The Invention of Russia

The Last Supper

Five minutes before 7 p.m. on 25 December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev walked briskly along a Kremlin corridor into a wood-panelled room teeming with photographers, technicians and cameramen to record his last speech as president of the USSR. Gorbachev sat at the desk, put down his papers and looked at his watch. ‘Oh, we still have plenty of time,’ he told the cameramen who were too overwhelmed with the historic significance of the moment to appreciate the irony. The Soviet Union was about to expire and Mr Gorbachev’s presidency with it.

Waiting for the clock to strike the hour, a large, grey-haired man energetically approached the desk and leaned over Gorbachev. ‘Don’t sign it now,’ he told him. ‘First you will [say] “I want to sign a decree relinquishing my duties”. The camera will show a close-up [of you signing it] and will then move back. Then you will start your speech.’¹ The man was Yegor Yakovlev, the head of Soviet television and a former editor of Moskovskie novosti (The Moscow News) – the mouthpiece of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Yakovlev had persuaded Gorbachev that his final days in office should be recorded by Soviet and American television crews and turned into a documentary, Ukhod (Departure).

Yakovlev and Gorbachev had spent the past hour in Gorbachev’s office reminiscing about their mutual Soviet past. Now Gorbachev looked up at Yakovlev as if he was seeing him for the first time. Gorbachev leafed through the papers. ‘I’ll simply sign it now and we will move on,’ he said, turning abruptly to his press secretary for a pen and trying it on an empty sheet of paper. ‘A softer one would be better,’ Gorbachev said.² The president of CNN, who had flown to Moscow to interview Gorbachev on his last day in office, held out his pen. Gorbachev accepted it and, with a journalist’s pen, signed his abdication from power. Nobody in the room noticed the moment. The clock struck 7 p.m. and Gorbachev began to speak. At first his voice sounded soft and forced, almost trembling, but gradually it became more controlled.

As one of the people present in the room recalled, once Gorbachev had finished speaking, Yegor Yakovlev rushed up to him. He was unhappy with Gorbachev’s intonation and suggested that the speech should be re-recorded. Gorbachev looked at Yakovlev in astonishment. It did not just seem tactless – it was absurd. A historic event was not a staged performance. It could not be repeated, just as the empire could not be restored or the clock turned back. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, to be replaced with the Russian tricolour.

The country that had come into being after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 had ceased to exist. Minutes later, Gorbachev passed the nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. Most of the television journalists who followed Gorbachev around in his last days were foreign – the Russian ones had lost interest. Bizarrely, the film about Gorbachev’s departure was shot by an ABC crew, with some assistance from Soviet television, and narrated by an American journalist, Richard Kaplan. This was partly the result of a difference in attitude between Russian and Western journalists towards Gorbachev, but also towards ‘historic’ media events. Soviet training did not leave space for the proclaiming of a historic event of this kind since historic events were defined by the party and the state. The Western media, which prioritized the personal over the ideological and had already elevated Gorbachev to a world figure, of course treated his resignation as a huge moment, even a tragedy. The Russian public did not see it in those terms.

A few hours later, in an empty and largely dark Kremlin, Gorbachev and five others gathered around a table in the Walnut Reception Room for a simple meal that resembled a wake or a last supper. Among them was Alexander Yakovlev, the chief ideologist of Gorbachev’s Perestroika.

The role played by Alexander Yakovlev in the dismantling of the Soviet Union was second only to Gorbachev’s. He was the spiritual leader of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. One of the most senior figures in the Soviet Politburo, Yakovlev was formally in charge of propaganda and ideology and in effect responsible for smashing both. He was also the author of Glasnost – the most successful part of Gorbachev’s reforms – which opened up the media by removing ideological constraints, knocking out one of the key elements of the Soviet construction.

Alexander Yakovlev’s relationship with Gorbachev was complex and often fractious. When Yakovlev died, Gorbachev did not attend his funeral, although Yakovlev had been by his side at one of the most difficult moments in Gorbachev’s life. Shortly before Gorbachev’s television announcement, Yakovlev had mediated an eight-hour long meeting between Gorbachev and Yeltsin at which power was transferred from the last president of the USSR to the first president of Russia. Yakovlev recalled the resolute step of Boris Yeltsin as he walked down the long Kremlin corridor ‘as if on a parade ground’ (‘It was the walk of a victor’) and the weakness of Gorbachev. When Yakovlev walked into Gorbachev’s office, he found him lying down on a sofa.

‘There were tears in his eyes. “You see, Sasha, that is how it is.” Thus spoke a man, perhaps in the hardest minutes of his life. I tried to console him. But I myself was choking… A feeling that something unfair had happened was suffocating me. A man, who had brought drastic change to the world, who only yesterday ruled the fates of billions of people on earth, today was a helpless victim of the cruelty and capriciousness of history.’³ The irony was that it was Gorbachev and Yakovlev who had set this history in motion.

Next to Alexander Yakovlev at Gorbachev’s dinner table sat his namesake, Yegor Yakovlev. Despite their common last name, the two Yakovlevs rarely got confused with one another. The elder Yakovlev was always referred to as Alexander Nikolaevich; the younger one was always Yegor, rarely with his patronymic and often without adding his surname. When he died, obituaries referred to him as Yegor. This was partly a reflection of his mythological status. He was not just the editor-in-chief of Moskovskie novosti, he was simply ‘the chief editor’. Legends were, and still are, told in Russia about Yegor’s talent for nurturing authors, his oozing of irresistible charm which affected men and women alike, his habit of falling in and out of love, his despotic and dictatorial manner, his sparkle.

The two Yakovlevs were not related but the bond between them was no less real for that. Yegor saw Alexander, ‘Uncle Sasha’, as a patron saint and a father figure who enabled him to stretch the limits of Perestroika and protected him when he crossed them. Although the difference between them in age was only six years, they belonged to different generations, separated by the experience of the Second World War. (Alexander was born in 1923 and fought in the war.) Yet the two Yakovlevs were to die within one month of each other: Yegor on 18 September 2005 and Alexander on 18 October 2005. Gorbachev spoke at Yegor’s funeral with a sincerity unusual for a politician: ‘I counted him among my closest people and friends. One could always rely on him. He was close to me in spirit, in his attitude to life and to people… We remember the role his newspaper, Moskovskie novosti has played… Yegor and everything that he did was a yardstick by which people measured themselves…’ Moskovskie novosti was a newspaper that tested Soviet ideology to destruction.

The Soviet system rested on violence and ideology. The death of Stalin in 1953 put an end to mass terror and repression. Violence, administered by the security services on behalf of the Communist Party, became more sporadic, and was now used mainly against dissidents. Nikita Khrushchev, who seized power after Stalin’s death, shifted the weight of the system from repression to ideology, promising to build communism by 1980. Writers and ideologists were to play a more important role in this than the security services. As Khrushchev told Soviet writers in 1957: ‘Just like a soldier cannot fight without ammunition, the party cannot conduct a war without print. Print is our main ideological weapon and we cannot pass it into unreliable hands. It must be kept in the most reliable, most trustworthy hands which would use this weapon to destroy the enemies of the working class.’⁴

By 1980 the ideology was completely rigid and lifeless. The economy was barely functioning and the grand utopia of building communism was dead. As Alexander Bovin, a speech writer for Leonid Brezhnev who replaced Khrushchev in 1964, and one of the leading Perestroika-era journalists, wrote: ‘Only the lies – the end product of ideologists – provided the effectiveness of the violence (real or potential) which the system had rested upon.’⁵ Once the ideology and propaganda started crumbling, the system came down, crushing those who had aimed to reform it. The Soviet collapse was determined not so much by the economic meltdown, a revolutionary uprising in the capital, or a struggle for independence on the periphery of the empire (at least, not directly), but by the dismantling of lies. Without lies, the Soviet Union would have had no legitimacy. The ruling elite no longer saw any reason to defend the system which constrained their personal enrichment and comforts. The paradox was that the dismantling of propaganda was not the result of some spontaneous and accidental process. As Otto Latsis, a prominent economics journalist of the time, a friend of Yegor Yakovlev’s and one of Moskovskie novosti’s regular authors, wrote in his memoirs, it was ‘a meticulously planned suicide’.⁶

The decisive blow was struck not by the dissidents – although their writing certainly undermined the system – but by the people who were in charge of this ideology and who had access to mass media. While Gorbachev carried the banners of Perestroika, it was Alexander Yakovlev and his team of like-minded journalists and editors, including Yegor and Latsis, who wrote the messages on those banners.

As Yegor himself put it, ‘This was a completely unique period in the history of the Russian, and possibly world, press. What we wrote was aimed at liquidating this state. At the same time all the newspapers were fully subsidized by the state.’⁷ The question is why did the men who had the most comfortable lives in the Soviet Union, commit this ‘suicide’? Alexander Yakovlev wrote in his memoirs:

These men were not heretics, rather many of them were faithful followers of the communist religion: they studied its sacred texts, paid tributes to its gods and participated in its rituals. Their Perestroika zeal stemmed not from a lack of faith, but from their desire to purify and cleanse communism of the orthodox bureaucracy. Alexander Yakovlev called Perestroika a reformation. This was not only its literal translation but also its historic meaning. Like the sixteenth-century Protestants in Europe, they rose up against the priests who inserted themselves between God and the people and who, they believed, had corrupted his teaching.

They fought against the corrupt nomenclatura under the slogan ‘more socialism’, holding Lenin’s teaching in their hands. They believed in the ideals of justice and equality and hoped to make the system more humane and moral. Had they wished to do anything other than that they would have most definitely shared the fate of many of the Soviet dissidents who were sidelined, exiled, jailed, or incarcerated in psychiatric wards. Stylistically, the reformers operated within the strict boundaries of Soviet language. Stepping outside the canon, breaking into a different style of writing, was a crime greater than criticizing the system within the Soviet mantra. A literary critic and writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who was tried and sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, said that his differences with the Soviet rule were mainly of stylistic nature. For the generation of the communist reformers, their objections to the Soviet system were ethical rather than stylistic.

‘We, the reformers of 1985, tried to destroy the Bolshevik church in the name of a true religion and a true Jesus not realizing yet that our religion was false and our Jesus was an imposter,’⁹ wrote Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev himself went further than anyone else of that tribe. His evolution from a Soviet apparatchik to liberal freethinker was perhaps the most deliberate of any high-ranking Soviet official, Gorbachev included. ‘I came to hate Lenin and Stalin – these monsters who had cruelly deceived me and crushed my romantic world of hopes.’¹⁰ In a country that had never fully repented for its crimes against its own people, Yakovlev embarked on – and completed – his own journey of repentance and atonement.

The fact that the reformation began with print also attested to its almost religious nature. The communists destroyed and defaced churches but borrowed from religion its attitude to the written word. Texts by Lenin and Marx were studied in every high school and university: they defined the approach to history and the view of the world. The battles on the pages of Soviet newspapers were conducted with the aid of citations from their sacred texts.

From the very beginning of the Bolshevik rule in 1917, words were nationalized and guarded by the party. Nothing could be printed without its permission. The first ‘black’ lists of banned books were compiled by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and included the Bible as well as many children’s books. In the 1930s a librarian was tried and exiled for issuing philosophical works that were not even banned, but which simply did not fit into the Marxist view of the world. Libraries had ‘closed’ sections and special permission was required for reading books there. Some books were marked with a stamp: ‘not to be issued’. Subscriptions to literary magazines and newspapers were strictly regulated by the state. A death sentence during Stalin’s Terror was euphemistically called ‘ten years without the right to correspondence’. The fear of the written word penetrated deep into the system. The secret police that carried out arrests and executions were specifically banned from issuing written statements to the relatives of those who were murdered. The relatives could only be told verbally (lied to) that a father, a wife, a son, a sister, had been sentenced to ‘ten years without the right to correspondence’ when he or she was in fact dead.

By the mid- and late 1940s – when the ten-year sentences were supposed to have expired – the families began to ask what had happened to their dear ones, and they were told (again verbally) that the relative had died while serving their sentence. The practice remained in place after Stalin’s death. Only in 1989 – three years into Perestroika – did the KGB (the initials stood for ‘Committee of State Security’) allow the true dates of and information about executions to be printed in formal documents and death certificates.¹¹ The letters of those who were not executed and who were sent to the Gulag were censored. Words equalled life. The denial of words equalled death.

Words, like people, were kept behind the Iron Curtain. Publishing a book in the West without the permission of the state was considered no less a crime than illegally crossing the frontier without a special ‘exit’ visa. In 1958 Boris Pasternak was expelled from the Writers’ Union and viciously vilified for the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, acknowledged the magic ability of words to transcend closed borders: being effectively barred from seeing his parents before their death, he wrote about them in English – a language they did not understand – as ‘their only chance to see me and America’ and ‘the only way for me to see them and our room’.¹²

In the 1980s the main ideological battles unfolded in print – rather than on television or the radio waves. All the men who led this new reformation were men of letters. Yegor was a student of history and archives; he was Lenin’s biographer which gave him strength in ‘theological debates’ about the purity of the teaching. Otto Latsis worked as an editor of a magazine called Kommunist. Alexander Bovin was a speech writer for Brezhnev. The list goes on. These men were members of one generation known as shestidesiatniki – the men of the 1960s, when they became most active. They were almost exact contemporaries of Gorbachev, born within a few months of each other in 1930 or 1931. They shaped the narrative of Perestroika and articulated the values of their generation. In the West, Gorbachev is often seen as a visionary historic figure solely responsible for the liberalization of the Soviet Union. In fact, he was a man of his generation, which determined his sensibilities and choices.

These men shared childhood memories of Stalin’s repressions, but their teenage years were overwhelmingly shaped by the Second World War and the Soviet victory which gave legitimacy to Soviet rule. They graduated from universities in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, which had profoundly changed the country, and began their professional careers at the time of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, where he denounced Stalin’s repressions and his cult of personality. Khrushchev’s Thaw gave them encouragement and a chance to pursue political careers without becoming either murderers or victims. To belong to the shestidesiatniki was not just a matter of age, but of background and values. Most of the members of this club were well-educated, like-minded liberal intelligentsia, largely pro-Western, certainly anti-Stalinist. They moved together as a group, seeking out and helping each other along the way. Some of the most active members and ideologists of that generation were born into the families of Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, many of whom were purged by Stalin. Their raison d’être was to restore socialist justice and clear the names of their fathers.

In the early years of Perestroika, young journalists keen to find their own roots turned to these men for their experience. A few years later, as is often the case with fathers and sons, they were to reject and ridicule them.

Fireglow

A cardboard folder with Yegor Yakovlev’s personal file; a snapshot for a Soviet-passport-sized photograph; a serious-looking Soviet man in a dark suit and thick-framed glasses. ‘Yakovlev, Yegor Vladimirovich, born 1930, member of the Communist Party from 1953. In 1954, graduated from the Moscow State Historical Archival Institute, writes articles on the subject of party propaganda, Soviet development and Communist ethics; pays particular attention to the subject of Lenin.’ A standard sign that stated: ‘politically literate, morally stable and ideologically sound’.¹⁴

Yegor was neither the most talented nor the cleverest of his generation. But he was one of the most colourful and active. He encapsulated its traits and its defining features with a clarity that is not obscured by genius. He remained an active player in Russian political life longer than many others. As such he makes an ideal subject for the study of the generation that attempted to reform the Soviet Union but instead contributed to its demise.

How and why did this ‘ideologically sound’ journalist, a fervent member of the Communist Party, come to undermine the system? If the Soviet Union was a monolith totalitarian system, how did he manage to break through it? And what gave him and his circle the strength and determination to rise to the top? Some of the answers can be gleaned from their ‘anketa’ or official forms which had to be filled in with every move – a change of a job, a trip abroad, a promotion, a demotion. The first question was always about ‘fathers’.

Yegor’s first ‘autobiography’ is dated July 1949, when Yegor was about to go to the Historical Archival Institute. Blue, faint ink on aged, poor-quality yellow paper. ‘Father: Yakovlev Vladimir Ivanovich, participated in the revolutionary movement since 1911, a member of the Communist Party since 1 January, 1919. The first years after the revolution worked in Ch.K in Ukraine…’¹⁵

Ch.K (pronounced Cheka) was an abbreviation for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation. It was set up to stop looting, but quickly developed into a secret police force designed to prevent counter-revolutionary actions and execute ‘class enemies’. Yegor’s father was the head of Ch.K in Odessa, which was taken by the Bolsheviks in April 1919. Ivan Bunin, one of Russia’s finest writers and its first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an ardent anti-Bolshevik, who fled St Petersburg after the revolution, described Odessa in 1919 as ‘a dead and empty port; a dead burned-out city…’. The office of the Ch.K, where Yakovlev’s father served, was ‘decked with red flags which, extremely filthy and droopy from the rain, cast thin and bloody reflections on the wet asphalt’.¹⁶ ‘Day and night we live in an orgy of death. They keep talking in the name of some “bright future” and will supposedly issue forth from this satanic gloom. There have already appeared on this earth an entire legion of specialists and contractors who seek to fashion human well-being,’¹⁷ Bunin wrote.

Yet in his own imagination Yegor placed his father, whom he barely remembered, in a context created by Isaak Babel, an Odessa writer who embraced the revolution and painted colourful portraits of local gangsters ‘squeezed into crimson waistcoats, their steel shoulders enveloped in red-brown jackets’. Yegor believed it was his father who had nailed the most notorious bandit Mishka ‘the Jap’, who had served as a prototype for Babel’s Benya Krik – the ‘King’ of Odessa gangsters. Whether Yegor’s father actually caught Mishka ‘the Jap’ is unknown. What is known, though, is that according to Grigory Besedovsky, a former Soviet diplomat who defected to Paris in 1928, he was a ‘strange and sinister’ figure of extreme cruelty who, in three months as the head of the Ch.K, ordered the execution of 5,000 people – among them his own father, who was an active member of the ultra-nationalist, monarchist and anti-Semitic organization called the Union of Russian People. Yegor described his grandfather as a drunken and abusive man who occasionally threatened his wife – Yegor’s grandmother – with a knife. When he was detained for counter-revolutionary activities, Yegor’s father decided he should be dealt with according to the law of the revolution and so he sanctioned his own father’s execution. Afterwards, Yegor’s paternal grandmother apparently committed suicide in her son’s flat.

Was this inhuman? Perhaps. But so, Yegor argued, was the death of his father’s sister, who was beaten to death with metal rods by the Cossacks when they found revolutionary literature on her. The harshness of the revolutionary years was dictated not by cruelty but by ‘the purity of the revolution and its ideals’ and by ‘neterpenie [intolerance or impatience] – the most wonderful quality of a revolutionary’,¹⁸ Yegor concluded in a short book published in 1965.

The book was written in the form of an imaginary conversation with his father. Yegor called it Ia idu s toboi (I Am Walking Alongside You). It was preceded and probably inspired by a novel by Yuri Trifonov, one of the most prominent and talented post-Second World War Soviet writers, called Otblesk kostra (Fireglow) – a semi-documentary book about the life of his father, an Old Bolshevik who participated in the revolution and the civil war. People of Yegor Yakovlev’s generation and background lived in the glow of the fire that their fathers had started in order to burn the old Russia, which eventually consumed them too. Soviet history was their family history and they perceived it as such.

Yegor’s father died in 1935, two years before Stalin’s purges of his own elite reached their peak. Yegor was five years old. Though his father apparently died of cancer, there were rumours that he had been poisoned. ‘Within a few years most of Yegor’s father’s colleagues vanished. Yegor remembered a family friend coming to see his mother in 1937 and telling her stories of people being taken away in the middle of the night. Her response was placid and common: “When you chop down trees chips fly.”’¹⁹

‘Chopping trees’ was something that Yegor’s father himself oversaw. Metaphors in the Soviet Union had a physical dimension. In the late 1920s to early 1930s Yegor’s father was responsible for timber harvesting which was almost entirely carried out by the slave labour of the Gulag. When Yegor was born, his father was in Vologda and Archangel – overseeing the logging of trees by the inmates. Some of this Gulag timber was exported to England. British timber yards received logs which had markings and inscriptions made by the Gulag prisoners as it was the only way of communication with the outside world that was still available to them. ‘With suffering you get this timber’, read one such inscription.

Yegor’s father had travelled to England on business, which probably included the export of that timber. That is where Yegor’s parents actually met. In 1929 – the year of Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ – his mother, who had worked at the Soviet Trade Representation, moved back to the Soviet Union pregnant with Yegor. As Yegor’s father was a senior member of the Soviet nomenclatura, the family was given an old merchant’s house in a quiet part of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. Yegor’s mother chose it in preference to a flat on the embankment, in a luxury apartment block where many of the Bolshevik elite lived – and where most of them would be arrested (Trifonov wrote a novel about this place called The House on the Embankment). Such was the scale of the purges that nobody living in the Moscow of the 1930s could claim ignorance. The show trials of the enemies of the people were public; the stories of those who returned from the labour camps were plentiful. But seeing the arrests, or hearing about them, was not the same as comprehending them as evil. That required a remarkable independence of thought and few people possessed it. Yegor was not one of them. He grew up with the cult of his father in his head and a portrait of Stalin on the wall – just like any nomenclatura family.

When, in 1949, Yegor’s school friend cursed Stalin and accused those who worshipped him of hypocrisy, Yegor kicked him out of the house. ‘I never heard anyone talk about Him [Stalin] like this. He called hypocrites those who spoke of their love for Stalin, he chose the worst epithets for him. It was unbelievable. But he spoke calmly and firmly – just like he talked about astronomy in school. First, I argued with him. Then I said: “Go away! Go away! You are a bastard.” He was walking down the stairs and I was shouting something offensive at his back.’²⁰

The next time Yegor heard something like this said about Stalin was in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, and this time the words were spoken by Nikita Khrushchev in the Grand Kremlin Palace.

Stalin’s death in 1953 was a watershed as great as his coming to power: it marked the end of one country and the beginning of another. But the realization of this did not come overnight. In the first days after Stalin’s death the country seemed numb, as if holding its breath. His death was greeted with a mixture of disbelief, fear and grief. Gods cannot die the way mortals do. His cult had hypnotized the brightest minds. Andrei Sakharov, one of the world’s greatest physicists and humanists, wrote to his first wife at the time: ‘I am under a spell from the death of a great man. Thinking about his humanity.’²¹ Sakharov cited this letter in his memoirs, struggling to explain his own reaction.

Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin, was a man who started to lift this spell. His own appearance – short, round, bald, with sticking-out ears – evoked laughter rather than terror. His national Ukrainian collarless shirt was an antithesis to Stalin’s buttoned-up, high-necked, military-style tunic. Khrushchev loosened the suffocating collar. ‘I like him ever so much,’ enthused Sakharov.²² ‘After all he differs so much from Stalin.’ A wild, uneducated, capricious man, complicit in Stalin’s Terror, with blood on his hands, Khrushchev nonetheless displayed some human features. Like a folk-tale hero who slays the dragon and opens up the castle, one of Khrushchev’s first acts was to open up the Kremlin to the public. The paralysing fear which enveloped the country during the years of Stalinist rule began to lift. ‘People were still scared to make any sharp move, but the nooses around their necks suddenly got looser.’²³

Yegor Yakovlev, who joined the Communist Party just before Stalin’s death, was working as a low-level party official. A few months after Stalin’s death, he organized street patrols in central Moscow to help the police to catch drunks and prostitutes. Yegor remembered the sensation of walking back at night along Moscow’s main streets. ‘For the first time, we walked the Moscow streets like masters, aware of our strength.’²⁴ Only a few months earlier, the nocturnal streets of Moscow had been ruled by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – the secret police) who whisked people away from their homes. Trade returned to Red Square. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, the nineteenth-century trading galleries facing the Kremlin, which had been occupied by state offices in the 1930s, became the main department store in the country – GUM. Yegor’s first journalistic job was in a small-circulation newspaper called Za obraztsovuiu torgovliu (For the Exemplary Trade), published by GUM.

The main marker of Yegor’s generation was Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 in which he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and revealed the scale of purges within the party. It had the impact of an exploded bomb. ‘Everything seemed unreal, even the fact that I was in the Kremlin… Everything [I lived by] was blown up into small pieces – like shrapnel in war,’ Alexander Yakovlev recalled.²⁵ The speech was delivered at an unscheduled secret session held on the last day of the Congress and lasted nearly four hours. It was not printed in newspapers or broadcast by television and radio. The most important events in the Kremlin that defined the fate of millions of people occurred with the media outlets being ‘switched off’.

Just like newspapers that were glued over windows during the war as protection against flying shards, the role of newspapers in the Soviet political system was to block out information and protect the façade of the state. (A few hundred copies of Khrushchev’s speech were printed for internal use and marked ‘strictly secret’. The first public text appeared in English a few weeks later in the New York Times but did not make it into the Russian press until 1989.) Instead of using the media, the party resorted to the most arcane and direct way of delivering information – through messengers by word of mouth. Perhaps one reason was that the spoken word was meant to have a greater impression on the listener than the printed one. (After all, people go to church to hear the Bible, not to read it.)

Yegor was one of the messengers charged with reading out the text of Khrushchev’s speech to the rank and file of the party. He did not like what he read. He remembered his feeling of protest at and rejection of the speech. When he came home that day and saw that his wife had taken Stalin’s portrait down, he touched the nail in disbelief. Yegor got angry and demanded that the portrait should be put back. Soon, he took it down himself – this time for good. The portrait of Dzerzhinsky, which the founder of Ch.K had given to his father, remained on the wall. Yegor was not alone in his initial reaction: many of the party activists felt the same way. As Gorbachev recalled, while those who directly encountered Stalin’s repressions welcomed Khrushchev’s speech, many either refused tobelieve it or rejected the need to bring it up, even if the facts cited by Khrushchev were true. ‘Whom will that benefit?’ Vyacheslav Molotov, one of Stalin’s senior henchmen, asked. ‘What will that give us? Why stir up the past?’²⁶ After all, the Soviet Union could have developed the same way as China after Mao. Swearing their allegiance to Stalin, his followers could have moved the country’s economy into a different direction. Lavrentiy Beria, the most feared boss of the NKVD, who primed himself as Stalin’s successor, could have played the role that Deng Xiaoping played in China. So why did Khrushchev do it?

Partly, it was an instinct of self-preservation. Khrushchev, like most of the high-ranking party nomenclatura, was exhausted by the constant fear and expectation of another super-purge which Stalin had probably been planning. The main reason, however, was not rational but emotional: he denounced Stalin because he could and because he wanted to. As William Taubman, Khrushchev’s biographer, wrote, it was partly ‘a way of reclaiming his identity as a decent man by telling the truth. On the night he gave the speech, he later recalled he could “hear the voices of comrades who perished”.’²⁷

Khrushchev’s speech had several vital implications. One was that it removed the fear of being murdered, particularly among the elite. After the execution of Beria in true Stalinist fashion in 1953 (Beria was accused of being a British spy and promptly shot), Khrushchev effectively called a halt to the use of violence against political rivals. The first test of the new rule came a year after the speech, in 1957, when a group of hard-line Stalinists, including Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, fearing that Khrushchev was undermining the foundation of the regime, attempted to overthrow him. The media once again were silent.[1] The conspirators were labelled as an ‘anti-party’ group – a charge which a few years earlier had carried a death sentence. This time none of the plotters was executed or even jailed. The same rule saved Khrushchev’s own life when he was finally toppled in 1964, and it was observed by his successors. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev spared those who led a coup against him and in 1993, although Boris Yeltsin jailed those who took up arms against him, he quickly let them out again.

In fact, the main reason the plotters lost in 1957 was a significant mood shift within the elite. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, the new generation, which supported Khrushchev in 1957 and then turned against him in 1964, did not want a return to the hyper-tension of Stalinist times. It was striving for a measured, safe and comfortable life. Its main goal was to stay in lifelong power without the fear of being purged. This pact applied not only to the top political ranks but to the Soviet elite more generally. Members of the ruling class who fell out of favour could be pushed aside, ‘exiled’ into far-flung embassies or put under house arrest, but they were not physically eliminated.

In the 1960s this pact allowed the growth and survival of a new party elite which could pursue its own goals. Its members were happy – not with Stalin’s death as such, but with their own youth, their hopes and their strength and, above all, just with being alive. Khrushchev opened up the Kremlin – both physically and figuratively – to a new generation which had been too young to serve under Stalin.

As Alexander Bovin, one of the young communist reformers in the Kremlin, wrote in his memoirs: ‘A critical mass started to form, a mass which a quarter of a century later blew away the mightiest totalitarian regime of the twentieth century.’²⁸ An invisible shift of the generations – the engine of all big social changes in Russia – was taking place.

Members of the generation empowered by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party did not seek to destroy the system, they tried to work their way into it in order to seize its tools and aim them against the old Stalinists. The denunciation of Stalin did not undermine the shestidesiatniki’s faith in socialism. On the contrary, it reinforced their belief in its self-cleansing quality. Stalinism was seen not as the ultimate manifestation of the Soviet regime but as a distortion. The goal, as Yakovlev’s generation understood it, was to improve the system of proofs rather than to throw out the theory. As Yegor reflected:

It is usual for the sons to reject the experience of the fathers. But the untimely deaths of the old Bolsheviks at Stalin’s hands meant that their children saw their duty in clearing and redeeming the names of their fathers and carrying on their socialist cause. Yegor’s generation lived with Hamlet’s complex: his urge to redeem and carry out his father’s commandments while reconciling his actions with morals. Hamlet, a play that was effectively banned under Stalin, returned to the Soviet stage after his death when these men graduated from universities and entered active life. In 1954, the first post-Stalin Hamlet was full of vitality, strength and determination: as he delivered ‘To be or not to be’, Hamlet viciously shook the iron bars of what looked like a prison gate.

