature and Revolution; and Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Etkind writes in Warped Mourning about the practice of collective memory and about the Stalinist repressions in the Soviet and post-Soviet consciousness. He poses what could be the key question for our political history and social psychology: why is the fundamental catastrophe of Stalin’s terror, which befell Soviet society in the very heart of its history – for thirty years, from the mid-1920s until the mid-1950s, and accounting for tens of millions of victims – still not comprehended and conceptualized by our society and our politics? Why have we not rid ourselves of this trauma – named the victims, judged the executioners? And, what’s more, why are the torturers justified in modern historical and political narratives by the self-appointed ‘patriots’? In other words, why is Russian mourning so ‘warped’?

Shortly before his death, the poet Joseph Brodsky expressed his surprise in an interview:

In actual fact, if in postwar Germany the memory of their catastrophe became a point of consensus and the nation united around the slogan, nie wieder, ‘never again’, then in Russia the memory of the repressions divided society into those who remembered and those who chose to forget – or even denied or justified the repressions: ‘Those were difficult times’; ‘But we won the War’; ‘When you cut down trees, splinters fly.’

In Russia there are ‘wars of memory’ around the key events of our twentieth-century history: the revolution of 1917, the repressions of 1937, the Victory over Germany in 1945 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991; but far from uniting people in grief or pride, each of these dates drives wedges between friends, colleagues and family members. In reality, the Civil War in Russia has not let up for a single day but carries on in our collective memory. At the heart of our national consciousness, a black lacuna has formed, a sucking void, which the majority of people manage to skate around. But then occasionally bones rise to the surface, like on the bank of the Kolpashevo River near the Siberian city of Tomsk, where on 1 May 1979 the River Ob flooded and burst its banks, opening up a mass grave of victims who had been shot in 1937. Thousands of well-preserved corpses were washed out; and the local authorities ordered that they be chopped up by the propellers of the river tugs and washed away.

What is the source, what is the anamnesis of this ‘anaesthesia dolorosa’, the insensitivity of our nation to the fundamental trauma of the Stalinist terror? Why is it that Germany could acknowledge the catastrophe of Nazism and carry out the difficult task of self-cleansing, while Russia today is further than ever from comprehending Stalinism? Etkind maintains that there are a few reasons. First, the sheer number of genocides and democides that were caused by Stalinism: from collectivization and the Holodomor[14] in Ukraine, to the deportation of whole peoples (the Chechens, the Kalmyks, the Crimean Tatars, and many others); from the Great Terror of 1937–8 to the antisemitic ‘struggle with cosmopolitanism’ in the last years of Stalin’s life, from 1949–53. The Soviet terror struck at the most diverse ethnic, professional and territorial groups.

Second, there is the absurd suicidal nature of the repressions, the total madness and irrationality of turning the terror against the country. Much research has shown that the terror was ineffective economically (labour productivity in the camps was half what it was among free people), and destructive for the state and national security; the war was won against incredible odds in spite of the terror, not thanks to it. And here there is one more feeling that interferes with the memory: scepticism that such a thing could ever really happen. The historian of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer, wrote that a deep disbelief – a refusal to believe in the reality of what had happened – was a typical reaction to the Nazi terror.[15] And this is exactly what happens with the victims and the witnesses of the GULAG. What’s more, our contemporaries refuse to believe in the reality of Stalin’s terror because it is so absurd and unimaginable. ‘The human brain is simply not capable of imagining the crimes that were committed’, said the writer Varlam Shalamov, who left us the most terrifying accounts of the GULAG in his work, The Kolyma Tales.[16]

The main difference, of course, was that in Germany the criminal regime suffered a military defeat, the country underwent occupation and enforced de-Nazification, which continued for decades. Nothing of the sort could have happened in the USSR, where victory seemed to justify the repressions, which began again with renewed vigour in 1946, and where the regime, with a few changes and modifications, has survived up to the present as the philosophy and practice of chekism, which is considered to be quite respectable these days. Etkind points out how incomplete was Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization programme, because it basically left the ruling elite untouched, making Stalin the scapegoat and removing the question of the criminality of the regime itself. Mourning could never be fully expressed in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia in terms of the structural reasons while there are still people and institutions in power who are the direct descendants of Stalin’s repressions.

As a result, Germany and Russia created completely different types of national memory. In Germany, that memory is ‘hard’ (as it is in France and more generally in Europe), based on concrete objects: monuments, memorial camps and, more broadly, institutions that give a legal and material guarantee that the crimes of the past will not be repeated. But in Russia it is a ‘soft’ memory: personal memoirs, films, works of literature, popular and alternative histories. Most of Etkind’s book is devoted to this ‘soft’ memory about the catastrophe of Stalin’s terror, which is dispersed throughout Soviet and post-Soviet culture. In living, breathing and the polyphonic score of his book, the voices are intertwined with those of the writers Nadezhda Mandelstam and Yevgenia Ginzburg, Vasily Grossman and Andrei Sinyavsky; the philologists Dmitry Likhachev and Mikhail Bakhtin; the drawings from the camps by the artist Boris Sveshnikov and the ‘barrack school’ of art, which grew up in the postwar years in the Moscow suburb of Lianozovo. There is a separate chapter devoted to the films of the director Grigory Kozintsev – Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). This is no coincidence; just as in his tragedies Shakespeare reinterpreted the traumatic experience of the Reformation, so Soviet culture looked to Shakespeare to reflect upon our national catastrophe.

Etkind compares memory to a saline solution: if you don’t heat it and stir it, but gradually saturate it, then at some point it will start to crystallize and memory will solidify as monuments, institutions and moral norms. In Russia, memory is constantly being shaken up, so it’s in a ‘liquid’ state and cannot crystallize. As the author points out, ‘to continue the analogy of the temperature of the solution, a crucial condition for the crystallization of memory is social consensus; a low level of consensus crushes the crystallization of memorials, but strengthens the fermentation of memory among the minority who remember and reflect’. The inability of contemporary Russia to come to terms with its trauma and to work through the mourning for the victims of the GULAG speaks about the desperately low level of social trust, about the atomized society, the social anomie.

This unceasing fermentation of memory overflows in modern Russia in literary texts, oral legends and in narratives of mourning: in the ‘magical realism’ of Yury Mamleyev, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sharov, which Etkind compares with the magical realism of Latin American prose; in the ‘magical historicism’ of the Russian political technologists and propagandists and in the pop history of all kinds of re-enactors and of books about time travellers who turn up in different eras in order to change the course of history.

Back in 1993, the literary critic and, at the time, an adviser to President Yeltsin, Marietta Chudakova, suggested that the writings about the camps by Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman will ‘carry out the function of a Russian Nuremberg Process’.[18] But this didn’t happen. Moreover, the large number of texts and cultural artefacts worked as an overflow valve, and let out the steam of a social discussion. In this sense, we can say that yet again Russia produced first-class culture but poor politics; instead of institutions, memorials or morality, it produced texts, but did not create any guarantees that the terror would not return. Here we have the essence of Russia’s ‘warped mourning’: culturally productive, but politically destructive, producing pathological post-traumatic politics and a divided society.

Unfortunately, the author’s narrative ends at the start of 2012, at the very peak of the ‘Bolotnaya protests’ and the hopes for political change. It would be interesting to continue it to the present and study the Russian politics of Vladimir Putin’s third term in office in terms of post-catastrophic consciousness, to try to understand Putinism as a type of ‘warped mourning’. In actual fact, this is a mimetic secondary policy, founded on a feeling of loss and resentment, trying to justify itself and resurrect outdated historical forms. It is not a new Stalinism (there are neither the economic nor the psychological resources in modern Russia for such a thing), but it is a type of post-traumatic reaction, which Freud called not nostalgia but melancholy, an unavoidable partner of mourning, which causes memory to turn into imagination. The work of the imagination and of ‘magical historicism’ in the rhetoric of Putin’s regime is unusually strong: this is where lie the origins of the cult of the Victory and the battle with imaginary ‘fascism’ in Ukraine and in the West, the mimetic Stalinism of the conservative propagandists, the calling up of the ghosts of the past, from Ivan the Terrible to Marshal Zhukov. Herein lie, too, the reasons for the extraordinary resilience and popularity of this post-traumatic resentment among the masses: people begin to compensate for their own fears, humiliation, loss and lacunae in their memory with the melancholic worry about ‘loss of empire’, and they replace the memory of the repressions with the illusion of geopolitical greatness. In this sense, Putin’s regime, with its unprecedented popular support, is the consequence of unprocessed mourning.

In his conclusion, Etkind quotes Freud: writing after the First World War, he said that if suffering is not remembered, then it will be repeated. ‘If we do not cry for the dead, like ghosts they will continue to haunt the living. If we do not acknowledge our loss, it threatens to return in strange forms; this particular combination of the old and the strange is particularly eerie.’[19] Looking at the post-traumatic landscape of modern Russian politics and culture, we observe exactly that appearance of the eerie, ‘post-Soviet haunting’ – a parade of ghosts, from children in Tyumen in Siberia, wearing the uniforms of the NKVD and standing guard at the new monument to the founder of the Soviet machine of repression, Felix Dzerzhinsky; to the veterans of the Cheka carrying out ‘lessons of courage’ in schools. The neo-Stalinists and the ‘historical revisionists’ create pirate republics in Eastern Ukraine, where they hold trials and shoot deserters and looters, based on Stalin’s actual orders from the time of the Great Patriotic War. The ghost of Stalin appears in films, on posters, tee-shirts, the covers of school exercise books and iPhone covers; columns of Stalinists, like zombies, plod to the grave of their idol on 5 March, the anniversary of his death. You can dismiss this as being mere confusion and delusion; but the bite of a zombie can be fatal.

If there is some way out of this eternal return of the dead, then it is in that very ‘crystallization of memory’, making it concrete in the form of monuments, state decisions and constitutional verdicts. The cancerous tumour of Stalinism, with all its metastases, must be cut out from all the organs of state control; the crimes of the past should be reflected in our history books, in declarations by our political leaders, decisions of the courts, national memorials and labour camp museums. The programme of de-Stalinization and the perpetuation of the memory of the GULAG are contenders for the role of that very national idea that the authorities are constantly going on about.

Without this, our dead will remain unburied, our catastrophe go unnoticed and the Solovetsky camp will slip past unrecognized on the creased five-hundred-rouble notes gradually going out of circulation.

TYRANTS DESTROYED

On a frosty day in Moscow, 26 January 2018, two events took place that should never have happened, but did, nonetheless. In one of the city’s registry offices, an official legalized a marriage between two men, Yevgeny Voitsekhovsky and Pavel Stotsko. They had married in Copenhagen, where same-sex marriage is allowed, and now the official had put a stamp in their passports to say they were married. On the same day, in the Pioneer cinema in Moscow, in front of a full house, they put on the Russian premiere of the British comedy film, The Death of Stalin, despite the fact that the Ministry of Culture had revoked the screening licence. And even though these two events were not connected, for a split second it seemed as if the system had crashed and treacherous cracks had appeared in it.

