Russians: The People behind the Power

8 The Avant-Garde

He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.

—from “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” a manifesto of the Cubo-Futurist art movement, 1912¹

Amid the old wooden dachas and new tin-roofed redbrick buildings that constitute Russian suburbia thirty miles northeast of Moscow, billboards and rudimentary strip malls selling construction materials give way to a rambling pine and birch forest. A two-lane road stops at a large metal gate flanked by a wall of neat concrete blocks and barbed wire. Behind them lies what used to be one of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets: Star City. Built to train cosmonauts to fly into space, the area formerly called Closed Military Settlement No. 1 hosts astronauts from around the world as they prepare for stints on the International Space Station.

The aging compound, constructed around sprawling, typically Soviet paved central quadrangles, includes apartment blocks and a school together with massive brick buildings housing replicas of space station components. One section lies underwater at the bottom of a pool, where trainees in space suits float with the help of scuba divers. In another building, engineers fiddle with wires, pipes and panels of electronics in a very cramped residential module. Decorated with acres of wood and linoleum, the complex appears basic despite the highly advanced technology it houses. Although the engineers say their simulations are crucial to ensure the proper functioning of the space station, it’s hard to imagine anything in the facility actually working in space, a perception heightened by the staff’s defensiveness. Everything’s better than at NASA, I was told, including the bureaucracy, which doesn’t choke off progress as American officials do. The rivalry sometimes surfaces into public view. Although partly conceived as a showcase for what countries can achieve by working together, the International Space Station has prompted arguments between Russia’s space agency and NASA that mirror Moscow’s troubled relations with the West. Shortly before my visit, the station’s commander confessed in a newspaper interview that squabbles about equipment and supplies were harming work in space. Since Moscow was charging foreign astronauts for using its facilities on the space station, he said, only Russians used the Russian toilets now and there was no more sharing of food. Other astronauts later played down some of the claims, but confirmed the general friction.

One of the loudest arguments was over the Russian practice of taking civilian travelers to the space station in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in fees. Vladimir Gubarev, a space industry expert who served as Moscow’s spokesman for the joint US-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission in the 1970s, was pained by such disagreements. Speaking in the comfortable study of his central Moscow apartment, decorated with photos of Apollo-Soyuz and other Soviet milestones, he told me the American and Russian space programs do things differently. “They have different cultures, so it’s a mistake to believe you can create a successful joint station in space,” he said.

Gubarev placed most of the blame on Moscow. Instead of developing new technology, he said, the Russians were mainly interested in squeezing profit from seriously outdated technology, leaving their space program at mounting risk. In 2011, one mishap after another caused Russia to lose five satellites and a spacecraft, an ambitious unmanned probe that would have collected soil samples from a Martian moon. After it became stuck in orbit around the earth, the space agency’s chief, Vladimir Popovkin, insinuated foreign sabotage. “I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone,” he told the newspaper Izvestiya, “but there are powerful [technological] means to affect spacecraft, and their use can’t be ruled out.” Although a deputy prime minister later admitted Russia’s failures could have been caused by equipment “produced about twelve to thirteen years ago,” other officials wondered whether American radar had disabled the probe.

To me, the space program vividly illustrated some of the paradoxes of Russian life. Star City’s jerry-rigged appearance reflected the legacy of a superpower with Third-World standards of living. Russia’s backwardness has ensured that many of its achievements, in art as well as science, are inspired by and measured against advances in the West (when they’re not largely stolen). The space program was also representative for another reason. In a society where many developments have been initiated by orders from above, the Soviet space program’s early successes came essentially from below—specifically from the ingenuity and dedication of a handful of individuals.

In other areas, too, Russians have excelled at getting primitive machinery to work under extreme conditions, not only in the extraordinary circumstances that figure prominently in the national consciousness, such as victory in World War II—which is celebrated with what seems to be ever-greater pomp each year—but also in everyday life. Despite or because of huge obstacles and limited resources, they’ve displayed great originality and inventiveness in literature, painting, music, theater and cinema, and their feats during the last century would have been even more brilliant if Stalin hadn’t killed so many splendid scientists and artists and driven so many others underground or abroad.

One theory holds that some of the very qualities that make largely undisciplined Russians relatively poor workers—lack of self-control, ambition and willingness to follow rules—also help liberate creativity. My relative Gera Kiva, a specialist in industrial automation technology who taught at Moscow State University, told me his field was seriously constrained because “we had no resources; we did everything by hand and the seat of our pants.” Still, that wasn’t the main problem. “Russians can think up anything—we swim in ideas,” he said. “But we can’t carry them out because we just don’t have the patience to take things to the end.”

With their dogged work, opposition leaders and human rights activists are spearheading some of the efforts to instill Western values in Russian society. One day, they may help change the relationship between the people and their state. Meanwhile, I believe the closed political system that inspires some individual creativity still stifles most achievement.

The Soviet Union trumpeted its launching of the Space Age half a century ago by sending the first man-made satellite into orbit around the earth. Far from the result of any government initiative, however, Sputnik was made possible largely by one man whose identity remained secret for decades.

Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, began building rockets for military use after World War II, relying on German plans that came to light after the United States had captured the top German engineers. (Nazi technology was advanced partly because the Treaty of Versailles following World War I restricted Germany’s production of weapons but said nothing about rockets.) The two-time winner of the Hero of Socialist Labor award—one of the Soviet Union’s highest honors along with the Lenin Prize, which Korolev also won—had barely survived Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937–38. He spent six years in the Gulag, partly in a Siberian labor camp, where he lost his teeth.

His longtime first deputy, a fellow rocket designer named Boris Chertok, first met Korolev in 1945 at a Soviet laboratory inside Germany. A frail ninety-five-year-old when he met a handful of reporters on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, Chertok was still wonderfully lucid. We gathered inside a museum dedicated to Korolev, surrounded by photographs and memorabilia of the space program, where Chertok said his former boss was not only a genius engineer but also a gifted organizer. “He had a great ability to persuade people,” he recalled. “He was also exceptionally single-minded and ruthless with subordinates. Deep inside himself, he felt a great responsibility not only to his people but also to history.”

Much of the Soviet Union was devastated after the war and many of its people were near starvation. But Korolev succeeded in persuading Communist Party leaders that rockets were worth funding because they alone could even the American advantage. The United States had military bases around the world, but the Soviet Union could deliver a nuclear warhead straight to the enemy. Gubarev, the former Apollo-Soyuz spokesman, believes it was “utterly illogical” for the Soviet Union to have been first into space, “but it happened because our rocket program was more closely tied to the military than the American one.” Stalin had wanted bombers to deliver nuclear warheads, but Korolev prevailed, with support from military generals who had seen legions of their soldiers killed during the war.

After being given the go-ahead, it took years of intensive work for Korolev’s rocket design bureau to have a prototype ready to fly. Chertok oversaw the missile assembly at the new Baikonur Cosmodrome, built on an isolated steppe in Kazakhstan, where conditions made the work grueling. “Sleepless nights, temperatures soaring above one hundred and twenty degrees, dust storms, murky, undrinkable drinking water,” he explained. “But I remember it as one of the happiest times in my life.”

The first R-7 rocket crashed when it was tested in May of 1957, and a second prototype failed to launch. Only the fourth succeeded in becoming the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. When the West failed to recognize the achievement, to the engineers’ amazement, Korolev suggested sending a satellite into space. “He was the only one who understood the significance of a satellite,” Gubarev said. Korolev went back to work and within weeks designed a simple, basketball-size sphere he called Satellite 1. It contained two powerful radio transmitters programmed to emit beeps over the course of three weeks. Sputnik I blasted off from Baikonur into Earth’s orbit on October 4, 1957.

Although its beeps could be heard on radios around the world, its designers didn’t immediately see the launch as a major accomplishment. So focused were the team members on the military aspects of their work, Chertok said, that they failed to recognize Sputnik’s historical significance. “We prepared the launch with no great expectations,” he said. “If it were to succeed, three cheers. If not, no big deal because our main task was to get back to building a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.”

The launch was first announced in a small item on the second page of Pravda, and the world reaction to Sputnik caught even the Soviet propaganda machine by surprise. “As for most of Sputnik’s creators, it took us four or five days to realize that from then on, the history of civilization could be divided into before the launch… and after,” Chertok said.