By the right of their revolutionary fathers, who had started the socialist experiment, the children were the Soviet princes, or patricians empowered by a sense of entitlement and personal responsibility for their country. They were the Soviet aristocracy. They did not try to escape the Soviet reality either physically or mentally, and never considered emigrating. It was their country – they were entitled to it – and they wanted to change it according to their own needs and views of what was right and wrong. ‘If only I was at the top’ was the thought that Yegor and his generation lived with. They were born for active life, had the strength for it and were constantly looking for a cause to which they could apply their energy.

Private Thoughts

The removal of terror also opened up space for individual thought and action and Russian artists, writers and journalists were quick to take advantage of it. Their work formed the consciousness of those who, thirty years later, would launch Perestroika. The word ‘thaw’ – which the writer Ilya Erenburg used as the title of his novel published in 1954 – gave a name to an entire period in Russian culture, and captured the sensation of new life breaking through the ice. One of the main discoveries and joys of the post-Stalinist years was that the nation, exhausted by collectivization, shattered by the war, tortured by the Gulag, managed to preserve some healthy instincts and lively qualities.

While the Soviet system still barred private ownership of land and property, it allowed space for privacy, for intimate feelings and thoughts. Khrushchev’s main urban projects of building five-storey-high apartment blocks throughout the country transformed the living space of millions of people who moved out of communal flats with one kitchen and one bathroom for up to ten families into small, individual apartments each equipped with its own kitchen and bathroom. These apartments were cramped and inconveniently designed but they were separate from one another. The impact of the transformation from communal into private living can hardly be overestimated. Individual tape-recorders and individual television sets now populated individual flats. With them came artists, poets and bards who filled up the intellectual space of that era. Their works were designed for an intimate audience rather for the echoing public halls.

Normal human feelings were cultivated by theatres and literature, but nowhere more so than in a journal called Novy Mir (New World). ‘All of us in those years – I mean the people of my circle – worshipped Novy Mir, we lived according to Novy Mir,’ Yegor recalled.³⁰ Whereas Pravda (Truth) appealed to the mass consciousness, Novy Mir appealed to private minds.

The Bolsheviks did not just nationalize private land and assets, they also nationalized humankind and individual consciousness. And while physical assets were expropriated by means of physical violence, minds were claimed through ideology and the media. The paternalistic state was supposed to take care not only of the livelihoods of its citizens but also of their morals. The aim of the media had been to standardize the minds of their readers by treating them as one collective body, feeding it the same (mis)information so that it would also think collectively. In the 1960s Novy Mir, which had a circulation of 130,000 copies, countered the very principle of a collective mind, restoring the individual as an entity. After the 20th Congress, the yearning for such an individual approach became a mass one.

At the head of Novy Mir stood Alexander Tvardovsky, a Russian poet from a solid peasant family whose father, brother and sisters had been ‘collectivized’ and exiled as kulaks (well-off peasants with their own land). His own consciousness was formed by his peasant background. His father was the son of a soldier who bought a patch of land with the earnings he had made as a blacksmith. ‘From a very tender age our father impressed on us the love for this sour land, mean and unkind, but our own – our “estate” as he called his farm jokingly.’³¹ C. P. Snow, an English author and essayist who met Tvardovsky in London, described him as ‘an honest and rooted man. He stood like a rock, exceptionally subtle in his emotional nature, strong and simple in his intellect.’³²

Tvardovsky, who was appointed the editor of Novy Mir by the Central Committee, gained his national fame as the author of a connected cycle of poems in which the central character is Vasily Tyorkin – a folk-style Russian private soldier, life-loving, instinctively patriotic, with an acute sense of duty and camaraderie, who never loses heart and defies death with his wit and courage. The rhyming poem, made up of scenes from Tyorkin’s own life, reads like a comic book. It was easy to remember and easy to tell to others. There was a folkloric sound to it – as though it was specially written to recite during short breaks in the trenches.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Vasily Tyorkin during the war, wrote:

Tvardovsky first heard of Solzhenitsyn in December 1961 when the reclusive schoolteacher from the provincial city of Riazan submitted to Novy Mir his story Щ-854, better known as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. To get it printed, Tvardovsky went straight to Khrushchev, who was moved by the story of a hard-working peasant in Stalin’s Gulag and saw it as a validation of his own attack on Stalin. He allowed it to be printed – ‘a fact’, Tvardovsky recorded in his diary, ‘remarkable not only for my daily life and which, I think, will have a pivotal importance in it, but one that will have serious consequences in the flow of literary (which means not only literary) affairs’.³⁴

Tvardovsky saw One Day… not as a subversive story – as did Solzhenitsyn – but as deeply therapeutic prose which would help to heal a society traumatized by Stalin’s excesses. It was printed in November 1962 and had an impact similar to Khrushchev’s own speech at the 20th Congress. Its novelty and power was not in the description of the Gulag system, but in the choice of the protagonist. Ivan Denisovich was not an inventor, an artist, or a communist. He was a Russian peasant: hard-working, conscientious and self-reliant – a close relative of Tvardovsky’s Tyorkin.

One Day… and Vasily Tyorkin had a common theme: the survival and continuation of life, and its resilience in any circumstances. Be it in the Gulag or the wartime trenches, life – physical and artistic – had its own rights that could not be squeezed out by politics. Both Tyorkin and Ivan Denisovich were survivors and they kept alive the best traits and qualities of the Russian peasantry however hard the system tried to erase them. Solzhenitsyn was invited to attend a reception at the Kremlin and was toasted by Khrushchev as Ivan Denisovich.

But having let thousands of such Ivan Denisovichs out of the Gulag, Khrushchev was not prepared to give them economic power. He allowed individual thinking, but not individual action, private land, or economic freedom. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, having achieved a spiritual breakthrough, Khrushchev did not dare to touch the economic foundation of socialism.

Otto Latsis, a Latvian by birth and one of the most respected economic journalists and proponents of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, recalled the draconian rules on private ownership in the late 1950s and early 1960s when his father, an Old Bolshevik, was expelled from the Communist Party on the pretext that he had built with his own hands and his own money a country house that did not fit in with the strict limits imposed by the party. The law banned the ownership of a private house that exceeded 60 square metres (51 square yards) of living space, regardless of the number of people living in it. It specified the height of ceilings in cellars and banned fireplaces in country dachas. ‘People were forced to physically bend down to the authorities: a cellar where a person could stand up to his full height was prohibited.’³⁵

The young party elite, which included Yegor Yakovlev, Bovin and Latsis, longed for economic and political reforms and was frustrated by Khrushchev’s failure to deliver either. His ousting in 1964 did not, at the time, spell disaster or the end of an era – at least not straight away. Bovin summed up the mood of the liberally minded part of the elite: ‘In less than ten years Khrushchev had exhausted his positive resources… He started turning into a monument to himself or rather did not stop others from turning him into a monument. The trouble was that Khrushchev was ousted by people of smaller calibre. Khrushchev would not let them have a quiet life. He destabilized them. Not the system, but each one of them. And he paid for it.’³⁶

A coup against Khrushchev was the work of two rival camps in the party: on the one hand, neo-Stalinists and nationalists led by Alexander Shelepin and his protégé and KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, and on the other hand, the mediocre but less militant regional clan led by Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev, who came out on top, oversaw nearly two decades of stagnation. He did not seem like a master of evil. He had been through the war, though not as a soldier, but as a political commissar. He was no reformer, but nor was he a bloodthirsty Stalinist or nationalist like Shelepin. His motto was ‘live and let live’. An obsessive hunter, he preferred shooting game at his country residence to dealing with international affairs in his Kremlin office. A man of little education, he was generally good-natured and not afraid to admit his own ignorance even to his own speech writer, Alexander Bovin.

‘Listen, do you know what “upland game” is?’ Brezhnev asked him after listening to one of the speeches Bovin had drafted for him.

‘Vaguely’, said Bovin.

‘Let’s do it this way,’ Brezhnev suggested. ‘I will tell you about upland game, and you will explain to me what the word konfrontatsiya [confrontation] means. Agreed?’

Bovin, who held a doctorate in philosophy, agreed.³⁷

Unlike Yegor Yakovlev and Otto Latsis, each of whom was born into a family of Old Bolsheviks, Bovin came from a less revolutionary background. His grandfather was a priest, his father a military officer in the Far East. Bovin trained as a lawyer, held two graduate degrees and worked as a judge. His enormous size, hussar-style moustache and side-whiskers, his sense of humour and joie de vivre, made an immediate comic impression on his interlocutors. But behind this appearance was a man of great brain and decency.

In the early 1960s, having spent a few years at the influential journal Kommunist, Bovin became a staffer at the Central Committee, which was a fairly large and diverse body that de facto governed the country. Bovin joined the department that dealt with communist parties in the Soviet bloc and was led by Yuri Andropov. ‘They needed people who on the one hand would give no grounds for doubting their allegiance to the political regime and ruling ideology and, on the other hand, who could look at the world openly and be able to understand and explain the changes that were coming.’³⁸

The biggest change of all was that that the country could no longer be held together by terror, nor could it be completely isolated from the rest of the world. Although the Iron Curtain was still very much in place, it worked more like one-way tinted glass than a brick wall. The Soviet people could not be seen by the West but they could see out to the West.

The system could bar its people and their ideas from travelling abroad, but it could not stop the fashion for mini-skirts, long hair worn loose, songs by the Beatles and films by Fellini from moving in the opposite direction (Fellini’s 8½ received a Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival in 1963). Unable to travel abroad, Soviet youths started roving around the country with rucksacks on their backs and guitars in their hands, spurring along the way an entire sub-culture of tourism. Journalism transcended the domain of the official party ideology and became romantic and fashionable.

Yegor Yakovlev set the fashion in a new magazine called Zhurnalist (Journalist). Its cutting-edge design, its illustrations and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock caught the attention of the urban intelligentsia that lived by the idea of the West, dreamt of the West, idealized it and longed for it, and tried to steal any glimpse of Western life from films and journals. A lucky few who travelled to the West on business brought back stories and pictures: friends and family were invited for an annotated show of slides. Zhurnalist aimed to satisfy that longing.

Before Yegor’s time, Zhurnalist had been called Sovetskaia pechat’ (Soviet Press). Yegor borrowed the title Zhurnalist from a magazine that had existed in the 1920s. He wished Zhurnalist to express what people of his own circle ‘talked about in their Moscow kitchens’. This suggested a new way of organizing the mind: not vertically, where the party through print dictated what its readers were to think, but horizontally, where a network of like-minded individuals shared views put forward in print.

Zhurnalist reflected all the strengths and weakness of the shestidesiatniki. Idle conversations around a kitchen table among the liberal intelligentsia all too often were a substitute for real action or work; it gave them relief, but yielded few results. It created a comfortable cocoon, but also increased the intelligentsia’s isolation from the rest of the country. The ‘cocoon’ itself, however, was growing larger in size. By the time Yegor was fired less than two years later, its circulation exceeded a quarter of a million copies.

Zhurnalist tried to break down geographical and intellectual barriers, moving freely between the village and the city, between Russia and the West. One of its authors was Yury Chernichenko, an agricultural economist and essayist who grew up in a Russian village that was devastated by Stalin’s collectivization and subjected to famine and cannibalism (his parents would not leave him at home alone, fearing that he would be stolen and eaten). Soviet bureaucracy not only spoilt the land by draining the rivers and destroying forests, it also drained the human and moral resources of the nation. Chernichenko, who turned to the Russia village in search of a positive, hard-working, entrepreneurial national type, was one of its finest examples.

Chernichenko’s essays about rural Russia happily coexisted on the pages of the Zhurnalist with themes and articles that constituted the world of Russian Westernizers. In one of the issues, Yegor published his interview with a prototype of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – a Soviet spy who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. (The novel itself was only available in samizdat – the clandestine copying and distribution of material banned by the state.) Hemingway was an icon of the shestidesiatniki: his photograph in a black-and-white roll-neck was displayed on glass-fronted bookshelves as a sign of belonging.

In the same issue, only a few pages apart, in a section called ‘If You Happen to Be in…’, Yegor published an illustrated essay about the ancient Russian town of Suzdal’, written and drawn by the artist Tatyana Mavrina. Ornamented wooden houses and white churches were accompanied by similarly ornate texts that conjured up the world of the Russian fairy tale with its fire-birds, magic horses, lively fairs and its pagan gods. The onion domes of Suzdal’ and the smoky bars of Valencia were equally exotic.

While the official Soviet press was cultivating the image of the Soviet Union as a besieged fortress, Zhurnalist took its readers to an American television studio and around Fleet Street, inside The Economist tower in St James’s and the Chicago mansion of Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, with a revolving round bed and pictures of Marilyn Monroe as the first ‘Girl of the Month’. These articles were not the usual rife propaganda about the bourgeois press, but surprisingly accurate and respectful descriptions of how the Western media operated. To be sure, the article about Playboy was written by a French journalist and accompanied by a commentary by a Soviet media guru who lamented the ‘depravity and degradation’ of Western readers. Positioned on the side of the main text in white letters on black ink, the commentary was quite literally marginal.

Inevitably, such articles prompted comparisons and planted ideas in the heads of those who were supposed to ‘propagate, agitate and organize’. Yegor’s generation tried to square the circle: how did one reconcile socialism, which rejected private ownership, with individual initiative, and the idea of a ‘party-minded’ media with the free flow of information? This was not a philosophical question, but a highly practical one. These people had an allegiance to the Bolshevik ideas of social justice and equality, but they wanted a good life for themselves and for their children, a life no worse than the lives of their counterparts in the ‘decaying’ West.

For a moment, it seemed that the answer was found in the Prague Spring of 1967–8 when the government of Alexander Dubček tried to reform the Czech economy by freeing it from state control and introducing competition. ‘There is no thick wall between economy and ethics: under socialism the rouble rewards honest and pure creative work,’ Zhurnalist enthused, displaying as evidence the experience of the socialist Czechoslovakia and backing it with a quote from the Czech ministry of the interior: ‘Our first problem is how to teach a cobbler, a vendor or a barber not to be afraid to earn a lot of money.’ It was a hymn to private initiative and to common sense.³⁹

Dubček’s idea of socialism with ‘a human face’ was a Eureka moment for the reformists in Moscow. The Czech reforms that offered more democracy, economic liberalization and constraints on the all-powerful security agencies filled Russian liberals with hope and enthusiasm.

The events in Prague inspired Andrei Sakharov to write an article which he titled ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’. The article warned of the threat of a thermonuclear Armageddon and called for an economic, social and ideological convergence with the West. It was circulated in samizdat and 18 million copies of it were printed around the world, more than any Agatha Christie novel. Yet, as far as Brezhnev’s Kremlin was concerned, the danger posed to the survival of the Soviet system by Sakharov’s proposed ‘convergence’ was greater than the threat of a nuclear war. The link between the Prague Spring and the advances of liberal thought in Russia was apparent.

In June 1967 Zhurnalist reprinted the new Czech media law which guaranteed freedom of speech, without giving up state ownership of the media. A group of intellectuals, including Sakharov, proposed a similar law at home. ‘It proclaims, in effect, the right of any citizen, to print any material, to stage any performance and to show any films,’ the KGB reported to the Central Committee in horror. The KGB added that ‘it was undertaking measures to prevent the further activity of those who have organized this document’.⁴⁰

In April 1968 Yegor was fired ostensibly for publishing a poetic and subtly erotic black-and-white photograph and a reproduction of a Soviet painting depicting a female nude in a bath-house. Yet the deeper reasons had to do with the publication of the Czech media law. There was talk in the Kremlin that if Zhurnalist was not closed down, the Soviet leadership would soon face the same situation as the one in Czechoslovakia.

As transcripts of telephone conversations and meetings between Brezhnev and Dubček testify, the Soviet leaders were much more worried about the media than by any other aspects of the Czech reform. Remarkably, newspapers were the main subject of the Soviet attack on Dubček. ‘We have not got much time,’ Brezhnev told him on 13 August 1968. ‘I once again turn to you with my concern about the media which not only distort our agreements, but spread anti-Soviet and anti-Socialist ideas… We had agreed that all media – print, radio and television – would be brought under the control of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party and all anti-Soviet and anti-socialist publications would stop…’⁴¹ Brezhnev accused Dubček of breaking the agreements and used examples supplied to him by the KGB.

The Czech reformers insisted they never intended to break away from the Soviet allegiance and argued that they imposed a threat not to socialism but ‘to bureaucracy which has been slowly and steadily burying socialism on an international scale.’ The Soviet bureaucracy perceived this threat as a serious one and prepared for a military invasion. A few rational heads in the Central Committee, such as Bovin, tried to talk Brezhnev out of it. On 14 August, a day after Brezhnev’s conversation with Dubček, Bovin submitted a memo to Andropov which argued that military action could be justified only if Czechoslovakia tried to move over to the West, which was not the case. A use of force, Bovin wrote, would irreparably damage the Soviet reputation among socialist countries. It would also isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe, pushing Western Europe to form a tighter allegiance with the United States, at Russia’s expense. (The situation would repeat itself more than half a century later in Russia’s actions against Ukraine.)

Bovin even got to present his views to Brezhnev, who told him: ‘The Politburo has already made its decision. We disagree with you. You can disagree [with us] and leave the party, or you can fall in line with the decision. You decide.’⁴² A few days later, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. On 19 August 1968 Bovin recorded in his diary: ‘Another session of the politburo. The situation is approaching the dénouement. Those who made the decision about sending in the troops have signed their own sentence. When it will be carried out is a matter of time.’⁴³ The ‘sentence’ was deferred but was carried out twenty years later when Gorbachev – with the help of people like Yakovlev, Latsis and Bovin – launched his Perestroika.

In Moscow, among the intelligentsia, the invasion created a sense of mourning, for the Soviet tanks in Prague crushed not only Dubček, they crushed the hopes of the Russian intelligentsia for reforming socialism into something humane and just. It showed that the Soviet system could be held together only by force. It was a breaking point. The Soviet leadership had alienated the smartest and the most creative part of the intelligentsia and lost control over the intellectual life of the country, Alexander Yakovlev reflected. For those who signed up to the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’, as Yakovlev, Bovin and Latsis had done, this was a personal defeat.

Dare You Come to the Square?

The crushing of the Prague Spring had divided the intelligentsia into two groups – those who joined a dissident movement trying to apply pressure on the system from the outside and those who condemned the invasion but stayed inside the system, hoping to push its boundaries from within. The two circles overlapped and complemented each other.

On 25 August – the first Sunday after the invasion – seven dissidents came out onto Red Square. As the clock on the Kremlin tower struck midday, they unveiled the banners they had brought with them. Some were in Czech: ‘Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia’, others in Russian: ‘Free Dubček’ and ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’. One slogan read: ‘For Your Freedom and Ours’. They lasted a few minutes before the KGB pounced on the demonstration, beat up the dissidents, banged them into a car and drove them off. (Two of the demonstrators were put in a punitive psychiatric clinic. The rest were exiled or sent to a labour camp.) It was an act of extraordinary individual responsibility and willpower.

Bovin, Yegor Yakovlev and Latsis did not come out on Red Square. They did not leave the party or even resign their jobs in protest. It was not merely a question of self-preservation, although it played a big part. They also believed that they could do more by staying inside than by moving out. They compromised and pretended, they did not speak the truth and took comfort when they managed not to lie. In the end their role in bringing down the system was probably greater than that of the dissidents. ‘It is easy to condemn us. We had to go against our beliefs… but we are not ashamed of what we did. We saw our task in preventing the destruction of the shoots which came through after the 20th Congress. And our generation managed to achieve this. Otherwise Perestroika would not have been possible.’⁴⁵

The generation of the children of the 20th Party Congress carried the curse of Oedipus: they came to vindicate their fathers’ ideas and avoid the destruction of socialism, but they were the ones who ended up unknowingly slaying it with words rather than tanks.

‘Words are Also Deeds’ was the title of an essay drafted by one of Yegor’s closest friends, Len Karpinsky, whose father had been Lenin’s friend and copy editor, and who was named after Lenin.⁴⁶ It was read out by its author at a secret meeting held at Yegor’s flat. Karpinsky suggested starting an underground political group and his essay was its manifesto. ‘Our tanks in Prague were, if you will, an anachronism, an “inadequate” weapon,’ he wrote. ‘They “fired” at ideas. With no hope of hitting the target.’⁴⁷ Conversely, the only weapon which the educated class of Soviet intelligentsia should use against this bureaucracy that monopolized power under the slogans of socialism, Karpinsky argued, was words and ideas. A bureaucratic system would not withstand the spread of facts and ideas, he concluded. Ironically, the ideologues of the Soviet bureaucracy had arrived at precisely the same conclusion, recognizing the risks of opening up the media during the Prague Spring.

As Mikhail Suslov, the shrewd and feared ideologue and guardian of the regime, said in August 1968, ‘It is known that the time gap between the abolition of censorship in Czechoslovakia and the sending of the Soviet tanks [there] was only a few months. I want to know: if we passed [a similar] law, who will send the tanks to us?’⁴⁸ Instead of abolishing censorship, they introduced jail sentences for spreading thoughts that blackened the Soviet regime. Yet, as Karpinsky wrote, this could barely stop a process that had already begun within the party itself. ‘The new times are percolating into the apparatus and forming a layer of party intellectuals within it. To be sure, this layer is thin and disconnected; it is constantly eroded by co-optation and is thickly interlaced with careerists, flatterers, loudmouths… But this layer could move toward an alliance with the entire social body of the intelligentsia if favourable conditions arose.’⁴⁹ One day, Karpinsky predicted, ‘our words can become their deeds’. In 1968 nobody knew how long the wait would be.

After 1968, time seemed to stop. While officially nobody revoked the decisions made by the 20th Congress, in practice they were frozen along with the very subject of Stalin’s repressions. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, the policies of those years amounted to a ‘creeping rehabilitation of Stalin’.⁵⁰ The main political battles for the future of the country shifted from the corridors of the Kremlin to the pages of literary magazines. Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir, which refused to endorse the invasion of Czechoslovakia and continued to defend the line of the 20th Congress, came under fierce attack from nationalists and Stalinists who gathered around two literary journals Oktiabr (October) and Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guards). They lashed out at a devious intelligentsia corrupted by Western influence that posed a threat to the ‘unique’ Russian spirit and way of life. ‘There is no greater threat to Russian people than the lure of a bourgeois welfare,’ wrote Molodaya Gvardiya, advising the Kremlin to rely on a simple Russia peasant.⁵¹

The liberals close to Novy Mir deployed the language of Marxist internationalism and the equality of nations to fight back. But the attack on Tvardovsky was sanctioned by the KGB that had rightly sensed a connection between Novy Mir and the ‘bourgeois’ ideas of personal freedom both in thinking and in the economy. The illustrated weekly Ogonyok (Little Flame) – the bastion of collective party-mindedness – which was edited by Anatoly Sofronov, a cheerleader of a late 1940s hate campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ (a euphemism for Jews) and a master of conflictless comedies, joined in the attack on Tvardovsky by publishing a ‘collective’ letter by anti-Semitic hack writers dubbed as ‘gunmen’.

Unable to quietly fire Tvardovsky, who was protected both by his fame and by his status as a candidate member of the Central Committee, the Kremlin forced him to resign by firing his key deputies. On 12 February 1970, the same day that Tvardovsky signed his resignation, he received a telephone call from the Central Committee informing him that he would continue to receive a generous salary, would remain attached to the ‘special’ Kremlin clinic and would be provided with ‘special’ Kremlin food supplies. In addition, his selected poems would be printed in a ‘special’ expensive-looking edition. ‘So, instead of a journal which “reigned over the mind” – a Kremlin feeding, a 500 rouble sinecure and the perspective of a jubilee,’⁵² Tvardovsky wrote in his diary.

The articles in the foreign press about his resignation reminded Tvardovsky of ‘funeral bells’. Tvardovsky himself did not survive the violation of his magazine. The conflict between Tvardovsky, a decorated Soviet poet and candidate member of the Central Committee, and Tvardovsky, a national Russian poet, had become irreconcilable. National poets could not live on a Kremlin diet. The dissonance between the ideal of personal freedom and Communist ideology caused tremendous stress. Soon after losing Novy Mir, he was diagnosed with cancer and died less than a year later.

Dukhobor

The fight over Novy Mir pushed the conflict between Stalinists and liberals within the party into the open. One of the main protagonists in this fight was Alexander Yakovlev, a short, round-faced balding man with a limp, a potato nose and clever, smiling eyes under bushy eyebrows. He was formally in charge of the press and wrote both the parting Pravda leader about Khrushchev and the first greeting speech for Brezhnev, but did not participate in the most odious attacks on the dissidents. Yakovlev, who began his political career under Khrushchev, was the main opponent (and target) of the nationalists and Stalinists in the Central Committee.

When Tvardovsky fell, Yakovlev struck back. In internal memos for the Central Committee, he identified Russian nationalism and chauvinism as the greatest threats faced by the country. He used all his weight and bureaucratic dexterity to get the editor of Molodaya Gvardiya fired. In 1972 he published an article in Literaturnaya gazeta with the headline ‘AGAINST ANTI-HISTORICISM’. Splashed across two full pages it was a head-on attack on the Russian nationalists, anti-Westerners and anti-Semites who constituted an informal group within the higher echelons of the Communist Party.⁵³

Yakovlev’s article was couched in Soviet phraseology and accused the nationalists of deviating from the Marxist-Leninist principle that states the superiority of class over ethnicity. The old patriarchal ways of life, which the nationalists eulogized, stood in the way of socialist progress and split the unity of Soviet society, Yakovlev wrote.

None of this coaching could conceal the seriousness of the target which Yakovlev had chosen. ‘You know that they will probably fire you for this article,’ the editor of Literaturnaya gazeta told Yakovlev. ‘I don’t, but I can’t rule it out,’ Yakovlev replied.⁵⁴ The stakes were high. Yakovlev recognized the dangers of Russia’s own home-grown fascism emerging from the alliance between nationalists and Stalinists. Stalin, who had swapped the ideas of internationalism, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks, for the resurrection of the empire, exploited nationalism and the Orthodox Church during the Second World War, invoking the spirit of its warrior saints, such as Alexander Nevsky. At a Kremlin victory reception held for the generals in 1945, Stalin had raised a toast to the Russians as the ‘elder brother’ of all Soviet nations. ‘I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people… and above all the Russian people… the most outstanding nation of all the nations comprising the Soviet Union.’ Soon Stalin launched his campaign against all things foreign and against ‘rootless Cosmopolitans’.

Anti-Semitism, which was rife among the White Army emigrants, was reimported into the Soviet Union from Germany after the Second World War and served as a common ground between Stalinists and nationalists: both saw Jews as agents of Western influence and enemies of the traditional Russian faith and the Russian state. Although nationalists rejected communist ideology, they considered the Soviet regime and its Iron Curtain as some protection against the spread of liberalism into Russia which they saw as an even greater threat.

As a German SS officer explains to an Old Bolshevik in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate – a novel which openly drew parallels between Stalinism and fascism:

Yakovlev was almost certainly familiar with Life and Fate. Grossman finished the novel in 1959 and submitted it to one of the literary magazines. The KGB instantly raided his apartment, seizing all copies, notebooks and even the ribbon from his typewriter. The book, however, was read by members of the Politburo and in Suslov’s department for ideology where Yakovlev served. But Yakovlev’s resentment of Stalinism and fascism was not acquired from books; instead it was engendered by his own life and fate.

He was born in 1924 into a peasant family in a village near the ancient city of Yaroslavl’. In his appearance and in the broad vowels of his Volga-region accent, he retained the features of the Russian peasantry – its wiliness, dignity and respect for toil. Six years older than Gorbachev, he belonged to a different generation; he was already six when Stalin’s collectivization began. He remembered the arrest of a village groom for harming socialist property (he had tied up horses too tightly at night) and of his school teacher for displaying a disrespectful attitude to the party leaders (in fact, it was the opposite: the teacher had torn a photograph of Stalin out of a newspaper that was to be used for toilet paper and out of respect pinned it to the wall in an outhouse).

Yakovlev’s own father nearly disappeared into Stalin’s grinder but was saved by a man called Novikov, with whom he had served in the Red Army and who by chance was appointed the village’s district military commissar.

Yakovlev finished school in the spring of 1941, a few weeks before Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and was conscripted on 6 August. An eighteen-year-old lieutenant in the Baltic Marines 6th Brigade, he led an attack on a battlefield outside Leningrad. He remembered the bodies of young soldiers left in the frozen snow-covered swamps and resurfacing in the thaw. ‘They were dead but did not know this.’⁵⁶ He nearly ended up as one such body himself with three bullets in the leg and one near the heart. Four of his comrades carried him from the field – three of them were shot dead. Yakovlev was taken by horse-drawn cart – the broken bones of his legs rubbing against each other and rendering him unconscious – into a field hospital, then by plane to another one. A doctor from Armenia saved his leg, though Yakovlev had a limp to the end of his life.

After the war, Yakovlev studied history and steadily climbed the career ladder as a party official. He spent a year at Columbia University in 1959 as one of the first Fulbright scholars sent by the Soviet Union to America to study American propaganda. He was supervised by David Truman, Columbia’s political science professor, and attended lectures by George Kennan, the master of Cold War diplomacy. One impression Yakovlev brought back was the gap between propaganda and real life – be it Russian or American. His personal experience and his own mind proved stronger than the Soviet ideology that he was put in charge of; he never lost his peasant sensibility, just as he never lost his vowel-singing accent.

The fact that Yakovlev’s first serious political battle was over Tvardovsky and Novy Mir was not accidental. In many ways, Yakovlev was Tvardovsky’s character. A positive variant of a national type if ever there was one, a man who had nearly lost his life in the war, he hated nationalism and anti-Semitism with every fibre of his soul. The Stalinists recognized Yakovlev’s article in 1972 for what it was – a declaration of war. Sofronov, the editor of Ogonyok, got Mikhail Sholokhov, a celebrated Soviet writer and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to write a letter to the Central Committee attacking Yakovlev.