Sitting in the packed hall of the Pioneer, I realized that cinema really is art for the masses, and no downloads or DVDs can compare with watching a film with a live audience. There was laughter in the hall from the very first scene, in which the pianist Maria Yudina (played by Olga Kurilenko) plays Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto, accompanied by an orchestra. In the film, the audience have already started to leave when Stalin demands a recording of the concert – and it transpires that they haven’t made one. The terrified sound director chases the audience back to their seats to try to ensure that the music and the applause sound exactly the same as in the original concert. Even given the absurdity of the situation, who can vouch for such an event not happening in those times, when heads would roll for a misplaced comma in a text or the wrong note in a music score? And when the conductor is knocked out after banging his head on a fire bucket and another conductor is sent for (looking for all the world like Gennady Rozhdestvensky), the second conductor, hearing the nighttime knock at the door, resignedly gets up, bids farewell to his wife, in passing, instructing her to disown him during interrogation, and makes his way towards the staircase in his dressing gown. Is this a black comedy? Or is it a reflection of reality? Especially in the light of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Noise of Time, where, after a crushing article in Pravda, Shostakovich is expecting to be arrested at any moment, and so every evening he shaves, gathers his belongings in a small suitcase, and goes out to the stairwell, so that his arrest won’t bother the family.

The whole film is like this: it isn’t just buffoonery, but a higher form of comedy, à la Chaplin, probing, where behind all the jokes and the gags we can see the black abyss of being. The director, Armando Iannucci, is well known for his political satires, such as The Thick of It, or the mockumentary based on it, In the Loop, and he doesn’t try to hide that he is filming a farce: there is no point in trying to find absolute historical accuracy in The Death of Stalin (deliberately, the crowds on the streets are caricatures – grandmothers in headscarves, bearded muzhiks; the Commissar of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, indulges in pleasures with schoolgirls in the basement of the Lubyanka, amidst the sound of shots and shouts of, ‘Long live Comrade Stalin’) – and the facts were not exactly as presented (for example, Marshal Zhukov wasn’t in Moscow at the moment when Stalin died). But the film is loyal to a different, deeper, truth: it mercilessly reflects the spirit of the times, where fear was mixed with the absurd, and laughter with death. The film is not realistic, but it is truthful, in the same way, for example, that Shakespeare is truthful. The Death of Stalin is very accurate in its assessments: again and again, it is clear that humour can reveal the essence of the era and the characters much more accurately than a historical reconstruction or a costume drama. Perhaps the best example of this was Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, which was banned not only in the Axis powers[20] but in the USSR, too, because Stalin didn’t like it.

For all the grotesque, operetta-like qualities of the characters, they have been drawn with deadly accuracy: the weak-willed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgy Malenkov; the Jesuitical People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, betraying his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, seven times in one day; the maniacal Commissar for State Security, Lavrentiy Beria; the conceited Marshal Georgy Zhukov; Stalin’s heir, Nikita Khrushchev, who, under the mask of being a country bumpkin is really a cunning schemer. Then there’s the rude, mistrustful, cruel and lonely Stalin, suffering a ridiculous and ugly death, lying in a pool of his own urine. Each of the masks has its own authenticity and depth, but above all they are hopeless, incorrigibly ridiculous, confusedly turning in a ritual dance around the corpse in their baggy trousers, trying to hide with party slogans their Darwinian struggle for power and for their lives.

And it is in this sense that this film probably presents the greatest threat to our current leadership. It’s not just that it’s a funny film; it’s because we are used to our leaders being portrayed as great, frightening, even helpless (as in Alexander Sokurov’s film, Taurus, where the dying Lenin was shown) or abhorrent (like in Alexei German’s picture, Khrustalyov, My Car!, about the last days of Stalin’s life) – but never funny. The myth of Stalin in all its parts – apologetic, critical, statist, liberal – can’t cope with coming up against British humour. It flies into a tantrum before Monty Python. In Russia we’re not used to speaking in this way about those in power. We’ve never had a television series such as Yes, Minister! or Absolute Power with Stephen Fry, or Iannucci’s other comedies. The legendary show Kukly (‘Puppets’ – a clone of the British satirical programme Spitting Image), remained as a programme of the Yeltsin era, having run aground with the series Little Zaches: The Story of Putin from Beginning to End; Putin found it insulting.[21] Laughter takes apart the very foundations of power, removing its sacred nature and its secret; it shows up human weakness, chance and meaninglessness. Laughter is the Achilles heel of power, which Vladimir Nabokov understood well in his pamphlet Tyrants Destroyed: ‘Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous.’[22]

The present leadership’s fear of Iannucci’s comedy is twofold. On the one hand, Stalin’s myth lies at the base of Russian power as an indulgence, as the state’s ultimate monopoly of violence, deeply ingrained in the collective subconscious; however anyone in the ruling elite relates to Stalin, they know instinctively that laughing at Stalin is the most painful spot for the authorities. But on the other hand – and this is even more important – in the depth of their souls they suspect that they are just as grotesque and just as funny, and when the inevitable change of leadership happens in the Kremlin there will be exactly the same scampering around like cockroaches and tragicomic scenes. Just as it was sixty-five years ago, so now the only political institution is the body of the leader, and the question of succession is spontaneous, not predestined, and there will be just such a furious ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, as Churchill allegedly described it so accurately.

Incidentally, the local failure of the system that took place on 26 January was quickly put right. The police turned up in the Pioneer cinema and the film was hurriedly stopped. As for the young men who had had the stamps put in their passports at the registry office confirming their gay marriage: the police paid a visit to their flat. When they didn’t open the door, the director of communal services shut off their electricity and Internet, and the Interior Ministry cancelled their passports and fined the men for ‘spoiling’ them. When journalists turned up at their flat, they found miserable policemen on the staircase, who complained that they had had to sit in ambush all night, and in the morning they were having to go off and break up an opposition rally… The absurdity of these events is even stronger than the films of Armando Iannucci; and we watch these farcical comedies about ourselves every day of the week.

RUSSIAN RESENTMENT

One of the more surprising metamorphoses of the mass Russian consciousness in recent years has been the pathological fixation with Ukraine. The average Russian knows all about the confectionery business of the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, and about the hairstyles of the politician, Yulia Timoshenko; they are better informed about the results of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine than they are about the elections for their own Duma. And they can go on for hours about ‘the Ukrainian fascists’ and ‘the Banderovites’ (followers of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist in the first half of the twentieth century), which they’ve heard all about on Russian TV. People talk about how, after watching news on Russian television about Ukraine, the middle-aged and older generations are so wound up that they rush about the house spewing out curses about ‘the Kiev junta’. It is now a sort of ‘Ukraine mania’, a mass psychosis among Russians, brought on by watching propaganda on television. Ukraine has become the mental training ground of the post-Soviet consciousness, where people work up their hate speech, techniques for making an image of ‘the Other’, and ways for mass mobilization of the population.

Such an unhealthy fixation with a neighbouring country bears witness to a deep post-imperial trauma. Ukrainians were too close to us, too much like us, for Russia to allow them simply to slip away quietly. For a quarter of a century Ukrainian independence was looked on as some sort of mistake, a bit of a joke – the very word nezalezhnost, Ukrainian for ‘independence’, was usually said in Russia with an ironic accent. Russians accept Moldovan, Tajik, even Belarusian independence perfectly calmly; but they can’t accept Ukrainian independence. And we’re not talking here about imperialists or nationalists, but about the vast bulk of the educated classes, who look on Ukraine as some sort of banana republic, while trying to conceal a deep resentment against this stupid ‘little brother’ who brazenly tore up their blood ties. Even the poet, Joseph Brodsky, failed ‘the Ukraine test’, cursing our neighbour in his famous poem, On the Independence of Ukraine. Rather like Alexander Pushkin in the nineteenth century, with his anti-Polish ode, To the Slanderers of Russia, Brodsky, the dissident and idol of the liberal intelligentsia, revealed the depth of his wounded great-power consciousness, which he took with him to America from Russia, along with his memories about the imperial greatness of St Petersburg.[23]

Nevertheless, there is more to this jealous Russian attention towards Ukraine than simply nostalgia for the empire. Britain and France also experienced post-imperial phantom pains, but in these countries no one compared themselves to their former colonies. In Russia’s case we can talk about a much deeper psychological mechanism – about symbolic compensation, the transfer and projection of our own complexes and frustrations onto the symbolic figure of ‘the Other’. The well-known Russian sociologist, Boris Dubin, spoke about this in April 2014, just after the annexation of Crimea:

Boris Dubin described here a classic condition of resentment, without actually using the word. In a state of resentment, it is usual to have a feeling of enmity towards the one whom you consider to be the cause of your misfortune (‘the enemy’), a helpless envy, an awareness of the futility of trying to improve one’s status in society. This is a continuation of an inferiority complex, which by way of compensation forms its own moral system, refusing to accept the enemy’s values and placing on him all the blame for your own misfortunes.

The understanding of resentment was first raised by Friedrich Nietzsche in his work, On the Genealogy of Morality. According to this German philosopher, ressentiment (resentment) is the defining characteristic of the morals of slaves, who are a lower race and incapable of historical activity or of altering the conditions of their own lives. According to Nietzsche, ressentiment reveals itself in the slave revolt:

In other words, resentment is the slave’s hatred for everything that looks to him like freedom.

Nietzsche was writing about ressentiment in 1887, but the word came up again a quarter of a century later, shortly before the First World War, in 1912, when Max Scheler, a German Lutheran who was converting to Catholicism, wrote a monograph about it. A man with a tragic outlook on life who committed suicide in 1928, he had a foreboding of the approaching disaster and effectively predicted the ‘Weimar ressentiment’ in postwar Germany, which produced a figure like the unsuccessful architect and artist, Adolf Hitler. Hitler (like the unsuccessful seminarian, Stalin) is a figure from Dostoevsky, an angry and vengeful ‘underground man’ straight out of Notes from Underground, or the lackey Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov, who falls greedily upon the heights of power. It is no coincidence that in his essay Scheler refers to examples from Russian literature:

Russia is a country which displays classic resentment. On the one hand, century after century it has witnessed various forms of class slavery, from serfdom to the Soviet propiska (permission to live in a particular city). This state slavery affected not only the tax-paying population, but even the privileged classes, including the nobility, who were obliged to the state through titles, estates and their very lives, not to mention those engaged in industry and trade, whose ownership of property was always relative, dependent on the whims of the state. In such conditions, people begin to feel offended, they sense that they are unwanted and their talent unappreciated, and figures such as the ‘superfluous man’ emerge, like Eugene Onegin in Pushkin’s poem of the same name, and ‘the underground man’ from Dostoevsky’s tale, thumbing his nose at the crystal palace of the rational world order. And it’s only a small step from here to the terrorists and bombers, to the frightening Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoevsky’s The Demons.