Despite the tremendous publicity Sputnik generated for the Kremlin, the names of its designers would remain state secrets for years. Even inside the space program, Korolev was known only as the Chief Designer, which caused significant anguish to the man who was also in charge of the effort that made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space in 1961. Sending scientists with no connection to the space program to take credit for its successes at international conferences—men humiliated by that role—was especially upsetting to Korolev, who was publicly recognized only after his death in 1966. Although other gifted pioneers contributed to the space program’s historic achievements, the extent to which everything else depended on one man’s ability to overcome outsize obstacles remains underestimated.

As they did with the space program, military strategy goals justified the funding of a large number of scientific institutes and projects. However, those aims weren’t enough to save many of them from ruin after the Soviet collapse because the state was no longer able to pay for much of anything beyond its most basic needs. Thousands of scholars and technicians who had helped engineer some of the USSR’s greatest feats lost their jobs. Many who didn’t emigrate survived by driving gypsy cabs, trading in cheap consumer products and taking part in other small-time businesses—as some still do.

One result is that Russian science is declining dramatically despite the government’s claim to be modernizing the country. A 2012 report by the well-connected head of the Russian Association for the Advancement of Science said a precipitous drop in funding—although not for government officials who oversee scientific institutions and earn far more than the scientists conducting research—has contributed to a “catastrophic” situation. Another study in 2013 listed no Russians among leaders in the world’s one hundred top-ranked specialties in the sciences and social sciences.² An astute observer, Olga Khvostunova, points out that much of what money does go to science is channeled toward unrealistic projects to boost national prestige, such as the drive to develop nanotechnology. “The collapse of Russian science,” she concludes, “will inevitably lead to a series of crises in the economy, social sphere, and public administration.”³ A recent plan to overhaul the Russian Academy of Sciences that would merge the hundreds of institutions it oversees under a single new government agency has prompted fears it will make matters even worse by putting scholars under the Kremlin’s control.

Other members of the intelligentsia—including those who provided some of the strongest support for Gorbachev’s reforms, which indirectly caused the end of their livelihoods—also continue to suffer. But prospects for some writers and artists have since improved with the rise of the consumer culture and its concomitant disposable income, which can be spent on diversions from the daily grind.

Comparing rocket science to art isn’t a big stretch in Russia, where creativity and originality often come in sudden bursts and contrast sharply with the slavish imitations churned out in many other spheres. Some believe it is precisely the impediments in much of Russian life that feed wellsprings of creativity. The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described two contradictory principles at the heart of what he saw as the Russian soul—“the one a natural, Dionysian, elemental paganism and the other an ascetic monastic Orthodoxy.”⁴ The opposition between those principles helps explain such contradictions in Russian life as “despotism [and] the hypertrophy of the State” on the one hand and “anarchism and license” on the other. Among those who see that kind of paradox as central to Russian culture, one Moscow artist is especially skilled at dissecting and celebrating the apparent contradictions.

Yuri Vaschenko, a smiling, mustachioed painter in his sixties, is a modernist fascinated by perceptions of open space, in which the Russian landscape is so rich. Although he spent several months each year in the United States over the course of many years, he always returned to Russia “because my inspiration is here,” he told me. Some of it is born from the kinds of disparities in which Russia is also very rich: the very wealthy versus the hordes of the very poor; the terrible taste in most things versus the deep, almost instinctive appreciation for the arts—music and ballet perhaps chief among them—in a country where aesthetic considerations are very important.

Vaschenko’s large studio lies under the eaves of a pre-Revolutionary building off a small lane in one of Moscow’s charming old neighborhoods. He has illustrated many books, work that provided steady incomes for artists during the Soviet era, when the authorities frowned on most real creativity. Although the city provides the studio he works in, Vaschenko almost lost it when a well-connected businessman one floor down decided he wanted it for a duplex. Having surprised himself by persevering in court, Vaschenko continues to dissect the vicissitudes of Russian life over tea or vodka at a cozy round table surrounded by canvases, still-life props and photographs of Boris Pasternak and his other intellectual heroes.

On a typical evening, he set herring, cold boiled beets, very dark Russian rye bread and vodka on his table: the substance of a delicious meal over which we talked well into the night. I hadn’t done that in a long time because Muscovites—renowned under communism for their “kitchen table” discussions of politics, metaphysics and anything and everything else—now tend to go to bars and restaurants, where conversation has become increasingly jejune. Despite Vaschenko’s hospitality, however, he sometimes complained about being interrupted at work by friends who stop by unannounced, an old Russian practice and a staple of life when few people had telephones. Friends and fellow artists insist they urgently need to speak for a few minutes and take offense if they’re not invited to stay.

Moscow seethes with corruption and violence, he told me, “but I sometimes daydream that I’m walking down a dark street and suddenly the side door of a tall building opens and inside a large smiling pasha [an Ottoman lord] is presiding over a big party in an enormous, ornate hall. I couldn’t conjure the image of abandon without the oppression. Maybe it could only happen here.” One theory about why Russian literature and art abounds with grotesque images and mystical realism is that absurdity is a response to the country’s history of unfathomable suffering. Vaschenko salvages significance even from the mediocre art that hardship often helps generate because he says bad work directs him toward useful visions. He told me that one evening, returning from a splashy exhibition of paintings mounted when the country’s new oil wealth was first fueling demand for big and gaudy works, he realized that he had seriously enjoyed going. The affair’s slogan, aping Soviet exhortations to “build communism,” was “Isskustvo—Pokupat!” (“Art—Buy It!”). The exhibits included warmed-over surrealism, huge canvases depicting the universe and paintings of Rollerbladers as well as motorcycles that had been airbrushed to resemble reptiles. The best of the pieces were whimsical. One untitled photomontage, by a talented and controversial artist named Oleg Kulik, showed the massive Christ the Savior cathedral with a crashed BMW in front of it, symbolizing the new Russia’s big spending and recklessness. “I didn’t go there expecting anything great,” Vaschenko explained. “I went to see artifacts. And it was incredible, like being on another planet!”

Although the Soviet authorities suppressed the work of many like Vaschenko, they invested in other creative spheres that also suffered when communism’s collapse dried up their funding. The flagship of Soviet culture, the Bolshoi Ballet, suffered serious damage to its morale and standing in the 1990s following the ousting of its famed director Yuri Grigorovich, who had run the company with an iron fist for thirty years. After years of infighting under a string of directors, Mikhail Shvydkoi, then the culture minister, was appointed to rebuild the theater in 2000. A savvy manager held in high esteem by many creative types, he told me he found the ballet in ruins. “The Bolshoi lost a lot of the really big stars and needed new blood,” he said.

Even in those years, when tickets were relatively cheap and some productions embarrassingly substandard, others were magical. Attending the ballet remains one of the great pleasures of living in Moscow, although music and theater are often no less brilliant. Some of the enchanting feeling surely must have to do with the soaring Bolshoi Theater itself, its gilded balconies and hundreds of chandeliers evoking pre-Revolutionary timelessness and grandeur. Founded in 1776, the ballet troupe long remained a poor cousin of the Imperial Russian Ballet—today the Mariinsky Ballet—in St. Petersburg. But it came into its own in the early twentieth century, before the Soviets advanced it as a showcase of communist achievement.

Shvydkoi hired the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, but his appointment of a talented new director who tried to reinvigorate the ballet in 2006 drew the enmity of Bolshoi veterans who accused them of destroying celebrated traditions. Thirty-seven years old at the time, Alexei Ratmansky forced the ballet to do more than restage classic productions; he hired new young talent and experimented with choreography by foreigners. One of his innovations that prompted vigorous criticism was his staging of a version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet by British theater director Declan Donnellan.

Nikolai Tsiskaridze was prominent among the critics. A huge but aging star, the tall principal dancer with a trademark mop of long dark hair and a penchant for controversy told me that Ratmansky had trashed the Bolshoi’s traditions and insulted its dancers. “I’ve been the main face of the Bolshoi for the past fourteen years,” he declared in his spacious dressing room. “And suddenly he arrives from nowhere, someone who never danced here, and who couldn’t even have dreamed of it. Now he’s saying the Bolshoi has no good traditions and its dancers are old supporters of the Communist Party.”