Brezhnev did not like the article either – not because he shared the ideas of the opposite camp, but because he resented confrontation within the party. He was neither a nationalist nor a liberal and so he decided to rid himself of both groups in order to rule in peace. Shelepin’s henchmen, who constituted the informal ‘Russian Party’ and attacked Tvardovsky, lost their administrative positions, but so did Yakovlev who was dispatched overseas, as ambassador to Canada.

Yakovlev picked Canada himself and this choice was not, perhaps, completely accidental, even if it was not fully conscious either. Canada was where Russian Dukhobors or ‘Spirit Wrestlers’ – a religious pacifist sect – had settled at the turn of the twentieth century with Tolstoy’s help. While in Canada, Yakovlev went to stay in one of their settlements. ‘Incredible people – hardworking, open, caring,’ Yakovlev recalled.⁵⁷ He was struck by the fact that Russian people who had settled on the other side of the globe at the end of the previous century had kept the language and traditions of the country they had left behind. It would be fanciful to suggest that Yakovlev was impregnated with their ideas, but he could hardly help drawing parallels between them and his own plight as someone who had split off from the main church.

In his concise memoirs, several pages are dedicated to the Dukhobors’ ethics, their dignity, their aspiration towards perfection, their belief in the superiority of human beings, their humility. This passage in his memoirs is immediately followed by one in which Yakovlev describes the sense of deep, burning shame he felt for Soviet policy which he had to represent and defend. ‘Almost every year I had to explain about those who had been thrown out of the country for “anti-Soviet” propaganda. And lowering my eyes I had to lie or change the subject. It was shameful to explain the reasons for our invasion of Afghanistan and to read and distribute the material sent from Moscow about Solzhenitsyn, Shcharansky, Rostropovich…’⁵⁸

The same year as Alexander Yakovlev was ‘exiled’ to Canada, Yegor Yakovlev and Latsis were packed off to Prague to a journal called Problemy mira i sotsializma (Problems of Peace and Socialism) – an heir to the Third International, also known as Comintern, which was an international communist organization that existed from 1919 until 1943. The most important result of the years spent in comfortable exile was that it offered time for thinking.

Time for Reflection

‘Dear compatriots, dear comrades, friends! The last minutes of 1970 are passing by. The Soviet people see it off with a feeling of completed duty and in good mood… It was an unforgettable year of new victories and achievement… Everywhere on Soviet land – from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, from the Northern Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, the passing year has left a kind mark.’ With this speech, Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, the Soviet commander-in-chief, greeted the country on New Year’s Eve 1970.

His speech ushered in a decade of ‘developed socialism’, otherwise known as zastoi (stagnation), a period in which the volume of empty words and slogans about economic achievements was matched only by the number of jokes about them. As one of the jokes went, it was a period when ‘the difficulty of growth turned into the growth of difficulties’. Every New Year’s Eve from 1970 until 1982, when Brezhnev died, Soviet citizens would hear him address the nation, hailing its achievements and victories. Void of meaning, these addresses were merely a prompt for popping the corks from bottles of oxymoronic ‘Soviet Champagne’. With time, the words got more slurred and the meat in Russian salads got more sparse.

Political seasons moved against the laws of nature. Khrushchev’s Thaw was followed not by spring but by winter. News and current affairs were replaced by the celebration of historic jubilees. The frosts were not nearly as severe as they had been, but they were substantial enough to grip the surface. The people and words which had populated the pages of Novy Mir were forced underground, into samizdat.

The regime, guarded by Mikhail Suslov, the ideology secretary, preserved a bleakly cynical system of reward and punishment: reward, often in the form of foreign trips; punishment in the form of the withdrawal of publication or performance rights. For those who strayed far – often defined as trafficking with the West in the form of interviews with foreign journalists or publication there – there was exile or, in the worst cases, a psychiatric ward or jail. The strayers included Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Bukovsky. The stayers, including Yegor Yakovlev, Latsis and Bovin, worked the system – stretching it here, being cramped by it there.

In 1974, after Gulag Archipelago was published in France, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country. As a parting shot, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to the Soviet intelligentsia which he called ‘Live Not by Lies’. It was a mixture of a scathing reprimand and a sermon. It ended with a commandment in capital letters: ‘DON’T LIE! DON’T PARTICIPATE IN LIES, DON’T SUPPORT A LIE!’ ‘In our country’, he wrote, ‘the daily lie is not the whim of corrupt nature, but a mode of existence, a condition of the daily welfare of every man. In our country, the lie has been incorporated into the state system as the vital link holding everything together, with billions of tiny fasteners, several dozens to each man.’⁵⁹

Solzhenitsyn appealed to the personal dignity and individual consciousness of the intelligentsia – not to the Soviet social class that implied higher education and loyalty to the regime which he despised. ‘The intelligentsia as a vast social stratum has ended its days in a steaming swamp and can no longer become airborne again,’ he wrote. Solzhenitsyn described them by an ugly and derogative term: obrazovanshchina or ‘educatedness’.

His main charge was that the intelligentsia had failed in its most vital task – to speak on behalf of the people suppressed by an authoritarian state. Members of the intelligentsia had become part of the system, allowing themselves to get comfortable in its folds, nooks and crannies. ‘A hundred years ago,’ he wrote in 1974, ‘the Russian intelligentsia considered a death sentence to be a sacrifice. Today an administrative reprimand is considered a sacrifice.’ The educatedness had little in common with the nineteenth-century thinkers who had been wiped out by the revolution and Stalinist repressions.⁶⁰

At the core of the Soviet intelligentsia, as Stalin conceived it, were the scientists, physicists particularly, who were bred and cultivated by the system with the particular military purpose of producing the nuclear bomb and strengthening the country’s military and industrial complex. The conditions created for the scientists were close to ideal: they had status, money, equipment and no distractions. Beria, who oversaw the nuclear project, realized that apart from physical conditions, they also needed a degree of freedom to stimulate their creativity.

Russian nuclear physicists were settled in closed or semi-closed scientific towns, and were often provided with dachas, or country cottages, amid forests. The scientific colonies were well supplied not only with food but also with culture. The political clout that scientists possessed allowed them to invite artists who were barred from giving official concerts. As Andrei Zorin, a Russian cultural historian, argued, Soviet military needs led to an overproduction of all kinds of scientists, matched by a hyper-production of culture. The consumers of this culture were the millions of engineers and scientists who worked in research institutes and construction offices with a postbox number for an address. Throughout the 1970s the size and the economic weight of the intelligentsia increased manifold. The number of people with a higher education doubled from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s to 20 million people. The share of specialists employed in the economy had more than tripled from 9 million to 33 million people.

Solzhenitsyn’s essay was partly a response to Andrei Amalrik, a historian by background and a dissident by conviction, whose essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? had been published a few years earlier. Like Solzhenitsyn, Amalrik refused to define the intelligentsia in spiritual or ethical terms and described it as a social stratum, a Soviet version of ‘the middle class’:

In the 1970s this urban social stratum became conscious of its own unity; it began to acquire both the physical and the cultural attributes of a European middle class. People started to holiday in the Baltic republics – the Soviet equivalent of the West. In 1970 the Soviet Union bought an old Fiat factory to produce the first middle-class car – the Lada. Over the following two decades car ownership in the Soviet Union went up tenfold. Thanks to the rising oil price, in the 1970s the Soviet people were getting better off. The ownership of flats and houses also increased. Like the middle class anywhere it required certain freedoms, but like any other middle class, it was also risk-averse. In reality, the Soviet economy could not accommodate them all: as the Soviet joke had it, they ‘pretended to work and the state pretended to pay’. The large number of educated, intelligent and underemployed people in their thirties and forties with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class. They were not dissidents and they relied on the state for provisions, but they were fed up with the restrictions imposed by Soviet ideology and they were critical of the system. As Zorin has noted, it was a familiar pattern: the state first creates an educated class, which then gets emancipated and starts undermining the state, which finally collapses and it gets buried under its rubble.

For all its political nastiness, the 1970s was also a golden era for the Soviet intelligentsia – a period of accumulation of knowledge and cultural experience. It produced a cultural layer that sustained the nation for years to come. Real life was happening on stage, on the screen, in libraries, while pretence, boredom and falsehood dominated reality. For those who dealt in reality – as journalists were supposed to – the 1970s were the least productive years.

Unable to write about current life, they turned to history. Latsis used the time in Prague to write a book, preparing for a new opening by accumulating knowledge and ideas. He sought to answer the question that possessed his generation: how had the revolution, which promised universal happiness, turned into universal misery? When and how had it gone wrong? Were there alternatives?

He went back to 1929 – a year which Stalin had called a ‘great break’ (wrongly translated in English as a Great Leap Forward) which marked the end of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the start of the forced collectivization (or elimination, to be precise) of peasantry. He saw a holy grail in the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. A charismatic Bolshevik leader executed by Stalin, Bukharin in the late 1920s called on peasants ‘to enrich’ themselves, defended competition between private and state enterprises, and argued that the market was a necessary step towards socialism.

Bukharin provided a point in history which beckoned liberal communists like Latsis with the unexplored, and therefore highly tempting, prospect of correcting the socialist course. Thirty-five years after his execution, Bukharin’s name was still anathema to Soviet ideologists and Latsis’s secret manuscript, seized by the KGB, landed him in trouble. But while Latsis, more academic by nature, found some satisfaction in his intellectual work, Yegor, more energetic and less reflective, felt bored and restless. Work in Prague gave him little satisfaction. ‘He would come home, have supper and go to bed at 9 p.m. He just wanted each day to go quicker,’ his wife recalled.⁶²

Upon his return from Prague, Yegor went back to Izvestia but was advised to ‘write less’. Instead he turned to a subject that was hard to ban: Lenin. By the 1970s the official Soviet iconography had produced a Lenin who was completely devoid of any human or even historic features. He had turned into a vehicle, a device for carrying almost any political message. Citations from Lenin could be used to prove diametrically opposite points of view. In the 1930s, Lenin justified Stalinism, in the 1950s and early 1960s he justified anti-Stalinism. In the 1970s he was adopted by the liberal thinkers to show the inadequacies of the Soviet economic and political system.

To make the device workable and convincing, their Lenin had to be distinctly different from the official mummified version. Yegor was among those who used his talent to ‘enliven’ Lenin’s image, or as Solzhenitsyn put it more crudely, ‘sucked surreptitiously on one solace that “the ideas of revolution were good, but were perverted”’. As Yegor said himself: ‘I only needed Lenin for one thing: to show that the system in which we live has nothing to do with Lenin.’⁶³ In fact, these intellectual games were dangerous and costly – not only to those who played them, but to the country’s future. They created a mythology about Lenin that lasted almost to the end of Soviet rule and held the country captive to an idea that had long been dead.

In the early 1980s few people thought that change would come any time soon. Time moved at a sticky pace, unaffected by the physical deaths of the country’s leaders. When Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov who lived for only eighteen months longer, and then by Konstantin Chernenko who, as the joke went, ‘gained office without gaining consciousness’. Soon he too was dead, on 10 March 1985. The rapid succession of general secretaries became known as ‘the hearse race’. It seemed it would never end.

The biggest frustration for people like Latsis, Bovin and Yakovlev during those years was not the food shortages or discomforts – their personal lives were perfectly comfortable – but the futility of their own work. By the time Brezhnev died they were in their early fifties. Born for an active life, they felt their energy seeping into the sand. They engaged in meaningless imitations of intellectual activity. This was both exhausting and humiliating, causing anguish and pain similar to that of Chekhov’s characters.

Latsis described this anguish in his memoirs. He was working on some useless document in one of the government sanatoria which offered the dubious comforts and petty luxury of Soviet bureaucratic life – better food, a large room with a television set, and a supply of fruit in a crystal bowl – when his thoughts started to wander. He gazed at important-looking people faking intellectual process, and his thoughts turned to his fourteen-year-old daughter who was ill. He was locked in the sanatorium, while she had been in intensive care; Latsis had no time to visit. ‘Suddenly came a thought which I had been trying to drive away for several years. There, at home, unfolds real life and a real drama: a person who is dear to me is suffering and fighting for her life. And I am sitting in the company of apparatchiks, who are engaged in useless talking, imitating their concern about important state affairs. Here nothing is real…’ Unable to bear it any longer, he snapped: ‘Nobody needs our work and I don’t want to take part in it any more.’⁶⁴ His outburst resembled that of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya who rebels against the professor, whose meaningless articles he had been copying out for years: ‘I am clever and brave and strong. If I had lived a normal life, I might have become another Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky. I am losing my head! I am going crazy!’

Uncle Vanya was the play at the Moscow Art Theatre that the still little-known Mikhail Gorbachev went to see on 30 April 1985, the eve of May Day, a month after his appointment as general secretary of the Communist Party. A few days later he telephoned Oleg Yefremov, the director, to share his impressions. He liked Astrov, the doctor, but it was Vanya’s part that he found ‘simply heart-rending’. He also told Yefremov that it was time to ‘get our flywheel moving again’. In 1998, seven years after Gorbachev had ceased to be the president of the USSR and the country itself was gone, he described why that performance of Uncle Vanya had made such an impression on him: ‘I understood a lot while watching it. I realized that we, the whole of society, were seriously ill and that we needed immediate surgery.’⁶⁵

March is the hardest month in Russia. The snow which has been on the ground since November turns grey and slushy. The temperatures stay sub-zero, the winds pick up, making the country’s landscape look particularly desolate and hostile. The cold air, the lack of sunlight and the stubborn snowfall drain the body and the soul. The lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in Soviet days meant that people were starved of vitamins. The knowledge that somewhere – a flight away – birds are singing and spring flowers are blossoming makes the early Russian spring particularly depressing. This is how the country felt when Konstantin Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. Only that winter had lasted for nearly eighteen years. The next day Gorbachev was appointed the general secretary of the Communist Party.

Two months later, the country got a chance to have a good look at its new leader with his birthmark across his forehead. Gorbachev’s first trip to Leningrad – the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution – occupied almost all of the state television news programme Vremya. It started in the usual staged and stale way: Soviet bureaucrats in grey suits meeting the general secretary off the plane, brightly dressed young pioneers saluting him on the tarmac, Gorbachev laying wreaths of flowers by a war memorial. But suddenly something changed in the picture: the new party boss walked briskly up to a crowd of onlookers and started talking to them. He smiled and told people about his plans to revive the economy and improve standards of living. Stunned by this impromptu engagement with the crowd, one woman uttered a Soviet cliché: ‘Stay close to the people and the people won’t let you down.’ Gorbachev, barely able to stretch his arms in the crowd, quipped: ‘Can’t get any closer.’ The crowd broke into laugher – not staged, but genuine.

After watching the ‘hearse race’ of gerontocratic general secretaries over the previous three years, such a display of human emotions by a relatively young, energetic, smiling leader won over the country. ‘We will all have to change,’ Gorbachev said in Leningrad. Long speeches about Perestroika came later, but it started there and then – in front of the television cameras. The first signs of freedom came not in the form of laws and manifestos, but in the form of sensations and impressions. It felt like a new start, the country slowly opening up, letting in fresh air from the West in the form of films, exhibitions, theatre productions. It was a period of ‘new thinking’ as Gorbachev defined it. Yet the thinking behind it was not very new.

In fact, one of the sensations of that period was that of déjà vu; one of the joys, the joy of recognition. Summing up his impressions of the theatrical season of 1985–6, Anatoly Smeliansky, the literary director of the Moscow Art Theatre and a theatre critic, wrote what many felt: ‘Something has changed in the literary climate. You open another issue of a thick literary journal, which you did not even feel like leafing through for the past few years, and you get glued. It is as if time has rewound its tape by some twenty years and has taken us back to the epoch of Alexander Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir.’¹

The energy of the mid-1980s and the sense of renewal were sustained by the release of a vast body of art and literature which had been created over the previous seventy years and kept under lock and key. It was an archival revolution: the previously banned works of Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman and Anna Akhmatova were published over a period of some four or five years in literary journals whose circulation soared to the levels of Western tabloid newspapers. By the late 1980s, the sales of Novy Mir, which published Doctor Zhivago and Gulag Archipelago for the first time in the Soviet Union, reached nearly 3 million copies.

The ideas and ideals of Tvardovsky filled the air of the 1980s. In 1987 two literary journals published an anti-Stalinist poem which he had written in the late 1960s entitled ‘By Right of Memory’. In a tribute to the poem and to link the two eras, Yuri Burtin, a literary critic and a former Novy Mir editor, wrote an essay which he called ‘To You, from Another Generation’, tracing the spiritual roots of Perestroika to Tvardovsky’s journal.

As Burtin wrote, Tvardovsky and his circle had formed a socialist opposition that derived its legitimacy from the presumption that socialism was open to democracy and did not have to resort to violence. ‘The idea was so strong that even today we live by it in our hopes for Perestroika. There is no other idea.’² In the 1980s that ‘opposition’ came to power – not through an election but through a generational shift. Their lifelong dream – ‘if only I was in charge’ – became a reality. It was only natural that this ‘opposition’ tapped into the pool of ideas that had formed them in the first place.

They started from the point at which they considered the country to have gone wrong – August 1968. Perestroika was carried out under the slogans of the Prague Spring: socialism with a human face. Its declared goal was a revival of Lenin’s principles distorted first by Stalinism and then by eighteen years of Brezhnev’s stagnation. It was an aspiration which Gorbachev’s generation had harboured since Khrushchev’s Thaw and which was quashed by Soviet tanks in Prague. Gorbachev was picking up from the point where Alexander Dubček had left off in 1968.

The violent abortion of the Prague reforms had a crucial and unforeseen consequence which became clear only twenty years later: it created a powerful myth that had it not been for the Soviet intervention, the Prague reforms would have succeeded, that ‘socialism with a human face’ was compatible with democracy and could be achieved. In fact, this was a utopia, a no-place. Had the reforms in the Czechoslovakia been allowed to proceed, there is every likelihood that they would have ended with Czechoslovakia’s becoming a normal Western-style capitalist country. By prematurely ending the experiment, the Soviet government turned the Czech reforms into an alluring and evasive goal which Perestroika reformers tried to pursue twenty years later.

Gorbachev had had a personal experience of the Prague Spring. One of his closest friends at university in Moscow was Zdeněk Mlynář, Dubček’s right-hand man. In 1967 Mlynář had visited Gorbachev in his native Stavropol region where he worked as party secretary and the two discussed the reforms in Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet tanks invaded Prague in 1968, Mlynář was brought to Moscow in handcuffs, along with Dubček himself, for a meeting with Brezhnev.

A year after the Soviet invasion, Gorbachev went to Prague as part of the Komsomol (the Young Communist Party League) to build bridges with Czech youth. He did not see Mlynář, who by then had retreated and worked in a museum – that would have been political suicide. But he saw anti-Soviet slogans and hostile workers who refused to talk to the Russian visitors. It was an uncomfortable trip. ‘I understood that there was something in our country that was not right,’ Gorbachev told Mlynář during one of their later conversations.³ Now he had a chance to put it right. The spring air of 1985 was filled with enormous optimism and hope. It seemed so simple: shift the heavy tombstone of Soviet bureaucracy and the nation would spring back to life with force and vitality. In the minds of Gorbachev’s reformers, socialism was the best system for releasing the creative potential of the people.

Perestroika reformers were obsessed with the idea of history as a tape that could be rewound to the point where the country took a wrong turn. In 1986, they called the country back to 1968 and even further back to Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In search of healthy economic forces, they turned to farmers and small-time entrepreneurs. Writer Anatoly Strelyany made a documentary about a smart, hard-working Russian man called Nikolai Sivkov who lived in a remote part of Archangel Region, on the northern edge of Russia, ‘in a Kingdom far, far away…’. Strelyany unhurriedly narrated the story of a model Russian farmer who survived the collectivization of land and spirit. His common sense, quick brain and able hands retained the muscle memory of hard work. He was a modern-day Ivan Denisovich who still carried the gene of the Russian peasantry. ‘There must be [other] Sivkovs. It can’t be that there are not any. There are, there are Sivkovs,’ Strelyany almost chanted at the end of the film.

But the miracle of revival did not happen. History could not be wound back. Sivkov was a rare sample of a nearly extinct breed eliminated through collectivization and subsequent negative selection. The likes of Sivkov may still have existed in the late 1950s but his type was almost gone by the mid-1980s. As Gorbachev himself admitted a couple of years after the launch of reforms, ‘There is something that prevents us from moving forward… We have passed more than 60 decrees on agriculture since April 1985. But people don’t believe in these decrees.’ The problem was not the decrees but the shortage of people who could respond to them. The roots suppressed by the tombstone of the socialist economy atrophied. In their obsessive striving to rewind the tape of history, the reformers followed the logic of the Sleeping Beauty. It was as though the country, which went into a slumber in the 1960s, could wake up fresh and strong twenty years later. There is a second part to Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, which is rarely included in children’s books. In it the Prince’s mother turns out to be a cannibal and orders that the children of the Prince and Sleeping Beauty be cooked for her dinner. (Luckily, they are spared by the cook and saved by the Prince.)

Gorbachev formally launched Perestroika in February 1986, at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party – thirty years to the day after Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Congress in 1956. In the years that had passed since Khrushchev’s Thaw, the country had not become cannibalistic, but it was in bad shape: exhausted, demoralized, economically crippled and, most important of all, drained of its human resources.

Perhaps one person who understood that the system had to be carefully defused and dismantled before it blew up itself and the world was Alexander Yakovlev, whom Gorbachev had appointed in charge of ideology and propaganda. Unlike Gorbachev, Yakovlev had few illusions about the critical state of the system and its ability to transform into something humane without drastically changing its foundation.

Gorbachev first met Yakovlev in 1983, two years before taking office, during his visit to Canada where Yakovlev was still ambassador. They had instantly struck a chord and spent hours talking about the state of the country. A common understanding which underlined their conversation was that the country simply could not go on in the same way any more. Things had to change. The question was how.

This was the eleventh year of Yakovlev’s honorary ‘exile’ in Canada and he had had ample time to dwell on this subject. Unlike the shestidesiatniki, who tried to find support in the ideas of Lenin and Bukharin, Alexander Yakovlev began to review the very foundation on which the system rested: Marxism and Leninism. In particular he questioned one of the key postulates of Marx’s materialism – that being determines consciousness. Does it mean, Yakovlev asked himself, that the way people live and relate to each other is simply the result of their material conditions rather than their will?

The essence of a man cannot be derived from his profession or way of life (what difference did it make that Jesus was a carpenter?) but only from his consciousness. The same was true of nations. ‘Consciousness determines being to a much greater extent than the other way around,’ Yakovlev concluded. ‘From my point of view, the source of everything, including progress, is information… Information is primary, the matter and spirit are secondary… Without a human brain – this perfect synthesizer of information – neither an atomic nor a hydrogen bomb could go off…’⁴ The only way to change the Soviet way of life was through opening up the flow of information and altering people’s consciousness. The ‘means of mass information’ – as the media were and still are called in Russia – were far more important in altering the country than the means of production. Glasnost – the opening-up of the media – was in large part the practical result of that idea.

In December 1985, a few months after his appointment, Yakovlev drafted a memo that was more radical in its views than anything that was to follow over the next few years. ‘The dogmatic interpretation of Marxism and Leninism is so unhygienic that it kills any creative and even classical thoughts. Lucifer remains a Lucifer: his satanic hoof stamps out any fresh intellectual shoots… Marxism is nothing but a neo-religion, subjected to the interests and whims of the absolute power… Political conclusions of Marxism are unacceptable for civilization.’⁵ Thus wrote the man in charge of Soviet ideology.

Yakovlev also believed that the country needed a free market and private ownership to overcome its economic sclerosis. ‘Socialism without a market is a utopia and a bloody one at that…’ Society needed a normal exchange of information, which was possible only in a democracy. Yakovlev defined the ingredients of Perestroika as a market economy, private ownership, democracy and openness:

Yakovlev did not show this memo to Gorbachev fearing that it would be too radical for his tastes. True to the principle of ‘divide and rule’, Gorbachev had split in two the job once held by Suslov, the Stalinist guardian of Soviet ideology, and Yakovlev’s position was complicated by the fact that he had only half of it and the other half was held by Yegor Ligachev, his ideological opponent. Although formally the two halves were equal, with Yakovlev controlling the workings of the media and propaganda, Ligachev was a secretary of the Central Committee and oversaw ideology. Moreover, Ligachev was a watchdog, one of the most senior people in the party, and he physically occupied Suslov’s office, which, in the Byzantine topography of the Kremlin, signalled superiority.

Wary of spooking Gorbachev and raising alarm within the party nomenclatura, Yakovlev had to tread carefully. As Yakovlev himself wrote, he often had to act like a ‘secret agent’, resorting to tricks and covert operations to advance his ideas. Here was a paradox: in pursuit of truth, people still had to resort to lies.

One of the ‘covert’ operations performed by Yakovlev was the release of the most powerful and honest film about the Stalinist legacy – Pokaianie (Repentance). It was a work by a Georgian director, Tengiz Abuladze, and was made a year before Perestroika, in 1984, under the patronage of Eduard Shevardnadze, one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, who headed Georgia at the time. Made like a philosophical fable and set in a small Georgian town, the film starts with a scene of a woman making cakes. A man in a rocking chair reads from a newspaper that the town’s mayor Varlam Aravidze has died.

The day after Aravidze’s funeral, his corpse turns up in the garden of his relatives’ house. The body is reburied, but next day springs up again in the same place, propped up in a garden chair. Aravidze’s grandson hounds and shoots ‘the corpse digger’, who turns out to be Keti, the cake-maker. Put on trial, she tells the court that Aravidze has no right to be buried and, through cinematic flashbacks, narrates the story of his repressions, including the murder of her parents. (One such flashback shows Keti, as a young girl, searching for her father’s name in a log pile of timber produced by Gulag prisoners. While she looks, the logs are being ground into sawdust which she sieves through her fingers.)

Aravidze’s son, Abel, defends his father and tries to get Keti declared insane. At the end, his own son commits suicide and Abel himself digs up Aravidze’s body and throws it off a cliff. The film ends as it begins – with Keti preparing a cake. An old woman, played by a legendary Georgian actress, the eighty-six-year-old Veriko Andzhaparidze, asks Keti at the window whether this is the road that leads to the temple. The woman replies that the road is Varlam Aravidze’s street and will not lead to the temple. The old woman replies: ‘What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a temple?’

In the highly politicized atmosphere of the mid-1980s, with little time for reflection, Abuladze’s philosophical film was too often used for a quick political commentary; pulled into quotes and soundbites. It was like using a telescope as a sledgehammer. Pokaianie was not about a distortion of the system, but about the universal nature of evil which can take any shape. The name Aravidze in Georgian means ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody’ and the mayor, dressed in a Stalin-like military tunic, had Hitler’s moustache, Beria’s rimless glasses and Mussolini’s operatic manner.

Yakovlev, who watched the tape at home, felt overwhelmed by the film. ‘It was merciless and convincing. It smashed the system of lies, hypocrisy and violence like a sledgehammer… I had to do everything in my power to get the film out.’⁷ (He argued to the Central Committee that the film was too complex to be understood by a broad audience, so there would be no harm in showing it ‘once or twice’, while ordering the official Committee for Cinema to produce hundreds of copies to be shown throughout the country.) The release of the film was scheduled for April 1986, but had to be put off because of the disaster that struck the country.

In the early hours of 26 April 1986, nuclear reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear station suffered a massive power surge, resulting in a fire and the release of 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The reactor had been built in the 1970s with severe safety breaches. The only reason it passed an examination by foreign experts was that, prior to inspection, its engineers had temporarily replaced Soviet electronics with Swedish and American ones. As Filipp Bobkov, first deputy chief of the KGB, told members of the Politburo a couple of months later, it embodied the carelessness, arrogance and window-dressing that were the essence of the Soviet planned system which commanded people to fulfil a plan at all costs, including the safety of people. As often was the case with such disasters, the cover-up was even more deplorable than the initial errors that led to the explosion. Despite the Politburo’s call to ‘provide honest and measured information’, the officials acted on their inbred instincts.

The main goal of the official media has traditionally been not to reveal, but to conceal the facts. When, in 1962, an uprising by workers in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in the south of Russia, was brutally put down by government forces, the media’s role was not to report it. The bloodstained streets were repaved and amateur radio reports were jammed. Discerning readers deduced facts from what newspapers did not say rather than from what they did: omissions were more informative than inclusions. If the media said something did not happen, people understood it to mean the opposite. In later years television played the role of a universal plug that kept the facts from leaking out into the open.

The public was informed about the Chernobyl catastrophe only two days later with an announcement merely twenty seconds long in the evening news on the state television channel. ‘There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people. An investigative commission has been set up.’ People in Moscow saw the announcement as a signal to tune to foreign radio stations which reported that a huge explosion had taken place and a radioactive cloud was moving westwards. But in the nearby town of Pripyat, children were playing football on the streets and sixteen weddings were held outdoors in the epicentre of the accident. Evacuation did not start until thirty-six hours after the catastrophe. On 1 May, while the communist bosses were evacuating their own families, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people attended a May Day parade in Kiev, where radiation levels were eighty times higher than normal. Many came with children in short-sleeved shirts. The lies were all the more pointless since the whole world was aware of what was going on.

