The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

Prologue: A Silent Procession

It was after midnight on 27 February 2015. I was making final changes to this book when I learned that Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician once groomed to be president of Russia, had been shot four times in the back on a bridge just metres away from the Kremlin.

It was the most resonant political assassination in Russia’s post-Soviet history and it did not seem real. I knew Nemtsov well – he was more than a journalistic contact. Of all the Russian politicians I kept in touch with, he was the only one I considered a friend. He was charismatic, determined, honest, unpretentious and very full of life. Now his large body lay on the wet asphalt, covered by black rubbish bags, with the cupolas of St Basil’s behind him: his was a postcard murder – continue past the cover image of this book and you would hit the spot.

Those who killed Nemtsov acted with impudence and did not expect to be arrested. When one of them was detained, he turned out to be an officer linked to the service of Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s strongman and former rebel installed by Russian president Vladimir Putin to keep the territory under his thumb. Kadyrov had sworn his personal loyalty to Putin, helped annex Crimea and promptly defended the alleged killer as a ‘true patriot’.

Nemtsov’s murder marked the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its ‘hybrid’ war against Ukraine. Now the violence ignited by Russia over the border returned to the homeland. The war in Ukraine, stoked and fanned by the Kremlin, has not just devastated a former Soviet republic that has dared to break free from its grip. It has devastated Russia itself – its sense of decency and moral fibre. It turned hatred, xenophobia and aggression into a norm and civility into an offence.

The murder of Nemtsov was first and foremost a murder of a good man, who tried to stop the war. In the state media this has earned him the title of a national traitor and an American stooge. In the weeks before his death he was demonized by television. Hate banners carrying his image were hung on building façades with the words ‘Fifth column – aliens amongst us’.

Six days before Nemtsov’s death, I watched thousands of people – some paid, others not – marching through the heart of Moscow, bearing slogans denouncing Ukraine, the West and Russian liberals. Muscle-bound toughs representing Kadyrov bore signs proclaiming ‘Putin and Kadyrov prevent Maidan in Russia’, alongside photographs of Nemtsov identifying him as ‘the organizer of Maidan’ (‘Maidan’ had become shorthand for Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in Kiev, the epicentre of Ukraine’s revolution).

I was born and bred in the Soviet Union and have worked for many years in Russia, but never have I seen such levels of hysteria. This was something out of a photograph or a documentary of 1930s Germany. As Nemtsov said in an interview recorded hours before his death, ‘Russia is quickly turning into a fascist state. We already have propaganda modelled on Nazi Germany’s. We also have a nucleus of assault brigades, like the [Nazi] SA.’¹

Andrei Sakharov, Russia’s great humanist and nuclear physicist, once argued that a country which violates human rights at home poses a threat to international security. In fact, it was partly Sakharov’s knowledge of the potential impact of his thermonuclear device that turned him into a human rights activist. Russia today has no Sakharov. It has propagandists who talk about the use of nuclear arms with a flippancy unimaginable in the Soviet period.

‘Russia can reduce America to nuclear ash,’ boasted Dmitry Kiselev – the anchor on the main television channel Rossiya. After Stalin’s death, the personal power of Soviet leaders was checked by the collective Politburo. Now, Kiselev said a decision to use nuclear arms ‘will be taken personally by Putin, who has the undoubted support of the Russian people’. In a documentary about the ‘return of Crimea’, Putin admitted he was ready to make such a decision if NATO forces tried to interfere in the peninsula.

The situation is more dangerous than the Cold War. The Soviet Union and America both emerged as winners from the Second World War and did not suffer from an inferiority complex. Russia’s current rulers, on the other hand, were shaped by what they consider to be a loss in the Cold War and by feeling rejected by the West despite all their fabulous wealth.

A mixture of hostility and jealousy has triumphed in Russia thirty years after Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War, opened up the country and proclaimed the supremacy of human values over the interests of the state. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, which is today deemed a fatal mistake in official textbooks, was greeted with approval not just by the West, but by Russia’s own people. The end of communism gave hope that Russia would become a normal country and join the civilized world. As a drama student in Moscow at the time I remember that feeling of hope.

The attempted communist coup in August 1991 seemed like a last spasm of the regime and its defeat was a celebration of freedom. On Christmas Day 1991 I watched the Soviet flag go down over the Kremlin towers and listened to Gorbachev bid farewell to the Soviet Union:

Gorbachev could not save the country, but he paid tribute to what had been achieved:

In 1992, a year after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I left to do my PhD in English Literature at Cambridge, grateful to Gorbachev for giving me the freedom to travel, study and write. A decade later, I returned to Moscow as a journalist, first with the Financial Times, then with The Economist – a foreign correspondent in my native land. By that time Russia had a former KGB man for a president who marked his first anniversary in the Kremlin by restoring the Soviet anthem and began to revise the Cold War order. In the process of ‘restoration’, Russia has not returned to the Soviet past; but it has arrived at a new junction. An old-fashioned nationalism – in neo-Stalinist costume – has become the most powerful force in Russian society, which threatens its own citizens and its neighbours.