Not everyone agreed. Liudmilla Semenyaga, one of the Bolshoi’s biggest stars in the 1970s, who had become a coach of prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova when I spoke to her, told me that conflicts between dancers and choreographers were nothing unusual and praised Ratmansky for provoking controversy. “We need a breath of fresh air,” she said. Nevertheless, Ratmansky left for New York’s American Ballet Theatre a little more than a year into his tenure and has since become one of the world’s most acclaimed choreographers.

The Bolshoi’s deep divisions erupted into public view in 2013, when a masked man attacked one of Ratmansky’s successors outside his apartment building by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. A former principal dancer, Sergei Filin suffered third-degree burns and serious damage to his eyes. His injuries astounded Moscow. In the preceding weeks, his car’s tires had been slashed, his cell phones disabled and his e-mail account hacked. Some suspected that Tsiskaridze was a leader of the faction of dancers who railed against Filin’s changes to the Bolshoi’s classical repertoire. Tsiskaridze had been passed over for director and later lost an attempt to replace Filin. The Bolshoi’s general director at the time, Anatoly Iksanov, went as far as telling a newspaper that even if Tsiskaridze had no part in the attack, “he led the situation in the theater to the state where someone else could have gone further.” The contracts of both Tsiskaridze and Iksanov were later allowed to expire.

Soon after the attack, police arrested a dancer in Tsiskaridze’s camp who was a staunch Grigorovich supporter and regularly clashed with Filin about money and roles. Pavel Dmitrichenko, who lived in Filin’s building and is the son of professional dancers, confessed to organizing the attack. In a sign of just how deep suspicions run, however, many ballet members said they didn’t believe Dmitrichenko alone hatched the plot and that someone else may have coerced him into becoming involved.

Whatever the truth, Filin wasn’t the first to be so publicly targeted: a leading candidate for artistic director before him had resigned after sexually explicit photographs of someone who looked like him were posted on the Internet. Despite the Bolshoi’s recent turmoil, however, ballet scholars say its artistic quality has continued to approach that of its chief rival, the Mariinsky, which added a modern new building in 2013 under its legendary director Valery Gergiev. In any case, Russian dance remains unmatched, a sphere in which Russian pride in mastering a foreign art form is truly deserved. Strict discipline is partly responsible. I’ve seen Bolshoi dancers perform astounding feats as if they were effortless even during their daily morning classes when I observed them in a large, airy room of the theater. Maybe because it’s connected to art, Russians’ mastery of ballet training appears to go against the general lack of discipline in other spheres. But that doesn’t entirely account for, among other virtues, the unrivaled gracefulness in the way Russian dancers hold their hands, which conveys an impression that they have achieved emotional mastery over their bodies. The same is true for their ice dancing, which draws heavily from ballet.

The Soviet Union produced many of the world’s top figure skaters until its Olympic training machine collapsed along with communism. But conditions have improved under Putin, who presided over a tenfold increase in funding for the sport. When I observed Russian champion Elena Sokolova prepare for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin by training in a well-outfitted Moscow ice rink, her veteran coach, Victor Kudriavtsev, told me that although training programs had undergone a sea change since the previous Winter Olympics, Russian figure skating had never really suffered serious decline. He said the consistency was partly explained by the difference in technique and choreography between the Russian school and its American and European counterparts. “We look at figure skating as art as well as sport. Russian athletes’ programs are more than performances; they’re spectacles.”

In tennis, too, Russians believe their national characteristics have helped them excel. Although the Communist Party authorities viewed the supposedly bourgeois sport with suspicion, Ekaterina Kryuchkova, who trained Alyona Bovina and Vera Zvonoreva in a tennis center near the Kremlin, told me the sport has since exploded because emotions play a large role in the game. Russians are “colossally emotional” people, she said approvingly.

I’ve often overheard conversations on the street whose pathos was so moving it seemed unreal, as if straight from the pages of a great nineteenth-century novel. My father liked to say that Russia’s celebrated realists, along with some of their twentieth-century successors such as Isaac Babel, were Russia’s best reporters partly because they fashioned plots from news stories of the day. Although the scenarios may appear absurd and the dialogue over the top to Western readers today, the fiction was far less fanciful than many imagine, much truer to the kinds of anything-goes talk that really takes place.

“Since college, when I first started reading them, I thought the great Russian writers invented this kind of dialogue, where they all speak, few if any listen, and non sequitur piles joyfully or gloomily upon non sequitur,” the celebrated correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote. “Invent, my foot. They were reporting. Russians talk this way.”⁵

Although the idea that suffering nurtures artistic creativity is hardly new, some believe there’s something else about Russia that distinguishes it, something that prompts its intellectuals to think especially big. The historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed to the country’s “intellectual vacuum,” as he called that aspect of its backwardness—for which its lack of a tradition of secular education was partly responsible. It allowed new ideas, when they arrived, to take root as if people were intoxicated by them.

Although others have picked different dates, Berlin traces the birth of Russia’s intellectual tradition to the country’s literal entrance into Europe, when Russian soldiers flooded Paris following Napoleon’s defeat at the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁶ Russia’s emergence as a great power coincided with the rise of Romanticism, the intellectual movement that turned its back on Enlightenment rationalism in favor of abstract mysticism. Among its main proponents were philosophers such as Hegel and other founders of German Idealism who credited an absolute spiritual force in nature, the Geist, with giving all aspects of life a single universal purpose. They believed the real and metaphysical worlds to be bound in one “organic” entity that was on an inexorable path toward progress.

Russian philosophers swallowed such ideas whole from the Germans. Friedrich Schelling, among the most influential, believed that people, as parts of the universal Absolute, can divine its patterns by using intuition to look within themselves. Such views informed attitudes toward literature and art, which came to be seen as parts of a whole. Berlin describes a supposedly Russian attitude toward literature in which private life and artistic work are inseparable. Thus the artist’s “duty” to produce beautiful objects is not simply aesthetic, it is also moral. Russia’s famous nineteenth-century writers, Berlin explained, “conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their divine Maker in whatever they did.”⁷

Even Ivan Turgenev—the most obvious example of a Westernized writer as opposed to a determinedly Slavic one, and thus supposedly more concerned with aesthetic than moral principles—believed social and moral issues were central to his work. His Notes of a Hunter (1852), a collection of short stories about rural life and the injustices of serfdom, humanized serfs by giving them complex characters, following his creed that “every being studied with sincere sympathy can free for us the truth which is the foundation of life.” The book led to his arrest.

Nicholas I’s reactionary reign further propelled the country’s intellectuals toward the mystical. Assuming the throne in 1825, the notoriously suspicious monarch ordered executions and Siberian exile for members of the so-called Decembrists, rebelling soldiers led by a disparate group of freethinking nobles who were opposed to autocracy and serfdom. They had hatched a quixotic plot to stop Nicholas’s coronation, then carried it out in a confused attempt that one scholar described as “one of history’s prime examples of how not to make a revolution.” However, they later became venerated among the intelligentsia as the courageous fathers of the revolutionary tradition.

Nicholas’s subsequent abolition of basic rights and liberties further enshrined romantic ideas about absolute truths. The intellectuals who didn’t flee abroad abandoned overt discussion of dangerous political issues and retreated to their ivory towers to contemplate the kind of abstract questions the crown found far less threatening. “So far from inducing despair or apathy,” Berlin wrote, Nicholas’s crackdown “brought home to more than one Russian thinker the sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for Russia alone.”⁸ The bourgeois European revolutions of 1848 only reinforced the tendency by ending in the suppression of the working classes that helped ignite them.

Reasoning along the same lines, the eminent critical theorist Boris Groys believes Russia’s backwardness made it better prepared to accept upheaval in 1917. Revolution in the West can never take place on the same scale, he writes, because Europeans respect tradition. Since Russian intellectuals associated the idea of tradition, if not tradition itself, with backwardness, they were more willing to change by rapidly assimilating new ideas. More than that, the intelligentsia believed that only quick change could sufficiently compensate for Russian inferiority and allow the country to surpass the West.⁹ It was partly a question of aesthetics. By being willing to organize all life in new forms, Groys writes, the Russians essentially allowed themselves to be subjected to a massive artistic experiment. True or not, Russian writers and artists led the modernist movement a century ago and created some of the twentieth century’s greatest works.