Moskovskie novosti, a propaganda sheet, printed in a dozen languages, published an article headlined ‘A POISONED CLOUD OF ANTI-SOVIETISM’. It listed foreign nuclear incidents and harangued the West for stirring anti-Soviet hysteria. ‘Yes, we are talking about a premeditated and well-orchestrated campaign, the aim of which is to soil the political atmosphere in the East–West relationship and to use this poisoned cloud to cover up criminal acts of militarism by the USA and NATO against peace and security.’⁸

Politically, the cover-up had a more devastating effect on Gorbachev’s reputation than the disaster itself. In the eyes of his two most important constituencies – the Soviet intelligentsia and the West – his pledge to openness and the supremacy of human values failed its first important test. As a transcript of an emergency Politburo meeting shows, Gorbachev himself had limited access to information, which made him furious: ‘We had no information about what was going on. Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. The whole system was penetrated by the spirit of boot-licking, persecution of dissidents, clannishness, window-dressing and nepotism. We will put an end to all this.’⁹

It was a catalyst for Glasnost – the opening-up of the media. ‘Don’t be afraid of your own people,’ he told his comrades. ‘Glasnost is the true socialism.’¹⁰ Gorbachev neither planned nor imagined where the opening-up of the media would lead the country to five years later. He came to give the Soviet Union a new lease of life. But Chernobyl was a bad omen – and the ‘new life’ would turn out to be a short one.

The opening of the media was not as quick and sudden as many retrospectively remember it. Glasnost did not mean a removal of censorship and a sudden burst of the freedom of speech. Nor was it meant to be all-embracing. Glasnost was a limited licence issued to a select few who could target the social groups that were most perceptive to Perestroika – students, young professionals and the urban intelligentsia. The purpose of Glasnost, as Gorbachev understood it, was to inject vitality in socialism. The consequence of Glasnost as Yakovlev saw it was to change the country.

The main medium of Perestroika was print. Two publications were selected for this task of mobilizing the intelligentsia and promoting Perestroika to the world. One was Ogonyok, the odious colour weekly still edited by the old Stalinist playwright Anatoly Sofronov who had led the attack on Tvardovsky and Yakovlev. Ogonyok, which had a circulation of 1.5 million, had one obvious advantage: it was so reactionary and anti-Western that any shift to a more liberal and pro-Western position was immediately noticeable. Yakovlev offered the job of the editorship to Vitaly Korotich, a secondary poet from Kiev who had spoken out about the deliberate attempt by the head of the Chernobyl nuclear station to conceal any information from the outside world.

At the same time as Korotich’s appointment to Ogonyok, Yegor Yakovlev was offered the editorship of Moskovskie novosti (The Moscow News), the propaganda tabloid meant for foreign consumption. It was the oldest English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union and had been started in 1930 by an American socialist to spread the Soviet message to the world. By the 1980s it was published in all the main foreign languages and circulated mostly outside the Soviet Union. As part of the vast News Press Agency (APN) – a propaganda outfit closely linked to the KGB – it was mostly staffed with failed spooks, rogue mercenaries from Arab countries and KGB minders. Its Russian edition, which Yegor was asked to edit, was launched only in 1980 for the Moscow summer Olympics, to advertise Soviet achievements.

Now its task was to advertise and rally support for Perestroika in the West. Yegor was well aware of this task. A year after being appointed as the editor, during which the circulation soared, Yegor told the newspaper’s local party committee: ‘Jointly we have managed to create a newspaper which is read, cited and trusted. [Now] we have a publication which can be used for very important actions/projects in regard to international public opinion.’¹¹ Yegor did not mind being used, for it gave him a chance to use Perestroika and Gorbachev for his own ends. It was the moment for which Yegor and his peers had been waiting for eighteen years.

Moskovskie novosti did not adhere to a Western idea of a newspaper. Fact-based material was still forbidden. The news was not gathered by the newspaper but distributed through the Soviet telegraphic agency TASS. For example, one of the biggest news items of the first Perestroika years – the release of Andrei Sakharov from exile that was splashed across front pages of the international press – in Moskovskie novosti was given forty words at the bottom of page three – a space usually reserved for corrections.

The early Perestroika press was not about reporting, it was about opinion and essay-writing and each one of those pieces was a milestone by which people measured the changes in the country. The most popular page in the newspaper was called ‘The Opinion of Three Authors’, where three public figures – writers, academics, essayists – shared their views on some current topic.

Within a couple of years of Yegor becoming the editor, Moskovskie novosti was the most sought-after newspaper in the Soviet Union. It came out weekly and every Wednesday a long queue of people would start forming outside newspaper kiosks at about 5 a.m. to buy a fresh issue. The print run was still strictly regulated by the Communist Party and limited by the censors, so by 9 a.m. all copies were gone. Those lucky enough to have one in their possession passed the read issue to friends. The unlucky ones read it on billboards outside the newspaper’s offices by the central Pushkin Square. The spot quickly turned into Moscow’s equivalent of London’s ‘Speakers’ Corner’. People did not come to Moskovskie novosti for news in the strictest sense of the word, but to get a sense of the direction in which the country was heading.

Reading through the thick tomes of bound issues of Moskovskie novosti twenty years later, it is hard to see what the fuss was about. Why would anyone want to get up at dawn on a cold December morning to queue for a newspaper that did not tell you much in the way of news but wrote about Anna Akhmatova? But at the time every issue of Moskovskie novosti was a political event. What Moskovskie novosti wrote about was not new – it had long been the subject of private discussions around kitchen tables. ‘New’ was the fact that the same things could now be printed in a newspaper under someone’s byline, that some of the things that had been banished into the world of samizdat were now published material. The very existence of such a paper was the biggest news of all.

A joke started circulating in Moscow:

In the early Perestroika years Alexander Yakovlev warned television and radio bosses that the jamming of foreign radio stations was to be stopped and that they would have to compete for the young audience which normally shunned drab Soviet news programmes and instead tuned in to the Russian service of the BBC or the Voice of America. One of the first ‘competing’ projects was a television programme called Vzglyad (Viewpoint) which was broadcast on Friday nights to coincide with a popular music show on the Russian service of the BBC.

To make it appealing, its presenters had to look and sound like the audience they were trying to capture. They had to be slightly cynical, well-informed, knowledgeable about Western popular culture. Yet they also had to be trustworthy. There was only one place within the Soviet television-and-radio empire that could provide such cadres: the foreign-language service of Radio Moscow – which broadcast Soviet views in dozens of languages around the world and was staffed by young linguists who wasted their time anonymously broadcasting Soviet propaganda.

It was effectively one of the branches of the KGB and many of the journalists who worked there were affiliated with it. One of Vzglyad’s main presenters was Alexander Lyubimov, the son of a legendary KGB spy in London, who had worked with Kim Philby and was expelled from the UK in the 1960s. Lyubimov Jr was born in London and had studied at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, a prestigious school for future diplomats and intelligence officers. He was the ultimate golden youth, one of the elite.

Unlike Soviet dissidents who listened to ‘enemy’ radio stations in the privacy of their homes and in secret, with the risk of being informed on, people like Lyubimov did so openly as part of their duty. They knew more about – and lusted more for – the openness of the West than those who worked in Soviet television. They had access to the Western media, they knew foreign languages, read foreign newspapers. As part of the Soviet counter-propaganda, they had to know what they were supposed to counter; they were supposed to misinform others, but they were very well informed themselves.

‘We had Solzhenitsyn’s writings at home. I knew well who Sakharov was. They do say that a gendarme is the freest man in Russia,’ Lyubimov said.¹² When Perestroika started in earnest, he and his peers were best equipped to shape the new Soviet television. They also stood to gain most from it. Vzglyad became the incubator for some of the most influential TV figures in the following two decades. They knew how to use the system to maximum effect.

The first Vzglyad progammes were anything but controversial: a young man from an orphanage reading his own poetry, one of the presenters instructing the audience how to distinguish real Levis from fakes, advice on how to open a small private business – a total novelty in a country where making a profit was a crime. The subjects were divided from each other by musical numbers. But every programme tested and pushed the limits, discussing things that allegedly did not exist in the USSR: homosexuality, drugs, AIDS, corruption.

Vzglyad talked about removing Lenin from the Mausoleum and carried an interview with a captain whose submarine had sunk in the Arctic Sea and said that Soviet submarines were death traps. It was the first programme to interview Sakharov when he was released from his exile at the end of 1987. Its dimly lit studio was set up like a Moscow kitchen where friends sat around the table talking about youth culture, music and politics, listening to the latest rock bands, watching video clips. In the late Soviet days the accumulation of wealth meant that people owned more than one television set, and in the 1980s one of these often lived in a kitchen. So kitchens became the settings for television programmes, albeit their format was more akin to a magazine than a TV show.

Past Present

The opening-up of the Russian media began not with a discussion about the country’s present condition, but with the past.

Three quarters of all publications in the years of Perestroika were dedicated to the past. As Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, two Russian sociologists, wrote, Soviet society resembled a man who was walking backwards into the future, fixated on his past. History dominated the discourse of Perestroika, one of the most transformative periods of Soviet history. It was not just a small group of intellectuals – the whole country seemed obsessed with history. In 1988, when the Soviet economy was in its death throes and bloody conflicts began to erupt on the periphery, street demonstrations were held in Moscow for unlimited subscriptions to the multi-volume edition of A History of Russia by Vasily Klyuchevsky, and an even more academic historic magnum opus by Sergei Solovyov. (Like everything else in the Soviet Union, the amount of paper and number of copies of each publication were regulated by the state.)

As historian Andrei Zorin has said, behind this was the notion that the state constantly concealed the truth about the past; once a true knowledge of history was obtained, the country could break out of the vicious circle of repeating past mistakes. Yet the actual study of history was often the last thing on the minds of participants in the historic debates of the 1980s. What communist reformers took from the past was the dominance of ideology over all other spheres of life, including the economy and history itself.

Thus the main ideological battles of the 1980s unfolded over history. Latsis wrote:

The liberals and their hard-line opponents fought over the past with the same ferocity as though they were fighting for natural resources. In many ways they were, for whoever controlled the past also controlled the present. The very word ‘memory’ became the reason for a fight. One of the country’s first openly anti-Semitic and right-wing organizations, patronized by the KGB, was called Pamyat (Memory) – a name it ‘stole’ from dissident historians who published a samizdat journal under that title. A human rights group launched by former dissidents with the support of Andrei Sakharov, which originally focused on rehabilitating the victims of Stalinist repressions, was called Memorial.

De-Stalinization, aborted with the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, started with new vigour. Articles about Stalin poured from the pages of Moskovskie novosti. But the real repentance – a way of coming to terms with the past – never took place. That would have required the re-examination not just of Stalin, but of the entire system that led him to power. It would also have meant ‘digging out’ the bodies of millions of people who supported the regime. And this was something that the 1960s generation was still not ready to do. Faithful to the memory of their fathers, they continued to perpetuate the myth that Stalinism was a distortion rather than a consequence of the Soviet system based on ‘a thousand-year-old model of statehood’, as Alexander Yakovlev put it. Publications about the crimes of Stalinism appeared next to those about the virtues of Lenin. Perestroika was carried out under the slogan of ‘more socialism’.

In January 1987 – the year of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution – Moskovskie novosti launched a new rubric: ‘Byloe’ (the Past). The first article in ‘Byloe’ was written in the form of a Q&A with Lenin: the newspaper posed questions to Lenin and provided answers from his works. On the same pages, Mikhail Shatrov, the playwright who specialized in plays about Lenin, and Stephen Cohen, a biographer of Bukharin and a left-wing historian at Princeton University, discussed the relevance of Lenin’s ideas under the headline: ‘TO RETURN IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD’. ‘Of course we must again and again go back to Lenin, to the full volume of his ideas, particularly to the ideas of the last years of his life. We must understand and make use of them to move forward,’ Shatrov said.¹⁴ The notion that the ideas of Bukharin and Lenin were still relevant in the late 1980s was validated by Cohen.

The Stalinists were not about to surrender history to the liberals, however: they hit back. In March 1988 Sovetskaya Rossiya, a mouthpiece of the hardliners in the party, printed a reader’s letter headed ‘I Cannot Forsake Principles’, signed by one Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacher from the Leningrad Polytechnic. A nearly full-page Stalinist attack on Glasnost and Perestroika, it was a manifesto of conservatives in the country. ‘The subject of repressions has been blown out of all proportions and overshadows an objective interpretation of the past,’ she wrote. ‘They try to make us believe that the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes.’¹⁵

In particular, Andreeva singled out Shatrov for attack – not only as an ideological opponent but as competition for control over historic discourse. The letter also contained more than a grain of anti-Semitism. The Soviet national interests had been betrayed by the Jewish followers of Trotsky, she wrote, while ethnic Slavs had heroically stood up to fascism.

As David Remnick, who met Andreeva at the time, wrote, she was a woman of letters. She used to write false anonymous denunciations about her colleagues’ ideological faults and was even thrown out of her institute’s party cell, though she was restored at the request of the KGB. The letter was expanded and printed by Sovetskaya Rossiya on the instructions of Yegor Ligachev – Yakovlev’s opposite number on the conservative flank of the party.

After the publication of Andreeva’s letter, Ligachev gathered media chiefs in his office to tell them that everyone must read this ‘wonderful’ article and instructed provincial papers to reprint it, giving it the prominence due to a party line. Many obediently followed the instruction.

Both Gorbachev and Yakovlev were out of the country when the letter came out and took it as being ‘nothing less than a call to arms, an attempted coup’. ‘It was meant to overturn everything that had been conceived in 1985… It had a firm, sort of Stalinist accusatory form as in the style on the front pages of our old newspapers… This was a harsh bellow of a command: “Stop! Everything is over!”’ Yakovlev said later.¹⁶ He interrupted his visit to Mongolia and urgently flew back to Moscow.

Andreeva’s letter was meant and, more importantly, perceived as a signal of a shift in the party line. There was a history of such ‘impromptu’ letters in the Soviet press. In 1952 there was a letter from a woman called Lidia Timashuk that prompted an ugly prosecution of Jewish doctors who were accused of deliberately harming senior Soviet figures, the so-called Doctors’ Plot.

In the same week as Andreeva’s letter was published, Vzglyad, the liberal television show, was taken off air. But the fact that the anti-Perestroika manifesto was printed in a newspaper rather than broadcast on television or radio gave it weight, permanence and most importantly historic context. The article put the intelligentsia into a state of stupor. The liberal press fell silent for nearly three weeks. Almost nobody dared to respond. ‘It was a terrifying time,’ Yegor Yakovlev said. ‘Absolutely everything we had ever hoped for and dreamed of was on the line.’¹⁷ Moskovskie novosti was the first to break the silence. Gorbachev also took the article as a frontal attack on his policies and convened a special Politburo meeting which lasted two days.

Alexander Yakovlev was charged to draft an editorial in Pravda that would spell out the party line. Liberal editors and journalists breathed a sigh of relief. Vzglyad was put back on air. The Andreeva affair was the last test of the ‘signalling’ system which had operated throughout Soviet history. The whole point of the printed word was its permanence. But when two opposing signals went through two party newspapers within two weeks, the system went into convulsions. It was clear that there was no single party line. As Korotich, the editor of Ogonyok, told Yegor at the time: ‘We used to keep trying to find out what’s going on. We overlooked the fact that we ourselves were creating the situation.’¹⁸

The clash over Andreeva’s letter was part of a wider conflict between two opposite ideologies. Behind Andreeva and her backers stood a centuries-old ideology of the absolute and sacred power of the state, which had been exemplified by Stalinist rule. A human being in that system was only a small cog. Closely related to the ideas of National Socialism or fascism, which Yakovlev had risen against back in the early 1970s, it was a noxious compound of anti-Semitism and chauvinism. The opposite ideology was one of ‘socialism with a human face’ that extolled individual human values such as dignity and privacy as supreme. It rejected Stalinism in all its forms and looked back to Bukharin and the New Economic Policy as a way towards a Western lifestyle.

The Communist hardliners, who resorted to Stalin, and the liberals, who extolled Bukharin, were both using history merely as a proxy for current political battles. In the process, both sides distorted history either by demonizing it or by idealizing it. Bukharin’s actual rehabilitation was an act of historic justice (in the same way Beria should have been rehabilitated from the false charges of spying for Britain). But there was a big difference between rehabilitation – a legal act of clearing a person of false charges – and turning him into a myth.

History did not like being mythologized and used as device and it took its revenge on both camps. The biggest problem was that by casting Perestroika in terms of the 1920s New Economic Policy and Bukharin’s idea of socialism, the reformers were not only distorting the picture of the past, they were also distorting the picture of the present. Perestroika was described as a new beginning, not as the ending that it actually was. But an ending, misconceived as a beginning, is nothing but a dead end.

Jumping off the Train

One person who did not care much about ideology and who recognized Perestroika for what it was – an ending of the Soviet command system rather than its second incarnation – was the secretary of the Moscow Party Committee and Russia’s future president, Boris Yeltsin. Like everyone else, Yeltsin made ritualistic speeches about the revolution and Lenin, but he also understood, earlier than most, that the party was heading towards self-destruction.

In the summer of 1987 Yeltsin wrote a letter to Gorbachev, who was on vacation, complaining that Perestroika was turning into empty words and asking him to relieve him from his duties as the secretary of the party organization and a candidate member of the Politburo. There were many cases when people were pushed out of the Politburo but nobody in the party’s history had ever asked to be removed from it voluntarily. When Gorbachev returned from vacation, he called Yeltsin, suggesting they should find time to talk. But a week passed, then another. Gorbachev was too busy working on a speech marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, in which he would mention Bukharin, to meet Yeltsin.

For several generations of Soviet leaders, Bukharin represented something they feared most: political opposition. Yet, too preoccupied with history, few paid attention to the fact that political opposition to Gorbachev was emerging in present time.

On 15 October a draft of Gorbachev’s speech was discussed by members of the Politburo. Andrei Gromyko, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the party’s elder statesman, enthused: ‘What an act is being born! Such acts are not your regular anniversary stuff. They make history. What does [the speech] say? From start to finish it conveys the following idea: there is capitalism and there is socialism, which was born seventy years ago… And in 1,000 years socialism will still be bringing good to the nation and to the world.’¹⁹ The time to the end of the Soviet Union was four years and counting.

With hindsight, the discussion among members of the Politburo was almost insane – as if train drivers were to discuss how to make an engine work faster, while their train, having lost its brakes, was heading towards a dead end. Yeltsin decided to jump off that train before it reached its destination.

Six days later, at a plenum of the Central Committee, Yeltsin publicly attacked hardliners in the Kremlin, warned that Perestroika was losing popular support (unsurprising given the empty shops) and, in conclusion, offered his resignation as a candidate member to the Politburo.

Most of the liberal reformers close to Gorbachev saw Yeltsin’s speech as a reckless acceleration of events which could only harm Gorbachev in his fight with the hardliners. In fact, Yeltsin’s speech was useful to him in two ways: first, it attacked the hardliners; and second, it allowed Gorbachev to slap down Yeltsin himself. As soon as Yeltsin sat down, Gorbachev launched a vicious and humiliating attack on him. He then invited members of the Politburo to speak.

When it came to Alexander Yakovlev’s turn, he said that Yeltsin was ‘immoral’ and ‘put his personal ambitions, personal interests, above the interest of the party’. Strictly speaking, Yakovlev, who shared Yeltsin’s frustration with the pace of Perestroika, was right: Yeltsin did have his own game. It was simpler and more strategic than that of Gorbachev. A politician of great animal-like instinct, what Yeltsin cared about was power – something that he understood better than anyone in the audience. Being held responsible for the worsening of the economic situation in the country without being able to implement reforms was politically dangerous. What may have seemed like political suicide from the outside, was, in fact, an act of self-rescue and survival. This did not, however, minimize the drama of his actions: jumping off an accelerating train was a risky business.

A few days later he was subjected to another savage attack – this time by the Moscow Party Organization which he headed. Stylistically, the language of many of their speeches resembled that of the 1930s show trials. But only stylistically. Yeltsin was no Bukharin and Gorbachev was certainly no Stalin. The dogs barked, but their teeth had been spoilt by all the sweets they had been handing out to each other over the past decades. In the 1930s, party renegades were shot. In the late 1950s, they were forced into retirement or placed under house arrest. In the more ‘vegetarian’ 1970s, they were parked in far-flung embassies. In the 1980s, they were propelled to the top. Gorbachev appointed Yeltsin as minister for construction and pledged ‘never to let Yeltsin into politics again’. He did not realize it was far too late for that and that he had just helped to create a new hero.

Once again, the role of the media was not to report Yeltsin’s speech. The protocol of the October Plenum, which contained Gorbachev’s speech, was kept secret and newspaper editors were strictly prohibited from mentioning Yeltsin’s name in print. This only boosted his popularity and his status as a martyr who suffered for the truth. Yeltsin’s speech struck a chord with the grievances of ordinary Russians, who, after two years’ talk about reforms, wanted to see and feel results. Instead they saw empty shelves and rising black market prices. By giving up his position within the Politburo and lashing out at the privileges enjoyed by the apparatchiks, Yeltsin gained far greater power – deriving its legitimacy from popular support.

Unable to read Yeltsin’s speech, people started to make up their own apocryphal versions of it. At least eight such ‘speeches’ circulated in Moscow. The most popular one read: ‘It is hard for me to explain to the factory worker why, in the seventieth year of his political power, he is obliged to stand in line for sausages in which there is more starch than meat, while on our table there is sturgeon, caviar and all sorts of delicacies easily acquired from a place which he cannot even approach… How can I look them in the eye?’²⁰ Yeltsin himself could not have put it better.

Yeltsin was focused on the present and the present gave little ground for optimism and illusions. ‘Where is Perestroika?’ a worker from the Urals asked a party conference convened by Gorbachev. ‘The stores are just as badly supplied with food as before. There was no meat before and there is no meat now. Popular consumption goods have vanished.’²¹ In the first issue of 1988, Moskovskie novosti ran a page-long vox populi conducted over a ten-day train journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific. Like any long-distance train conversation in Russia, it started over the traditional fare of boiled chicken and hard-boiled eggs, which passengers pulled out of plastic bags minutes after the train’s departure from Moscow, and continued over a bottle of vodka in the dining car. But as the train left Moscow further behind, the comments became more outspoken and the fare on compartment tables more primitive. In the old days, passengers were able to buy steaming boiled potatoes with dill, fried and salted fish, pickles and berries from an army of local men and women who ambushed the train at every station. Now, locals ambushed the train not to sell but to buy produce from the passengers: meat, butter and anything else.

The local shops were empty and so was the dining car which sold its own supplies to entrepreneurial re-sellers along the way. Amid the train conversations, Moskovskie novosti distributed a questionnaire among the passengers. In response to the question, ‘Do you believe in Perestroika’s results?’ 64 per cent answered negatively. More generally, only 16 per cent enthusiastically supported Perestroika and 13 per cent rejected it. This was hardly a scientific poll, but it amply bore out Yeltsin’s point. It was this train that Yeltsin was jumping off.

The first wave of street protests swept the country from Omsk in Siberia to the centre of Moscow. They were carried out under slogans that could have been written in the editorial offices of Moskovskie novosti: ‘No democracy without socialism; No socialism without democracy’. Yegor’s heart and the hearts of the Soviet intelligentsia swelled with pride and hope. ‘I am certain that Soviet workers value democracy over goods… It is true that there still are terrible shortages, but you would not believe how Glasnost has changed the way workers think,’ Yegor told Stephen Cohen a year later.²²

Yet under the slogans of democracy and Glasnost, people all too often meant ‘clothes’ and ‘sausages’. In fact, democracy and sausages were seen as part of one package: once the country had freedom of speech, sausages and clothes would follow and Russia would miraculously turn into a nice-smelling Western-style country. Unlike China, which kept the ideology and reformed the economy, Russia changed the ideology but did not reform the economy.

Food shortages had an important moral dimension. An article about queues in Moskovskie novosti, by the writer Alexander Kabakov, had the headline ‘HUMILIATION’ set in large, bold type. ‘Queuing for everything – from sausages to razor blades – has become a necessary part of Soviet life. For the citizens of a country which built atomic power stations and space shuttles, queuing for a bar of soap is humiliating,’ he wrote.²³ It was not just about the inability to sate one’s needs, it was also about wasting one’s precious life in queues.

The need to move to a free market and to liberalize state-controlled prices was obvious to almost everyone in the Soviet government. But Gorbachev dithered. Raising or deregulating prices would mean breaking the social contract that implied that food was affordable even if it was not available.

The memory of the riots in Novocherkassk in 1962, which were provoked by a sharp rise in meat prices and a reduction in real pay, outweighed any arguments about the current situation. ‘I know only one thing,’ Gorbachev told one of the free market proponents, ‘that after two weeks, this “market” would bring people out on the streets and sweep away any government.’ As it happened, a few months later, people were out on the streets anyway, but the economy was in a much worse state. Instead of deregulating the prices, Gorbachev effectively liberalized politics and loosened control over state property.

The ideologues of Perestroika, those who concentrated around Moskovskie novosti, had not thought through, any more than had Gorbachev, the nature of the Soviet failure and had assumed that Leninism was a pure doctrine morally, as well as one that could be the spine of a governing class. Consumed with inner party struggles, they missed the point that the system was unravelling and the governing class itself was fast abandoning the ship. By the late 1980s the ghost of Stalinism was just that – a ghost; nobody had an appetite for repressions. The likes of Nina Andreeva were sidelined, if not marginalized.

In May 1988 the government passed a law allowing the setting-up of private co-operatives. The word and the idea of a co-operative were, once again, borrowed from the 1920s New Economic Policy. The hope was that the spirit of private entrepreneurship and small-time trade would help revive the Soviet economy as quickly as it had done in the mid-1920s. The difference was that in 1925 only eight years had passed since the Bolshevik Revolution; in 1988 the distance was measured in generations.

In everything but name, the co-operatives of the late 1980s were private firms which were allowed to set their own prices for anything they produced. The only problem was that most of them did not produce anything. Instead they bought goods from state enterprises at subsidized prices and sold the same goods at market prices, keeping the profit or splitting it with a state manager.

‘The co-operator’s job was to legitimize the black market which the corrupt bureaucracy did not want to see legitimized, and to destroy the prejudices which the communist power structure did not want to see destroyed.’²⁴ Thus spoke a chronicler of the co-operation movement and himself a successful ‘co-operator’, Vladimir Yakovlev – Yegor’s son. At the same time, by loosening control over state enterprises – all strictly in the spirit of the 1960s reforms – the government allowed state managers to participate in these schemes. The vast majority of these co-operatives were attached to state plants and enterprises and affiliated with their management.

If that was not enough, a number of state Soviet oil refineries were given special licences to export their oil products and keep the revenues, bypassing the state export monopoly. This gave rise to people like Gennady Timchenko who worked for the ministry of foreign trade and who, along with his partners, lobbied a state-owned refinery near Leningrad to set up an in-house trading arm that hired them to export some of its products. A few years later, this ‘trading desk’ was sold, turning Timchenko and his partners into private oil traders. Fifteen years on, under Vladimir Putin, Timchenko emerged as one the biggest private traders of Russia’s state-owned oil, and, critics say, a symbol of crony capitalism and the corporatist state. In 2014 he was designated as a member of Putin’s inner circle by the US government and was subjected to sanctions. According to the Wall Street Journal, he was also investigated for money laundering, which he denied, by the US prosecutors. Yet he started his career at the same time, and in the same city, as that in which Andreeva wrote her letter. ‘My luck started there,’ he said.²⁵

Many of Russia’s first businessmen, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the future oil tycoon turned political prisoner, emerged from the ranks of the Young Communist Party League. Komsomol activists were young, cynical and ruthless. They had none of the idealism or the baggage of their fathers and all the frustrations of a hungry elite constrained by the doldrums of Soviet ideology. They could not care less for Bukharin or the New Economic Policy and they embraced with a vengeance the opportunity offered by Perestroika. None of the names, which a few years later would make up a Forbes Magazine list of billionaires, those who would shape Russia’s economy and politics over the next decade, featured on the pages of Moskovskie novosti, even though some placed advertisements in the paper.

The reason for this was not censorship, fear, or lack of professionalism. These events and these people simply did not fit into the picture of the world that Moskovskie novosti had created for its readers. They did not even enter its field of vision. The paper carried on arguing about socialism, the benefits and disadvantages of the market and the legacy of Lenin and Bukharin when a large part of the party corps was already making its millions.

In 1990, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the head of Gorbachev’s cabinet, posed a question: ‘Are we building socialism or capitalism?’ By that time, the question had long been answered, not only by the co-operators but also by a large number of the red directors who had begun the transfer of state property into their own hands well before the official privatization of the 1990s. The signs of this major shift of economic power from the central government to the Soviet managerial corps were out there, but few, including Ryzhkov, understood the consequences.

In May 1989 Viktor Chernomyrdin, a fifty-one-year-old archetypal corpulent minister for the Soviet gas industry, with bushy eyebrows, an instinctive sense of humour and a mastery of unprintable Russian expressions, came to Ryzhkov with a proposal to transform his ministry of gas into a state corporation called Gazprom, swapping his ministerial position for the job of the company’s chairman. Ryzhkov struggled to grasp the logic. After one long conversation he asked Chernomyrdin:

Ryzhkov assumed that Chernomyrdin had gone mad. No Soviet minister had ever voluntarily given up his perks, which included a chauffeur-driven car, a large apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the country, free holidays in a Crimean sanatorium and jars of black caviar from a special shop. A smart Soviet industry boss, Chernomyrdin had sensed that the centrally planned command economy administered through ministries like his own was crumbling. No longer backed by the threat of coercion or economic benefit, ministerial orders had no power and were getting ignored.

A few months later, Ryzhkov was gone, the Soviet Union had collapsed and within another two years, Chernomyrdin became prime minister in capitalist Russia, reaping the benefits of his creation. Gazprom became the largest and most powerful firm, worth billions of dollars, offering privileges no Communist Party could match. This story of Gazprom’s creation goes a long way to explain why the disintegration of the Soviet regime was relatively peaceful, but also why its transformation was so incomplete. The economic foundation of the Soviet system was destroyed not by an external enemy or the dissidents, but by the proprietor’s instinct of the Soviet red directors who gladly exchanged their petty privileges for something far bigger – a piece of socialist property. It was this nomenclatura that undermined the core principle of socialism.