On the other hand, for more than three hundred years, if we count from the time of Peter the Great (or almost five hundred, if we start with Russia’s first encounter with the technology of the gunpowder revolution at the time of Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’), Russia has jealously copied the West, from time to time rebelling against this imitation. This phenomenon of constantly trying to catch up with modernization while continually lagging behind the world leaders in the basic socioeconomic indicators (Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the USA in the twentieth and twenty-first) is a fertile breeding ground for resentment in the foreign policy sphere. Russia either sees itself as Cinderella, unfairly forgotten by the evil stepmother and the ugly sisters, or presents itself as a nation sacrificed, which puts itself on the line to save the world from destruction, be it from the Mongol hordes or the fascist tanks.

The early twentieth-century Russian philosopher, Vasily Rozanov, pointed out on a number of occasions this sense of Russians as being victims. He compared them to the Jews, who also have a strong sense of being a people sacrificed. It is no coincidence that conspiracy theories are so developed in Russia, as are fantasies about ‘worldwide behind-the-scenes deals’, which have been hatching plots against our country for centuries. But all this amounts to nothing more than variations on the theme of resentment, which all comes from the inability to change the external conditions of our existence, and from our inability to catch up with the West and overcome our own provinciality. This impotence expresses itself in the demonization of the opponent and in the creation of a dreamt-up reality, where Russia stands alone in opposing the rest of the world.

Russia in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a classic example of where resentment has become state policy. One of the main propaganda myths of the Putin era that began to spread almost in the first few months after Putin came to power was the ‘theory of Russia’s defeat’, beginning with the lamentation about the collapse of the USSR as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, going right through to the similar meme about the ‘evil nineties’. A sensible way of looking at it was that the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union (in contrast, for example, to the explosive collapse of Yugoslavia) was not a defeat for Russia but a new opportunity for it: it had retained its principal territory, its population, its nuclear potential and it was considered as the successor state to the USSR. Yet it had thrown off the costly ballast of empire, it could complete the transition to the post-industrial state, and it could align itself with the Northern Hemisphere’s richest nations. Strictly speaking, the active part of the Russian population, including all the ruling elite and President Putin himself, used this opportunity successfully. In the early 2000s, Russia came to terms with the crisis of 1998,[27] and, capitalizing on the windfall created by the weak rouble and rising oil prices, doubled its GDP, joined the World Trade Organization and cooperated with the USA in the war on terror. However, at the same time the myth was constantly repeated for domestic consumption about the geopolitical defeat, the humiliation and plundering of Russia by global liberalism and its henchmen: President Boris Yeltsin and the architects of the economic reforms, the Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, and the Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais.

The idea about defeat and the feeling of offence against the reformers and the world outside became a convenient excuse for the lack of social progress and the parasitism of the Putin era, and it tied in well with the deep Russian tendency towards resentment. As the modern Russo-American philosopher Mikhail Iampolski has remarked:

Modern Russian resentment divides into two levels. On one level, political commentators and analysts who support the state have skilfully constructed the idea of ‘the humiliation’ of Russia by the West: the political scientist, Sergei Karaganov, talks about ‘the creeping military and economic and political expansion that has been going on for almost a quarter of a century into the areas of Russia’s vital interests, which is in effect a “Versailles policy in kid gloves”, which has brought out in a significant part of the elite and the population of the country a sense of humiliation and a desire for revenge’.[29] In fact it seems that a totally contradictory process has taken place: over the course of twenty-five years the West tried to integrate Russia into its institutions, proposing privileged conditions for partnership with both NATO and the European Union, at the same time as this ‘humiliated’ elite was rushing to spend its oil dollars on Western real estate, citizenship for their families and education for their children. But Russia as a whole didn’t make use of the open window of opportunity, instead chanting the mantra about being offended and humiliated and inflating NATO’s war in Kosovo in 1999 to the level of a universal catastrophe. Operation ‘Allied Force’ (the NATO codename for the military operation in Kosovo) was indeed a rushed, poorly thought-out and not legally justified action; but it wasn’t aimed directly at Russia, and, what’s more, this mistake by the West certainly does not give Russia the right the build a foreign policy on the principle, ‘The West can do it, so why can’t we?’

Vladimir Putin’s thinking on foreign policy, judging by his speech at a session of the Valdai Club in Sochi on 24 October 2014, is constructed totally on the paradigm of respect and humiliation:

The expressive string of words such as ‘taiga’, ‘bear’, ‘shoe’ and ‘missile’ indicate how important for the Russian president are such ‘male’ concepts as ‘respect’ and ‘authority’. According to this logic, the West did not show the necessary respect; it failed to answer Russia’s openness to cooperation after 9/11, when Vladimir Putin was the first world leader to declare his support for George Bush and offered him a global partnership in the war against terror. As Igor Yurgens, an economist, lobbyist and a man with many years’ experience observing the life of the Kremlin, noted: ‘Both Putin and his close circle had a feeling of humiliation and betrayal on the part of the West (at least, that’s how it looked to them).’

The breaking point, it seems, was in autumn 2004: first there was the terrorist action in Beslan, where Chechen fighters seized a school, taking around a thousand children hostage, for which President Putin unexpectedly blamed certain forces behind the terrorists who wanted to snatch Russia’s ‘juicy morsels’, clearly meaning the West. Then there was the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in the winter of 2004, when the Kremlin directly blamed the USA for apparently aiming to weaken Russia by tearing away from it its key partner. Putin’s stubborn reluctance to see the real forces and processes that had led to Beslan and to the Maidan (the collapse of the neopatrimonial regimes in the Caucasus and in Kiev, which Moscow supported), and his desire to blame everything on the intrigues of the USA, is typical resentment: an attempt to transfer his own misfortune onto the figure of an external enemy.

On the other level, there is enormous resentment on the part of wide sections of the population who have been unable to adapt to the new reality of the market economy, or to the global flows of finance, information, images, migrants or technology, and who take out their anger on the Russian liberals and reformers. Many political parties expressed the views of these layers of society, from the Communists to ‘A Just Russia’ (a political party), but most of all over the past twenty-five years they have been represented by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which captured this Russian resentment precisely, with its slogan, ‘For the Russians, for the Poor!’[31] In this catchy slogan, postulated as an axiom, no one stops to explain why the Russians are poor and how they are poorer than, say, the Tajiks, the Moldovans and all the other fellow partners in the post-Soviet transit. Before our very eyes the discourse of offence becomes the dominant one in the social sphere and it becomes a particular genre of Russian politics.

In Brezhnev’s times, a joke did the rounds about Soviet man’s sixth sense: ‘the sense of deep satisfaction’, a cliché used in the propaganda, which he was supposed to experience when he became familiar with the details of a regular congress of the Communist Party. Now it seems that the basic instinct of post-Soviet man is a sense of the opposite kind: deep offence at the outside world.

In the public discourse, there are special groups in whose name offence is created, such as, for example, veterans. It appears that veterans (and not only war veterans, of whom there are very few left, but veterans of labour, the Communist Party or the KGB) form a group with particular reactions, in whose name it is convenient to label and to judge everything. Another offended group is the ‘Orthodox community’, which sees its role as calling out blasphemy in shows, be it Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in Konstantin Bogomolov’s production in the Moscow Arts Theatre, or Jesus Christ Superstar in Rostov. This choir of victims was recently joined by representatives of the siloviki: the security guards at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour experienced ‘moral suffering’ when they witnessed Pussy Riot’s performance.

Soviet speech practices have returned with a vengeance. The authorities have recreated the Soviet practice of orchestrating outraged public opinion: ‘Inhabitants of Tolyatti Against a Memorial to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’; ‘Veterans of Novgorod Offended by the Programmes of the Dozhd[32] television channel.’ This is typical collectivization of speech, the creation of a collective body with its sacramental phrase, ‘I haven’t read Pasternak, but I’m outraged!’, which comes from the times when meetings were held attended by thousands of Soviet citizens to judge the author of Doctor Zhivago, even though they hadn’t actually read the book. This is the body of society that speaks through the mouths of veterans, guards, loyal representatives of the arts and trained journalists at President Putin’s press conferences. A whole class of professional offended people has emerged, which under the impression of ‘speaking for the people’, transmits the will of the ‘owners of the discourse’ and, in doing so, becomes an effective instrument of repression, the pervasive censor of the collective unconscious.

Spreading the discourse of offence, in practice the state cleans the public arena; like a virus, resentment is self-perpetuating in society and produces new prohibitions, taboo subjects and groups of offended citizens. Officially, the regime is not involved; it simply formulates ‘the will of the people’, expressed in various ways through hysteria, denunciations and collective letters – but in reality it moulds this will then goes on to manipulate it.

The myth about Ukrainian fascism grew out of the state’s teenage complexes, the elite’s childish disappointment with the West and the social infantilism of the population. The resentment demanded an object for symbolic revenge: after twenty years of having a go at Gaidar and Chubais, people had already tired of that; the opposition protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011–12 had already been broken up; America was a long way off; and then suddenly there was the Ukrainian Maidan, the mass protests on the Maidan (Independence Square in Kiev; ‘Maidan’ means ‘square’ in Ukrainian) in the winter of 2013–14. For the second time in ten years, Ukraine was daring to ignore its big brother and was trying to tear itself away from the paternalistic paradigm on the way to a bourgeois-democratic revolution and European development. The answer was consolidated Russian resentment, in which the frustrated ambitions of the Kremlin merged with the jealousy of the Russians. Ukraine was declared a traitor, and its treachery was even more offensive because the Ukrainians were supposed to be the Russians’ blood brothers, the closest of all in the Slav family. In accusing Ukraine of treachery, there were clear echoes of the ressentiment of the Weimar Republic and the Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory),[33] which was popular in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; this time it was a European ‘stab in the back’.

The invention of ‘Ukrainian fascism’ was a diabolical triumph for the political technologists, who managed to create the myth about the ‘Banderovites’ and the ‘punishers’ (a reference to the German squads that carried out reprisals following Ukrainian partisan activity during the Second World War) and suggest it to the government and the vast majority of the population through television. For some years now, the whole of Russia, including President Putin, has tended to live as if in an endless TV serial, a parallel reality, where fascists march around Kiev, where Ukrainians, not Donbass rebels, shoot down MH17, and where the West sponsors the ‘Maidan’ revolution, planning to bring Ukraine into NATO and to position the US Sixth Fleet in the Black Sea.