Kazimir Malevich, the main originator of the Suprematist movement whose simple black squares typify Russian avant-garde painting today, believed “the artist can be a creator only when the forms in his painting have nothing in common with nature.”¹⁰ Echoing the language of the Bolsheviks, he denounced all realist art as “savage.” Once in power, however, the Communist Party soon banned such subversive ideas. Then came socialist realism and, decades later, the Soviet collapse, which left most artists to fend for themselves. Russia’s new wealth has since funded new galleries and fueled hopes that Moscow will once again play a major role in world art. However, Putin’s political crackdowns, which have encouraged wealthy collectors to invest elsewhere, have clouded the immediate future for Russian contemporary art.

Vinzavod, a new center of Moscow’s art establishment where gallery owner Marat Guelman briefly opened a showroom, is located in an old industrial site next to a train station. The sprawling former wine cellar was kept truly industrial: the tiled vaulted ceilings of its main exhibition space remained dirty, much of the floor was kept gritty, and the space is freezing even in summer. Opening night in 2007 attracted a large crowd of hip young Muscovites who spent time seriously contemplating the spotlit exhibits: a fountain constructed of cheap Soviet plumbing fixtures, a huge bulldozer covered in a black shroud and many video installations. Smoke machines helped evoke a sense of an incense-filled cathedral. The exhibition was called “I Believe.”

Sitting on a shag rug in his incense-filled apartment, the long-bearded curator, Oleg Kulik—a major artist whose painting of a cathedral and a crashed BMW may have been the best installation in the gaudy “Art—Buy It!” exhibit that fascinated Yuri Vaschenko—told me the new show was meant to take back the sense of belief, or faith, from what he called the dogmatic contexts of religion and communism. “We don’t know there will be a tomorrow, but we believe there will be,” he said. “It’s not certain, only a hypothesis. And we don’t know it’s not good to shout at people, but we believe we lower ourselves by doing so. The exhibit is meant to assemble various statements about the beliefs according to which we live our lives.”

One of the works, Anatoly Osmolovsky’s Bread, consisted of various boards of wood intricately carved to resemble slices of dark Russian bread then mounted in a series, some in bread-like outlines, others in the form of Orthodox icons. Kulik called it “part of the Russian tradition of religious iconostases, and the effect is strange.” He said Osmolovsky’s art was related to the works “field artists produced a thousand years ago, when importance lay not in the icon itself but in the feeling it arouses between the object and the viewer.” Kulik thinks the discovery surprised even Osmolovsky. “Although he was simply making a formalist gesture, in doing so he realized that centuries of art history have been wrong,” he explained. “The most important thing isn’t the art, it’s the consciousness it awakes. Its value isn’t the price it commands, but the number of viewers who understand its qualities, who share a belief in it.”

Kulik explained that each of the works in his exhibition was meant to contribute to a new belief system based on questioning. “We want a global revolution,” he concluded—“to make people live correctly, to ensure happiness and wealth for everyone, to turn our rockets into flowering gardens.” Although that call for a new moral order is typically messianic, its relatively elaborate theoretical basis also showed just how far Russian art had come since the 1990s.

Two decades ago, Kulik came to the art world’s attention by staging street performances for which he stripped naked, went down on all fours and barked like a dog while an assistant led him around on a leash. That role represented the complete chaos brought on by the Soviet collapse. “Everything we understood was destroyed—the political system, the social system,” he said. “I didn’t know how to live. The only honest thing I could do was reflect my primordial state. It was an important part of starting over.”

Yuri Vaschenko agrees that the Moscow art scene reflects a period of revolutionary change, but he feels there is still a long way to go. Moscow artists, he complains, are still too heavily influenced by their Western counterparts. But he believes the city’s dynamism makes it one of the world’s most interesting places for contemporary art. “Each time I return, I find something completely new,” he said. “One building was demolished and another built right outside my window in a matter of months. Life is boiling and bubbling, and art reflects that hyperactivity.”

However, Putin’s reelection as president in 2012 after four years as prime minister caught the nascent art market off guard by encouraging the wealthy, wary of officials’ mounting greed, to spend more of their time and money abroad. Collectors began turning their backs on local artists in favor of more established Western artists whose works they saw as safer investments. Some gallery owners, including Marat Guelman, turned to the government for support, but with artists and other intellectuals becoming increasingly politicized and joining the opposition to Putin, it’s unlikely that state funding will do much to help Russian art.

Like much of its art, literature in the land of Dostoevsky and Chekhov was considered a wasteland in the 1990s, when readers flocked to buy pulpy romance novels and thrillers that had been banned under Soviet rule. Fiction writers are still struggling with the effects of decades of strictures against free expression, but authors and critics agree that Russian literature is coming back, its fresh inspiration partly provided by Putin’s authoritarianism.

Dmitri Bykov, one of the country’s most popular writers and a ubiquitous fixture on talk shows, dismisses the notion that Russia’s great literary tradition was ever in peril. “Literature reflects Russian life,” the rotund, curly-mopped Bykov, who is given to smiles and not afraid to criticize the authorities, told me. “Reality is in constant crisis,” he added. “In that sense, people saying Russian literature is in crisis is the best sign it’s actually alive and well.”

The most prominent new writers became known abroad in the late 1990s mainly for their black humor, which mocked Soviet life and Russia’s new wild capitalism and described versions of a dark, anti-utopian future. They included hermit-like Victor Pelevin—who declined to be interviewed—and Vladimir Sorokin, who told me that Putin’s regime provided a treasure trove of subject material for his grotesque plots. We spoke on the porch of his substantial country dacha, surrounded by birch trees, near the celebrated Soviet writers’ community at Peredelkino, fifteen miles southwest of Moscow.

Tall and thin with a goatee and a trademark mane of white hair, Sorokin had recently completed the sequel to his novel Day of the Oprichnik, which describes Russia in 2027. Separated from the West by a new great wall, the country is overrun by royal terror squads that indulge in gay sex and drug abuse: a metaphor for the kind of place Russia became under Putin, the author said. “Once again, the authorities in the Kremlin are completely closed off from the people,” he said. “They’re cruel, unpredictable and corrupt. They’ve taken the place of God and they’re forcing people to worship them.”

“In our society, the individual is repressed from birth on all levels,” Sorokin continued, adding that fiction writing is one of the few pursuits in which completely free expression is still allowed. Nevertheless, Sorokin has run into trouble. Members of a pro-Kremlin youth group made headlines in 2002 by ripping up copies of his novel Blue Lard and throwing them into a mockup of a giant toilet. “I felt as if I’d become trapped in one of my own stories,” he said. Charges of pornography, on which he was later taken to court, were subsequently dropped, just before a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, at which Russia was the guest of honor. “They didn’t want to lose face,” Sorokin explained.

Although he and a handful of other writers are becoming increasingly well known abroad, Natalia Ivanova, the enterprising editor of the storied literary journal Znamya, told me the best Russian writers are younger and barely known. “Today’s Russian literature is like a cake with many layers,” she said. “We have popular mass literature and middlebrow literature, but we also have very good, complicated literature for the elite.” Znamya publishes the latter kind of work, including novels by Mikhail Shishkin, one of the country’s best writers. However, even as Russia’s literary scene expands, Ivanova said, it’s being threatened by a shrinking readership. Literature may have been the main form of escape from Soviet repression, she continued, but the proliferation of movies and television shows—many made available by the huge illegal pirating industry—threatens to turn a country of readers into one of viewers.

Although also under threat, drama, unlike literature, flourished during the 1990s. Moscow currently has more than 115 theaters, many of whose performances are packed by very discerning audiences. Among the top venues, the New Generation Theater stages plays by its director, Kama Ginkas, one of Russia’s most acclaimed. I spoke to him during a production of his play Rothschild’s Fiddle, based on Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name. The protagonist, a master builder of coffins, is consumed by anger because people don’t die often enough. He ignores his wife and forgets the existence of his son until he is driven to despair by realizing too late he’s let life pass him by. “The frightening paradox, that Rothschild starts becoming a real person only three days before his death, is absolute genius,” Ginkas told me. “It’s the closest Chekhov got to stating something directly, albeit through black humor.” Ginkas’s spare, inventive production, with brilliant acting, was compelling.