The elimination of private property and of individual thinking was the Bolsheviks’ idée fixe. The artists of the 1920s dreamt up a utopia of collective living devoid of any individualistic habits. Stalin got rid of Lenin’s New Economic Policy that allowed small-time private enterprise, not because he doubted its economic results, but because he had correctly judged that any such enterprise was a threat to the totalitarian regime. Stalin bestowed upon his courtiers royal privileges, grand state apartments, cars and dachas, but the ownership of all these assets stayed with the Kremlin. The fact that nothing could be sold or bequeathed bred a sense of dependency and impermanence.

The ideologists of the regime watched vigilantly for any expression of the proprietor’s instinct. After Stalin’s death the threat of execution was lifted but the taboo on ownership remained. But by the late 1980s the deal by which the nomenclatura had to satisfy itself with perks and delicacies doled out from special shops had started to break down. Worse still, the food packages themselves started to shrink thanks to the worsening of the economic situation. A populist campaign against privileges, led by Yeltsin, added to the discomfort.

For years their proprietorial instinct had been constrained by the ideology of state ownership and the threat of violence on the part of the state. However, when ideological constraints were loosened and private enterprises legalized those who were charged with managing state assets gave in to their ownership instinct. They realized that instead of being rewarded for looking after the assets, they could actually own the assets.

The Soviet Party elite and the ‘red directors’ embraced and handsomely benefited from Perestroika. As Yegor Gaidar, who would come to reform the Russian economy a few years later, wrote: ‘The nomenclatura moved forward, testing its way through, step by step – not according to some thought-through plan, but by submitting to its deep instinct. It followed the scent of property, like a predator follows its prey.’²⁷ Everything was done by trial and error and the benefits of the trials went into the pockets of the bureaucracy. The costs of the errors stayed with the state.

In the late 1980s, Gaidar, a bright young economist, was working for the Kommunist journal that was supposed to set the ideological tenets of the party, but instead worked to destroy them. Gaidar was brought to Kommunist by Latsis, its deputy editor and a close friend of his father Timur. Yegor Gaidar was the grandson of two writers, Arkady Gaidar, the universally famous author of children’s stories who had fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war of 1918–22, and Pavel Bazhov, an author and collector of folk tales. Born in March 1956, during the 20th Congress of the party, Gaidar was barely thirty-three years old in 1989 and belonged to a generation that harboured no illusions about a socialist utopia. As a student at the Moscow State University, Gaidar read his way through the works of the Western economists, including J. M. Keynes and Milton Friedman. One book that perhaps influenced him more than any other was the Economics of Shortage by the Hungarian economist János Kornai.

Kornai’s book was published in 1980 when the oil price was still high, but shortages were widespread throughout the Soviet bloc. Unlike the communist reformers, Kornai argued that those shortages were the consequences not of planners’ errors or of the wrong prices, but of a systemic flaw in socialism, its integral part. Gaidar met Kornai in 1981 at a conference in Moscow. They strolled along grey Moscow streets arguing about whether the system could be reformed. In August 1986 Gaidar and a group of bright young economists gathered in Zmeinaya Gorka, a sanatorium outside Leningrad, to discuss their countries’ economic prospects – much as Timur Gaidar and Otto Latsis had done in August 1968. But, unlike their fathers, the young economists did not look for fifty-year-old historic models but examined the subject that was before them.

By night, they made bonfires, grilled shashlyk and sang songs from their fathers’ repertoire. By day, they spoke a different language – one free of euphemisms and nostalgia for the revolutionary ideals. Their diagnosis was clear: socialism cannot and will not work. The only way forward was to move the Soviet economy towards the market and private property. At the concluding seminar, Gaidar offered two possible scenarios: in the optimistic one, this club of economic boffins would soon run the country, steering it towards capitalism; in the pessimistic one, they would all be sent to the Gulag.

Yet, the biggest difference between 1968 and 1986 was in the balance of probabilities. In 1986, the prospect of repression already seemed increasingly outlandish. The general atmosphere was one of excitement and hope spiced up with disbelief and apprehension. It was this feeling and these ideas that Gaidar brought to Kommunist when he joined the journal in 1987. The taboos were falling too fast for any official to follow the line. Occasionally Gaidar would receive a telephone call from the Central Committee. ‘Are you sure this problem can be discussed in the open?’ a caller would ask. ‘Have you not heard?’ Gaidar would reply, implying he knew something that the caller did not.

With figures at hand, he showed that the Soviet economy was heading towards an abyss. In 1988 he wrote an article which he headed ‘The Foundation Pit’,²⁸ borrowing the title from the novel by Andrei Platonov in which socialist workers dig out a giant foundation pit for building a house for the entire proletariat: the deeper they dig, the more futile their work becomes, sucking out their energy and their lives. The novel had been written in 1930 but was not published until 1987.

The figures cited by Gaidar were devastating. In the period from 1976 to 1985, when the Soviet Union invested $150 billion into its agriculture, the increase in agricultural product was… zero. Soviet workers mined seven times the amount of iron ore extracted in America, cast three times as much iron and yet they smelted the same amount of steel. The waste was enormous. The Soviet Union made twelve times as many combine harvesters as America did, but harvested less wheat. The point of the article, however, was not to lament past losses but to warn of the dangers ahead. By continuing to pour money into an inefficient economy the country was digging itself a grave.

Gaidar introduced a new language and a way of thinking about the economy which moved beyond the communist ideology and which operated in concepts that were alien to Soviet party bosses: budget deficit, inflation, unemployment. His voice sounded calm and cold. The question, he wrote in a column for Moskovskie novosti, was not whether capitalism was preferable to socialism, but how to avoid another social explosion.

As far as Gaidar was concerned there was no point in trying to retrace one’s steps back to Lenin, just as there was no point in fantasizing about a painless transformation of a socialist economy into a capitalist one by taking Lenin’s body out of the Mausoleum. The situation in which the Soviet Union – a superpower with nuclear arms – found itself in the late 1980s simply had no historical precedents.

End of Mystery

In the summer of 1989 a group of American Sovietologists asked the young, bright analyst and academic Igor Malashenko what Gorbachev was doing with the country. ‘I told them: he is dismantling the whole system of the communist regime, the Soviet Union. Then they asked me what he was planning to do next and suddenly I was stuck for an answer.’³⁰ A Moscow University graduate with a degree in philosophy, Malashenko had joined the international department at the Central Committee of the Communist Party. A few years earlier this would have seemed like a smart decision, but in 1989 the omnipotent Central Committee was suddenly no longer seen as a good career move; indeed, many staffers were heading for the exit. But Malashenko was curious. ‘I thought that there must be a plan and that I was simply not getting it because I did not have access to information. It was only when I got into the Central Committee that I realized that not only was there no plan, but that Gorbachev did not even understand the consequences of his own actions. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, he did not remember that “if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds”.’³¹ In fact, had Gorbachev foreseen the consequences of his actions, he was unlikely to have started.

In the absence of coherent economic reforms and policy towards the Soviet republics, Gorbachev proceeded to loosen political control as the communist reformers had urged him to do, transferring power to the Soviets – government bodies, or councils, which were in theory electable even though in practice they were simply enacting the policies of the Communist Party.

It was the opposite of China where economic reforms were happening under authoritarian rule. But in June 1989, the Chinese way led to Tiananmen Square. The Soviet way led to the first democratically elected Congress of People’s Deputies which proclaimed ‘all power to the Soviets’. What had long been an empty slogan suddenly became reality. It was the strongest signal that Moscow was letting go of the centralized system and dissolving power.

The Congress started with a minute of silence: a few weeks earlier, in the small hours of 9 April, Russian troops and armour had moved in against 10,000 people who had come out onto the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to demand cessation from the Soviet Union. The soldiers used a paralytic gas of unknown origin and spades to crack skulls open. Twenty people were killed, sixteen of them women, including one seventy-year-old and two sixteen-year-olds.

Gorbachev was in London and apparently only learned the facts when he returned to Moscow on the evening of 9 April. Everyone tried to distance themselves from the massacre. It was not clear who had ordered it. What was clear was that the country’s leadership was not prepared to take responsibility for cracking down on a protest and had run away at the first sight of blood. Yegor Yakovlev, along with several other deputies of the Supreme Soviet, went to Tbilisi to investigate and concluded that the use of force was completely unjustified. At the opening of the Congress, a deputy from Lithuania demanded that everyone should stand up to pay their respects to those killed in Tbilisi, effectively implying that the leadership had committed a crime of murder – in the presence of the party hacks who occupied most seats in the audience.

This was just a start. Independent deputies from the ranks of the liberal intelligentsia insisted that the Congress, in the spirit of Glasnost, should be broadcast live on the central television channels. In the past, important decisions were always made behind closed doors. The amount of information the public received about official meetings was usually in reverse proportion to their importance. Congresses of the Communist Party that decided nothing were broadcast almost in full. Central Committee meetings and Politburo sessions were never made public. This was the first time a genuinely important convention was not only reported but televised.

As the Grand Inquisitor explains in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, ‘There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness. Those powers are miracle, mystery and authority.’ Soviet rulers, and Stalin in particular, learned the lessons of the Grand Inquisitor well. But the three powers that had been guarded by Soviet ideologists for decades were destroyed in a two-week-long televised drama.

The country was glued to the television screen, listening to speeches and debates which were considered too radical for newspapers to print or for television news programmes to repeat. People watched Andrei Sakharov, whose name was taboo in the media only a few years before, propose radical political reform and challenge Gorbachev; they heard a former Olympic weightlifter attack the KGB – ‘a veritable underground empire’ – and a Dostoevskian scholar demand the removal of Lenin from the Mausoleum; they heard that their ‘country was bankrupt’, that the war in Afghanistan was a criminal mistake; that the rate of child mortality in the Soviet Union was higher than in many African countries and that life expectancy was up to eight years shorter than in the developed world; that half of all processed baby milk contained a dangerously high concentration of chemicals. But the most shocking part was not what was said but that it was being said on a state television channel. As Alexander Yakovlev said at the outset of Perestroika, ‘the television image is everything’.³²

With this cloak of mystery torn into pieces, authority was irreversibly seeping from the Kremlin. As Sakharov wrote at the time: ‘The Congress has cut off all the roads back. Now it is clear to everyone that there is only the road forward or ruin.’³³ As it happened, it was both: the road forward led to the ruin of the empire.

The Congress produced an astonishing sense of exhilaration and euphoria. But it also revealed an unbridgeable divide between the minority of the liberal intelligentsia and what one of its members called an ‘aggressively obedient majority’ – the grey and menacing mass of Soviet-bred men and women who applauded the military commander who had led the crackdown in Tbilisi and who tried to boo Sakharov off the stage. They belonged to the same breed as Nina Andreeva, usually known as ‘Homo soveticus’, which had little in common with Soviet people such as Alexander Yakovlev. These were two different species.

The fact that Homo soveticus made up the majority was not merely the result of the election rules of the Congress. It was a fair reflection of a negative selection process which first eliminated the best and the brightest physically and then nurtured double-think, suspicion, isolationism, dependence, and discouraged independence of thought and action. As the fairy-tale dragon from a play by Evgeny Shvarts, the 1940s Soviet playwright, tells the hero who slaughters him before he dies: ‘I leave you burnt souls, hollow souls, dead souls.’

In the same year, 1989, a group of Russian sociologists led by Yuri Levada launched a research project about Homo soveticus. Its aim was to describe a vanishing social type created by several decades of oppressive regimes, but one that could no longer reproduce in the new circumstances. But as the sociologists realized over the next decades, the breed of Homo soveticus was immensely resilient. The type did not vanish: it mutated and reproduced, acquiring new characteristics along the way. Conversely, the social genes of Alexander Yakovlev and Andrei Sakharov would over the years become weaker.

But for a short period in the late 1980s this liberal minority had the upper hand – not least because of its broad and even unlimited, at some point, access to the media. Despite all the hushing and stamping, their voices were more audible and their speeches far more powerful than those of the ‘aggressively obedient majority’. Members of the Politburo were exiting through a guarded back door to escape the journalists – both foreign and Russian – who were harassing them with microphones and notepads. As Sakharov wrote in his memoirs, drafted a few months after the 1st Congress, ‘That evening we felt triumphant. But, of course, this feeling was mixed with a sense of tragedy and complexity of the situation in general. If our feeling can be described as optimism, it was tragic optimism.’³⁴

The Congress ended – just as it had begun – with a speech by Sakharov. He called for a repeal of the Communist Party’s rule, transfer of power to the Soviets, privatization of land and reorganization of the country along federal lines. During this speech Gorbachev grew increasingly impatient, telling Sakharov that his time was over, trying to send him back to his seat. Then Gorbachev simply switched off the microphone. But Sakharov continued to speak. Remarkably, while the audience was no longer able and willing to listen to Sakharov, his speech continued to be broadcast on television. At the end of his speech Sakharov demanded that the Soviet Union recall its ambassador to China in protest against the bloody massacre in Beijing.

Sakharov did not have long to live. He died on 14 December 1989. With his death, the country lost the moral authority that no politician could replace. Coming from the depths of the Stalinist system, he was the closest thing to a saint that Russia could produce. He was the elite in a way that neither the intelligentsia nor the nomenclatura ever were. On the day of his funeral, attended by long lines of mourners in a terrible frost, Moskovskie novosti printed a special issue dedicated to ‘Andrei Sakharov – Our Bitter Conscience’, carrying tributes from Russian intellectuals, writers and politicians. The most poignant was written by Sergei Averintsev, the scholar of early Christianity and one of Russia’s finest thinkers. Averintsev overturned the popular perception of Sakharov as an other-worldly, unpragmatic and inept politician. A truth searcher and a good speaker are not the same thing, Averintsev wrote.

In many ways, Sakharov was the moral foundation of Perestroika. With his death, the ground turned into shifting sands.

A few hours before he died, Sakharov spoke to a group of liberal deputies. His short speech was printed in Moskovskie novosti: ‘We cannot take responsibility for the actions of the country’s leadership. It is leading the country towards a catastrophe, prolonging the process of Perestroika for years. It leaves the country in a state of intense decay. All the plans of moving towards an intensified, market economy will turn out to be unattainable and the disappointment is already rising.’³⁶

By May 1989 the parliaments of all three Baltic republics now dominated by non-communists, declared their sovereignty. To give their demand historic legitimacy, the deputies from the Baltic states requested that a special commission should be set up for a historic assessment of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol that carved up Europe, something that the Kremlin continued to insist had not existed. The commission was headed by Alexander Yakovlev. At the same time Novy Mir started printing chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – ‘the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times,’³⁷ as George Kennan, the dean of American diplomats, put it. The Soviet Union had little to offer its people in way of economic benefits. Now it was also deprived of its historic legitimacy.

By the end of 1989 the excitement and euphoria inspired by Perestroika and sustained by Moskovskie novosti were evaporating. Hopes of reviving socialism and rewinding the tape of history to the point where socialism had gone astray clashed with the economic reality. By 1990, the queues had subsided: there was simply nothing to queue for anymore. Shortages of tobacco in Leningrad risked sparking off riots. Ration cards became a reality. Newspapers did not have to write about shortages – they were literally visible in the poor quality of their paper and in the fading colour of the print. The foreign firms that provided the Soviet Union with ink and paper were not getting paid and halted their supplies. As economists warned Gorbachev, from 1 January the state would not be able to pay salaries to the army and the police.

The last year of the 1980s was also the end of an historic era. As a policy, Perestroika would continue for another two years, but its spirit had left the country. The future seemed bleak and utterly unpredictable. Millions headed to the West. Gorbachev’s traditional New Year’s greeting for 1990 conveyed a sense of gloom. As Marietta Chudakova, a literary historian, recorded in her diary: ‘Gorbachev started his greetings with a serious, almost tragic face. A momentary glimpse of fear, if not horror, touched his face. What does he see in front? What does he feel?’¹

Popular culture was swept by a wave of noir. One of the most gifted and popular producers of the genre was the television journalist Alexander Nevzorov, Russia’s first TV star, who over the years had tried himself out as a church choirboy, a professional stuntman, an investigative reporter, a crusader, an ultra-nationalist, a parliamentarian, an imperialist, a romantic individualist, a mercantile cynic, a con man and in the end even a liberal. Nevzorov was the product of television and its embodiment, a man who constructed reality and his own image.

He made his first television appearance at the end of 1987 in the daily news show 600 Seconds. The handsome Nevzorov, clad in a black leather jacket and sporting fashionable stubble, sat under a blinking clock that was counting down 600 seconds during which he was uncovering dirt and corruption, shaming bureaucrats, showing murderers and their victims, talking to prostitutes and alcoholics. Watching his show broadcast live was a sport. Some people made bets: will he make it in 600 seconds or not? His stunts were flawless. Although 600 sekund (600 Seconds) was initially produced and broadcast by a regional Leningrad channel, it was watched by 50 million people across Russia.

Nevzorov was both the presenter and a reporter. He and his crew burst into offices and hospitals, broke into prisons and abattoirs. He showed the underworld in all its gory details. His journalistic stunts and his chutzpah mesmerized the audience. He pushed his microphone into the faces of city council officials and prisoners. While Vzglyad was made and watched by the Westernized urban elite, 600 Seconds had a much wider appeal and peddled anything that sold: gratuitous violence, nationalism and death pornography. The more corpses the merrier.

‘I was a conquistador who was conquering virgin information territory and crushing savages along the way. I did not give a damn about morality or public interest. I was simply dealing in the most profitable information. And the most profitable information at the time was crime… I had impudence, courage and an exceptional lack of principles,’ Nevzorov explained.² Some of Nevzorov’s ‘revelations’ were simply staged. His nightly prime-time programmes created the sensation that the country consisted entirely of criminals, drunkards and the homeless. How much of what Nevzorov showed was actually true was a very different matter. In his programmes, he called Leningrad ‘Petrograd’, as the city was known at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war.

In 1990 Nevzorov played himself in a full-length documentary film called You Can’t Live Like That, directed and narrated by Stanislav Govorukhin, a film-maker best known for his thrillers. Nevzorov appeared in the film in the part of a lone crusader against crime, a heroic reporter-investigator fighting for the truth. You Can’t Live Like That was a classic film noir which people queued to see as though it was a thriller, not a documentary, deriving odd pleasure from self-deprecation. The film presented a Bosch-like picture of the country’s physical and moral degradation. Rapists, serial killers, thieves, drunkards and prostitutes populated the film which showed the lowest depths of Russian society. ‘This is what seventy years [of Soviet rule] have done to us,’ Govorukhin lamented.

In 1989 most people in the Soviet Union favoured ‘socialism with a human face’. Between 1989 and 1991 the number of those who felt that socialism brought nothing but queues and repressions and that ‘we are the worst country in the world’, destined to teach others how not to live, grew from 7 per cent to 56 per cent. People started to refer to the Soviet Union as ‘this country’ rather than ‘our country’. The word ‘Soviet’ morphed into ‘Sovok’ (dustpan) and was used as an antonym to ‘normal’ or ‘civilized’. This self-deprecation had nothing to do with repentance. It was the reverse side of the imperial superiority complex that had been hammered into people for decades and which was to resurface a decade and a half later when Russia got richer. The narrative of revenging the humiliation of the 1990s, ‘imposed on Russia by the West’, would become the centrepiece of the restoration ideology under Vladimir Putin. In fact, this ‘humiliation’ was imposed not by the West but by those who cultivated the idea of Sovok and by Putin himself.

The pessimism that engulfed the country in 1990 was as exaggerated as the euphoria had been four years earlier. It partly reflected the worsening economic situation in the country, uncertainty about the future, the rise in criminality and the weakness of the government. But as Alexander Yakovlev remarked at the beginning of 1990, ‘It seems to me that there is a lot of theatricality and exaggeration in this confusion of minds, this whirlwind of events, outbursts of emotions and ambitions’. The paradox was that for all the difficulties and pessimism, Russian society was more friendly and receptive to the outside world than it was a decade later when life had become more comfortable and people started to holiday abroad, while lamenting the loss of the empire and its influence. At the time, the majority of people felt the most significant achievements of the Perestroika years were the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and freedom of speech. Russian society seemed more agitated than depressed. And however apprehensive people felt about the future in 1990, few wished to go back to Brezhnev’s era of ‘developed socialism’.

This spirit of the last years of the Soviet regime revealed itself in a raft of anti-Utopian novels which appeared in the late 1980s. The most interesting one was a short novella by Alexander Kabakov, an author and staff writer for Moskovskie novosti. It was called Nevozvrashchenets (The Man Who Doesn’t Return) and painted an apocalyptic picture of the future. A scientist, transported into the future at the instructions of his KGB minders, finds Moscow in 1993 run by quasi-military juntas who arbitrarily execute people in the name of Great Reconstruction. Tanks roam around the ruined city. Orthodox ‘knights’ spear Jews gathered by the stands of a liberal newspaper, while bearded members of the Revolutionary Committee of Northern Persia hunt people wearing Orthodox crosses. The scientist – an ultimate intelligentsia type – moves around the dark and cold streets with a Kalashnikov, dexterously dodging death like a Hollywood movie hero.

The novella ends on an unexpectedly optimistic note: offered the chance to go back to the good old times where people ‘drank milky tea and read family novels’, the scientist decides to stay in ‘catastrophic’ 1993. Walking up a desolate Tverskaya Street, he spots a car containing his KGB minders who are pointing a gun at him. ‘I fell to the ground, having already undone a gun holster under my coat – at the ready. Here [in 1993] I was not afraid of them…’³ The dissipation of fear was one of the most important results of the Perestroika years.

Looking for Cover

If anyone had a reason to feel fearful in 1990, it was the party and the KGB that were fast losing control over the situation in the country. Faced with mass rallies outside the Kremlin, the Communist Party was forced to abolish the sixth article of the constitution that guaranteed its monopoly on power. The KGB – the ‘combat division’ of the Communist Party – was also under pressure. By 1990 the liberal media, with Moskovskie novosti in the vanguard, turned its cannons on the KGB. Watching the party surrender its political monopoly, many KGB officers felt disoriented and exposed.

Yegor assigned the job of assailing the most formidable bastion of Soviet power to two young female reporters – Yevgenia Albats and Natalia Gevorkyan. Albats tracked down Stalinist investigators who were still alive and grilled them about themselves and their victims.[1] Gevorkyan mainly dealt with the KGB’s present. ‘Yegor called me in and told me: “I want you to write about these bastards – the security services, the KGB, you know…” I told him that I had never even read a law book in my life. “Never mind: you will go to these KGB guys, cross one leg over another and look at them with your silly eyes – you will see they will tell you stuff that they would never tell any man.” It worked.’⁴

The reason for choosing Gevorkyan for the job was not just her good looks and journalistic talents: she was someone Yegor had an affinity with and could trust. The granddaughter of an old Bolshevik, she was the next generation of the Soviet aristocracy – with roots not dissimilar to his own. Her father was at the heart of the Soviet intelligence service – first at the United Nations in New York where he befriended Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, then in Ethiopia. At the time when she walked into Yegor’s office, in 1989, her father had just retired as the chief of the American department at News Press Agency (APN) to which Moskovskie novosti was subordinated. Like Yegor, she had spent time in Prague (as a journalism student she specialized in Czechoslovakia) but instead of returning to the Soviet Union at the end of her year out, she had married a foreigner and stayed in Czechoslovakia – a move which turned her into a renegade in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, closing most career paths.

One of Gevorkyan’s first articles about the KGB was based on an open letter, which a former KGB staffer sent to Moskovskie novosti. The man was neither a senior KGB officer nor even a member of the party. He was an English-language interpreter mistakenly sent to work in Dresden. After he quit the service the KGB barred him from travelling to West Germany to see a friend, so he wrote to Moskovskie novosti to complain. All he did in Dresden, he wrote, was take the wives of KGB officers shopping and deliver matches and soap to his boss.

The years when the unfortunate interpreter served in Dresden – 1985 to 1988 – coincided with the service of another young KGB operative there: Vladimir Putin. (Gevorkyan’s next-door neighbour in Moscow was Putin’s boss in Germany.) Fast forward to 2000 and Gevorkyan, by that time a star reporter, was chosen, along with two other people, to interview Putin for a book to be called First Person. He told her how in 1989, in Dresden, he burnt documents fearing that an angry crowd could storm the KGB headquarters at any moment. When the crowd appeared outside the building where Putin worked, he came out to talk to them. ‘These people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”’⁵

Eventually, Putin said, military personnel did come and the crowd dispersed, but Moscow’s silence stayed with him: ‘At that moment I had a feeling that the Soviet Union had disappeared.’ That feeling of betrayal experienced by many KGB officers around the Soviet bloc was exploited – with significant damage to the country – when former KGB men seized power in Russia a decade later. But in 1990 many of them felt uncertain and were desperately looking for political cover. Vladimir Putin ended up working for Anatoly Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St Petersburg. Then a far more senior man – Major-General Oleg Kalugin who was in charge of Soviet counter-intelligence – came to knock on the door of Moskovskie novosti.

Kalugin had spent thirty years as one of the most senior Soviet intelligence officers; his code name was Petrov. In the late 1980s clouds started gathering over Kalugin’s head and he was put under surveillance personally authorized by the KGB chief as a suspected double agent (Kalugin always denied this). The day when Kalugin was forced into retirement, he ‘handed’ himself over to the ‘democratic camp’.

A few months later he gave an interview to Gevorkyan. He did not disclose any secrets, but he made a political statement: ‘The KGB remains untouchable. Its structure remains unchanged and so does its mighty potential which for years was the main power base of Soviet dictators. Even after five years of Perestroika, it is a state within a state, an organ endorsed with enormous power, able to trample down any government.’ At the end, Gevorkyan asked Kalugin why he was undermining the system which he had loyally served for thirty years. In reply, Kalugin quoted Donald Maclean, a British diplomat who had spied for the KGB. ‘Maclean said: “People who read Pravda every day are invincible”. People who are well-informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking,’ Kalugin explained.⁶

Within days of Moskovskie novosti running the interview, Kalugin was stripped of his military rank and his medals. But this only boosted his ‘martyrdom’ status. Moskovskie novosti rushed to his defence, demanding explanations from the government. A few months later, Kalugin was elected as a parliament deputy and began his political career.[2] There was a certain irony in Kalugin’s relationship with the media: a man who had used a journalistic cover when he served as a Soviet spy in America, went to a newspaper for political cover when the power moved away from the KGB. Going to a foreign embassy would have meant treason. Going to Moskovskie novosti meant insurance. Kalugin even deposited his medals in its safe.

A month after Kalugin’s interview, Moskovskie novosti ran another interview – also by Gevorkyan – this time with Jan Ruml, the new Czech minister of the interior, a former dissident and a friend of the Czech president, Václev Havel. He told Gevorkyan how the new government had compiled a list of 140,000 people who collaborated with the State Security Service (STB). ‘We wish the reformers in Czechoslovakia good luck, particularly since many of their problems are inseparable from ours. We hope that their ideals will never again be countered with Soviet tanks,’ Gevorkyan concluded her article.⁷ In 1990, the Soviet KGB was still immensely powerful, but the prospect of sharing the fate of their Czechoslovakian counterparts was alarming and real. The liberal media were a power to be reckoned or sided with.

The KGB was particularly demoralized by Gorbachev’s resolution not to resort to force. At a Politburo meeting on 3 January 1990, Gorbachev explained his reasons.

Then without the slightest pause, Gorbachev switched back to the present. ‘I think my greatest task is to take the country through Perestroika without a civil war. Some casualties are inevitable. Here and there someone gets killed – you can’t get away from this. But to use force, weapons – that is a different matter. I will not do it.’⁹

Emboldened by Gorbachev’s aversion to violence and repression, regional elites started to pull away from Moscow, declaring ‘sovereignty’ in their own affairs. Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Soviet forces since the Second World War, was among the first to use this window of opportunity. Its Communist Party quit the all-Soviet structure. ‘Do you really want to leave?’ Gorbachev questioned the Lithuanian intelligentsia as he tried to persuade them to stay with the flock. ‘Yes’ came a resolute answer.

In May 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia – the largest and most important of the Soviet republics – and a month later, on 12 June 1990, Russia’s Supreme Soviet followed the example of Lithuania and voted for Russia’s sovereignty. On the same day the Soviet government abolished censorship and passed a new media law that turned freedom of speech from a privilege granted from above into a legal right. The coincidence of dates was symbolic.

Gorbachev desperately tried to stop Yeltsin’s being elected as Russia’s leader. The KGB planted stories about him in Pravda and showed embarrassing videotapes of Yeltsin’s visit to America where he appeared to be drunk. But with the media no longer under central control, this did not have much impact: few people in 1990 read Pravda or paid attention to the party line. Yeltsin enjoyed mass popular support and was unstoppable.

The attitude of Perestroika reformers towards Yeltsin was more ambivalent. On the one hand Yegor and his circle of journalists refused to participate in a campaign against Yeltsin. On the other hand, they considered Yeltsin as a dangerous populist force who was calling for the break-up of the Soviet Union under the guise of Russian sovereignty. At the end of May 1990, Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in Moscow, who dropped in on Yegor, found him unusually depressed. ‘He says that the new government structures are simply not working, and there is a real risk of chaos… He is as gloomy as I’ve ever seen him: not the volatile gloom to which the Moscow intelligentsia has always been subject, but a settled depression which is much more worrying.’¹⁰ Yegor was not alone in this. Braithwaite himself was apprehensive.

Foreign governments felt far more comfortable with an enlightened party man like Gorbachev, in whom they had heavily invested, than with a popular leader like Yeltsin. When, in September 1990, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, and Braithwaite went to see Yeltsin, they were almost hostile in their predisposition.

Few people realized at the time that Yeltsin, while seeking to eschew Soviet power structures, was the only consolidating figure in the country, who offered the best hope for preserving Russia itself from disintegration and a collapse into civil war. There was no reason why some of the regions of Russia, particularly the ethnically based ones, should not demand their own sovereignty. In fact, many of them did. Yeltsin’s offer to the regional elites ‘to take as much sovereignty as they could swallow’ but stay within the Russian Federation was the only way of keeping Russia together.