Typically, the use by Russian propaganda of the image of fascism as a synonym for absolute and final evil is the ultimate dehumanization of the enemy. In the Russian discourse, fascism represents the universal value of ‘the Other’; a whole new Russian identity is built on the ideology of the victory over Nazism. An ontologization of the conflict with Ukraine is taking place, making it the struggle of absolute good against absolute evil. And according to Nietzsche, here is where ressentiment creates its own system of values, ‘the moral of the slaves’, which says ‘no’ to everything external and foreign. Mikhail Iampolski remembers the French political philosopher, Étienne Balibar, who described ressentiment as ‘anti-politics’: ‘Anti-politics is not just the result of the crisis of statehood, it is also the product of Nietzschean ressentiment, which has its roots in the inability to act positively. As Nietzsche believed, everywhere we have only pure negativity, a reaction to the resistance of the outside world.’[34]

Russia’s war in Ukraine is an example of anti-politics, of pure negativity, based on a feeling of personal loss; compensation both for the elite’s inferiority complex in relation to the West, and the people’s loss concerning the conditions of their own life. The state can’t change Russia’s role on the international stage with the help of ‘soft power’ or quality economic growth, and it cannot achieve respect or recognition from its partners. The vast majority of the population, trapped within the framework of the class system that Putin has restored, is also unable to break out from the bounds of state paternalism (in reality, class slavery) and social parasitism, a syndrome of trained helplessness. The symbolic compensation was the creation of a dreamt-up enemy in the image of Ukraine and dreamt-up victories: the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the pirate republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. But from the broader point of view, the popular slogan ‘Crimea is ours!’ and the actual seizure of southeast Ukraine became ‘the march of the losers’. This is the final parade of the forces that have suffered an historical defeat in the battle with globalization. They have lost in the clash with the open society and with the mobilization of citizens, with the Internet and with the European Union, with modern art and the financial markets, with ‘soft power’ and with complex structures. Crimean resentment is a contract of the state with a critical mass of people who are unable to adapt; it is an apology for weakness, the defensive reaction of a fading nature, an historical dead-end.

The irony of the situation is that these dreamt-up resentful offences become real. Russia called up the ghosts of confrontation so zealously that, as a result, it was put under sanctions, which are having a negative effect on the economy and the standard of living. Russia’s geopolitical specialists scared us so wonderfully with fairytales about NATO expanding into Ukraine that, as a result of their paranoid politics, they turned Ukraine into a hostile country and obtained a decision by NATO to widen its military presence and set up permanent bases in the Baltic States. And Putin took offence against the West over such a long period and so demonstratively that the West eventually answered him in kind, turning Russia into a pariah state. Resentment is a vicious circle, which gives rise to hostility all around: as the saying goes, ‘one who takes offence hurts only himself’.

The only prospect is of Russia’s inevitable collision with reality, healing itself of its empty ambitions, imagined offence and its inferiority complex, and coming to terms with its status as a mediocre country of average income. Lord Skidelsky described these perspectives in an article, explaining the idea that there will be no world war with the West for resources, and that the West’s only wish is to see a stable and non-aggressive Russia, even if it has an authoritarian government. All that remains is to hope that Russia’s recovery from its post-Soviet resentment does not prove to be as tortuous and bloody as was Germany’s healing process to recover from its Weimar ressentiment.

THE FLOWER REVOLUTION

A strong wind is blowing across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge and a snowstorm is swirling all around. Spring is a month late coming to Moscow, as if agreeing with the authorities’ decision to switch Russia to ‘permanent Winter time’: in October 2014, President Putin ended the practice of the country changing over to summer time. In March, the frosts set in, it snowed again, and this April night it’s as cold as winter. Heavy snowflakes are swirling around in the spotlights above the walls of the Kremlin, over the Spassky Tower – which is covered in scaffolding as it is being restored, and looks like a grim gigantic ziggurat – and over Red Square, beyond which, like a phantom, the shining lights of the GUM shopping arcade are visible. At one o’clock at night the bridge is empty, there are neither cars nor people, and only around the improvised memorial at the spot where Boris Nemtsov was murdered is there a group of volunteers, protecting the memorial from hooligans and vandals. This people’s memorial made out of fresh flowers has already been destroyed a few times by unidentified workers wearing plain clothes, from the city’s street-cleaning department, and by hooligan pro-government activists – but every time that has happened the memorial has sprung up again and people have continued to bring flowers, posters, portraits of Nemtsov and Russian flags, which have once again become the symbol of the opposition movement, just as it was when the USSR was collapsing in 1991.

The opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot on the bridge by Chechen killers on the night of 27 February 2015; the motive for the assassination, according to the ruling of the court, was because he had insulted Islam. But most people in Russia are in no doubt that this was not a religious but a political murder, linked to Nemtsov’s opposition activity and his harsh criticism of Putin. Today the memorial to Nemtsov is a genuine Via Dolorosa, a road of grief, covered in a carpet of carnations, which runs along the last route walked by the politician, from the start of the bridge to the spot where he was murdered; here a pyramid of flowers stands. Day and night people bring bouquets, some even order large baskets to be delivered by the florists: the bridge is covered in baskets with hundreds of roses. On these cold spring days, the flowers on the bridge have become a citizens’ protest, and it’s no joke that they have frightened the authorities, who don’t know what to do with this spontaneous memorial. Right in the centre of Moscow, underneath the walls of the Kremlin, a symbolic war with flowers is taking place: a war between winter and spring; between fear and hope; between the state, ashamedly hiding away behind the backs of the street-cleaners, and the buoyant urban class.

Why is the state so afraid of these flowers? There’s a number of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that they are a ghost of the ‘colour revolutions’, which started in the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal in April 1974. According to the legend, it began when one woman from Lisbon placed a carnation in the barrel of the rifle of a soldier standing in front of her. It was the season for carnations, and people started handing out flowers to the soldiers. An almost bloodless military coup successfully took place on 25 April 1974, which put an end to one of the last dictatorships in Europe. After that, within a year, the Franco regime in Spain had ended, as had the Colonels’ Junta in Greece. Thirty years later, flowers returned to politics: in the wake of the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia (2003) came the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine (2004) and the ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan (2005). Recent years have witnessed attempts at ‘colour revolutions’ in Belarus, Uzbekistan and Armenia. It’s more than likely that these have been exaggerated by journalists, but fear opens eyes wide, and ‘flower paranoia’ has firmly settled into the souls of post-Soviet autocrats.

Second, the history of spontaneous memorials is a battle for the city’s space: who does it belong to, the state or the citizens? The whole of late-Soviet and post-Soviet history can be presented as a process whereby civil protest has taken over areas in Moscow, from the demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands on Manezh Square and at the Luzhniki Stadium in 1990–1, and from the protests and scuffles around the White House (at the time the home of the Russian Parliament) in 1991 and 1993, to the years-long battle with the ‘Strategy-31’ opposition movement behind the Mayakovsky statue on Triumphal Square on Tverskaya Street. The ‘Strategy’ movement was rallying for the right to demonstrate seven times a year, on the thirty-first day of each month of that length, thus carrying out the freedom of assembly guaranteed by Article 31 of the Russian Constitution. Demonstrations in 2011–13 widened the geography of the battle: now it included Chistoprudny Boulevard, Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt, as well as the Garden Ring Road, which, in February 2012, protestors turned into ‘the White Ring’, creating along it a living chain made from white ribbons, the symbol of the opposition. In moving around the city, these protests have been creeping ever closer to the Kremlin, and the murder of Nemtsov on 27 February 2015 unexpectedly and visibly placed a bloody spot and created a place of memory right alongside the walls of the Kremlin. The fifty thousand people who went in procession to the place three days later in the March of Remembrance didn’t just pay their final respects to the murdered politician; they also threw down a challenge to the people behind these walls, whom they considered to be either directly or indirectly linked to the killing.

And third, the story with the flowers on the bridge is a battle for memory, which in recent times has become the scene of the sharpest political confrontations. ‘The Memorial Era’, the arrival of which was declared by the French historian Pierre Nora, turned out in Russia to be an unprecedented attack by the state on the historic memory of the nation, a vociferous battle with ‘falsifiers’ and ‘vilification’, the censoring of intellectual discussion. The country is presented with an edited version of Russian history, which is simply a chronicle of victories and accomplishments in praise of the state, in which there is no place for victims, human suffering or the question of responsibility for the crimes of the regime – from the Stalinist repressions of 1937 to the shooting of the Polish officers at Katyn in the spring of 1940; from the invasion of Prague in 1968 to the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In exactly the same way, the propaganda wipes out the memory of the newest victims of hatred, the political murders of the past thirty years: the journalists Dmitry Kholodov and Vladislav Listyev, Yury Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya; politicians Sergei Yushenkov and Galina Starovoitova; the editor-in-chief of Russian Forbes magazine Paul Khlebnikov, and the Chechen human rights’ defender Natalia Estemirova; the secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko, and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. This roll-call of martyrs can be continued, and Boris Nemtsov is simply the latest, and perhaps the best-known, victim on the list. But each of these cases has in common the state’s desire not to allow any public reaction.

They started to trample on Nemtsov’s memory within the first few hours after the tragedy: in the words of President Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, Nemtsov was ‘little more than an average citizen, and he didn’t represent any political threat’; the Duma demonstratively refused to honour the memory of Nemtsov with a minute’s silence (only the deputies Dmitry Gudkov and Valery Zubov stood up); no member of the leadership, or any high-ranking city official, attended the memorial service or the funeral. In the same way, the sweeping away of the flower memorial on the bridge by anonymous cleaning staff and hooligans from the patriotic movement SERB[35] (they are the ones who vandalized Nemtsov’s grave in the Troekurovsky Cemetery, throwing away all the flowers and portraits that had been placed there) bears witness to the fact that the state is afraid of the people’s memory. That fear also led to pressure being put on the largest clubs and open spaces in Moscow so that they would refuse to hold a concert with some of the biggest names in Russian rock music in Boris Nemtsov’s memory on the fortieth day after his death.

The story of the flower memorial continues. And if the ghost of the ‘colour revolutions’ lives on only in the frightened heads of the inhabitants of the Kremlin, or still stalks places far away from Russia, if the authorities can win the battle for the city only by administrative bans and police barriers, then they have already hopelessly lost the battle for memory. The meme ‘Nemtsov bridge’ went viral on the Internet, a memorial plaque was put up on the house where Nemtsov lived, a movement is growing to name a street in Moscow after the murdered politician, and the memorial on the bridge has already been firmly established in the Moscow topography of protest. They can ban it and put a permanent police guard on the bridge – but if they do, people will simply take their flowers elsewhere, or to a third place: there are many places in Moscow linked to Boris Nemtsov. Perhaps they could ban the sale of flowers in the city (which, incidentally, the Russian authorities are more than capable of doing…). The paranoia surrounding the clearing away of the flowers and prevention of the concert from taking place, and the agreement of the leading figures in the state to remain silent, all indicate that Nemtsov was far from being ‘an average citizen’. The state fears him more after his death than they did when he was alive – which only goes to show the size of his personality and the significance of Nemtsov as a figurehead.

WHO’S AFRAID OF SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH?

The inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, simply couldn’t have imagined what sort of bomb he was placing under the Russian mass consciousness when he introduced his Nobel Prize for Literature. Of the five Russian language laureates of the twentieth century – Ivan Bunin in 1933, Boris Pasternak in 1958, Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 and Joseph Brodsky in 1987 – four of them were persecuted in their motherland. ‘White Guard’ Bunin;[36] ‘Anti-Soviet’ Pasternak; ‘Traitor’ Solzhenitsyn; and ‘Parasite’ Brodsky: their Nobel Prizes were seen in the USSR as a political provocation, leading to them being defamed in the press and judged by the masses (Brodsky was slightly less affected by this than the others, since the Soviet era was already ending). If we add in the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to the dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1975 and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, a year before the collapse of the USSR, then we see a very clinical picture: instead of being proud of its laureates, on each occasion Russia rejected them, united not by joy in the country’s achievements, but by hatred for the West. Or, more precisely, by an eternal paranoia, a conviction that the outside world is doing this simply because it is plotting against us.

In this sense, the Nobel Laureate for 2015, Svetlana Alexievich, is in worthy company with authors who are recognized by the world but indignantly rejected by their own country. Yes, she’s actually a Belarusian writer born in Ukraine, but her books tell of our general Soviet and post-Soviet experience, about the merciless millstones of the empire, so therefore she belongs also in equal measure to Ukrainian and Russian history and culture – and the offended attitude towards her in Russia shows that she is considered to be one of our own, but an apostate who is washing our dirty linen in public.

Why do the indignant Russian ‘patriots’ denounce Svetlana Alexievich? On the whole, there are three objections: first, they say, she is hardly known in Russia; second, they attack her because, they say, what she writes ‘is not literature’ (it’s documentary prose); and, third, their main objection, is that she is a ‘Russophobe’, who plays up our problems and ‘does PR on someone else’s grief’. All three of these accusations indicate one thing: Russia does not like, is unable and is simply afraid to talk about its traumas. And it is, namely, the trauma and memory that cannot be expunged of the tragedy of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century that comprise the overriding theme of Alexievich’s books, and she has chosen the cruellest and most uncomfortable genre: documentary prose, where you can’t hide your pain behind fiction. If Flaubert called himself ‘the pen-man’, then Alexievich calls herself ‘the ear-woman’: she listens to the noise of the street and picks out the voices of people and their personal stories. Her mission is to testify (in the high, biblical sense); she is here in order to speak about the trials and tribulations of the individual. Alexievich herself spoke about this in an interview she gave to the magazine Ogonyok:

Alexievich’s gift for compassion is indicative of her Belarusian roots. ‘I was traumatized from childhood by the subject of evil and death’, she acknowledges, ‘because I grew up in a postwar Belarusian village where this was all anyone talked about. We constantly thought about it.’ Lying as it does at the crossroads of wars, and suffering from the wheels of history more than anywhere else, Belarus created its own particular culture of memory, encapsulated in the books of the writers Vasil Bykov and Ales Adamovich: as the Belarusian poet, Vladimir Neklyaev, noted, if all of Russian literature came out of Gogol’s Overcoat, then Alexievich’s art comes from the documentary book by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, Out of the Fire. The Belarusian gaze of Alexievich is the anti-imperial vaccination of humanity for our common culture, the best representatives of which, from Pushkin to Brodsky, were often blinded by the temptation of empire.

Her works are a catalogue of the tragedies of Soviet and post-Soviet history: the Great Patriotic War (the books War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face and The Last Witnesses, respectively about women and children in war); the war in Afghanistan (Boys in Zinc); the Chernobyl disaster (Chernobyl Prayer); suicides in the transition period of the 1990s (Enchanted with Death); and the problem of post-Soviet refugees (Second-Hand Time). Her books are uncomfortable, her observations ruthless and passionless, like the tale about the single mother from the Stalinist year of 1937 who, when arrested, asked her childless girlfriend to look after her daughter. The friend brought the girl up, and when the mother returned from the camps after seventeen years and asked to see how her daughter had turned out, it emerged that it was the friend who had denounced her, because she dreamt of having the daughter for herself; unable to cope with the reality of this, the mother went and hanged herself. Alexievich has hundreds of similar stories, which she pushes, like needles, into the most painful spots – areas not normally talked about in Russia.

The ‘Alexievich problem’ for Russia is not political, nor psychological; and it certainly is not because of her imagined ‘Russophobia’, or the political preferences of the Nobel Prize committee. It’s in the deep complexes of the Russian consciousness, which cannot talk about pain and cannot cope with the experience of trauma. On the whole, the subject of pain is taboo in Russia. Suffering is something internalized, which people try to deal with inside themselves or possibly in a very narrow family circle, but it is never brought out for public viewing. It is not normal in Russia to talk openly about pain. Often, if people happen to hear by chance about an illness from someone they’re talking to, they’ll wave them away, as if they are afraid of being infected: ‘Oh, don’t offload your problems onto me!’ Topics such as cancer, disability or deformity are as taboo as they always have been. People will collect money to help, but often that is simply a way of buying one’s way out of someone else’s pain, a magic spell. The Russian mass consciousness is archaic and superstitious. We hear, so frequently: ‘Don’t demonstrate other people’s illnesses on yourself!’, or ‘Don’t talk about illness or you’ll go down with it!’

Because of this superstitious horror in Russia, the experience of the collective trauma of the twentieth century has never been openly discussed: the Revolution, famine, the GULAG, the war, evacuations, deprivation. In many families, younger generations learn about the repression of their relatives only by hearsay; at first people kept quiet out of fear, then this became habit: the less we talk about frightening things, the sooner we’ll forget about them. Eighty years on, this experience has not been assimilated into our culture or the mass consciousness, nor have the witnesses – conversations about the repressions, incredible in their moral blindness, go round in circles: people seriously argue about whether they were justified or whether the evidence of them has been exaggerated. Varlam Shalamov’s books, with their terrifying accounts of what went on in the camps in Kolyma, stand like a solitary monument to the side of these discussions: people are too scared even to come close to them.[38] In the same way, people are afraid to touch on the subject of the famine in the Volga Region in the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–3, or the siege of Leningrad – there was hysterical reaction in the media after a single question (which wasn’t even approved!) on the Dozhd television channel as to whether it was worth the cost of one and a half million lives to hold onto the city.[39] Any attempt to discuss the victims or the human cost of the victory is cut short by the strict internal censor of the Russian mass consciousness.

In exactly the same way, the experience of Russia’s colonial wars in the twentieth century hasn’t been brought out, from Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, to Afghanistan in the 1980s and Chechnya in the 1990s. Compared to the way in which the Americans have agonized over Vietnam – with thousands of books, films, eye-witness accounts – Russia hasn’t even begun to pick over the bones (in 1992 in Minsk, veterans of the Afghan War even brought a political court case against Alexievich for debunking the heroic myth about the war in her book, Boys in Zinc). The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, was right when he wrote two hundred years ago that Russia is a country without a memory, a space of total amnesia, a virgin understanding of criticism, rationality and reflexes. All our state narrative, family histories and individual experiences are built around a huge emptiness, a lacuna, a minefield. We prefer to tread safe paths with pat phrases and generalities: ‘Those were difficult times’; ‘It was tough for everyone.’ The Second World War, Afghanistan, Chernobyl, people’s broken destinies – they all flare up briefly in the newspapers and are instantly forgotten by society, pushed off into the silt at the bottom of pain. The same is happening today in the conflict in Ukraine: it seems that the fate of the paratroopers from Pskov, the tankmen from Buryatia or the special forces troops who have disappeared in the anonymous battles of the nonexistent war concerns only the opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta; society has already forgotten about this war and now watches with fascination the clips produced by the General Staff about the bombings in Syria.

This inability to accept, discuss and comprehend trauma leads Russia to an endless cycle of loss. In the same interview with Ogonyok, Alexievich asks the eternal question:

And here she is stating one of Russia’s deep secrets: all too often, sacrifices are simply pointless. For what did tens of thousands die from cold, hunger and beatings in the now abandoned coal-mines of Vorkuta, or lie buried beneath the sleepers of the useless ‘railway of death’ from Salekhard to Igarka in the Far North? Why did tens of thousands of civilians perish in the first Chechen campaign in 1994–6, which was so ineptly lost by Russia; or in the equally senseless and helpless war in the Donbass today? The people remain silent, the state refuses to comment – and the victims are merely a footnote.

Suffering in Russia is supposed to have its own value, which fits in with the Orthodox line (‘Christ suffered and so should we’, as the Russian saying goes), and with the centuries-old tradition of slavery, reverence before the Leviathan of the state, disdain for the life of a single person, and the endless patience that has been elevated to a state-approved virtue: remember Stalin’s famous toast at the Victory banquet on 24 May 1945: ‘To the patience of the Russian people!’ The experience of this state-sanctioned suffering does not carry across into social action, but does come out in certain cultural forms: in the well-known Russian sense of longing (toska), in the boundless Russian song and in the depths of Russian drunkenness (usually, all three at once). But there is also the endless Russian self-irony: as the writer, Viktor Pelevin, puts it, ‘the cosmic significance of Russian civilization is in transforming solar energy into people’s grief’.[41]

Svetlana Alexievich breaks this cultural convention of violence by the state and suffering by the people, and the sanctification of the victim. She violates what is taboo as well as the etiquette of our speech; she is the awkward witness who spoils the blissful picture in the courtroom, which has already been agreed by the judges, the prosecutor, the accused and the victims themselves. This is why the ‘patriots’ and the guardians of the state myth are so afraid of her books. And it’s why Alexievich’s Nobel Prize is so essential for Russia – it’s not politics and it’s not literature: it’s a therapy session, an attempt to teach society to listen and to speak about pain. Like the impassive witness, John, in the Book of the Apocalypse, Alexievich says to her readers: ‘Come and see.’[42]

THE PRIVATE NUREMBERG OF DENIS KARAGODIN

Russian state propaganda has found yet another enemy. It is thirty-four-year-old Denis Karagodin, a philosophy postgraduate student at Tomsk University, who undertook a private investigation into the shooting by the Chekists in 1938 of his great-grandfather, a peasant called Stepan Ivanovich Karagodin, with the aim of naming and condemning those responsible for the murder. One might think that there would be nothing special in Karagodin publishing the names of all those responsible for his great-grandfather’s murder, since all of them are dead and the case has been long closed on the time principle. Surely the information would have only academic and archival interest, and no legal consequences? However, the haste with which the regime’s propagandists set about hounding Karagodin illustrates that his action struck a painful chord and scratched a weak link in the machine of violence.

The peculiarity of our situation is that violence is anonymous, an inherent part of the state, accepted in society like some kind of constant in Russian life; it’s inescapable, like the cold winter. The names of the members of each troika were anonymous (‘people’s courts’ of three people); and the names of everyone who took part in the firing squads, the names of the investigators and the snitches (stukachy, as they call in Russian those who denounce others, from the verb stuchat, ‘to knock’), are all hidden away in the KGB archives. In the USSR after 1956 there was an unwritten agreement according to which the victims of Stalinism were rehabilitated in exchange for anonymity for those who carried out the terror. The KGB carefully censored any information about the repressions; the names of the investigators and denouncers were removed from all the personal details of the victims; relatives received the files with pages either glued together or torn out. They considered that the very act of rehabilitation was sufficient for a person to be satisfied: you were still alive (or had been shot but had had your good name returned), so thank God; could you expect anything more from our state? In conditions of a permanent borderline situation, of a choice between life and death, the state not having shot you began to look like the greatest good.