“There are lots of monsters like Rothschild in life,” he continued. “People who are busy with business, art or whatever—but it turns out they, too, have wives and children, and they don’t realize that life is much more than just their work. To put it another way, you don’t have to be Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to realize there are no ideological, religious or any other justifications for killing. Everyone must realize that within himself.”

Ginkas knows something about ideology, and not only from Soviet harassment. Born in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in 1941, he survived its notorious Jewish ghetto after the Nazi invasion and began directing in Leningrad in the 1960s. He agreed to meet me in his massive studio in the theater, filled with props from previous productions, only after insisting I observe him directing a rehearsal for his next play, about the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. He often explores themes from literature, painting and music. “My challenge is to search for ways to express in drama material otherwise not meant for the stage,” he said. “I think it’s no more difficult than staging plays, but I don’t believe in doing anything that comes easily. Your work isn’t worth anything unless you have to struggle.”

The American critic of Russian drama John Freedman is among those who rate Ginkas as one of the world’s great directors. Freedman, who co-wrote the book Provoking Theater with Ginkas, traces the success of new Russian drama to the 1996 staging of a highly praised play called Tanya-Tanya, a comedy about love in post-Soviet suburban Moscow. But the popularity of theater is hardly new to Russia. Freedman cites Mikhail Shepkin, a nineteenth-century actor who called it “a cathedral.”

“Russians go to the theater to worship,” Freedman told me. “They go to the theater to hear the truth, to hear what’s happening in their own lives.” Marina Davydova, a young theater critic for the newspaper Izvestiya, agreed. Despite the Soviet era’s censorship and isolation from the world, drama thrived even then. “It helped carry out the functions of a real parliament and a free press, which didn’t exist,” she said. “It took on a number of roles it otherwise shouldn’t have.”

Drama is again being politicized. One of the newest theaters, called TEATR.DOC, stages experimental works by young playwrights, often about topics in the news. A recent production described the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the anticorruption crusader. Drama critics say the best Moscow theater continues to prosper because it successfully reflects the country’s rapidly changing society.

Still, both Ginkas and Davydova are pessimistic about the future. Davydova is concerned that outside the small circle of talented directors like Ginkas, middlebrow theater is deteriorating. “We could make rockets to send into space,” she concluded, “but we could never mass-produce cars properly.” Ginkas agrees, saying serious productions like his make up a tiny part of the theater scene, which continues shrinking as old intelligentsia give way to newer audiences who prefer expensive sets and sensationalized plots. “You can no longer put on a play that doesn’t concern things like AIDS or prostitution,” he said. “But what about the universal, everyday problems that matter to all of us? That we’re all mortal? That we don’t want to suffer, we want to love? That we’re jealous, we hate, we want success and fear loneliness?”

I’ve often felt more exhilarated stepping onto the street after successful productions staged by Ginkas and other leading Moscow directors than after I’ve seen similar off-Broadway dramas in New York, perhaps because in Moscow life’s inequities and brutality aren’t hidden behind a veneer of civility or suppressed by a belief in a supposed equality of opportunity. In Russia, deriving some sort of catharsis, if not necessarily understanding, through art seems less academic or diversionary than it does in the United States—more necessary for coping with life’s difficulties. Perhaps that helps explain why the bitter enmities between advocates of opposing solutions to Russia’s enduring, generally unhappy condition have been a defining part of the country’s history.

Although its relevance to universal problems was sometimes buried, no conflict defined Russian intellectual life as much as the nineteenth-century battle between the Westernizers, who believed Russia should look to Europe for its inspiration, and the Slavophiles, who wanted Russia to follow what they considered its own traditions. Among the Westernizing writers and philosophers who hoped Russia would abandon its despotic practices and adopt European ideas about individualism and liberty, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky was especially influential. An idealist, Belinsky believed art should serve the overriding goal of combating the great evils of autocracy and serfdom as well as the resulting social ills of poverty, alcoholism and other afflictions. Content was more important than form for Belinsky, so it may have been no accident that even his supporters found some of his work unreadable. Nevertheless, his exile to Siberia, where he was crippled by malaria, helped burnish his reputation as a father of Russia’s revolutionary tradition.

Belinsky heaped praise on Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1846 for his first work of fiction, Poor Folk, a novella that traces the relationship of a lowly, nearly destitute clerk and a woman he loves. Twenty-five-year-old Dostoevsky was a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that met to discuss the works of French utopian socialists and other philosophers. It was named after the man who hosted the organization’s secret meetings in his St. Petersburg apartment—a risky business. Infiltrated by some of the tsar’s legions of informers, the circle was broken up in 1849, when its members were arrested and sentenced to death. Reprieved at the last minute, most were sent to Siberian penal colonies, where Dostoevsky’s four-year incarceration helped transform him from an idealistic Westernizer into something close to a Slavophile, a conservative who came to believe Russia’s salvation lay in adopting the Christian model of suffering and forgiveness.

By then, the European revolutions of 1848 had begun splitting the very loose school of Westernizers into two main camps: those who advocated bourgeois society as an ideal and those who adopted radical socialism. No one embodied the split more fully than Alexander Herzen, the philosopher many believe to be Russia’s best. The father of Russian socialism emerged amid the generation of idealistic superfluous men of which Ivan Goncharov’s character Oblomov was a caricature. Twice arrested and exiled to distant Russian parts before 1848, Herzen eventually settled in London, where he published a journal called Kolokol, “the bell.” Initially a Hegelian, Herzen came to believe that no ideology or dogma could explain the human condition, a position that approached existentialism. His conversion began during the revolutions of 1848, when he happened to be in Europe and was shocked to observe the bourgeoisie’s domination over the working classes who had helped it fight the old order. The disappointment prompted him to lose faith in his belief in inevitable progress. Convinced that life’s purpose is life itself, he concluded that abstractions and general principles threatened to tyrannize society.

If progress is the goal, then what is it that we are working for? What is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, recedes instead of rewarding them; who, to console the exhausted and doomed crowds greeting him with morituri te salutant, can only reply with the ironic promise that after their death life on earth will be splendid? Can it be that you, too, doom the people of today to the sad destiny of the caryatids supporting the balcony on which others will someday dance?¹¹

Advocating nonviolent change over revolution, Herzen idealized the peasant commune as an answer to Russia’s social problems. Believing the peasantry’s “communism” superior to Western social structures, he aimed to reconcile it to Western individualism.

Back in Russia, some progress was about to be made. The death of the autocratic Nicholas I in 1855 brought his son Alexander II to power. A reformer who would come to be known as the Liberator for abolishing serfdom, Alexander instituted Russia’s first jury trials and made other changes to combat Russia’s staggering corruption and inefficiency, which were driven home by its humiliating defeat in 1856 at the hands of the British, French and others at the end of the Crimean War. Seen as the last best hope to stabilize the empire, liberalization had the paradoxical effect of further radicalizing the wing of the intelligentsia that believed in revolutionary change.

Many of its members came from a new generation of revolutionaries who emerged in the 1860s and split from their intellectual mentors, the men of the 1840s such as Turgenev and Herzen. Turgenev immortalized the divide in his novel Fathers and Sons. Unlike the “fathers,” who mostly came from the gentry, the hard-bitten “sons” were usually raznochintsy—those of “mixed rank” background, many from clerical families—who harshly criticized their liberal, romantic fathers for being weak.

The new generation was well represented by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the radical literary critic and social philosopher whose novel What Is to Be Done? celebrates young revolutionaries. Along with his protégé Nikolai Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky believed all endeavors should be subordinated to politics. Denouncing bourgeois liberalism, he, too, idealized the Russian peasant commune as a model for his vision of socialist collectivism. Arrested in 1862 and exiled to eastern Siberia, Chernyshevsky became a hero to many other radicals, including Lenin, who once credited Chernyshevsky’s novel for converting him to revolution.

Chernyshevsky had an especially strong influence on the Russian populist movement that flowered in the 1870s. Radicalized students dispersed into the countryside to educate peasants, whom they believed to have revolutionary instincts. Deeply suspicious of parliamentarianism, which they saw as a tool of bourgeois domination, the populists opposed the call for a liberal constitution, which they were convinced would set back the revolutionary movement by strengthening Russia’s wealthy capitalists. Some turned to terrorism. In 1881, an extremist splinter group called the People’s Will killed Alexander II when it bombed his carriage as it drove along a narrow canal.