The party, which in the eyes of Gorbachev’s supporters – at home and abroad – was ‘the only force capable of holding the fractured society together’, in Yeltsin’s eyes was a superfluous burden which had to be cast off altogether. This was precisely what Yeltsin did, formally quitting the party at the 28th Congress which also turned out to be its last.

Alexander Yakovlev, who had as few illusions about the party as did Yeltsin, faced the choice of abandoning the ship or staying with Gorbachev to the end. He stayed with Gorbachev. So did Yegor. As he wrote in Moskovskie novosti, ‘I am far from blaming people who have acted according to their convictions [and quit the party]. I will be honest: there were moments at the Congress when I also had an inexpungible desire to return my mandate along with my party membership card.’¹²

His reasoning for not succumbing to this desire had nothing to do with ideology. ‘There is no power equal to that of the party. And this party boasts a politicized army and the KGB, a combination of Soviet and party posts, ownership of a vast amount of property and monopoly over the media… And if that is so, how can one distance oneself from this colossus and transfer it into the sole possession of the conservatives?’¹³ The status of a patrician entailed a sense of personal responsibility. At the same time, Yegor faced the dilemma of what to do next with the paper.

On 1 October, Moskovskie novosti was published with the new strap-line ‘an independent newspaper’. The question of its future was openly debated on its pages. Alexander Yakovlev suggested that the task of Moskovskie novosti should be to appeal to and form the middle class – not the intelligentsia, dependent on the state, but a class of professionals who could support themselves and not rely on the state for handouts. These were the people who could move Russia forward. Nikolai Shmelev, a popular economics writer, backed Yakovlev: people were fed up with any party-mindedness or ideology. ‘Let the newspaper follow in the footsteps of the 18th-century enlighteners. Let it try to appeal to the intellectual and humane features of the bourgeoisie, to those shoots of goodness which are not yet completely destroyed in people. Let its slogan be: “Long live common sense and decency.”’¹⁴ Decency and common sense were in very short supply. The benign instincts of the European bourgeoisie were virtually extinct. The Party and the KGB still had a few surprises in store.

Denouement

Faced with mounting pressures – both economic and political – Gorbachev dithered. His attempts to reconcile Yeltsin’s programme of economic liberalization with retaining state control predictably yielded nothing but more frustration. Yeltsin, fed up with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to face reality and agree to urgent reforms, threatened a complete secession of Russia from the Soviet Union – effectively a liquidation of the USSR.

Yeltsin’s speech was an ultimatum and Gorbachev perceived it as such. ‘What does Yeltsin’s speech mean?’ Gorbachev questioned his presidential council. ‘It is a declaration of war to the Kremlin. If we don’t take retaliatory measures, we will be defeated,’ replied Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB. Nikolai Ryzhkov, Gorbachev’s prime minister, painted a gloomy picture: ‘The country is becoming ungovernable. It is on the verge of disintegration. Our power may not extend beyond the Kremlin walls or the Garden Ring [Road]. And that is all. The system of government is destroyed and we are responsible for it. We have to show that we are in power!’¹⁵

Like every Soviet government before it, Gorbachev’s Politburo reached out for the two main levers of power – the police and the media – only to discover that neither of them was available. The police was headed by Vadim Bakatin, an intelligent, decent and pragmatic man of liberal views who refused to ban mass demonstrations or to use force against them. This was not a matter of softness, but of common sense. Dispersing a crowd of 400,000 people was physically impossible. When Kryuchkov demanded that Bakatin should ‘demonstrate power’, Bakatin told him: ‘You show it. Let those who wish to ban those protests put these bans into practice. The police are not going to do this.’¹⁶

The media were even less compliant. As Ryzhkov told the presidential council: ‘It is sickening to watch a TV presenter pronouncing Yeltsin’s name with aspiration! [We should] remove half of the people from television! And kick out all these… from newspapers!’ Gorbachev agreed: ‘[It is time] to restore some order in the media.’ In fact the time for doing this had long passed. On 14 November, Yegor printed an appeal from the country’s most highly regarded artists, writers and thinkers who were now also the founders of the new independent Moskovskie novosti. The letter was headed ‘The Country is Tired of Waiting’ and was addressed to Gorbachev. It drew a line under the period which had started in the spring of 1985. ‘The peaceful changes are over. Blood has been spilled in many republics and could now be spilled in the centre. The country is sliding towards an abyss and a civil war.’ It ended with an ultimatum: ‘You cannot escape responsibility for today’s state of affairs by swearing an allegiance to the socialist choice and communist perspective. Either you confirm your ability for decisive actions, or resign.’¹⁷

Gorbachev felt he had been hit in the solar plexus. ‘Gorbachev is more upset by this than by anything else these days. He saw in it a personal betrayal,’ Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev recorded in his diary on 15 October 1990. ‘The country is in a state of collapse and panic. Every newspaper predicts revolts, civil war and a coup. Every critical statement ends with the demand on the president: if you cannot even use the powers which you have been granted – “Go!”’¹⁸

The liberal reformers were not the only ones who presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum. So did the hardliners. The same day as the article in Moskovskie novosti printed its open appeal to Gorbachev, Viktor Alksnis, a Latvian army colonel – a reactionary figure dubbed the ‘black colonel’ by liberals – demanded that Gorbachev either restored order in the country and brought the republics to heel, or resigned.

Two days later Gorbachev addressed the Supreme Soviet with a short and dramatic speech, marking his sharp swing towards the hardliners. In his twenty-minute-long speech – one of the shortest in his political career – Gorbachev put the government under his direct control, dismissed the Presidential Council that included Alexander Yakovlev and a few other liberals and replaced it with a hawkish Security Council. The liberals were appalled. The conservatives were delighted. ‘We will have to become more right-wing,’ Gorbachev told his aides. The country, he argued to himself, could not cope with the pace of reforms and the liberals were irresponsible in their criticism.

Kryuchkov smeared Yakovlev, telling Gorbachev that he had been plotting against him. Having emasculated Yakovlev, the KGB took over the key appointments in the media and the police. The liberal-minded Bakatin was replaced as the head of the police with one of the KGB’s own men, Boris Pugo. Leonid Kravchenko, a conservative party hack, was put in charge of television and promptly removed liberal TV presenters from the air.

All the signs pointed to a counter-revolution. Yet its creeping nature meant that nobody called it that. But, on 20 December, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister who had helped to end the Cold War, ‘detonated’ the situation by announcing his resignation. He said dictatorship was coming and a ‘junta’ was preparing to take over. Shevardnadze knew what he was talking about: half of the foreign ministry staff was seconded from the KGB and many of them had told Shevardnadze about its plans.

Vzglyad, which refused to go on the air without interviewing Shevardnadze, was shut down. Interfax, the first independent news agency in the country, was kicked out from its offices. ‘It begins to look more and more like a crackdown on the organs of Glasnost. Glasnost is the central principle of Perestroika: a real crackdown would be very serious, close to the beginning of the end,’ Braithwaite recorded in his diary.¹⁹

At the same Congress of People’s Deputies that Shevardnadze used to make his resignation, Ales Adamovich, writer, war veteran and one of the founders, along with Sakharov, of Memorial, gave a prophetic warning. ‘Gorbachev is the only leader in Soviet history who has not stained his hands with blood, and we would all like to remember him as such… But the moment will come when the military will instigate a bloodbath, and later they will wipe their bloodstained hands against your suit,’ he told Gorbachev.²⁰

The moment Adamovich warned about came on 12 January 1991 when interior ministry troops and the KGB tried to overthrow the government of Lithuania which had declared independence. There was shooting on the streets of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. Tanks went in. It all seemed like a repeat of 1968. Events seemed to follow a familiar script: a call for ‘normalization’ in Lithuania, clearing the ground at home and cracking down on the media. There was one big difference, however. Those who had lived through 1968 were not about to give in. They still controlled print and print was still powerful. Most important of all, there was an alternative source of political power in the country – Yeltsin – who overtly supported the Baltic states.

That evening, Yeltsin was among the reformers, artists, journalists and foreign diplomats who gathered to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Moskovskie novosti. Yegor considered cancelling the party, given the events in Vilnius, but his journalists persuaded him otherwise: it was decided they should use the occasion to rally the country’s elite and tell Gorbachev what they thought about Vilnius – while they still could. Yegor was on the stage at the Moscow Film-Makers Club when the news came in about tanks surrounding the television and radio centre and the main printworks in Vilnius. Yegor looked at his journalists who were in the audience and dispatched them to the three Baltic republics. They left before the evening was over – still dressed in their party wear. Boris Yeltsin also left early and went to Tallinn for an emergency meeting with the heads of the Baltic republics.

Shortly after midnight, Soviet special troops burst into the Lithuanian television and radio centre. The Lithuanian news presenter reported the attack live until she could do so no longer. The screens went blank. The main fighting, however, unfolded outside the television transmitting tower. Fourteen Lithuanians were killed and 140 wounded by Soviet soldiers who opened fire at the unarmed crowd that tried to defend the television tower. None of this was shown on Soviet television, which presented the crackdown as an attack by Lithuanian nationalists. Apart from one young newsreader, Tatyana Mitkova, who refused to read out the official statement on the late-night news programme Televezionnaia Sluzhba Novostei (Television News Service), most television programmes, including Vremya, fell into line. The main source of information in Moscow was a private radio station called Echo Moskvy (Moscow Echo).

The fact that the main fighting occurred over a television tower was a tribute to the power and importance of television as a way of controlling the minds of the people. To prevent the bug from spreading to Russia, the KGB had reinforced its forces with its own information offensive led by the television paratrooper, Alexander Nevzorov.

He raced to Vilnius to shoot a ten-minute ‘documentary’. With a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and with Wagner’s Das Rheingold as the soundtrack, he strode into the television tower, talking to the stern-looking Russian ‘heroes’, the ‘defenders of the empire’ and the Russian-speaking population against the ‘fascist threat’ posed by the ‘nationalist Lithuanian traitors’. As for those Lithuanians who had had their skulls smashed by the riot police, or been run over by the tanks, they had died of ‘heart attacks’ or in ‘car accidents’, according to Nevzorov.

Nevzorov’s ten-minute ‘reportage’ from Vilnius grew into a two-part documentary which he called Nashi – ‘Ours’, or ‘Our Guys’ – as opposed to Lithuanians or any non-Russians who were not ‘ours’. ‘Nashi’ is how Petr Verkhovensky, the scoundrel and agent provocateur in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, describes his circle of pseudo-socialists. (A decade later Nevzorov said he was infatuated with Dostoevsky, and in particular with The Devils. He was particularly fascinated by Nikolai Stavrogin, a charismatic prince of darkness and nihilist who confesses to seducing a fourteen-year-old girl and driving her to suicide.)

Nevzorov said that behind him stood Kryuchkov, the bald and bespectacled head of the KGB: ‘I always had connections with the KGB and it never ceased.’²¹ According to Nevzorov, he was brought up by his grandfather – a KGB general who, between 1946 and 1953, fought against Lithuanian partisans who organized an armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. ‘I grew up in the KGB family.’ Kryuchkov, Nevzorov boasted, was a friend who often asked him for favours. ‘To me, he was a romantic figure – the keeper of a great deal of explosive secrets, living under their spell.’²² How much of what Nevzorov says is actually true and how much is ‘romantic’ fiction is impossible to say.

As Nevzorov himself later admitted, it was not about what happened in Vilnius, it was about whose side he was on. The anonymous Lithuanians were ‘fascists’, who were shooting at ‘Nashi’. Standing by the window of the television tower and staring into the darkness outside, Nevzorov was told by one of the Russian officers how Lithuanian snipers were aiming at his soldiers. The fact that the room was lit by camera flashes and would therefore be an obvious target for any sniper persuaded Nevzorov’s critics that the whole thing was staged. ‘They did not understand that I turned on the lights in the hope that they would shoot at us. I needed an action shot, windows being shattered – that is why I did it,’ Nevzorov countered the criticism.²³

Not a single Lithuanian was interviewed in the film. For Nevzorov’s purposes, the enemy had to be collective and anonymous. ‘I was very sincere then. I defended our soldiers not from the position of a Soviet man, but from the position of a Russian patriot. To support savages who rise against your country is not in the tradition of a Russian patriot.’²⁴ The film was praised by Pravda and was subsequently shown fourteen times on national television. Whereas Soviet television propaganda was drab and dull, Nevzorov’s version was thrilling. Nevzorov set the precedent of an information offensive which was to be repeated many times over subsequent years, including during Russia’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 and then again –with tenfold vigour – against Ukraine in 2014.

Yet while the main purpose of Putin-era propaganda has been to consolidate the power of Vladimir Putin, in 1991 neither Nevzorov nor those who were outraged by his film looked favourably at the Soviet president. Nevzorov blamed Gorbachev for not acting more decisively and for abandoning Soviet soldiers in the Baltic republics without reinforcements. The intelligentsia blamed him for moving in on the troops in the first place. There was no decision that would have satisfied both sides. Gorbachev said he was asleep when the attack took place and blamed it on the local authorities.

For the generation of Yegor Yakovlev and Moskovskie novosti, the events in Vilnius were a breaking point that annulled everything they believed in and had worked towards since the beginning of Perestroika. It turned out that socialism with a human face was an illusion after all, that the only things that could hold the regime together were the violence and lies which poured out from state television screens.

The morning after the bloodshed in Lithuania, Moskovskie novosti was printed with a black mourning border and eight full pages of stories about events in Vilnius. The journalists and editors also hung a flag with black ribbon on the side of the building and put up a sign on the door: ‘The bloodshed in Lithuania is our blood.’ The front-page editorial, printed under a photograph of a young man holding a national Lithuanian flag against a Soviet tank, was headlined: ‘THE CRIME OF THE REGIME THAT DOES NOT WANT TO LEAVE THE STAGE’. ‘After the bloody Sunday in Vilnius, what is left of our president’s favourite topics of “humane socialism”, “new thinking” and a “common European home”? Virtually nothing,’ it said. (To be fair, it was not just Gorbachev’s favourite topic – it was theirs too.) The editorial concluded with an appeal that echoed Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Live Not by Lies’: ‘We particularly appeal to journalists: If you don’t have the strength or ability to tell the truth, at least do not participate in lies! This lie will become evident not tomorrow, not in the future. It is already obvious today.’²⁵ In the bottom right-hand corner of its last page Moskovskie novosti printed the names of its own journalists who had decided to leave the party. In alphabetical order, the last name was that of Yegor Yakovlev. After thirty-six years as a member of the Communist Party, Yegor had finally called it quits.

Soon after the Lithuanian events, a few of Yegor’s closest friends came to mark his sixtieth birthday. His son Vladimir was also there. ‘It was a meeting of people who did not know what to say to one another,’ he told David Remnick afterwards. ‘The energy they used to have was gone, and the world around them was no longer their world. And, most important, they did not know how to relate to this world. It was the feeling you see at the traditional gatherings in Russia forty days after someone dies. No one is crying any more, but no one knows quite what to say. These birthday gatherings had always been such celebrations. Now it was just silence, a complete breakdown.’²⁶

The turn-around by Moskovskie novosti and its readers made such an impression on Gorbachev that he proposed suspending the media law and putting the print and television media under the direct control of the Supreme Soviet – to ‘ensure its objectivity’. In anger, he referred to the newspaper by its English name, The Moscow News, to stress its foreignness and alienation. But the genie could not be put back in the bottle. The days of Glasnost, when Gorbachev had handed out to a select few a licence to speak up, were over.

When one of the newspaper’s journalists publicly and in his face challenged Gorbachev’s proposals about suspending the media law, Gorbachev backed off from the idea as easily as he had put it forward a few minutes earlier. Gorbachev’s swing to the right was easy to defy because it did not seem convincing. But the hardliners also sensed Gorbachev’s weakness and volatility and found his refusal to endorse their actions in Vilnius deeply worrying.

A month after the failed coup in Vilnius, Gorbachev received an analytical report from the head of the KGB which urged him to impose control over the media in the interests of protecting the Soviet constitutional order. ‘It is clear that the weakening of ideological work as a means of defending socialist ideals cannot be replaced by any other political force,’ Kryuchkov wrote.²⁷ Just like in 1968 in Prague – the media were the biggest threat to the regime. And just like in 1968, the only tools available to the Soviet regime to save itself were tanks – with or without Gorbachev at the top.

In April 1991, Alexander Yakovlev wrote to Gorbachev:

Gorbachev dismissed Yakovlev’s prophetic and sincere note. He believed there was still a way out. On 23 July, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan met at Gorbachev’s dacha to thrash out the final details of a treaty that would govern the relationship between the Soviet Union and its republics. Yeltsin, backed by the leaders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, demanded that the three men responsible for the bloodshed in Vilnius – Kryuchkov, Pugo and Yazov, the heads of the KGB, the police and the army – should be dismissed. Gorbachev agreed, unaware that the whole conversation was secretly being recorded by Kryuchkov.

The same day Sovetskaya Rossiya published a manifesto entitled ‘A Message to the People’: ‘Our Motherland… this great state which history, nature and our predecessors willed us to save, is dying, breaking apart and plunging into darkness and nothingness.’ Yeltsin and other ‘scheming, eloquent leaders, cunning dissidents and greedy rich exploiters… who hate this country and are now slavishly seeking advice and blessings from overseas’ had to be stopped. ‘Let us all rise up in unity and challenge the destroyers of the Fatherland… Russia, unique among nations, is calling for our help.’²⁹ The letter, Nevzorov said, was drafted by him. This time, it was signed not by the unknown Leningrad teacher, but by men who, as Braithwaite put it in his diary, ‘could do something about it if they wished’. Among them was General Varennikov, the head of the Soviet ground forces. The liberals and the hardliners were racing each other.

On 16 August Alexander Yakovlev, whose letter to Gorbachev was left without reply, quit the Communist Party and published an open letter about the possibility of a coup: ‘I’d like to warn society that a powerful Stalinist group has been formed in the leadership of the party, which opposes the course chosen in 1985… [It is] leading the country toward a revanche and a state coup.’ Two days later, at 4.50 p.m., a group of coup leaders arrived in Foros in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was vacationing, to tell him he had a choice – either to resign or to support the self-appointed Committee for Emergency. ‘Yeltsin’s been arrested. He’ll be arrested… Mikhail Sergeevich, we demand nothing from you. You’ll be here. We’ll do all the dirty work for you,’ one of the group told Gorbachev. Gorbachev told them to get out.³⁰ Soon his lines of communications, including those by satellite, went dead.

In the small hours of 19 August 1991, special interior forces surrounded the Moscow television centre and TASS, the Soviet telegraphic agency. Leonid Kravchenko, the head of Soviet TV, was summoned to the Central Committee and instructed about an upcoming state of emergency. Once it was in place, ‘television should work to the same regime as during the funerals of the leaders of the Communist Party and the country’. At 5 a.m. he was handed the decrees of the Emergency Committee abbreviated into the all-consonant GKChP. An hour later, a Soviet television announcer read out a statement: ‘In view of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev’s inability, for health reasons, to perform the duties of the USSR president and of the transfer of [his] powers to Vice-President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev, we resolve: to declare a state of emergency in some parts of the Soviet Union for six months from 04:00 Moscow time on 19 August 1991.’

The coup leaders stated: ‘The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiative… have led to a dead end… Using the granted freedom… new extremist forces have emerged aimed at liquidating the Soviet Union…’ The statement was repeated on the hour throughout the day with no commentary. In between, television channels played classical music and showed the ballet Swan Lake – just like during the funerals of the Communist Party leaders. The bells were tolling for the USSR. The television centre was put under the control of the KGB. Gorbachev was under house arrest in Foros.

Yeltsin was at his dacha when the coup broke out and like everyone else in the country learned about it from state television. Remarkably, though, he was not arrested. Having ensured that some of the military were on his side, he went to the White House – the seat of Russia’s parliament ‘that would become the main bridgehead of the events that were to come’, Yeltsin recalled.³¹

First of all, Yeltsin held a press conference in which he defined the actions by the GKChP as a coup, demanded an immediate reinstatement of Gorbachev as the Soviet president and appealed to Muscovites to resist the junta. In the midst of the press conference, Yeltsin received information that another fifty tanks were moving towards the White House. Following his political instincts, he walked out of the building and climbed onto a tank, shaking hands with its crew. In scenes resembling Lenin reading out his first decrees, Yeltsin took a piece of paper from his pocket and read his appeal to the ‘citizens of Russia’. In the days of the disintegrating empire, imagery and symbols had far greater power than any legal papers or even guns. And none was more important than that of Yeltsin on a tank reading out his appeal. It gave political focus and meaning to everything that unfolded in Moscow over the next three days. Thousands of people – young and old – flocked to the White House to defy the coup – not in the name of Gorbachev but in the name of Russia and Yeltsin.

And just like seventy years earlier, this battle unfolded over the printing press and telegraphic agencies. The first decree of the GKChP, after announcing the state of emergency was a ban on the publication of all independent newspapers. Moskovskie novosti was the first on the list. Its offices were heaving with people – not just journalists and editors, but everyone who considered it a key venue on the political map of the country. Yegor came back from the White House at about 2 p.m. on 19 August. He was collected and calm. He told his staff that, since they could not print the paper, they would print and photocopy leaflets and distribute them around Moscow by hand. He also told his journalists they were free to decide whether to stay or leave since Moskovskie novostis could be stormed at any moment. Everyone smiled but nobody left.

Yegor got an anonymous call on his vertushka – a special frequency ‘Kremlin’ line. The caller did not introduce himself: ‘You tried to do me in, now listen to the radio, you son-of-a-bitch…’³² The radio broadcast the decrees of the GKChP. Yegor was in his element. He relished it. This was his finest and most heroic hour – something that he had waited and longed for all his life. It was his answer to the revolutionary life of his father’s generation. It was the moment that allowed him – and everyone who defied the coup – to show their best side. With tanks in the centre of Moscow, there was the beautiful simplicity of moral choice.

A few weeks later, life would return to its complexity, but in August 1991 most people lived for the moment. Alexander Kabakov, who reported the news from a window sill of the Moskovskie novosti building via a makeshift radio, wrote a few days later that these were the happiest days of his life. Journalists stuck their leaflets on the side of the tanks. ‘A tank is the best advertising vehicle’ someone joked. It was their war: words against tanks. Fear was lifted by the sense of the absurdity of the situation. For every KGB officer who wished to hang journalists on lamp-posts, there was one who supplied them with information.

Yeltsin appointed himself the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces on the territory of the Russian republic and at the same time Yegor effectively appointed himself the editor-in-chief of all liberal media. He gathered the editors of all closed newspapers in his office and suggested they unite their forces and publish one newspaper – Obshchaya gazeta – literally a ‘common newspaper’. To print it, they used the offices of Kommersant, the first private newspaper that was edited by Yegor’s son, Vladimir, which was equipped with photocopiers and old rotary printers. The four-page broadsheet Obshchaya gazeta carried descriptions of the distribution of troops around Moscow.

Nobody, however, inflicted as much damage to the coup leaders as they did to themselves when, inspired by Yeltsin’s press conference, they decided to call one of their own. The very proposition was absurd: a militant junta which had brought tanks onto the streets of Moscow was paying heed to Glasnost. Remarkably, the press conference was broadcast on television.

The entire country saw five grey, middle-aged Soviet apparatchiks sitting behind a long table on the stage of the foreign ministry’s press centre, preparing to answer questions from Russian and foreign journalists. Yanayev, the man who had assumed power in the country, tried his best to look composed, but his hands gave him away: they were shaking – either from fear or drinking and most probably from both. Constantly sniffing, as though searching for a drink, he and those next to him looked pathetic rather than scary.

Then it got worse. Halfway through the press conference, Tatyana Malkina, an open-faced and good-looking, twenty-four-year-old journalist in a light chequered summer dress, stood up and, fixing her eyes on the men in grey suits, said with a smile: ‘Tell me, please, do you realize that you carried out a state coup last night? And which comparison do you find more appropriate – 1917 [the Bolshevik Revolution] or 1964 [the overthrow of Khrushchev]?’

Instead of suppressing this obvious revolt, by having Malkina arrested on the spot, Yanayev proceeded to answer her question: ‘As for your assertion that we have committed an anti-constitutional coup, allow me to disagree with you, because our actions were based on the constitution… Historic comparison is not adequate here and is, in fact, dangerous.’ If this was a thinly veiled threat, it did not scare the journalists.

Vremya, the main news programme, followed the broadcast of the official statements by the GKChP with the footage of Yeltsin on top of the tank, and protesters gathering in the centre of Moscow. A smooth, bespectacled reporter, Sergei Medvedev (soon to become Yeltin’s press secretary), was allowed to gather news material under the innocent-sounding rubric ‘Moscow today’. With a microphone in his hands, he stood under the bridge next to the White House, talking to men who were setting up the barricades and saying they had learned the lessons of Vilnius. With the acquiescence of Kravchenko’s deputy, the report was put on air. Yeltsin, who also watched the programme, could not believe his eyes.

The report demonstrated that the coup leaders were not in full control of television and, therefore, of the country. Individual editors and reporters exercised their own will and judgement as far as they could. Elena Pozdniak, a long-serving news director at Vremya, who was entrusted with video-editing Brezhnev’s speeches and ‘correcting’ mispronounced words, was asked to edit out Yanayev’s shaking hands. She did not.

In the absence of any enticing idea or any overt violence, the orders issued by the coup leaders were worthless. Not a single person in Moscow came out in support of the coup. But thousands came out against it despite reports that the KGB’s special forces were preparing to storm the White House.

From a military point of view, storming the White House presented no difficulties. But with tens of thousands of civilians defending the building, bloodshed was inevitable and someone had to take responsibility for giving an order. Finding such a person in Moscow in August 1991 proved impossible.

As Yegor Gaidar later wrote, the military commanders marked time, waiting for the KGB to act, the KGB waited for the army and the police waited for both of them. Nobody wanted to make the first move and shoot at people shouting ‘Rossiya’ and ‘Yeltsin’ in front of the building. Yet those who spent that night defending the White House could not be confident that the KGB would not use force. In fact, the experience in Vilnius and Tbilisi suggested the opposite. However ridiculous the coup might look in retrospect, the heroism of the 40,000 people who stood by the White House in the rain that night was real. As were the deaths of the three young men who were dragged under the tanks’ treads in a tunnel under the Garden Ring Road across from the American Embassy.

In the morning of 21 August, tanks started to pull out of Moscow. Less than twelve hours later the coup leaders were arrested and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. For the first time in Soviet history, the state apparatus – armed with tanks, nuclear rockets and the largest military in the world – capitulated before its unarmed citizens. Vasily Rozanov, a nineteenth-century philosopher, wrote after the revolution of 1917 that ‘Russia faded away in two days – three at the most’.³³ So did the Soviet Union.

With the coup over, emotions ran high. A vast crowd of up to 200,000 people moved to the building of the party’s Central Committee and the KGB headquarters, threatening to smash up both. Inside the Central Committee building, the shredding machines were overheating, as party apparatchiks rushed to destroy whatever papers they could. Behind the darkened windows of the KGB headquarters, its few remaining officers were preparing to defend themselves with machine guns and hand-held grenades.

Ironically, the man who prevented the crowd from attacking the building was Alexander Yakovlev, the man most hated by the KGB. Standing on a makeshift podium and cheered by a jubilant crowd, Yakovlev sensed that ‘a critical moment was approaching. One comment about “why people in the building behind my back are not applauding”, or the question “What are they doing in there?” would have been sufficient for the irreparable to happen. People were wound up and ready for any action and had to be led away.’ He quickly came down from the stage and walked towards Manezh Square, away from the KGB headquarters. People in the crowd picked him up, lifted him in the air and carried him all the way down to the turn of Tverskaya Street. ‘Probably only my mother and the nurses in hospitals during the war had held me in their arms before then,’ he recalled.³⁴

Meantime, a crane appeared on the square and the anger of the crowd was diverted to the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the KGB’s founding father. A couple of men climbed up and slipped a rope around his neck. Then he was yanked up by the crane. Watching ‘Iron Felix’ sway in mid-air, many KGB officers felt betrayed ‘by Gorbachev, by Yeltsin, by the impotent coup leaders’.³⁵ The death of the regime was accompanied by a series of suicides. Marshal Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, was found dead with a rope around his neck and a stack of suicide notes on his desk. Pugo, the head of the interior ministry, shot himself and his wife minutes before investigators came to arrest him. A man who oversaw the finances of the Central Committee jumped out of the window. There were a dozen other suicides in the first post-coup days.

With hindsight, most of these suicides were needless. After about eighteen months in jail, the coup leaders were granted amnesty. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin respected the rule made by Stalin’s heirs after his death not to use violence against members of the ruling elite. Kryuchkov, who orchestrated the coup, lived long enough to regain wealth and status. So did many other conspirators. A decade later, Russia would be ruled by a KGB officer and his former colleagues who would project their sense of defeat and humiliation in August 1991 onto the rest of the country.

Mikhail Gorbachev and his circle of Perestroika lieutenants were both the winners and the biggest casualties of the coup. Gorbachev was physically alive but politically dead and so were most of the Perestroika reformers. As Latsis wrote in his book, ‘we suffered a victory’.³⁶ If any hope of saving the union existed before the coup, it was certainly dead afterwards. ‘After the events of 19–21 August, the death of the empire became not just inevitable, it happened,’ pronounced Yegor Gaidar.³⁷

That day Moskovskie novosti was published – the first time since the coup – with the headline: ‘WE WILL LIVE!’ Soon, however, the sense of victory and joy gave way to anxiety and reflection. The question was not ‘Will we live?’ but ‘How will we live?’ Humiliating Gorbachev may have given Yeltsin satisfaction, but it did not resolve any of the big questions, the main one being ‘What next?’ After the excitement and heroism of those three days, a downturn in the mood was perhaps inevitable. But this was a symptom of something far deeper than just a temporary anticlimax. The defeat of the coup did not become an ideological watershed; for all its revolutionary imagery, including Yeltsin on a tank, it was not celebrated as the birth of a new country, only as the collapse of the old one.