‘I’d like to name you all by name’, wrote Anna Akhmatova, in her poem Requiem, a powerful witness of the Stalinist repressions, but her dream was merely to name all the victims; Akhmatova wasn’t talking about those who carried out the repressions.[43] During the period of rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist repressions under Khrushchev, the NKVD investigators were called to account; but in practice only a few individuals were punished. On the whole it was limited to administrative responsibility – being fired from their posts or losing their pension or their rank. According to the evidence uncovered by the historian Nikita Petrov, under Khrushchev no more than a hundred people were declared responsible. Under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the whole process was stopped. There were a few cases when incriminating evidence against individuals was published, such as about the investigator Alexander Khvat, who tortured the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, or about the Head of the NKVD Komendatura (Commandant’s office), Lieutenant-General Vasily Blokhin, who personally shot between ten and fifteen thousand people, but these were individual cases and there were no legal consequences. The executioners and the investigators and their victims continued to live side by side; they would bump into each other on the street or in queues and sometimes even went drinking together (there is the famous case of the writer Yury Dombrovsky, who spent ten years in the camps doing just that with his investigator). In the space of anonymity which was ‘the Soviet people’, there was a yawning great black hole right in the centre named ‘repressions’; but everyone carefully went around the edge of this lacuna, from official government reports to private family histories, where this matter was diligently covered up.

Moreover, this conspiracy of silence became a guarantee that the terror would continue. In the same way that the flywheel of the Stalinist repressions worked anonymously, so the pursuit of dissidents continued anonymously in Brezhnev’s USSR, using the machine of ‘punitive psychiatry’. Nowadays we come across the anonymous violence of the law enforcement system, where torture has become the norm. But only isolated cases come to light thanks to social networks, like the tortures that took place in the ‘Dalny’ police station in Kazan, where a man arrested for being drunk on the street was raped to death with a champagne bottle; or the case of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died while in a detention centre because he was refused medical help. But hundreds of other police stations, detention centres and prison camps remain places of totally depersonalized violence, just like thousands of Russian homes, in which daily – hourly – women become the victims of domestic violence. (Officially, up to forty women die every day in Russia from being beaten, but no one knows how many deaths are covered up by medical staff and police putting them down to other reasons.) But this violence is considered normal; it remains unnamed and anonymous, it’s not usual to talk about it or tell the police, and now, in any case, it’s been decriminalized: according to a law passed by the State Duma in 2017, beating people close to you when it’s inflicted for the first time is not considered a crime. But cases do become known through social media, such as one recently in the city of Oryol, where the police refused to help a girl but promised ‘to register her corpse’ when she was killed – within half an hour the man she lived with had beaten her to death.

In Russia, violence is the socially acknowledged norm, the way to solve problems and define relations, the way to act between the authorities and the people, between men and women, parents and children, teachers and pupils. This is precisely why we need to prevent violence from being automatic and anonymous – it should be called what it is, attributed and judged. Our society is growing up and is beginning to speak about violence. Not so long ago the flash mob ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ appeared, when Russian women for the first time in their lives spoke about the sexual violence and humiliation they have suffered. Then there was the scandal of the elite School No. 57 in Moscow, when the names were revealed of the teachers who, over the course of many years, had been sleeping with their female pupils. And finally we had the fearless philosopher from Tomsk, Denis Karagodin, who, having spent four years digging in the archives of the KGB to find the names of those responsible for sentencing and shooting his great-grandfather in 1938, received all the names and established the name of each member of this criminal group who took part in the murder, from the driver of the car that went to pick him up when he was arrested, to the NKVD typists and all the way up to the People’s Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov, and Stalin himself. The names are declared, the chain of silence is broken and the Mafia omertà (code of silence) is removed from society.

The Russian culture of violence stands on two pillars: the right of the strong and the silence of the weak, and the second is no less important than the first. Remember how everyone pounced on the women who spoke out about rape and harassment: they themselves were the guilty ones! They shouldn’t have provoked their attackers! In the same way, for years a conspiracy of silence was woven around the prestigious Moscow school, for fear of spoiling the corporate etiquette of the capital’s intelligentsia. And even more important for understanding the complexes and fears of modern Russian society is ‘the silence of the lambs’ before the executioners, the lack of desire to raise and discuss the issue of the Stalinist terror. Immediately after Denis Karagodin’s posts on the Internet with the names of the killers, there followed replies saying that there was no need to stir up the past and rock the boat. The former Duma deputy, Alexander Khinshtein, who had links with the siloviki, wrote in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that he had only good words for the NKVD forces and he poured criticism on those ‘who wish to divide our recent past into black and white’.[44] The journalist Natalya Osipova, writing in Izvestiya in a column under the typical title of ‘I fear justice’, also seemed to be afraid of disclosure, repeating the favourite thesis of the Russian propagandists of the postmodern era: everyone has their own truth, their own version of reality, their own list of who’s guilty and their own list of martyrs. She concluded that ‘a bad peace is better than a good civil war’.[45]

The call for forgiveness and reconciliation between the descendants of the executioners and their victims is a typical Russian way of solving a problem not by a law but by an agreement, taking away the responsibility for finding a judicial solution and moving it into the murky world of political expediency. Terror in Russia has been smeared in a sticky layer across society and across history in such a way that it appears that everyone has taken part in it and everyone is at one and the same time both guilty and not guilty. Karagodin translates the question into a straightforward judicial one: if the state killed people for its own diabolical quasi-legal reasons, then now it should answer for it before the law. From the amorphousness and subjectlessness of Russian life, he highlights the names of those who carried out or took part in the terror – and for this reason he is dangerous for the system, which rests on the anonymity of terror and the silence of the victims.

The guardians of the system understand only too well that once the names of the long-dead executioners start to be exposed, the living participants in terror will no longer be able to retain their anonymity – and suddenly ‘the Magnitsky list’ rises up in the public space and hits the ruling elite in a sensitive place (it is no coincidence that removing this list was one of the first demands made by Putin to Donald Trump’s administration). And then the European Parliament is calling for the acceptance of ‘the Dadin list’, with specific names included on it of people who are linked to the torture of the civil rights activist Ildar Dadin, in the correctional colony in Karelia; he’s managed to inform people about this via his lawyers. As is the case with the Stalinist executioners, simply rehabilitating the victim is insufficient: it is essential to specify the criminal act of a particular person responsible for the repression and, if possible, punish them for it. But, following this logic, risks start to appear on the horizon for the Russian authorities associated with the annexation of Crimea, and with the shooting down of MH17, and with the war in Eastern Ukraine, and with many other aspects of new Russian history, each of which is fraught with legal consequences for many officials, right up to the highest people in the state – exactly the same as Denis Karagodin did by showing that Joseph Stalin was a participant in the murder of his great-grandfather.

It is precisely by pulling on the thread of just one story about a peasant who was murdered by the Chekists in 1938 that can one gradually unravel the whole spider’s web of anonymity and lies; and that’s exactly why the state so fears the ‘Karagodin effect’, and has let loose on him its propaganda dogs. But Russia has no road into the future other than the legal one. The country has lived for too long under the shameful agreement between the victims and the executioners. The time has come to live according to the law and give a precise judicial assessment of the Stalinist terror and those who carried it out, and make justifying it a criminal offence – as justifying the Holocaust is now in most Western countries. Without this legal clarity regarding Stalinism in the past and the political terror taking place now in Russia, civil peace will be impossible, either with the current regime, or after it.

THE BATTLE AT THE RIVER ISET

There’s yet another battle for memory raging in Russia. This time in the firing line for the propaganda barrage is the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg, a memorial museum, complete with library and multimedia centre, dedicated to the first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, who hailed from the region. Specifically, objections were raised to an eight-minute-long cartoon film about Russian history, which they show to visitors. Speaking out against it were the film director, Nikita Mikhalkov, and the Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky; and the Mufti of the North Caucasus, Ismail Berdiev, declared that the Centre should be ‘blown sky-high’.

The critics were answered by President Yeltsin’s widow, Naina, and the local leadership, the Governor of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yevgeny Kuivashev, and the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Royzman. Royzman replied to Medinsky and the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, saying that the ministers ‘should be very careful about what they say’. It was they who, along with Vladimir Putin, opened the Centre in 2015, underlining the role of Russia’s first president.

The row about the museum reflects the schizophrenia of the Russian leadership towards the figure of Yeltsin and to the 1990s in general. On the one hand, nearly all of them, politicians and oligarchs, grew up in Yeltsin’s shadow, as they say – from Vladimir Putin, who served as the faithful bag-carrier of Yeltsin’s comrade-in-arms, the charismatic Mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak; to Vladimir Medinsky, who was a pro-Yeltsin activist during the coup in Moscow in 1991; to Nikita Mikhalkov, who appeared during the presidential election campaign in 1996 as a trusted supporter of Boris Yeltsin. On the other hand, in the new political consensus of Putin’s 2000s, the 1990s have become a target for abuse, they are seen as the original sin, stigmatized; and the new identity of power is being built on denying anything positive about that decade. Observing how the current elite tries to extricate itself from its links with that period and with Yeltsin is a truly Freudian spectacle, reminding one of the Oedipus Complex and patricide.

However, this is not merely a case of the shadow of Yeltsin, which still makes the ruling class uncomfortable; it’s a lot bigger than that. It’s about Boris Yeltsin, and the Centre named after him, and his local region, the Urals, and in particular the film clip that is shown in the museum, which presents an alternative view of the generally accepted line of Russian history, which is authoritarian, imperial and Moscow-centred: it’s this that has particularly upset the guardians of power. By the very fact of its existence, the Yeltsin Centre demonstrates the possibility of there being a different Russia: nonimperial, free and federal, which could have happened in the 1990s but which was torn up on 31 December 1999, that very New Year’s night when Boris Yeltsin appeared on television and announced that he was stepping down, effectively naming Vladimir Putin as his successor.

The exterior of the museum is rather unusual. It was an unfinished and crudely constructed shopping centre, just like hundreds of others that sprang up in Russian cities in the 1990s. It was redesigned by the architect Boris Bernasconi, and turned into an open exhibition space with an enormous atrium, inside which there rises a spiral staircase, rather like in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Huge windows look out onto a wide city pond, fed by waters from a dam on the Iset River, an industrial river that flows between Yekaterinburg’s factory buildings and the pre-revolutionary merchants’ houses. But the most outstanding feature of the building is the façade made of perforated aluminium. Most of all, this reminds one of a rusty iron curtain; light shines through the holes in it. In no sense could the building be described as pompous or even looking like a ‘memorial’; rather, it looks like the rethinking of a cult object from the 1990s, a shopping centre, in technocratic and political terms, a redevelopment of commercial real estate for the public and human space.