The tsar’s reforms ended with his death. In an effort to save the empire from revolution, his son and successor, Alexander III, reversed many of his father’s policies by strengthening his rule at the expense of the nobility and local government. Alexander’s harsh despotism continued under his son Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar, whose shortsighted bungling helped set the conditions for revolution in 1917.

No serious Westernizer advocates violence today, although a popular street-art group called Voina, “war,” has riled the authorities in St. Petersburg by producing a video of its members setting alight a police truck as a sign of solidarity with political prisoners and spray-painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises opposite the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the former KGB. The group also gave rise to the all-female punk band Pussy Riot. In general, the opposition leaders, human rights activists, lawyers and others advocating such still-foreign concepts as rule of law and free elections risk arrest and harassment by merely turning up for peaceful demonstrations that call for institutional transparency, freedom of speech and other ideals that would undermine the traditionally closed workings of state affairs. Some have taken up the mantle of Soviet-era dissidents.

Russia’s new generation of human rights campaigners includes Tanya Lokshina, a slight Human Rights Watch activist with a grave demeanor who has risked her life documenting abuses perpetrated by security forces in Chechnya and other regions of the North Caucasus. When I traveled with her on a trip to Chechnya to record the abductions of young men in isolated villages in the Caucasus Mountains, she complained of similarities between her trials and what dissidents under the Soviet Union endured. “I’m a young professional of thirty, and I’m suddenly telling my staff what they have to do if the KGB walks in,” she said. “This belongs in books. It shouldn’t be happening.”

The murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya by an unknown gunman in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in October 2006—one of dozens of unsolved killings of reporters and rights activists—dealt the group a serious blow. Politkovskaya’s courageous investigations into atrocities in Chechnya had made her a household name, and Lokshina said her friend’s death demonstrated the new level of impunity for those who kill Kremlin critics. “When Anna was gone, we all realized to what extent everyone else is vulnerable. If they could do it to her, everyone else is completely unprotected.”

Two young Chechens, brothers of the alleged gunman, and a rogue former security service officer were acquitted of helping stage the shooting, which some officials blamed on foreigners and the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Other techniques for silencing critics have been more overt. In 2005, the head of an NGO that tracked abuses in Chechnya was charged with inciting ethnic hatred in what Lokshina called a “typical political trial.” Soon after Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the organization’s closure, the Kremlin issued a bill increasing its already strict control over human rights groups and other nongovernmental organizations by forcing them to comply with draconian registration and accounting regulations. As legislators sped the bill to a yes vote on a freezing, gray November day, eight young activists tried to protest outside the imposing Stalinist parliament building next to Red Square. Ivan Nenenko, of an environmental group called Groza, told me he was taking part because the new bill would enable the Kremlin to further consolidate its power. “Every activity will be controlled from above, including even nonpolitical actions,” he said before police dragged him away.

The following year, a loose alliance of rights and political groups called the Other Russia, headed by chess master Garry Kasparov, began staging demonstrations ahead of parliamentary elections and a presidential vote that would surely elect Medvedev as Putin’s successor. Each time, officials denied permission before ensuring that many hundreds of riot police, backed by thousands of regular troops, broke up the crowds. Photos of young activists being hauled off to police trucks provided a revealing portrait of Putin’s Russia.

Although reporters are permitted to cover such protests, they’re never safe from police. I was never detained, but I’ve witnessed many arrests of journalists who were hauled off despite their visible credentials and other clear proof they weren’t demonstrators. Attending such rallies is never fun. Expecting the worst, I’ve usually felt an unpleasant foreboding on top of the sinking feeling that the events were largely held in vain because, notwithstanding the attention they generated in foreign media, most Russians didn’t care.

At one rally marking an anniversary of the Beslan school siege—when more than 380 people, half of them children, were taken hostage by Chechen rebels in 2004 and died during a shootout with troops who used grenade launchers and other heavy weaponry—police arrested Lev Ponomaryov, one of the first of many such detentions of leading protest organizers. In the 1980s and ’90s, Ponomaryov, a veteran rights activist and protégé of dissident Andrei Sakharov—the brilliant nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—organized mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people in protest of Communist Party policies, events that helped bring down the Soviet Union. Ponomaryov, who spent three days in jail after the Beslan anniversary rally, told me in his cramped Moscow offices soon afterward that the former KGB officers who hold top government posts had revived Russia’s police-state culture. “They’re not able to conduct a political dialogue,” he said. “They can only work according to the ‘I’m the boss and you’re the underling’ principle. It’s the way the military functions, and they’ve made the whole country like that.” In 2013, police raided Ponomaryov’s office and forced it to shut down after officials said the lease had expired. Ponomaryov, who insisted the rent had been paid through the end of the month, was thrown out on the street.

International organizations such as Freedom House in Washington put Russia near the bottom of the lists that rank countries’ respect for political and human rights. Despite their difficulties, however, activists are still allowed to work. Liudmilla Alexeyeva, a dissident from the 1970s Brezhnev era who is the doyenne of the human rights movement, helped found the Moscow Helsinki Group, which she still chairs. Now very frail and in her eighties, Alexeyeva told me matters have never become as bad as the days when most dissidents were jailed, put into psychiatric wards, or forced to emigrate. “Back then, if you decided to publicly criticize official ideology,” she said, “it meant you had to have decided to pay for it with your freedom.”

Today’s authorities are more subtle. The government accused Alexeyeva of involvement with British intelligence soon after two British diplomats who were serving as liaisons to the Moscow Helsinki Group and other NGOs were accused of spying with the aid of high-tech communications equipment hidden in a fake rock—which the British authorities later confirmed. “It was done to blacken our reputation,” she said of the accusation that her group was involved in the espionage. “It was based on false documents, and the lies were never punished.”

Alexeyeva has also been threatened by nationalist groups, including one that put her at the top of a list of Russia’s worst enemies. She said the Kremlin encourages such extremists with nationalistic policies such as occasional mass deportations of Georgians and police raids against foreigners working in street markets. Despite the pressure on them, Alexeyeva and other activists kept a tiny flame of protest alive by staging small demonstrations on the thirty-first day of each month, to symbolize the Russian constitution’s article 31, which grants the right to free assembly.

Their doggedness was partly rewarded in 2011. That September, seemingly apolitical members of Moscow’s middle class began grumbling after Putin announced he would follow his four years as prime minister by returning to the presidency for a third term, now extended from four to six years. Russia was starting to look like Brezhnev’s stagnation-era Soviet Union, they said, a perception heightened by Putin’s aging appearance. It was as if his many years in wealth and power had given him the impassive (probably Botoxed) sheen of a haughty dictator. One longtime acquaintance who works as a lawyer for a foreign law firm and whom I’d never heard utter a single word of criticism against Putin—perhaps because her firm profited handsomely from navigating the rising seas of paperwork required of foreign companies—now said she was thinking about moving abroad. Although she seemed more than content with her lifestyle, which includes several nights a week partying with affluent friends in exorbitantly expensive nightclubs and restaurants, she added that she no longer wanted to live in a place that appeared uncomfortably like the sovok, literally a “dustpan” and figuratively the Soviet Union, or Sovetskiy Soyuz.

“Those people want to stay in power for the rest of their lives,” she complained. Putin’s assertion that he and Medvedev had agreed to swap positions years earlier seemed especially insulting to many who had previously appeared unmoved by the widespread expectation that he would return to the Kremlin. After parliamentary elections in December, accusations of massive vote rigging—although no less rife than they were four years earlier—provided an excuse for tens of thousands to take to the streets for the first time since the early 1990s.

Two demonstrations were so big and attracted so many young, respectable-looking professionals in addition to no less respectable middle-aged and even elderly protesters that the authorities dared not refuse them permission to take place. The rallies helped open a new chapter in the Putin era: the protesters who said they were tired of their national leader after his more than a decade in power caught him on his back foot. Forced to react to rather than lead the political discourse for the first time, Putin employed a range of his old tricks, including insulting the opposition, subterfuge and blaming subordinates for corruption and ineptitude. Starting with a dismissal of the protesters as chattering monkeys financed from abroad, he retreated to backing a toothless Medvedev proposal for political reform and reshuffling some of his top officials.