There was an expectation that, once the communist system was gone, Russia would become a ‘normal’ country, part of the civilized world. It was as if the main problem was ideology rather than a ruined economy, a demoralized workforce, a corrupt and greedy bureaucracy and a lack of institutions. Nobody had warned the hundreds of thousands of people who had demonstrated on the streets for sovereignty and democracy in the late 1980s that a collapse of the Soviet empire would be accompanied by continued hardship – otherwise why would people come out for it? Neither Gorbachev nor even Yeltsin as Russia’s first president had any coherent plan or idea of what kind of a country would succeed the Soviet Union.

The Soviet intelligentsia, as a class, was the engine of the 1991 revolution, but it was caught unprepared by it. Used to raising toasts to ‘the success of our hopeless cause’, it did not know what to do when its cause succeeded. The intelligentsia and the state had been joined at the hip. It was a product of the Soviet system and could not exist without it. Having lost its main opponent (as well as its feeding hand), the intelligentsia lost a sense of its meaning and purpose; it felt depressed and disoriented. Many Russian intellectuals left the country. Others lamented their own fate. There was a vacuum of power, but there was also a vacuum of ideas.

A week after the coup, Alexander Kabakov wrote in Moskovskie novosti: ‘Fairy tales end with weddings and revolutions; life only begins with them. Communism is over in our country. “What joy,” one would have thought: I could have only dreamt to live to such a day. But there is no joy. Instead there is growing anxiety. How can one be glad of an ending if there is no beginning to follow or if the beginning is too hazy? For now, it is still a funeral.’ Kabakov called his article ‘A Ghost at the Feast’.³⁸

The motif of the ghost was persistent in the months after the coup. Around the same time, the scholar and philosopher Sergei Averintsev wrote the essay published by the Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette) – a newspaper of Soviet intelligentsia – entitled ‘God Keep Us from Ghosts’. It resembled a sermon illuminating the risks and opportunities of the coming era. ‘It seems that we are entering an era of politics when any amateurism – however noble, sincere and morally invincible – is inadequate and therefore dangerous,’ he wrote.³⁹ ‘This does not mean that moral problems, moral examples become irrelevant – God forbid – but the period which is starting is more prosaic, where political weight is determined not by emotional and ideological criteria, but by the ability to offer particular solutions to particular problems.’ The new era required Aristotle, not Plato, Averintsev argued. The problem was that Aristotles were few and far between.

Averintsev’s sermon also contained a warning to the generation that was to follow the Soviet intelligentsia and which felt confident that it knew ‘particular solutions to particular problems’. ‘Beware of the difference between feeling right and displaying one’s righteousness and superiority,’ he wrote, citing the example of Pharisees.

According to Averintsev, ‘the younger ones are always more guilty, because the older ones are feeble. It is never easy for the young, but it is nevertheless harder for the old. I would not want the righteous anger against totalitarianism to be exploited by those who are entering the stage as an excuse not to follow God’s commandment “Honour your father and your mother so that you can live long on this land…”’⁴⁰ Above all, he argued, do not distort reality. Facing the past was one thing, reinventing it was quite another. ‘Christ tells people to return from the imagined world to reality and from the imagined self to one’s actual self. A return to God is possible from any real place – however shameful and disgusting, but not from an imagined one – because we are not there. An imagined self in an imagined world cannot start a journey toward God. Let us try to choose reality and God saves us from any ghosts,’ Averintsev concluded.⁴¹ Inevitably, his words of wisdom fell on deaf ears.

Look Who Is Here

The coup induced or coincided with a generational shift in Russian public life. Rarely had the transition been so clear-cut. The shestidesiatniki, or the generation of the 1960s, were succeeded by their children. Naturally mistrustful of Gorbachev’s circle of reformers, Yeltsin surrounded himself by people who were twenty or thirty years younger. But the generational shift was even more pronounced and meaningful among those who came to control the media and the narrative of the country.

Unlike Yegor’s generation of reformers who grew up in the ‘fireglow’ cast by the revolution, their children had no reverence for their fathers’ generation. They did not suffer from Hamlet’s urge to redeem their fathers or to carry on their deeds. First, their fathers were still alive; second, they were bankrupt, both intellectually and financially.

The idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ was as dead as the Soviet economy. While Yegor’s generation wished to carry on their fathers’ deeds, their children presented the shestidesiatniki with a hefty bill for their failures: ‘How could they justify the Bolshevik Revolution even when its consequences were so obvious?’ Settling scores with the shestidesiatniki became one of the popular intellectual pursuits of the first post-Soviet years. The young ‘liberals’ were too quick to blame their fathers (and the Soviet intelligentsia as a whole) for getting too close to state power, for playing cat-and-mouse games with the authorities, for their slogans of ‘more socialism’, but above all for their civic pathos.

Public rejection of the shestidesitaniki’s ‘pathos’ and ‘idealism’ became the main raison d’être of their children’s generation. In 1992, in a television programme called Moment istiny (Moment of Truth), Andrei Karaulov, a journalist at Nezavisimaya gazeta (Independent Newspaper), talked to two intellectuals of his generation – Alexander Timofeevsky and Andrei Malgin. ‘What they [shestidesiatniki] cried over – we laugh at,’ Malgin summed up the motto of his generation. ‘You have to take life lighter and more ironically,’ he explained. Karaulov questioned his interlocutors: Did they support Yeltsin? ‘We would support him if he took the country down the same path as South Korea.’ What Russia needed, they argued, was an Augusto Pinochet who could reform the country and establish order while building capitalism.

Karaulov, who was also the son-in-law of Mikhail Shatrov, author of plays about Lenin, reprimanded his interlocutors for taking too radical a position. To him, the shestidesiatniki were neither right nor wrong – they were irrelevant. People like him, Karaulov said, were the real winners of August 1991. It was a disturbing thought.

The divisions between people and generations at the time of the Soviet collapse occurred not just along political lines – those were simply the most visible. Most people with a brain joined the ‘democratic’ camp whether they believed in it or not. Far less visible, and in the long term far more important, were the rifts that were opening up along moral and ethical lines.

The irony is that Karaulov, who appeared to be claiming the high moral ground, was arguably one of the most cynical Russian journalists. In Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick describes Karaulov as a ‘journalist-hustler the likes of whom I never had seen before or have since – at least not in Moscow’.¹ One day Karaulov took Remnick to see the editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya gazeta, Vitaly Tretyakov. As they passed the KGB buildings on Lubyanka Square, Karaulov tried to sell Remnick – literally, and for dollars – ‘some crackpot spy-story documents involving the Bolshoi Theatre… When I refused Karaulov’s “tip” on the Bolshoi and explained the rules about not paying for information, he seemed alternately bemused and hurt. “Besides, you’d never find the place without me. You owe me for that at least.”’ In the following decade Karaulov would become one of the most despised figures in television journalism, whose Moment of Truth, even by the relative standards of Russian journalism, became a byword for cynicism and slander.

After the television programme, Malgin had a debate with Yegor Yakovlev, which he printed in his magazine Stolitsa (Capital City) under the headline ‘LOOK WHO IS GONE’.² Yegor had just been fired as the head of Central Television – the job he had taken immediately after the August 1991 coup – and decided to start his last newspaper Obshchaya gazeta. Malgin attacked Yegor and his circle. ‘You served the power. You persuaded our poor, brainwashed generation that revolution is good, that socialism is even better and we should all march towards communism.’ Yegor tried to defend his generation. ‘You don’t understand the tragedy of our generation: we tried to improve the political system, not to bring it down… Was it possible? I don’t know. The problem was that whenever you try to improve the system, it begins to self-destruct.’ But, as Yegor argued, there was nothing wrong with the ideas of social justice and equality in themselves.

Malgin cut him short: ‘After everything the country had been through, to say anything good about socialism is indecent.’ A year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yegor was in no position to defend socialism as a political system, but he told Malgin that extolling capitalism and boasting about the bourgeoisie were equally improper. ‘Yet, in Russia everyone is now dreaming of capitalism in its most primitive and inhuman sense.’ At the end of the conversation Malgin told Yegor: ‘For young people – those who are not even thirty-four, but half that age – you are hopeless [as a generation].’ Yegor did not argue: ‘It is sad, of course, but I have to say that my generation has gone from the stage. One could, perhaps, publish a newspaper of a “gone generation” but every obituary in such a paper would mean that the paper had lost a reader.’

Yegor sensed the generational shift personally and acutely because it occurred within his own family. His son Vladimir Yakovlev was the founding editor of Kommersant, the first and most formative newspaper of the nascent capitalist era that became the manifesto of the ‘sons” generation. A true journalist, fond of an effective ending, Yegor marked the signing-off of his last issue of Moskovskie novosti in 1991 by interviewing his own son.

The conversation between the father and son was tense. Undercurrents ran through every question and answer and much was left between the lines. Politics did not interest Vladimir. When Yegor asked his son to come to Gorbachev’s leaving party hosted for journalists, Vladimir did not turn up. To him, Gorbachev and his father were history. He was far more excited by the opportunities that were opened up by the Soviet collapse to deliberate on the reasons for that collapse. He saw the Soviet system as a hindrance, an aberration that prevented people making money without falling foul of Soviet bureaucracy.

For Yegor, who was a Soviet man with a state salary, the idea of his son becoming an entrepreneur was incomprehensible. ‘I could never understand you, nor agree with you. Even in the smallest thing: in your readiness to receive money not from a state exchequer, but elsewhere…’ Yegor concluded the two-page spread with a reminiscence that had neatly encircled the conversation. ‘A quarter of a century ago, I published my first book. In it, I dwelled on the problem of fathers and sons. It was called I Walk Along With You, confirming that I was ready to carry on along my father’s path. I thought it was possible at the time. I dedicated it to my son, “Vovka [diminutive of Vladimir], a participant in future debates”. I could hardly imagine what kind of conversation I would have with him quarter of a century later.’³

Vladimir Yakovlev, named after his Ch.K grandfather, certainly did not plan to walk alongside his father. In fact, he directed his energy towards shaking off his father’s grip over him. Yet he shared some of his father’s traits, including his energy, ambition and belief in the transformative power of information and the printed word. Kommersant (its name comes from ‘commerce’) did not just reflect but defined and directed Russia’s transition to capitalism, in the same way as Moskovskie novosti defined Perestroika.

Like the capitalist era itself, Kommersant was born out of a co-operative that Vladimir Yakovlev had started in the late 1980s while working as a journalist at Ogonyok, the Perestroika weekly. The co-operative dealt in information and was a by-product of a journalistic assignment: an editor had asked Vladimir to write an article about how to open a co-operative and, in the interest of the story, to open one himself. Vladimir soon realized that while there was no shortage of people wanting to start a business, few of them had any idea of how to do so.

For all the openness of the Soviet print media, factual information was the privilege of the powerful. Telephone directories were classified. To get a telephone number for a government office, an embassy, or a co-operative, one had to have connections in the right places. Vladimir realized this was a golden opportunity. He advertised his services in finding people work in private co-operatives and helping with starting a business. ‘The next day we had 235 responses. We sat down that morning, looking at each other in panic, and asked “Well, now, how the hell are we going to help these people get work?” We had no idea.’⁴ Thus was born a co-operative called Fakt. Getting hold of information about co-operatives was not as difficult as it seemed. As Vladimir soon discovered, it was not just he who needed that information – most cooperatives looking for clients and for staff wanted to have it. All he had to do was to make his own presence known. Fakt operated like the Yellow Pages.

People flocked to his office which had been set up in an accordion store, and paid him 1 rouble for getting information on anything from a co-operative restaurant to plumbing, or ten times that much for offering their own services to co-operatives that were on Fakt’s database. Fakt also sold manuals, along with a set of documents, for starting a business – at 30 roubles apiece – and published a bulletin about co-operatives and black market prices, a prototype of a future newspaper.

The idea to start a newspaper, Vladimir Yakovlev said, was forged in a conversation with Artem Tarasov, the first Soviet legal millionaire whose business was to import computers and repair second-hand Japanese electronics. Tarasov, who headed the co-operative movement, argued that it needed its own print organ and urged Vladimir to create one. Vladimir saw the co-operatives for what they were – not some marginal experiment in private business, but a way of legitimizing one of people’s basic instincts: making money. His talent was to recognize the future Russian businessmen as a social force.

Vladimir’s plans were more ambitious than anything that Tarasov had suggested. He wanted to create the first truly Western-style newspaper like the New York Times which he saw at home. It would come out both in Russian and in English and the information would be supplied by its own news agency which he called Postfaktum.

Vladimir had an unlikely partner – Gleb Pavlovsky, a former dissident from Odessa who was first picked up by the KGB in the mid-1970s for possession and distribution of anti-Soviet literature. In exchange for naming his contacts, he was let go. A few years later he was arrested again – this time for publication of a samizdat magazine. He agreed to co-operate with the investigation and was sent into exile instead of to a labour camp. He had a dubious reputation among Moscow dissidents as someone who was said to have closely collaborated with the KGB and testified against fellow dissidents. Pavlovsky was put in charge of the Postfaktum news agency. Vladimir became the editor of Kommersant.

In 1989, censorship was still formally in place. To circumvent it, Vladimir presented Kommersant as the organ of the Association of the United Co-operatives of the USSR and persuaded Glavlit, the main censorship body, that it was not a newspaper but an advertisement, which was exempt from censorship under a new Perestroika law. ‘Why does your advertisement look like a newspaper?’ a suspicious censor queried. ‘It is an advertisement for a newspaper,’ Vladimir explained. Vladimir’s explanation was not entirely misleading. In many ways, Kommersant was an advertisement. It advertised a new capitalist life as Vladimir envisaged it at the time. Its title sounded provocative. Officially, there were no kommersanty in the Soviet Union and commerce itself was an offence punishable by prison.

Kommersant was the antithesis of Moskovskie novosti and a reaction to it. It rejected its civic pathos, its elevated language, its speaking of the Truth, capitalized and accentuated with exclamation marks, its sense of calling and duty, its political stand. ‘What we did was anti-journalism, from the point of view of my father’s circle. Theirs was journalism of opinion. Ours was journalism of facts,’ Vladimir said.⁵ Only a few of Kommersant’s reporters were Soviet-trained journalists. Most were intelligent young men and women who had never written a newspaper article in their life.

As a bourgeois paper, it was not supposed to be read on a newsstand, like Moskovskie novosti, by politically minded intelligentsia. It was a newspaper for serious people involved in the serious business of making money and it was supposed to be read in the comfort of one’s home, at breakfast, with a glass of orange juice (non-existent at the time) and a cup of coffee on the table. The irony was that having established itself as a paper of the new times, Kommersant was as concerned with the question of the past as the print media run by Yegor’s generation, which it rejected. Searching for the key historic junctions at which Russia took a ‘wrong’ turn, Yegor had rewound the tape to 1968 and then further back to the times of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The only difference was that while Yegor was trying to reach back to the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, his son was rewinding the tape even further back – to the notional (and much idealized) era before the First World War, when Russia had a fast-growing entrepreneurial class. While Yegor had borrowed the title of Zhurnalist from the 1920s, Vladimir borrowed the title of Kommersant from the early 1900s.

The paper started with a manifesto printed in its test issue:

The pre-revolutionary Kommersant had hardly been a newspaper of note. Started as a trade sheet, it quickly ran out of money and was bought by a paper manufacturer and publisher of pornographic pamphlets. Having predicted, on the eve of the revolution, that the Bolsheviks would never succeed, Kommersant, along with other newspapers, had been promptly shut down when the Bolsheviks came to power.

But the fact that a newspaper with that title and a pre-revolutionary hard sign Ъ on the end had existed in the past was more important than what kind of paper it really was at the time. Vladimir Yakovlev was not reviving an old newspaper, he was reinventing the past and historical experience – supplying Russian capitalism with the biography it lacked.

The masthead of the newspaper carried an important message: ‘The newspaper was established in 1909. It did not come out from 1917 until 1990 for reasons outside editorial control.’ Kommersant was defining a period – 1917–1990 – and simply extracting it from its own experience. The entire Soviet era was being disposed of as irrelevant to the readers and writers of Kommersant. If Kommersant had not come out in those years, then why should they be of any interest?

‘We did not know the history of the country well. We saw the whole of the Soviet period as one muddy stretch and we wanted to reconnect, to establish a connection with an era of common sense and normality,’ said Vladimir Yakovlev.⁸

Kommersant fought against Soviet ideology but its own rejection of Soviet culture – dissident or official – was deeply ideological. Anything that was touched by the Soviet aesthetics was out – regardless of its content or artistic merit. The ‘sons’ were not only disposing of wooden Soviet language, newspaper headlines and party-minded literature, they were throwing out an entire layer of culture that contained, among other things, strong antidotes to nationalism and totalitarianism. By doing so, they severely damaged the country’s immunity to these viruses, making it easier, a decade later, to restore the symbols of the Soviet imperial statehood.

Kommersant readers and authors treated the Soviet civilization not as an object of study or reflection but as a playing area for postmodernist games and mockery, a source of puns and caricatures. The written Soviet language, which had long lost its connection with literature, had become so petrified that it easily lent itself to this exercise. The post-communist Russia lacked its own serious language to describe the biggest transformation of the century. Words such as ‘truth’, ‘duty’ and ‘heroism’ were completely devalued. In 1990, the year when Kommersant started to publish, literary historian Marietta Chudakova noted in her diary: ‘Do our people expect any “new word” from themselves? No. Nobody expects anything. What could come out from such a total absence of pathos?’⁹

What came out was styob – jeering, imitation and denigration of anything remotely serious. Styob became a house-style for Kommersant headlines loaded with wordplay and double-meanings: ‘THE CITY COUNCIL ORDERS MEAT TO GET CHEAPER. MEAT REFUSES’; ‘HOMOSEXUALS ARE MAKING ENDS MEET’; ‘SOCIALISM WITH A HUMAN END’. Styob was infectious and spread through the Russian media like a rash. It pricked and deflated the fake pathos of the Perestroika era, but it contributed nothing in terms of new ideas and meanings. The smirk and imitation concealed emptiness.

In the early 1990s, however, Kommersant emerged as a new type of newspaper that not only described reality differently, but also aimed to shape it. To do so, it needed a new language. A man who was largely responsible for creating this new language, not just in Kommersant but in much of the post-Soviet media, was Maxim Sokolov, its chief political columnist. ‘At the time when I started writing for Kommersant, there was either the canon of the Soviet Communist Party print, or the revolutionary “auf Barrikaden, auf Barrikaden” which called to the struggle against the forces of darkness.’¹⁰ Sokolov introduced a third one: detached, ironic, drawing on the tradition of nineteenth-century popular prose.

Maxim Sokolov was not a journalist. He was an intellectual and a liberal conservative. Both in his writing and his appearance Sokolov cultivated the image of an erudite individualist and sceptic who belonged in a pre-Soviet era, who had been asleep for the last seventy years of Soviet history and who had been catapulted by a time machine into the present day and was now trying to make sense of a contemporary Russia through a nineteenth-century monocle. Each issue opened with his column called ‘The Logic of the Week’ (later becoming ‘What Happened This Week’). Unlike the columnists of Moskovskie novosti, who always took a stand and expressed their position, Sokolov sounded nonchalant and detached from the subject: the only stand he took was that of an impartial observer, looking at current affairs and their main actors from the height of historic wisdom. He placed political events into a traditional church calendar and applied words that did not suit them, making them sound comical and absurd. His columns were laced with nineteenth-century phraseology and peppered with Latin words, quotes from literature and hidden allusions.

The fact that his articles were for the most part impenetrable for those who were supposed to be Kommersant’s main audience – the nascent class of businessmen more versed in prison slang than in Sokolov’s Latinisms – was part of his selling point. It created a sense of exclusivity and belonging among the new rich. Although it would be hard to imagine Sokolov’s column in any Western or Soviet newspaper, it was a perfect match to Kommersant. His literary ‘monocle’ was as much an imitation as Kommersant’s ‘long tradition’.

Kommersant exemplified the contradiction of the 1991 transition. As a product of a revolutionary era, it rejected the immediate past. At the same time Kommersant shunned revolutionary aesthetics, mainly because, as Sokolov himself wrote ten years later, ‘Revolution is a time when people say and write an unbelievable amount of banalities.’¹¹ Its coverage of the August 1991 coup was completely devoid of any revolutionary pathos. Whereas Moskovskie novosti came out under the banner ‘We Will Live!’, Kommersant came out under the headline ‘THANK GOD, PERESTROIKA IS OVER’.

Sokolov’s lead article was preceded by a silly ditty: ‘I woke up at 6 a.m. and felt a wave of joy / The elastic in my pants was gone and so was Soviet rule.’ ‘The past two days in Moscow have been a funeral: the idiotic regime died in an idiotic way. The coup turned out to be foolish, because people stopped being fools,’ Sokolov summed up his impressions.¹² A week later, in the Markets & Exchanges section, Kommersant wrote: ‘An attempt to stage a coup by a group of people on 19 August was so short-lived that it has not had an impact on the prices of goods which were defined by orders placed beforehand.’¹³

The end of the Soviet Union produced none of the cultural vitality which accompanied its birth in 1917. The energy of the 1920s was sustained by the emergence of a vision of a great utopia, even if it turned out, like all utopias, to be a deception. In contrast, August 1991 was the end of utopia and the end of ideology. As Sokolov wrote phlegmatically, all he wanted to do after three days in the White House was to ‘have a bath and sleep’. In Chudakova’s words, what could come out from such a total absence of pathos?

Lacking a new project, or even a vision of a future country, Russia searched for a mythical past. Those who came to power after the Soviet collapse, both in the Kremlin and in the media, portrayed themselves not as revolutionaries but as keepers and followers of the tradition that had preceded the Soviet era. (The inauguration of Yeltsin as Russia’s first-ever president was announced, absurdly, as being carried out in the style of long historic tradition.)

Alexander Timofeevsky, a young belletrist who articulated the ideas of the thirty-something generation, enthused about Kommersant’s conservatism, its deliberate and measured tone, its sense of solidity which ‘like in a thick, British paper implies a centuries-long stability of life, which has been set and planned for centuries’. In reading articles with enigmatic foreign words such as ‘leasing’ and ‘banking clearing’ and ‘exchanges’, ‘one gets an illusion not just of common tone, but of something infinitely bigger – an illusion of a different life which has been watered and mowed for 200 years’.¹⁴

The fact that this life was a pure invention did not bother him. Kommersant, he wrote, ‘unfolds a different life on its pages – charming and desirable. The common reproach that Kommersant lies a lot, is irrelevant. It does not matter. What matters is that it lies confidently and beautifully.’ After that article was published, in December 1991, Vladimir Yakovlev invited Timofeevsky to be his personal, in-house critic. Timofeevsky’s article was headed ‘Bubbles of the Earth’ and was pre-empted with an epigraph from Macbeth: ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them…’ The line in the play refers to the witches whose lures are as deceptive as their appearances. It applied both to Kommersant and to Timofeevsky himself.

‘Moscow in December 1991 is one of my most painful memories. Grim food lines, even without their usual squabble and scenes. Pristinely empty shops. Women rushing about in search of any food to buy. Dollar prices in a deserted Tishinsky market. An average salary of seven dollars a month. Expectations of disaster were in the air.’¹⁵ This is how Yegor Gaidar, who took charge of and responsibility for the Russian economy, remembered the month when the Soviet Union came to an end. There was talk of hunger, complete paralysis of transportation, collapse of the heating system. Russia was bankrupt.

On 2 January 1992 Gaidar removed the state regulation of prices for most products, which led to a threefold increase in the price of food, revealing an inflation which had been previously hidden by shortages and which now wiped out people’s nominal savings. Destroying worthless rouble savings was the only way of making money work again. A few weeks later, Gaidar lifted restrictions on trade, allowing people to sell anything anywhere, and removed import barriers.

Almost overnight central Moscow filled up with makeshift trading stalls. People – young and old – came to sell anything they had – a pair of socks, a bottle of vodka, a packet of butter, pornographic magazines, Bibles, apples, anything. It was an unseemly sight, but in the winter of 1991 nobody was thinking about aesthetics apart from Kommersant, of course. The younger and more energetic travelled to Turkey and China, filling up cheap plastic holdalls with jackets, coats and underwear, and brought them back for sale. These shuttle traders clothed the country. This was not a sign of poverty. It was a liberation of forces and instincts that had been fermenting under the surface of official Soviet propaganda for years and were constrained by the state. The people who sold bread and butter on the street did so not because they themselves could not afford it, but because they were allowed to trade.

In the early 1990s Russian capitalists bubbled up from underground. They were black-marketeers, opportunists, adventurists, hustlers and so on. Most of them had cut their teeth in co-operatives. They were colourful and they marked themselves out by dressing brightly, extravagantly and mostly tastelessly. They favoured purple and fluorescent yellow jackets. But bright did not mean beautiful or nutritious. Poisonous flowers or plants often mark themselves out in bright colours – a form of defence or a warning to birds and animals: eat me and you will die.

These bright bubbles were Kommersant’s people, whom it wished to fashion and educate, but above all to whom it wanted to give a veneer of respectability and self-awareness as a class – or to use Lenin’s term, ‘class consciousness’. ‘The most important quality in a newspaper is not its information or emotions, but a sense of social belonging. You pick up a newspaper and you feel part of a certain class,’ Vladimir Yakovlev explained.¹⁶ The paper appeared first; the class came later.

Kommersant organized life that lacked structure into rubrics and subjects. ‘We have always argued at our editorial meetings which page this or that character should go on. Is he on page two – which was about economic policy and those who made it – or should he be on the business pages, or should he be moved to page nine which was about crime,’ recalled Elena Nusinova, an editor who started along with Yakovlev at Kommersant. ‘The usual progression was from an official, to a businessman, to a criminal. Although sometimes it worked the other way around. The conversation went like this: “Should he be on your page or on mine? OK, let him stay on your page (business) one more time, and then he will move to mine (crime) unless they kill him first in which case he moves to obituaries.”’¹⁷

The early 1990s was a wild and entrepreneurial time, when anything seemed possible. The state was weak and private initiative and individualism were strong. It was, perhaps, the freest time in Russian history. As Vladimir Yakovlev said, ‘We were like kids in a kindergarten with real machine guns.’¹⁸

Kommersant was the flesh and blood of Russian capitalism and and bore some of its unattractive birthmarks. It was partly funded by an American grain trader Thomas Dittmer, whom Vladimir Yakovlev had courted in the late 1980s.[1] Dittmer, who hosted Vladimir Yakovlev at his forty-two-acre (16.2-hectare) Chicago estate, was so impressed with his chutzpah and ambition that he agreed to finance $400,000’s worth of equipment for Kommersant in return for exclusive rights to Kommersant or Postfaktum information in the West.[2] (Vladimir was planning to have an English-language edition of Kommersant.) This did not stop Pavlovsky trying to peddle the content of Postfaktum to Dow-Jones and Reuters directly.

Within a few months of launching a short-lived English-language edition of Kommersant, Yakovlev started to lose interest in Dittmer and his Refco trading business and decided to ditch the arrangement. After a series of rows, Vladimir, in order to free himself from any obligations, secretly renamed Co-operative Fakt – with which Dittmer had signed a contract – as Joint Stock Company Fakt. ‘There is no Co-operative Fakt any more. And if there is no more Co-operative Fakt, there is no more Kommersant,’ Vladimir explained to Copetas. This was a very Russian way of doing business. At the same time Vladimir Yakovlev was negotiating a new deal with a French media group, La Tribune de l’Expansion, which agreed to pay $3.5 million for a 40 per cent stake in Kommersant.

Yakovlev argued that from a legal point of view the deal with the French holding did not contradict his arrangement with Dittmer. ‘Refco had the right to all our content outside Russia. The French formed a joint venture with us. But from the point of view of human relationships, it was questionable.’²⁰ In the early 1990s, though, nobody asked questions about the ethics of doing business. ‘There were no rules. A businessman was driven or stopped only by what was inside him. Some people thought it was OK to steal, but not OK to kill. Some people thought it was OK to kill, but not to touch family members,’ said Nusinova.

The new class of businessmen that emerged from the rubble of the Soviet economy thought of themselves as the champions of capitalism as they understood the word. In some ways they were victims of a Soviet propaganda and ideology that portrayed capitalism not as a set of rules and ethics based on the ideas of honest competition and fair play, but as a cut-throat cynical system where craftiness and ruthlessness were more important than integrity, where everyone screws each other and where money is the only arbiter of success.

Russian capitalism had nothing to do with Weber’s Protestant ethics. It was not built on a centuries-long tradition of private property and feudal honour and dignity. In fact it hardly had any foundation at all, other than the teaching of Marxism-Leninism that described private property as theft. Since they favoured property, they did not mind theft. The words ‘conscience’, ‘morality’ and ‘integrity’ were tainted by ideology and belonged in a different vocabulary – one that was used by their fathers’ generation. ‘For us these were swear-words which the Soviet system professed in its slogans while killing and depraving people,’ Vladimir Yakovlev said.²¹

The tenets of Soviet ‘morality’ and socialism were removed only to reveal a vacuum of morals – in itself the result of the Soviet experiment of breeding a new being. The transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet society was accompanied by a change in perception of what makes one succeed in life. In 1988, 45 per cent of the country felt it was ‘diligence and hard work’. In 1992 only 31 per cent felt these would get you anywhere. The factors that gained importance, on the other hand, were ‘good connections’, ‘dexterity’ and ‘being a good wheeler-dealer’. The first Russian businessmen had all those qualities and boasted about them.²²

In June 1992 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Menatep Bank, published a book that could be considered a manifesto of a new capitalist man. He called it Chelovek s rublem (Man with a Rouble) – an ironic take on a famous Soviet play about the Bolshevik Revolution, Chelovek s ruzhiem (Man with a Gun). Imitating the combative style of 1930s agitprop, Khodorkovsky wrote:

The laws did not really apply, but profit was certainly the compass. One ‘genius’ who turned a dollar bill into millions through an alchemy of Russia’s banking system was Alexander Smolensky, the owner of Stolichny Bank, who lent money to Kommersant.