This is what was turned into the Yeltsin Centre, which has become the focus of the cultural and social life of Yekaterinburg. As well as the museum and the library, there is an educational centre, a conference hall, a bookshop called ‘Piotrovsky’, which is probably the best one east of the Urals, and the ‘1991’ café, where they sell burgers, Soviet-era cuisine, locally brewed craft beer and a bird-cherry cake made to Naina Yeltsina’s special recipe. Dozens of conferences, concerts and exhibitions take place in the Centre, and the museum has become the most visited in the region, with up to a thousand people a day passing through its doors.

A real indication of the genuine popularity of the Centre is that it has become a stopping point for wedding parties; dozens of them can turn up on an autumn day.[46] Along with the statues of Lenin and the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov (after whom the city was re-named ‘Sverdlovsk’ in Soviet times, before reverting to its original name in 1991, although the region remains Sverdlovsk Oblast), the statue of Yeltsin – an imposing figure, carved out of a block of marble by the sculptor Georgy Frangulyan, and giving the impression that Yeltsin is stepping out of it – has also become a part of the traditional route for newlyweds as they tour the city’s ‘places of memory’. And on the bronze statue of Yeltsin, where he has apparently sat down on a bench to relax in the foyer of the Centre, the nose is shiny – it has become the norm to rub it for good luck. Here, Yeltsin is one of their own, a man from the Urals, an ambassador for the industrial population who conquered Moscow and changed Russia, and the people of the Urals stand shoulder to shoulder in his defence – as they did after Vladimir Medinsky and Nikita Mikhalkov denounced the Yeltsin Centre.

The Urals is a region with a very strong and deep sense of local identity. It represents an anti-imperialist alternative, and is an independent centre of power; it was no coincidence that in his speech against the Yeltsin Centre Mikhalkov mentioned the talk of Urals separatism which occurred in the 1990s. And independent politicians like the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Royzman, simply strengthen the feeling that this is a special place. The siting of the museum in Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s cultural and industrial centres, was a strong step on the road to the decentralization that our country so badly needs, and the hysteria that erupted in Moscow because of the Yeltsin Centre was partly caused by the instinctive fear of regionalism.

But the main apple of discord is the eight-minute-long film clip of Russian history, which is shown on a constant loop in the small cinema at the start of the museum’s exposition. It shows an unorthodox version of Russian history: as a series of attempts to break out to freedom. It doesn’t show the Battle on the Ice of 1242, when the Prince of Novgorod, Alexander Nevsky, defeated the knights of the Livonian Order on Lake Chudskoe; but it does talk about the Novgorod Veche, the free city assembly, which elected its own princes and twice forced out Alexander Nevsky because he infringed the city’s liberties, in contravention of their agreement. There is no mention of the capture of Kazan, the capital of the Kazan Khanate, by Ivan the Terrible in 1552; but there is ‘the elected council’, the informal government called by the young Tsar Ivan when he planned to reform the monarchy. The film talks about the enlightened dreams of Empress Catherine II at the end of the eighteenth century, which changed the word ‘slave’ to ‘subject’ in official documents; and about the draft constitution drawn up by Mikhail Speransky under Emperor Alexander I at the start of the nineteenth century; about the Decembrist uprising in 1825; and about the great reforms of Emperor Alexander II in the 1860s and the emancipation of the serfs. It tells how, in the twentieth century, the people were not broken by fear or Stalin’s machine of repression, and were able to carry out industrialization and build ‘the Magnetic Mountain’, the largest metallurgical plant in the world in Magnitogorsk; achieve victory in the Second World War; conquer the Arctic and Space; it tells of Khrushchev’s thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika. The film ends with the election of Boris Yeltsin, who completes the series of reforming leaders and becomes President, relying not on his personal power but on the independent choice of the people.

The film clip shows not the standard ‘History of the Russian State’, as written by all Russian historians, starting with Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Klyuchevsky in the nineteenth century, but the history of Russian freedom. The video is full of respect for the people, their choice and their sovereignty. As the philosopher, Kirill Martynov, put it, it is ‘a republican history, seen through the eyes of the downtrodden, who are excluded from the corrupt state food chain’;[47] and this is what has upset the critics most of all, who demand from historians a dutiful list of rulers and victories, an encyclopaedia of the state’s greatness.

The row about the Yeltsin Centre is not a discussion about Yeltsin or even about the 1990s; it’s a row about Russian freedom and about the alternatives, the different paths of Russian history. The film shows how, century after century, Russia stood before the choice of freedom – but ended up choosing autocracy. In reality, the same thing happened with us in the nineties, and the main exposition in the museum illustrates this brilliantly. It was thought up by the film director Pavel Lungin, as a biblical seven days of creation – seven days that turned out to be turning points of the era, from the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in October 1987, when Yeltsin declared that he didn’t agree with the course being taken by Gorbachev, through the barricades of the coup of August 1991 and the ruins of Grozny, destroyed by the war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, to the presidential elections of 1996 and Yeltsin’s heart operation later the same year.

The concept of the museum was created by the American company, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, famous for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow. In the gallery devoted to 19 August 1991, visitors find themselves in an ordinary Moscow flat of those times: there’s a divan, a rug, and a sideboard containing books and photographs (genuine items that belonged to the three young men who died during the defence of the White House); on the small cabinet there stands an old-style telephone, which suddenly starts to ring – and when you pick it up you can hear actual conversations from that time, with worried Muscovites telling each other about seeing tanks on the streets. This room leads straight onto the barricades, with metal barriers and the Russian tricolour, and from there visitors enter the empty void of a food shop in the autumn of 1991. On the counter lie scattered useless food vouchers, and on the shelves there are tins of seaweed, the only thing you could buy in the shops in those days of food shortages…

‘…And on the seventh day He rested, after His work of creation.’ The journey through the nineties ends up in the President’s office, the artefacts for which were all taken from the Kremlin and set up in Yekaterinburg. Beyond the fake windows there is a frosty December day in 1999, an accurate pile of documents stands on the desk, along with a malachite writing set and a steaming cup of tea; a jacket hangs on the back of the chair as if the owner had just popped out for a minute. In one corner the lights flash on the Christmas Tree, and in front of the desk there stand a television camera from Russian Television Channel One and a TV monitor, on which Yeltsin, sitting in that very chair, repeats his farewell address to the nation.

Leaving the office, visitors are now in an empty room called ‘The Freedom Gallery’. On the wall there hangs a picture by the conceptual artist Erik Bulatov, where the word ‘freedom’ becomes lost in the clouds; on the window frames there are screens, on which famous people speak lovely yet unreliable words about freedom; in the windows there is the view of the dam on the Iset River, with the factories in the distance, a low sky, blackened by the smoke from the factory chimneys.

And a little to the right of the river, you can see the rich golden cupolas of The Church on the Blood, built on Yeltsin’s personal instructions: as a sign of repentance, they say, for taking the decision when he was First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region Committee of the Communist Party to knock down the Ipatiev House, the place where the Royal Family was murdered.[48]

This exit into emptiness says no less about the era than do the ‘seven days’ of its creation. The era ends on that winter’s day, when, under the gaze of the television camera, the heavy and puffy Boris Yeltsin handed over his office and the nuclear briefcase to the young Vladimir Putin, who was confused and couldn’t believe his luck, while Yeltsin, wiping away a tear, said to him, ‘Look after Russia’. At that moment, Russia once again – as in the stories of the Novgorod Veche, Catherine’s reformist projects and Speransky’s dreams of a constitution – chose authoritarianism. Yet another attempt to break through to freedom slowly died as the nineties wore on and, as a result, produced Putin. And as the visitor looks round this empty gallery, he or she simply cannot but think about the pattern of what happened and about Russia’s path through history, which each time tries to set out on the path to freedom, but inevitably slides down into slavery.

Nevertheless, the Yeltsin Centre is dangerous for the guardians of the state and the obscurantists, who see it as an alternative space, as an image of a different Russia – nonimperial and not run by Moscow. They see it as epitomizing the freemen of the Urals and regional autonomy, as a mechanism for remembering the gatherings of millions of people on the Manezh Square in Moscow and that period when the state, the eternal Russian Leviathan, stepped aside and shrunk back under the pressure of space, the people, history and freedom. It’s like the bulky stone version of Yeltsin at the entrance: this bear of a man, the representative of that same rebellious element of the people which so frightens Nikita Mikhalkov, behaving like the typical Russian barin, the landlord, in the times of serfdom. Instead of the Yeltsin Centre, they would rather build across the country a chain of Stalin Centres and military-patriotic parks with tanks. But they are quite incapable of seeing a very simple truth: genuine patriotism means freedom. And the museum on the River Iset preserves this idea as a memory, as nostalgia – and as hope.

CONSTITUTION DAY

On a cold morning in mid-December 2015, a grey-haired old man stepped onto the platform of the Yaroslavl Station in Moscow from a third-class carriage of the fast train No. 43 from Khabarovsk to Moscow, carrying a knapsack in his hands. He was of shortish height, broad-shouldered and stocky, wearing an old sheepskin coat, fur hat and mittens, and with felt valenki boots on his feet. He stopped, looking around in wonder, but was immediately shoved in the back by passengers exiting with their luggage, and was cursed by a porter with a trolley. ‘What’re you standing there for gawping, grandad! Get a move on! You’ve arrived!’

The old man picked up his bag and moved off along the platform with the crowd. The policemen with a dog by the exit were busy checking the documents of two Chinese people and paid him no attention. As he drew closer, the dog gave a quiet growl, but then whined and tucked in its tail. The old man went past the stalls selling icons and the kebab kiosks, squeezed past the crush to get into the metro and found himself on Three Stations Square, with its clusters of taxis, ringing of tram bells and smoke-blackened railway bridge, beyond which he could see tall towers. Large snowflakes began to fall from a leaden sky. The old man pulled his belt tighter around himself, threw his knapsack over his shoulder, and set off on foot into the throbbing winter city.

This old man was none other than the Decembrist, Alexander Nikolaevich Lutsky, a junker of the Moscow Life-Guards Regiment, who was charged with taking part in the uprising on Senate Square in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825 and who was known also as ‘the forgotten Decembrist’. He was born in 1804 in Borovichi, into the family of Senior Officer Nikolai Andreevich Lutsky, who belonged to the old noble family from the Lutsk District in Volhynia. Alexander did not actually take part in the Decembrist Uprising, but in defending the crowd he wounded a police horse, for which he was arrested and incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress on an island on the Neva.

The investigation lasted over a year, and in January 1827, a military court decreed that ‘Lutsky be relieved of his Junior Officer rank and under the terms of military rule 137 he be hung.’ Three months later the death sentence was commuted to permanent exile ‘with hard labour’, and he was sent off to Siberia. He didn’t go with the other Decembrists, but was sent on ‘the bar’ with the ordinary criminals. They spent the whole journey in foot shackles, and by day were handcuffed and attached to an iron rail known as ‘the bar’. They walked between twenty to twenty-five versts[49] each day, through heat and frost, and when they came to villages they sang the mournful ‘Lord have mercy’ in order to beg alms from the peasants. On the way, Lutsky frequently fell ill; he ended up spending two months in the infirmary in Kazan, and five months in Perm.