Many took the removal of Vladislav Surkov from his position as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue as a major concession. The wily and surly young official had masterminded the incorporation of fake opposition parties, coined the term “sovereign democracy” to characterize Russia’s political system and justify its growing authoritarianism and devised the youth-movement campaign to denounce Vladimir Sorkin’s novel Blue Lard. Reappointed to first deputy prime minister, Surkov said he would no longer involve himself in domestic politics. However, his successor Vyacheslav Volodin, a loyal enforcer in Putin’s United Russia Party who would help oversee a major crackdown against the opposition, appeared even less democratic.

Another Kremlin ploy for sapping energy from protesters was to secretly back pliant opposition figures. Few were surprised, therefore, when the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov announced he would run against Putin for president soon after the demonstrations. He later started a political party he said would give civil-society leaders a platform, but many saw that as another attempt to dilute the opposition; Prokhorov himself did not become a member. As 2011 drew to a close, however, Putin’s tactics made him appear out of touch. For the first time in many years, there was hope that at least a small segment of the population, the urban middle class, would finally stand up for genuinely fair elections and other rights—the Western kind—that support their interests.

However, it has since been very rocky going for the opposition, whose strategy has been complicated by a new crackdown on the Kremlin’s critics. One of the main symbolic events took place in May of 2012 after riot police blocked demonstrators from attending an authorized rally against Putin’s inauguration for a third term. After some frustrated protesters ripped off police helmets and lobbed chunks of asphalt at the officers, some thirty police and more than a hundred protesters were wounded. Six hundred people were arrested. Evidence later surfaced that the violence was probably initiated by pro-Kremlin provocateurs organized by the police and was possibly meant to further polarize the opposition. Some began to worry that young, more radical protesters, frustrated by what they see as no options for enacting peaceful change, are becoming increasingly disillusioned—more evidence that Putin’s self-interested authoritarianism is driving his country off a cliff. Few predicted that the authorities would arrest almost thirty of the protesters on charges of participating in mass unrest in what came to be called the Bolotnoye Affair, named after the square on which they were to gather. One of the protesters who pleaded guilty was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in what’s seen as one of the most direct present-day parallels to political repression under communism. The liberal former Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov compared the proceedings to Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s.

Another well-known Kremlin opponent, the journalist and music critic Artemy Troitsky, was also a protest organizer. He describes the Kremlin’s relationship to the country’s creative classes as a “Cold Civil War.” The crackdown has prompted many conversations among his friends about where to go when they flee Russia. “Young, smart professionals, the very people this country needs, want to go,” he lamented. “They want to leave behind what’s turning into a country of drunkards and corrupt officials who can steal all they want of Russia’s oil wealth.”

Mikhail Prokhorov was already the talk of the town in late 2011 for being forced from his leadership of the Kremlin-friendly, pro-market Right Cause Party. Because it had been assumed he’d taken the post at the Kremlin’s bidding, he surprised many by convening a meeting of supporters to denounce Surkov as a “puppet master” for attempting to control the party. Although no one could tell whether his accusation had been coordinated with Kremlin agents to provide the appearance of dissent, Russians watching video footage of the event were transfixed. The transgression of a top oligarch—whose continuing good fortune depended on the Kremlin’s goodwill—in condemning a top ideologue injected longed-for drama into Russia’s otherwise stage-managed politics. Not that anyone saw any of the news on television. The video showed on Dozhd, meaning “rain,” a burgeoning Internet television site, while the main state-controlled news channels, which had regularly shown Prokhorov on nightly newscasts, barely mentioned him.

That was no coincidence. Much of the innovation taking place in Russia happens on the Internet, where serious newsmagazines such as Gazeta.ru publish uncensored news and incisive analysis of events. Well-designed culture-oriented sites—such as Openspace.ru, which helped lead the way until its recent closure—post reviews of Russian and international literature and art that are often more illuminating than, say, The New Yorker’s. Journalist Kirill Rogov—the founding editor of Russia’s first major political news site, Polit.ru, in the late 1990s—credited the Internet with enabling reporters, scholars and bloggers to bring topics to public discussion outside the “controlled, traditional media.” Indeed, social commentators divide the country between “Internet Russia,” consisting of mostly young, increasingly globalized readers who can access whatever information they want, and “television Russia,” which hears what the authorities want it to.

With roughly eighty million Russians—around 60 percent of the population, according to the Levada Center—already online, Russia has Europe’s largest Internet audience, and readership dynamics continue steadily tilting in that direction. Surveys also show that the number of people going online every day, those who tend to use social media and get their news from the Internet, is growing fast. In April of 2012, the country’s biggest search engine, Yandex, attracted more daily visitors than Channel 1, the most popular state television channel, for the first time. Forty-three percent of Internet users regularly use Facebook and Twitter, up from 33 percent the previous year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2012, and the Russian version of Facebook, VKontakte, is even more popular than either of those sites. No surprise that the Federal Security Service demanded that VKontakte’s young founder, Pavel Durov, close protest organizers’ pages at the height of the demonstrations in December 2011, although it dropped the case after he ignored a summons and refused to answer when police rang his doorbell. That may have only bought him some time; shortly thereafter, two of Durov’s founding partners were convinced to sell their shares in the company to a businessman who was rumored to be a Kremlin agent. After a police officer accused Durov of running over him in his car, he fled abroad amid predictions that the Kremlin aims to take over the site.¹²

With crucial media outlets constrained by Kremlin-friendly owners within certain editorial limits—chief among them a ban against outright criticism of Putin, Medvedev and the highest-ranking members of their circles—blogs are playing an increasingly central role in the national debate. Many originate on the country’s most popular platform, LiveJournal. Embattled opposition leaders who are seeking to build on their support from largely educated, middle-class urbanites are also counting on social media to help mobilize Russians throughout the country to tackle the authorities in local politics. The first significant evidence of the effort took place during the presidential election of 2012, when thousands of monitors used Twitter to report widespread violations such as ballot stuffing and “carousel voting”—groups of people voting multiple times at various ballot stations. “People are increasingly skeptical about traditional political parties,” a veteran newspaper editor and protest organizer named Sergei Parkhomenko told me soon afterward. “If social media can facilitate building nonhierarchical networks of people to disseminate information and coordinate activities, their role will become far more important.” That remains to be seen.

Andrei Lipsky is a veteran editor at Novaya Gazeta, a stalwart independent newspaper co-owned by Mikhail Gorbachev. He, too, believes the dynamic is changing, thanks partly to the Internet. Lipsky, whose aging, cigarette-smoke-filled offices are home to some of Russia’s best investigative journalists, said, “More people want an active part in life, for their voices to be heard. And that’s the hope—the slow growth of civil consciousness.” Kirill Rogov of Polit.ru told me that daily Internet use is driving up the number of people who get their news online. Before the election protests of 2012 began, just 5 percent of people got their news online, but the number is growing. “The Internet has started to become politicized,” he said.

Although the authorities can monitor everything posted on Russian websites, they had long considered censorship unnecessary because control over the national media enabled them to influence the vast majority of Russians. That has begun to change. Nikolai Patrushev, a former Federal Security Service chief who now heads the Kremlin’s security council, recently cited China as an example of “reasonable regulation” of the Internet, ostensibly for combating extremism.

Soon after Putin’s reelection, parliament passed legislation enabling the government to close websites as part of a broad crackdown on the protest movement. Although the bill’s backers said it was aimed at sites that display child pornography or promote suicide or drug abuse, critics feared it would pave the way toward censorship. Wikipedia’s Russian version protested by going offline for a day and Google said the bill “threatens users’ access to legal sites.” According to at least one human rights group, the year 2012 marked a turning point for the authorities, who now see the Internet as “the main threat to [their] well-being and stability.”¹³ The report cited 103 criminal prosecutions among measures across the country it said were aimed at censoring online information. The Kremlin also prevailed on Internet service providers to install software that enables officials to block sites banned for their supposed extremism. Still, statements by other officials, including Medvedev—who’s called Internet censorship “impossible and senseless”—reinforce expert opinion that it is too late to impose controls without major political risk.