How did Russia get from 1991 to 2015? Has a counter-revolution taken place in Russia? When did it happen and how did I miss it? Over the past quarter-century Russian thinkers have often been obsessed with trying to find a particular point in time at which the country went wrong: they viewed history as a tape that could be wound back and forth in order to identify that crucial junction, so that a different route could then be tried. Yet while the history was not reversible, it was not pre-determined either. There was no one event after the collapse of the Soviet Union that made Russia’s state today inevitable, and while it may be tempting to blame the state of Russia on Putin that would be missing the point. While he bears enormous responsibility for it, he is as much a consequence as he is a cause of Russia’s ills.

In this book I have sought an answer to the question of how Russia got here by following its story, narrative and dominant ideas over the past quarter-century, hoping to illuminate the turning points in its history. The main characters are not politicians or economists, but those who generated the ‘meaning’ of the country, who composed the storyline, who produced and broadcast it and in the process led the country from freedom to war. They are ideologists, journalists, editors, television executives: people in charge of the message and the media.

From the time of Gorbachev’s Perestroika onwards, journalists have been more than transmitters of ideas and designs conceived elsewhere. They became a source of these designs and ideas and, as such, they are responsible both for Russia’s emergence from authoritarianism and its descent back into it. This book is not the history of Russian media, however; rather, it is the story of the country they have invented.

Russia is an idea-centric country and the media play a disproportionately important role in it. As Ivan Pavlov, Russia’s Nobel Prize-winning physiologist famous for his work on conditional reflexes, observed in a lecture he gave in the cold and hungry Petrograd of 1918, the task of every mind is to comprehend reality accurately. But in Russia, he remarked, ‘we are mostly interested in words and have little concern for reality’.³ He blamed the mind of the intelligentsia – ‘the brain of the country’ – for leading Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution.

As with any utopia, communism disregarded reality and as a pseudo-religion it operated through words and images. It is not for nothing that Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who sacrificed the country to the communist idea, described himself as a ‘journalist’.

The Bolsheviks began by taking over the printing presses and guarding their monopoly over printed words. Words were used to conceal facts and construct an alternative reality. Lies and repressions were the two main pillars that upheld the Soviet system. Words justified repression. Repression enforced the words. It worked like an arch. The mind dealt with the disconnection between signals and real life by developing double-think – a condition described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the system which emerged ‘by the word’ also vanished by the word. The Soviet Union expired not because it ran out of money – after all, it could have turned into a North Korea – but because it ran out of words.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrestled with the Soviet system, knew there was only one way to defeat it: ‘Live not by lies’, as he wrote on the day of his arrest. The paradox was that the opening-up of the media could be achieved only by engaging in half-truths. But when reality burst through that opening in the form of live television broadcasts and uncensored publications, the Soviet Union crumbled.

Whoever controlled the media also controlled the country. ‘To take the Kremlin you must take television,’ Alexander Yakovlev, a good man and the main ideologist of Perestroika, once said.⁴ This was no metaphor, for the fiercest and often deadliest battles that unfolded in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Soviet disintegration were for the television tower. In the 1990s television and main newspapers were in the hand of pro-Western liberals who set out to project a new reality by the means of the media. But in the end they used the media to enrich themselves and to consolidate their power.

Television turned Putin, an unknown KGB operative, into Russia’s president within months of his eruption into the national consciousness. His first step as he settled in the Kremlin was to take control over television, only then could he seize the commanding heights of the economy. It has been the main tool of his power, his magic wand that substituted a TV picture for reality. As Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi once said: ‘What is not on TV does not exist.’ Putin took it further: things that did not exist could be turned into reality by the power of television. This alchemical power was displayed vividly both in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine.

I was in Crimea when ‘polite green men’, as Russian soldiers with no markings would soon be known, turned up under the pretence of protecting the local Russian population from Ukrainian ‘fascists’. In Sebastopol, a large crowd of people waved flags and danced along to old Soviet songs in celebration of their liberation. Yet the ‘enemy’ was nowhere to be seen. ‘We saw them on television,’ one man explained. Signals and reality swapped their places: words and images no longer signalled reality, rather reality was constructed to validate signals or, to put it simply, provide the right picture. ‘You furnish the pictures, I will furnish the war,’ William Randolph Hearst famously told his correspondent in Cuba in 1897. As is often the way in its history, Russia pushed this concept to its extreme.

Television has been the primary weapon in Putin’s ‘hybrid war’ against Ukraine. It has created a narrative that is enacted on the ground at the cost of thousands of lives. Television news has turned into a war serial. Yet those who conduct Russia’s aerial battles are not some crazy nationalists bent on the idea of world domination. Nor are they the helpless pawns in the hands of a despot. They are sophisticated and erudite men who started their careers during Gorbachev’s Perestroika and prospered in Yeltsin’s 1990s, but who now act as demiurges – the creators of reality. The purpose of the show they have staged is to perpetuate the power and wealth of Putin and his elite, of which they are a part. In doing so they have stirred the lowest instincts and intoxicated the country with the aggression, hatred and chauvinism that made Boris Nemtsov’s murder possible.

Shortly before Nemtsov was shot dead, he was handing out leaflets for an anti-war rally he had organized. But the rally turned into his funeral march. Two days after his murder, I walked with my wife and nine-year-old son among tens of thousands of Muscovites to the place where he was killed. It was a silent procession.