Lutsky was relieved of hard labour down a silver mine only after twenty years, during which time he had married the daughter of the mine’s barber, Martha Portnova, and had four children. An amnesty was declared in August 1856, but this news didn’t reached Lutsky until 1857, which is why he has gone down in history as ‘the forgotten Decembrist’. He settled in the town of Nerchinsk, in the Trans-Baikal Region, where he taught at the Nerchinsk Parish school. The last record of ‘the nobleman teacher Alexander Nikolaevich Lutsky’, found in the archive in Chita, is dated 8 December 1870.

Further details about his life are sporadic. It’s known that Lutsky liked to go hunting and would head off alone into the taiga with his rifle and his dog; he could be gone for several days. Despite his advanced years, he enjoyed excellent health and was remarkably strong; it seems that the hard labour had toughened him up and given him a rare will to live. It is generally thought that he disappeared in the taiga during a fierce snowstorm on 22 February 1882, aged seventy-eight, having lived through the reigns of three emperors; but in fact, having lost his dog, he took refuge from the storm in the empty shelter of a Buryat shaman. There he found dried biscuits, yak’s fat and herbal tea, and, having brewed this and drunk it he fell into a wonderful sleep – for 133 years.

When he awoke in the autumn of 2015, he emerged from the taiga and wandered in amazement along the streets of Nerchinsk, craning his neck to look up at the tall buildings and dodging the cars. His natural intelligence and his experience as a prisoner helped him to adapt to his new surroundings; and the collection of squirrel skins which he brought out of the taiga helped him to avoid being sent to a psychiatric hospital and even enabled him to obtain a new passport ‘to replace the lost one’. In the police station they just laughed, having concluded that they were dealing with just another ‘pest’, an unlucky prospector who had found his way out of the taiga just before the winter set in. At the start of December, Lutsky made his way to Shilkia, and from there to Chita, where he boarded the train from Khabarovsk and arrived in Moscow on the morning of 12 December – Constitution Day and on the eve of the one hundred and ninetieth anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising, which his old new Motherland had almost forgotten about…

The Decembrists occupy a special place in our national pantheon, but opinions about them are split in two. Some see them as irreproachable heroes, the seventeen-year-old generals who went through the Napoleonic campaign and the allurement of Paris, and who created the first and only ‘revolution of dignity’ in Russia. Others, though, consider them to have been inept conspirators, whose plan for an uprising failed miserably: Pyotr Kakhovsky failed to shoot the Tsar; the ‘dictator’, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, went and hid at his relatives’ place; Captain Alexander Yakubovich didn’t lead the Guards to attack the Winter Palace; Colonel Alexander Bulatov was unable to seize the Peter and Paul Fortress; and four thousand soldiers and rebellious officers were left standing in the cold all day not knowing what to do, just five hundred paces from the Winter Palace, until, as the sun was going down, they were fired upon with buckshot. From one side it is seen as an attempt to plant the first green shoots of the French Enlightenment in their native soil; from the other, it is perceived as the complete collapse of their ideas, leading to all hope of change in Russia being frozen for the next thirty years until the Crimean War finally bankrupted the system of serfdom. On the one hand, they were canonized by the Soviet system, caressed by the propaganda and official histories: streets and steamboats were named after them, local historians and schoolchildren trod in their footsteps and more than twenty thousand academic works were written about them. On the other hand, the authorities today clearly don’t love them: they see the Decembrists as rioters and Voltaireans, as freemasons (literally: a recent film, The Order of the Russian Knights, accuses the Rosicrucian Order of organizing the uprising) and even as agents of influence from the West – another recent film, The Mirage of Enchanting Happiness, tells how British intelligence used the Decembrists as a way of getting their hands on the gold in the Urals.

And if Yemelyan Pugachev[50] is a metaphor for the senseless Russian riot,[51] then the Decembrists are a metaphor for the doomed Russian uprising. Alexander Herzen created the sacrificial myth about the Decembrists, which was taken up by tens of thousands of people, from members of ‘the People’s Will’[52] to the Bolsheviks, who created, in the words of the modern historian Sergei Erlikh, ‘a sacrificial class’ of the Russian intelligentsia. This myth encouraged the ‘sixties generations’ of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the writer Natan Eidelman, with his books about the Decembrists, and the poet Alexander Galich, with his Petersburg Romances: ‘Dare you go out to the Square / At the appointed hour?’[53] The Decembrists’ myth has even encouraged the opposition today: at his trial, Mikhail Khodorkovsky called his wife, Inna, ‘a Decembrist’ (referring to the historical fact that almost all the Decembrists’ wives voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberian exile), and in his first message from prison in Chita, in the Trans-Baikal region, he wrote that he was ‘in the land of the Decembrists’. The protests in Moscow in December 2011 and the entire ‘White Protest Movement’ that winter also followed the Decembrist myth, both with its pride and its elite character, and the fact that it was doomed to failure: it was unable to excite the crowd and persuade them to march from Bolotnaya Square to Revolution Square by the Kremlin. That was exactly the ‘Decembrists’ syndrome’: individual dignity yet collective defeat. On the evening of 30 December 2014, when there was a ‘people’s assembly’ on Manezh Square in Moscow (discussing the sentence passed on the Navalny brothers, which had been fabricated by the state), a few thousand people stood in the frost along the pavements on nearby Tverskaya Street and Okhotny Ryad, unsure about chanting slogans, or going onto the Square or stopping the traffic – just like the Decembrists, two hundred years ago.

… By one o’clock in the afternoon, Alexander Lutsky had reached the Kremlin. He stood on Red Square, crossed himself in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan and the Resurrection Gates, was amazed by the clumsy equine statue of Marshal Zhukov, underneath whom the horse appeared to be striding forth with an outlandish gait, and wandered on up Tverskaya Street, past the bright shop windows and through the crowds, lively with the New Year approaching. Reaching Pushkin Square, he saw the statue of the poet, whose work he used to read in his youth, but whom he had never met. It was busy around the monument. Workmen had erected a huge artificial Christmas tree and fairytale plywood towers, and alongside them buses had pulled up, and out of them were emerging dozens of men in black uniforms and protective vests bearing the word ‘Police’.

The construction of the Christmas tree was being directed by a chubby man holding a folder, who was giving instructions to the workers, and saying something to the actors who had just turned up. Seeing Lutsky with his knapsack on his back he called out: ‘What’s this then, Santa Claus, why are you late? And what’s with the sheepskin coat? No one said anything about that.’

Much to the surprise of the Decembrist, they plonked a fake red hat decorated with silver on his head, placed in his hand a heavy staff with a twisted handle and told him to go and wait by the stage, which the workmen were hurriedly putting together. By now the snow was falling much more heavily; a veritable snowstorm was brewing. At that moment, Lutsky noticed a group of people who had gathered on the other side of Pushkin’s statue. Standing a little way apart from each other, they began to unfurl homemade banners, which read, ‘Observe the Constitution’. Some of them were holding little booklets of the Russian Constitution in their hands. The policemen started to run towards these people, ripping their banners out of their hands, pushing their arms behind their backs and marching them off, barely resisting, to other buses standing there, which had bars on the windows. At the same time, some of the others in black formed a line. People were coming up a staircase out of the ground and the men in black started to push them back down, as their commander began to say into a loudspeaker: ‘Citizens, disperse! There’s a Christmas tree being put together here! Don’t stop, move into the metro!’

A little way off to the side of this pandemonium, Lutsky noticed an elderly lady standing on her own, holding a banner which said, ‘Down with the power of the Chekists!’ One of the men in black raced over to her and started to snatch the banner, but the woman resisted and wouldn’t give it up. The man hit her. At this, beside himself with anger, Lutsky rushed over and clouted the policeman on the back with his staff. Surprised by this assault, the policeman let go of the woman and fell down in the snow, at which four hefty lads in black pounced on the Decembrist and started to beat him with their truncheons and their fists, seized his arms, put him in handcuffs and threw him into the bus with the barred windows, deliberately hitting his head on the door as they did so. ‘And this bloody protestor dressed up as Santa Claus!’

Breathing heavily, the Decembrist collapsed on the bench, and spat out blood. There was only one other detainee in the bus, a young man who looked at Lutsky with curiosity. Waiting until he had got his breath back, the young man asked him:

‘So they got you then, grandad?’

‘Ah, it’s nothing, I’m used to it… They used to beat us with cudgels that were much worse. And our handcuffs were heavier.’

‘You’ve been in prison, then?’

‘Twenty years down a mine.’

‘Twenty years!’ drawled the young man with respect. ‘Were you a political?’[54]

‘Yes, a political.’

‘And what were you after?’

‘A constitution.’

‘We want a constitution, too’, said the young man, excitedly. ‘Today’s Constitution Day, and they bang us up for it.’

‘’T’was ever thus,’ said the Decembrist. They were silent for a while.

‘So what else were you after?’ the young man asked.

‘The abolition of estates’, Lutsky began to reminisce; ‘equality for all before the law, freedom of speech, freedom of association…’

‘That’s exactly what we want! Nothing ever changes in this country…’

Outside the bus, New Year music started to play: a group of balalaikas struck up, and in a high voice, rising and falling, a woman was singing folk couplets. Her singing was mixed in with weak cries of, ‘The Constitution!’ and orders from the police colonel: ‘Clear the square! Don’t hang around, into the metro!’

Lutsky smirked: ‘We called for a constitution, too. We told the soldiers that “Constitution” was the name of the wife of the Grand Prince Constantine, so that we would get them to shout her name: “We want Constantine and Constitution!” You should find a woman’s name, too.’

‘I know, we’ll say that “Constitution” is the name of Putin’s new dog!’

‘Caligula made his horse a member of the Senate’, said Lutsky. ‘It’s all been done before.’

The gearstick of the bus crunched, the vehicle shook and set off. The jolly music and the shouts of the demonstrators faded, only bits of the exhortations of the colonel drifted to them: ‘Citizens… don’t obstruct the path… into the metro….’ The snow-covered trees of Strastnoy Boulevard swam past, with the crows cawing above them. It was beginning to get dark, it had stopped snowing; a turquoise sky with pink clouds appeared. The van turned right onto Petrovka Street, and through the bars on the windows they could see the red-brick walls of the Higher Petrovsky Monastery.

‘Chaadaev was right,’ muttered Lutsky to himself. ‘Time stands still, and this is a country where everything changes every year and nothing changes for centuries.’

‘Don’t worry, grandad’, said the young man, getting out a flask with brandy. ‘We’ll celebrate the New Year in the detention prison, then there’ll be the court case, and eventually we’ll be sent to Chita. Article 318, attacking an officer of the law when he is on duty, part one, without risk to life, up to five years. But you’re used to it, anyway. Well, here’s to the New Year!’

‘Here’s to the New Year,’ said Lutsky and swallowed the brandy. The paddy wagon, its engine buzzing, continued along the eternal route of Russian history.