But the Kremlin has been fighting back in other ways. While the government backed friendly news sites, compromising videos appeared on the Internet alongside leaks of hacked telephone conversations and private e-mails from opposition figures’ accounts. Some of the transcripts appeared on a pro-Kremlin tabloid site called Lifenews.ru, which falsely accused Boris Nemtsov of spending New Year’s with a prostitute in Dubai. Other tactics came to light when hackers posted their own trove of e-mails from accounts they said belonged to overseers of the Kremlin-backed youth group Nashi. The messages discuss the deployment of abusive trolls—people who post inflammatory comments on websites—and the launching of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against media sites. The e-mails suggest that journalists and bloggers were directed to extol Putin’s popularity and attack his critics.

Despite the ardent hopes of many in the West that the Internet’s rise would help undermine authoritarianism in Russia, observers say it hasn’t happened, at least not yet. Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a group that advocates freedom of the press, believes that’s partly because most Internet use is for social networking and entertainment. “The Internet isn’t a panacea,” he told me. “It’s only a medium, an opportunity to access information.”

The rise of anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny was among the Internet’s most significant developments for the opposition. His site, Rospil.ru, where volunteers have exposed crooked deals by posting information and documents about state business transactions, helped make Navalny the leading voice among opposition figures before a suspended five-year prison sentence in 2013 made him Russia’s most famous political dissident. A lawyer and blogger who held a six-month fellowship at Yale, he began his crusade against the corruption he said was choking his country by buying small stakes in some of the country’s largest companies and then demanding information about how their managers spent their profits. He went after the giants of Russia’s energy industry, including Gazprom and Rosneft, and published what he said was a leaked audit of Transneft, the state oil pipeline monopoly. The audit described shell companies that produced fake contracts and siphoned off some four billion dollars from funds intended for the construction of a pipeline to China. “When I read every day how those people are buying soccer clubs, flying on private airplanes, partying at luxurious ski resorts,” Navalny said, “I understood it was funded by the money stolen from me. That’s why I decided to do a very simple thing. If crimes are being committed so openly, why not just try to go to court or write prosecutors? It’s simple enough; it’s just that no one did it before me.”

A blond thirty-seven-year-old who exudes confidence, Navalny runs his operation with a handful of others from cramped quarters rented in a Soviet-era building near a busy train station. Sitting behind a laptop in his office, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, he was relaxed, well-spoken, and lawyerly in developing his arguments. Official corruption is so widespread in Russia, he said, that even the government admits that more than thirty-five billion dollars is stolen from state contracts each year. “Corruption is so hardy here because it forms the very basis of the power structure,” he added. One of his biggest successes was branding Putin’s United Russia as the “party of crooks and thieves,” which, along with Navalny’s fiery rhetoric and apparent fearlessness, helped make him the biggest draw at anti-Putin protests. Although he’s received almost no coverage on state television, one poll found his name recognition across Russia shot up to 37 percent by 2013.

He also became a leading Kremlin target. Convicted on embezzlement charges he dismisses as absurd and aimed to keep him from running for political office—although he remains free—Navalny has been compared to Khodorkovsky. Like the oligarch, he was sentenced after he refused to flee. “I want my children to live here and speak Russian,” he told a reporter during his trial. “I want to pass on a country that’s a little better.” Some believe Putin’s disinclination to mention Navalny’s name when publicly criticizing him is evidence that he sees him as his main rival. Not everyone agrees that Navalny is the pioneer he claims to be, however. Galina Mikhalyova, a prominent member of the once popular social-democratic political party Yabloko, to which Navalny once belonged, reminded me that Yabloko members have been silenced in the past for campaigns against corruption that posed a threat to the authorities. “We know in our party how that kind of activity ends,” she said. “One of our chairmen was killed, several of our members are under criminal investigation and others have been sentenced to jail.” The death in 2003 of Yabloko member Yuri Shchekochikhin, a crusading investigative reporter who often guided me and other foreign correspondents toward the hidden sources of corruption, was among the most disturbing of Russia’s many unsolved killings. He was looking into criminal allegations involving the Federal Security Service in 2003 when he suddenly fell ill and died from what his family says was poisoning.

No typical Westernizer, Navalny has extreme views about nationalism that have alienated would-be allies. Mikhalyova often sparred with Navalny before he was expelled from Yabloko in 2007 for his support of right-wing nationalist groups such as the militant Movement Against Illegal Immigration. He later helped organize annual marches of xenophobic groups, part of what appeared to be a new tactic among some young opposition members for attracting followers. He said Russia was swamped by illegal immigrants and plagued by “ethnic crime” that prompted conflicts, including attacks against the immigrants themselves. “Those are real issues today,” he said. “But for some reason the liberal movement believes they should be made taboo because discussing them will unleash mythic dark parts of the Russian soul and result in the emergence of a new Hitler. That’s idiotic.”

Such bickering partly explains why the liberal opposition has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Putin. Clashes of ego have played a large role in its leaders’ failure to form a unified political bloc that could contest parliamentary elections or rally behind a single candidate for president. Although some organizations have joined forces, Grigory Yavlinsky, a gifted economist and co-founder of Yabloko—who represents an older generation of liberal opposition leaders—is among those who remain steadfastly opposed to joining any other group. Aided by the government’s multifaceted strategy to marginalize the opposition and prevent the emergence of a challenger to Putin—including propaganda, refusal to register parties on technicalities and banishment from state television—the failure to get along has dogged several attempts to forge a united movement.

In addition to stoking tensions among the opposition, Navalny’s nationalism gives serious reason to worry about what Russian protesters may really want. Most of those who turned against Putin’s regime in 2011 did so for some of the same reasons Russians have criticized their leaders for centuries: not necessarily because they want reform but because they perceive that their leaders have moral failings. Putin’s return for a third term as president was a step too far, exposing naked greed that flew in the face of his professions of sacrifice and exhaustion (he once compared himself to a galley slave). Polls indicate that rather than a Western form of government, many of the disgruntled probably still want a strongman in the Kremlin—just a better one.

Regardless of Russia’s immediate future—including Putin’s possible return for another six-year term in 2018, which would make him the longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin—the vast majority of Russians will continue to endure great difficulties, not least from the grinding bureaucracy and huge inefficiency that kills productivity. A Levada Center poll in 2013 reported that more than 70 percent of respondents said they would refuse to take part in protests against falling living standards or in support of their rights. Although the Communist Party’s treatment of rocket mastermind Sergei Korolev and others of their best innovators lies in the past, government repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent in the present.

The great contrasts they help generate have contributed to the creativity of artists and other intellectuals, including the opposition politicians and rights activists battling the odds to establish some of the universal values envisioned by Soviet-era dissidents and their nineteenth-century predecessors, the writers and philosophers—some of them, at least—who established Russia’s intellectual traditions and hoped their country would join enlightened Europe.

The call is still being made, not for revolutionary change but evolutionary introduction of the institutions and practices democracies require. Among the civil-society initiatives to come out of the 2011–12 protests was Demokratiya2, a website enabling visitors to join groups taking part in, among other things, environmental activism, election monitoring and involvement in regional politics. Its organizers proposed a grassroots party that would elect leaders in regular direct online voting and be financed by its members, which Navalny once praised as the best hope for changing the dynamics of Russia’s bickering, top-down party structures by drawing “real activists” into a bottom-up system of politics.

However, such Internet-reliant projects haven’t fared well under the onslaught of new repression during Putin’s third term. As the protest movement ran out of steam in late 2012, Navalny directed his energies toward the maintenance of apartment buildings. Seeking to sustain momentum, he set up a website on which users attacked the laziness and slovenliness of municipal plumbers and electricians by filing complaints about the lack of lightbulbs, broken elevators and other failures in the maintenance of communal areas. He has also continued to expose officials’ hidden wealth by publicizing the work of bloggers digging up such evidence as registration forms for property held outside the country.

If such creative efforts help today’s Westernizers draw enough support to challenge the status quo, they may eventually be able to help put Russia back on the difficult path from which Putin diverted it in 2000, after the short run of reforms following the collapse of the USSR. However, although predicting the future is futile, my observation of the deep-seated continuities in Russian behavior makes me pessimistic about the chances that my children will live to see Russia become a genuine part of Europe even if it abandons its current path in the near future. If the experience of the 1990s showed anything, it’s that the country is too large and its character too ingrained to change more quickly. That’s a deeply disappointing conclusion for those who, in 1991, hoped the transition would be far quicker—including me, my friends and members of my family, especially my father, who loved Russia thanks largely to the company of his long-suffering friends, almost all of whom were Westernizers.