A man with no higher education who began as a typesetter in a state printing house made his first money in the 1970s by printing Bibles for the black market. After a two-year jail sentence for the theft of state property (ink and paper), he worked in construction and decoration firms, selling building materials on the side. In the early 1990s Stolichny Bank handled co-operators’ accounts. He used the rouble to speculate on the foreign currency exchange rate. With the rouble depreciating nearly 100 per cent between 1991 and 1994, this was easy money made quickly. ‘You give money in the morning and collect your earnings in the evening. It was like a machine that was printing money,’ Smolensky explained.²⁴

Vladimir Yakovlev borrowed money from Smolensky partly to pay for the paper’s new editorial offices. As part of the ‘debt service’, Yakovlev blocked any negative news about Smolensky and allowed an occasional puff story to appear in print. Kommersant journalists got their own measure of Smolensky’s bank, though. Their salaries were paid into Stolichny accounts and when, in 1998, Russia defaulted on its domestic debt, Smolensky declared his bank insolvent and froze deposits while reshuffling assets into a new banking empire. Kommersant journalists later managed to get their money back. But foreign investors, who had put more than $1 billion into it, never did. All they deserved, Smolensky said in an interview to the Wall Street Journal, was ‘dead donkey ears’.²⁵ Such was the newspaper, such was the capitalism.

The 1991 turmoil brought to the surface not the hardest working, but the most impertinent. ‘Men with a Rouble’ were the biggest winners of the Soviet transition to capitalism and the main beneficiaries of the mass privatization. Gaidar entrusted privatization to his friend Anatoly Chubais, another participant of the economic seminars in the 1980s. Both men saw its aim as breaking the communists’ grip on the commanding heights of the Russian economy and creating a class of proprietors who would have a vested interest in liberal reforms. ‘We were perfectly aware that we were creating a new class of owners and we did not have a choice between an “honest” privatization and a “dishonest” one. Our choice was between “bandit communism” or “bandit capitalism”,’ Chubais explained.²⁶

To create a veneer of inclusion and justice, the reformers decided to sell state firms for special vouchers issued to all 148 million people in the country. Yeltsin unveiled the ‘privatization cheque’ on 19 August 1992 – the first anniversary of the August 1991 coup – as a reward for people’s defiance. In fact the cheques were just a marketing gimmick since their value was determined not by the nominal figure of 10,000 roubles printed on them but by the amount of property on sale. But when Chubais went on television and told people, most of whom had no idea what ‘shares’ meant, that each voucher was worth two Volga cars, metaphorically speaking, everyone took it literally, only to realize that they had been duped.

Instead of symbolizing reward, the vouchers came to symbolize deceit. Not knowing what to do with these ‘vouchers’, most people either sold them straight away or entrusted them to mutual funds that sprang up overnight, promising to invest them in gold and diamonds and disappearing without a trace. Yet, in the course of two years, 70 per cent of the state economy, including natural resources, was sold.[3] A new class of private owners was created and the free market experiment began.

Confident that its audience had increased and that it needed information to manage its new wealth, the weekly Kommersant turned into a daily. If Russia was to have a proper market, it had to have a proper business newspaper first. ‘For those who don’t know what A2 [format] is – it looks like the Wall Street Journal,’ Kommersant addressed its readers. ‘For those who don’t know what Wall Street Journal is, it looks like Pravda – in terms of the page size… A daily newspaper of such a size – at least a relatively NORMAL newspaper – has not been published since 1917… We’ve decided to try.’²⁷

Nobody really knew what ‘normal’ was, but, like the title of КоммерсантЪ-Daily, it consisted of two parts – Russia’s pre-revolutionary past and its Western ‘daily’ future. This ‘normal’ life was supposed to be organized by a ‘normal’ daily newspaper. The mention of Pravda in Kommersant’s jokey editorial was not entirely accidental. A ‘collective organizer and propagandist’, as Lenin called newspapers, Pravda in the 1930s tried to model a New Soviet man – an exemplary worker and citizen – and set the tenets of the state-dominated, collective life. Seventy years later, Kommersant assumed a similar role in setting the tenets of the new capitalist orders dominated by the individual. It tried to model a new type of man and called him a ‘New Russian’ (spelled in English): ‘Clever, calm, positive, and rich – these are the people who are forming a new elite and who are setting a new style and new standards of living.’²⁸

Kommersant hailed private values and initiative and above all success – something that the vast majority of the country, brought up on the ideas of paternalism and equality, had little affinity with. Almost 90 per cent of New Russians, according to Kommersant, considered themselves self-made people who had had a lucky break. To visualize a new Russian, Kommersant made a short advertisement with a young, suave actor who had all the attributes of an ‘ideal’ reader: a dark suit, a tie with a pin, a shirt with cuff-links, talking on a massive satellite phone, sitting in the back of a limousine, an office in some Stalin-era factory club and a copy of Kommersant-Daily in hand. ‘Your newspaper, boss,’ an invisible voice intoned.

The ‘Old Russian’ was represented in Kommersant by the caricature ‘Petrovich’ – a humorous Soviet character trying to adapt to modern reality with a mixture of naivety, cunning and the dumb insolence of the good soldier Svejk. The New Russians almost immediately turned from a model into a caricature – the subject of popular jokes and stories. (One New Russian shows off his tie to another New Russian: ‘I paid a hundred bucks for it.’ The second New Russian replies with contempt: ‘You’ve been done. I bought exactly the same one for a thousand.’) One reason was the actual behaviour of the New Russians. Another was that the image did not fit into a national tradition where the commercial and entrepreneurial spirit was never seen as a virtue and the rich were mostly hated. The most entrepreneurial men in Russian literature were Chichikov who traded in dead souls in Gogol’s poem, or Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard who chopped the old trees down to make way for dachas. Kommersant was clearly trying to challenge that perception.

Kommersant conveyed and projected the energy and optimism of this new class. It published a regular column under the bold rubric ‘What is Good’. ‘NOTHING BAD HAS HAPPENED. AND COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED’ read one headline. ‘EVERYTHING IS NORMAL’, read another. Vladimir Yakovlev’s wife, a Kommersant editor, wrote: ‘We think that everything that is happening around us is logical and therefore right. If this is called looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, so be it. They are better than dark glasses… A free man is responsible for his own actions. This is why such life is considered natural, or, in other words, normal, or, in other words, happy.’²⁹ The optimism was supposed to extend not just to New Russians, but also to the old ones. The benefits of the market economy seemed so obvious compared to the planned one, that it was hard to imagine that anyone would disagree.

In the early 1990s a new character burst onto the Russian screen and conquered the minds of millions of Russians. His name was Lenya Golubkov and he was a tractor driver who beamed with optimism over his capitalist future. He had greasy black hair, closely set eyes, a large flat nose and a metal tooth. He wore a baggy suit and was unburdened with intellect or education. But he had done well. He had fixed a pair of leather boots and a fur coat for his wife and was aiming to buy a car in a few months’ time with the money he had got from MMM, an investment company that offered 1,000 per cent profits.

The only trouble was that none of this was real. MMM was a pyramid scheme and Golubkov merely a fictional character who advertised it. It was probably the most successful television project of the 1990s and beat Latin American soap operas. The Russian Ponzi was Sergei Mavrodi, a bespectacled mathematician turned con artist who devised a scheme that financed itself by issuing shares in an empty shell company and repaying earlier investors with new ones. The price of MMM shares which became ubiquitous in the early 1990s was set by Mavrodi himself. By the time it collapsed, the scheme had attracted some 15 million people.

It was the commercial created by Kazakh film director Bakhyt Kilibaev that kept the scheme going. MMM’s ads consisted of short skits set to a jolly foxtrot tune and featuring the same characters. Apart from Golubkov, these included Rita, Golubkov’s chocolate-crazy, plump wife with a beehive hairdo, his older brother Ivan, a tattooed coal miner from Vorkuta, the lonely spinster Marina Sergeevna and a newly wed couple.

The middle-aged Golubkov was a Soviet joke character: a lazy simpleton and free-loader, a product of the Soviet paternalistic system who embraced the easy reaches offered by Russia’s dysfunctional capitalism with an enthusiasm that horrified Russian market reformers. With the use of a pointer, he showed his wife a chart that marked the stages of family happiness: new furniture, a car and a house. ‘A house in Paris?’ asked Rita as she gobbled up another chocolate. ‘Why not, Lenya?!’ intoned the voice of an announcer. Another episode showed Lenya and his brother Ivan sitting at a kitchen table over a bottle of vodka and a large jar of pickled cucumbers: ‘You are a khaliavshchik [free-loader], Lenya. You forgot what our mother and father taught us: to work honestly. And you are running around buying shares. Khaliavshchik!’ said Ivan. ‘You are wrong, brother. I am not a khaliavshchik, brother… I am a partner,’ said Lenya. ‘That is right, Lenya, we are partners,’ said the MMM voice.

In the Soviet era, Lenya would have been a character of a Soviet satire condemning infantilism and the petty bourgeois lifestyle. In the early 1990s he became a household name whose popularity exceeded that of any Russian politician, including Yeltsin, who grumbled that Lenya was getting on his nerves: ‘We have too many touts of every ilk who promise fantastic dividends in the future or homes in Paris. But very often there is no basis for this. They are just conning the people.’

Very few people shared Lenya’s enthusiasm in the early 1990s. Opinion polls in 1992 showed that only 5 per cent of the country felt optimistic, some 40 per cent felt stable and half of the country experienced anxiety, frustration and tension.³⁰ The dominant sentiment, however, was one of defiance: while life is going to be difficult, we can manage.

The Battle for the Nuclear Button

In 1992 Maxim Sokolov wrote an essay called ‘So Which War Did We Lose?’ ‘The paradox is that while the most vulnerable [people] more or less agreed with Gaidar’s “draconian reforms”, the least vulnerable turned into a state of fury.’³¹ To understand this ‘paradox’, Sokolov argued, one has to look at the spiritual and aesthetic side of reforms and here the loss of the Russian nationalist-communists and chauvinists who extolled the imperial state and its geopolitical status as the ultimate good that trumps universal human values was far greater than that of ordinary people who mostly got on with their lives.

Sokolov drew parallels between contemporary Russia and Germany after the wars. The key question was whether Russia resembled Germany after the Second World War, when it was forced to rebuild its economy and move towards democracy? Or was it more similar to the 1918 Weimar Germany that had led to fascism? There was certainly no shortage of populists and demagogues after 1991 willing to exploit the frustration of ordinary Russians under the nationalist, communist and imperial flags for the sake of their own revanchism.

The nationalists and communists openly embraced each other to form a red–brown coalition. Whatever differences they had had in the past, they were united in their struggle against a common enemy: the West, with its liberal democracy, and those who tried to impose it on Russia – Yeltsin and his Zionist government. As often in Russian history, liberals were synonymous with Jews.

The leader of the Russian communists was Gennady Zyuganov, a second-tier communist functionary who worked in the ideology department of the party and was one of Alexander Yakovlev’s main adversaries. He was a patron of the Sovetskaya Rossiya newspaper which had published Andreeva’s Stalinist letter and formulated the new Russian communist ideology as anti-Western, anti-liberal, nationalist and traditionalist, allied with the Orthodox Church. Central to this ideology was the idea of the sacrosanct state.

As Natalia Narochitskaya, one of the ideologists of state nationalism, wrote in Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), a right-wing literary journal, ‘Russia was a unique, giant Eurasian power “with an Orthodox nucleus and the cosmic spirit of its stately idea”’. ‘The future of Russia is in the creation of an organic state where an individual is not opposed to society but is a manifestation and carrier of the state idea,’ she wrote.³² Stripped of the rhetoric about equality and internationalism, communist ideology seamlessly morphed into fascism. The first full Russian-language edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was printed and started to sell openly on the Moscow streets in 1992.

The consolidation of imperialist, nationalist and communist forces was taking place against the background of Russia’s withdrawal to its current borders and a series of conflicts that flared up between Russia and its former vassals, including Georgia and Moldova. The nerve point for the imperialists was the loss of Crimea which had been transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev – a symbolic act that commemorated the 300 years of union between Russia and Ukraine.

Since the times of Catherine the Great, Crimea had been at the heart of Russia’s imperial project. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Crimea stayed within Ukraine. No other territory, including the Baltic states or even Georgia, touched the nerve of imperial nostalgia as much as Crimea. The nationalists exploited the dispute between Moscow and Kiev over the fate of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to lay claim to Crimea. This was one of the main subjects of the nationalist press, including Den’ (Day), ‘a newspaper of spiritual opposition’ as it was called by its editor Alexander Prokhanov, a writer devoted to the idea of Russian imperialism who reconciled nationalists and communists in the struggle against Yeltsin and his Westernizers.

One of Prokhanov’s regular authors was Igor Shafarevich, a distinguished mathematician, an ideologue of Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism, and a friend of Solzhenitsyn. Shafarevich wrote in early 1993:

The disintegration of the Soviet Empire was blamed on the West and its agents of influence in Russia. An émigré Russian philosopher, Alexander Zinoviev, wrote in Nash sovremennik: ‘The West wished to destroy Russia by the hands of [Nazi] Germany. It failed. Now it is trying to do the same under the guise of a fight for democracy, human rights etc. This is a war of two civilizations.’³⁴ The only reason the American and Western economies were still afloat was because of cheap natural resources supplied by Russia. ‘Without our resources, the well-being of the West will immediately collapse,’ asserted Den’. America was not just parasitic, it was suffering from an innate sin that started with the elimination of its indigenous people and which had led to the bombing of Hiroshima and the killing of 150,000 Iraqis, wrote Shafarevich.

Few people at the time, including the nationalists themselves, could have predicted that twenty years later this narrative would move from the pages of the extremists’ Den’ newspaper onto the main television channels, that Russia would annex Crimea, try to annihilate Ukraine and carve out Novorossiya, and wage a war on the West.

In parallel with the ideological conflict between the red–brown coalition and the liberals, a power struggle unfolded between Yeltsin and his government of reformers, on the one hand, and the parliament, on the other. Formed before the Soviet collapse and still known as the Congress of People’s Deputies, the parliament was dominated by Soviet factory bosses, who had been pushed out of the way during the privatizations, and representatives of the military and industrial complex and the powerful agricultural lobby, none of whom fitted into Gaidar’s market reforms. Out of more than a thousand deputies, only 200 were Yeltsin loyalists. The rest opposed him either openly or covertly. The parliament was chaired by its Speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, a clever and manipulative deputy from Chechnya who played the deputies like a fiddle.

Khasbulatov’s ally in his stand-off with Yeltsin was Alexander Rutskoi, a former air force pilot and a hero of the Afghan war – a man of limited intelligence and imposing looks. In 1991 Yeltsin chose Rutskoi as his vice-president to capture the ‘patriotic’ votes and melt the hearts of Russian women and Khasbulatov as his deputy to appeal to ethnic minorities. A former economist, Khasbulatov had his eye on the job of prime minister and felt snubbed by Gaidar. He played on Rutskoi’s vanity, luring him to his side. They publicly attacked Gaidar and his government, whom Rutskoi called ‘boys in pink pants’, for moving too fast in building capitalism and Americanizing the Russian economy.

The red–brown coalition used the parliament as a way of legitimizing itself. In the meantime, Khasbulatov was using the communists and nationalists as a force that could bring people out on the streets and help him come to power.

As Alexander Yanov, a historian of Russian nationalism, argued, an outburst of imperial nationalism under Yeltsin was inevitable. ‘The collapse of a 400-year old empire and, even more importantly for Russia, the loss of a utopian, but great national goal, could not but produce “patriotic hysteria”.’³⁵ The whole question was whether this ‘hysteria’ could turn into regime change. By the end of 1992, the nationalists’ opposition was laying out plans for the overt throwing-over of Yeltsin’s government. What it needed was a powerful amplifier in the form of mass media.

Being a truly conservative force, the nationalists consolidated not around television but around old literary magazines such as Nash sovremennik and Prokhanov’s newspaper Den’. Television was in the hands of the liberals. At the helm of post-Soviet television was Yegor Yakovlev who was appointed to the job by Gorbachev (with Yeltsin’s approval) almost immediately after the August 1991 coup. His first step was to clear the television centre of the KGB staff who worked both openly and under cover. His second step was to dispose of Vremya – the main nine o’clock evening news programme – replacing it with the plain-sounding Novosti [News]. The change of title, theme tune and format was as symbolic as the lowering of the red flag over the Kremlin or the change of the Soviet anthem.

Vremya had a sacred status in the Soviet Union. Its two serious-looking, buttoned-up presenters were the oracles of the Kremlin. It did not actually report the news, but told the country what the Kremlin wanted its audience to think the news was. It was a nightly ritual in which nothing ‘new’ or unpredictable could ever happen. Vremya, a name that in Russian means ‘time’, was as regular as the chimes of the Kremlin clock that preceded the programme. Like time, Vremya seemed infinite. By changing the format, Yegor was removing the sacred function of television and desacralizing the state itself.

Yegor saw the role of television in helping people adjust to the disappearance of the country that they were born in. He tried to save a common information space – a union in the ether – when the actual union had fallen apart and conflicts erupted on the periphery. As Igor Malashenko, who worked as Yegor’s deputy, explained:

As a print journalist, Yegor neither understood nor particularly liked television and tried to turn it into a version of Moskovskie novosti, appealing to the same audience of liberal intelligentsia, said Malashenko. But above all Yegor was hoping to turn television from a means of propaganda and mobilization into a private activity. As he told his staff: ‘My generation lived by the hope of bringing politics and morality together. All the lessons I learned from 1956 persuaded me that this is impossible… Television must help an individual to go back to his own world, to find values other than politics. Our task is to make politics occupy as little space in our lives as possible.’³⁷ The politics kept bursting in, though, and television soon turned into a battleground.

On 12 June 1992 – the first anniversary of Russia’s independence – a hysterical and xenophobic mob of diehard communists beseiged the television centre situated in Ostankino, in the north of Moscow. They were led by Viktor Anpilov, the hot-tempered, foaming-at-the-mouth leader of the radical left-wing Working Moscow and Communist Workers’ Party. Anpilov, who started as a journalist, understood the importance of television well. ‘I was an ideal Soviet journalist – from the working class,’ he said.³⁸ He was trained to broadcast Soviet propaganda in Spanish to Latin America. Unusually for the time when he graduated – the early 1970s – he was an orthodox Leninist. After university he went to Cuba to work as an interpreter. In a book of memoirs, poignantly called Our Struggle, he described how Fidel Castro addressed a vast crowd with the words: ‘A revolution is worth something only if it knows how to defend itself.’³⁹ A decade later, reportedly recruited by the KGB, he was posted to Nicaragua during the war between the Soviet-backed Sandinista and the American-backed Contras. He informed on his cameraman for his ‘anti-Soviet’ views.

In August 1991, he was on the side of the coup leaders. As a true communist and a tireless speaker he never shunned the basic forms of propaganda. He agitated workers at factories and could always rally a few thousand hard-core supporters to come onto the streets.

In June 1992, Anpilov’s thugs blocked entrances and exits to the television centre for seven days, demanding access to the air waves. Anpilov called it ‘A Siege of the Empire of Lies’. ‘Television has become a tank which is killing the fragile soul of the Russian people,’ he shouted. His followers spat and hurled abuse at journalists – ‘Zionists’ and ‘agents of American influence’ – demanding ‘Russian television for Russian people’. Anpilov tried to storm Ostankino and clashed with the police who showed little resistance. ‘It was a dark and ugly mob: the twisted, hateful faces, saliva in the corner of a mouth, the openly fascist slogans,’ the liberal Izvestia wrote. ‘A movement that makes pogroms their main goal cannot have any future,’ it added hopefully.⁴⁰

Trying to deflate the situation, Yegor invited Anpilov and a few others inside the television centre to negotiate and even offered Anpilov a chance to come on air and comment on the siege. Anpilov demanded a daily prime-time slot on television and Yegor’s resignation, and threatened a sit-in hunger strike if his conditions were not met. After a five-hour-long discussion, Yegor gave his own ultimatum, both to Anpilov and to the government: if the situation around Ostankino was not restored to normal, the centre would stop broadcasting. ‘And I will be the first to make an appeal to all staff to go on strike,’ said Yegor. With that, he left his ‘guests’ in the company of government officials and the police. ‘I don’t know why Anpilov and his people have not taken over the television centre yet. I can’t imagine a more impotent executive power,’ Yegor told Moskovskie novosti, his former paper, a few days later.⁴¹

Anpilov’s siege and Yegor’s response made a strong impression on Yeltsin. ‘I realized,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, ‘that “Ostankino” is almost like a nuclear button… and that in charge of this button should not be a reflective intellectual, but a different kind of person.’⁴² Not only did Yeltsin see Yegor as Gorbachev’s man, but he also saw him as being too independent. In early December 1992 Yeltsin fired Yegor, replacing him two months later with Vyacheslav Bragin, a former party apparatchik from Tver. A mediocre and slavishly obedient man with no experience in television, Bragin saw his job as simply providing free air time to the Kremlin whenever it needed it, even if this meant interrupting scheduled programming and cancelling the Latin American soap operas. Yeltsin’s unceremonious and unjustified firing of Yegor looked ugly and outraged the liberals. Yeltsin knew the dismissal was unfair, but his main concern was not the quality of programming, but the use of television as a weapon.

With parliament paralysing the governance of the country, a direct televised appeal to the people was the only way of conducting power and he needed an obedient loyalist in charge of the television button. Most institutions in the country were malfunctioning, the economy was in free fall and television had turned from a fourth estate into the first one.

In December 1992 Khasbulatov out-manoeuvred Yeltsin, forcing him to surrender Gaidar as his prime minister in exchange for holding a referendum on the constitution the following year. Gaidar was replaced with Viktor Chernomyrdin – the former minister for the gas industry who was (mistakenly) seen by the communists as their man. In fact, giving up Gaidar made things worse for Yeltsin, not just economically, but politically. The parliament took Gaidar’s removal as a sign of Yeltsin’s weakness rather than as a compromise, and within a few months reneged on the agreement to hold a constitutional referendum and stripped Yeltsin of his powers to rule by decree.

The nationalists smelled blood. At the beginning of February Prokhanov’s Den’ declared: ‘A new clash is fast approaching. It will peak in March–April when the regrouping of political forces will be completed, when the economy will be ruined, food reserves exhausted… The opposition will have to carry the burden of power in a ruined, disintegrating country engulfed by chaos.’⁴³ Yeltsin, too, was ready for a fight. On 20 March 1993 he went on television to announce that he had signed a decree introducing a period of ‘special rule’ in the lead-up to a nationwide referendum to be held on 25 April. In fact, when the decree was published four days later, it was couched in much more careful terms with no mention of the ‘special rule’. The real event, however, was not the decree – that never came into force – but its announcement on television.

Khasbulatov declared Yeltsin’s decree ‘unconstitutional’ and called an emergency session of the parliament to impeach Yeltsin. On the day of the vote, tens of thousands of Muscovites came out on Red Square under Russian flags in support of Yeltsin. Gaidar and his father were at the forefront of the demonstration. On the other side of Red Square a much smaller, but more aggressive, crowd gathered under Soviet red flags. A few hours later, Yeltsin came out to his supporters to announce that the impeachment had failed.

Yeltsin’s popularity was confirmed a month later in a referendum that posed four questions. 1. Do you trust President Yeltsin? 2. Do you approve of his economic policies? 3. Do you consider it necessary to carry out early presidential elections? 4. Do you consider it necessary to hold early parliamentary elections? Television played a crucial role in mobilizing people to support Yeltsin. It ran a relentless advertising campaign in which ordinary people, pop stars and famous actors repeated the answers to the four questions like a chant: da, da, net, da (yes, yes, no, yes).

Just before the vote, the seventy-minutes-long Odin den’ iz zhizni prezidenta (A Day in the Life of the President) was aired – directed and presented by one of the country’s most popular film directors, Eldar Ryazanov – which showed Yeltsin in his intimate family circle. This was a sharp contrast to the image of Yeltsin on a tank in August 1991. Then he was a symbol of a revolution. Now he was a symbol of the peaceful, domesticated, normal life that people longed for and which was being jeopardized by the opposition.

The result of the referendum was better than anyone could have expected. Not only did 58.7 per cent say ‘yes’ to Yeltsin, but 53 per cent also said ‘yes’ to Gaidar’s reforms, despite the loss of savings and rising prices. However hard things were economically, nobody wished to go back to the past. Remarkably, however, Yeltsin failed to capitalize on his victory in the referendum to disband the parliament and to fire his mutinous vice-president. The struggle grew more vicious and personal.

The media resources of the opposition were more limited but not insignificant. Khasbulatov managed to get the state Russia Channel, which was formally under Russia’s Supreme Soviet, to put out the Parlamentskii chas (Parliamentary Hour) – a lengthy anti-Western and anti-Yeltsin diatribe which was broadcast at first weekly and then daily in a prime-time slot. Far more important, though, the nationalists had one of the most charismatic and popular TV showmen on their side: Alexander Nevzorov, who saw the unfolding drama as a continuation of his old battle with the liberals in Vilnius in 1991. By his own admission, Nevzorov experimented with ideas of fascism in Russia and turned his 600 Seconds into the mouthpiece of the red–brown coalition. Attempts to shut it down inevitably led to mass street protests by his fans.

Yeltsin also began to line up his weapons. At the beginning of August he gathered television executives and managers in his office. ‘We have to get ready for the decisive battle which will come in September. August has to be used for artillery preparations, including in the mass media,’ Yeltsin told them.⁴⁴ He stopped short of revealing any concrete plans, other than to say, ‘We are studying the situation very carefully and are preparing different variants of action, but the action will come.’ A month later, Yeltsin told his aides to draft a decree to disband parliament. He visited an elite military unit, the Dzerzhinsky Division, where he combatively announced the return of Gaidar to the government. Military and television powers were equally important and were intertwined in the upcoming battle.

On 21 September Yeltsin again appeared on television. Collected, clear and charismatic, he made one of the most forceful speeches of his career: ‘Parliament has been seized by a group of persons who [are] pushing Russia towards the abyss. The security of Russia and its peoples is more important than formal obedience to contradictory norms created by the legislature. I must break this disastrous vicious circle… to defend Russia and the world from the catastrophic collapse of Russian statehood and of anarchy with the vast potential of nuclear arms.’ With this, Yeltsin said, he had signed decree number 1,400 dissolving the parliament and calling for early parliamentary elections and a referendum on the constitution.

‘It is a tragic and almost irreparable stupidity,’ Nevzorov dramatically stated in his programme that night, as the blinking clock in the corner counted down the seconds. ‘The usual way of life has been upset for months. Life will become even harder and even more anxious. People are already gathering to defend the White House [the seat of the parliament] and those who have come to realize that the past two years, since August 1991, were shameful and catastrophic… The opposition will not surrender it without a fight.’ The outlawed parliament ‘impeached’ Yeltsin and pronounced Alexander Rutskoi Russia’s president.

Within the next forty-eight hours, a motley crowd of Anpilov’s communists, nationalists and Cossacks started to gather at the White House. Rutskoi distributed firearms, kept inside the White House, among the ‘defenders’, many of whom had fought as mercenaries and regular soldiers on the periphery of the empire. They had started off in the Baltic republics, then moved to a bloody conflict in Moldova and most recently had taken part in a vicious war against Georgia on the side of separatist Abkhazia. They were attracted by the promise of armed action in the heart of Moscow. Among them was Nevzorov who was issued with every possible bit of paper by Rutskoi and Vladislav Achalov, a high-ranking Soviet military commander who had led the anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991 and was now appointed as defence minister by Rutskoi. The picture inside the White House did not inspire Nevzorov with confidence.

Whether Achalov or Rutskoi actually controlled any of the armed men inside the White House was very much in question. In the words of Sergei Parkhomenko, a young liberal journalist for Segodnya (Today) newspaper, the White House looked like a ‘partisan republic’, lacking discipline and cut off from communications. Achalov presided in a vast ministerial office, barricaded by old furniture and surrounded by a dozen telephones, none of which worked, so he had to borrow mobile phones from reporters. Rutskoi paraded a motley crew of 200 volunteers, including a short plump man in a rusty Second World War helmet, a thin unshaved one with a skiing pole for a rifle and an ‘intelligentsia type’ in a hat with a shopping bag in his hands. ‘It was clear that we were not going to get very far with these commanders,’ Nevzorov reflected.⁴⁵

The only person who looked the part and impressed Nevzorov was Alexander Barkashov, the Hitler-praising leader of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity who was called to the defence of the White House by Achalov. Barkashov refused to be lumped together with Anpilov’s communists, commanded a small but well-disciplined group of young men and women in black shirts with swastika-like signs who threw their arms up in a Nazi-style salute shouting ‘Hail Russia’. They did not think much of the porous police cordon that surrounded the White House. The cordon was supposed to stop the leakage of weapons in and out of the White House, but journalists like Parkhomenko, who wandered in and out of the place, were miffed by the seeming lack of coordination in its sealing-off.

‘The only logic that can be deduced from the actions of the police and security chiefs is that their goal is to pique, provoke and madden the armed rebels. If so, they’ve done a fine job,’ Parkhomenko wrote.⁴⁶ Veronika Kutsyllo, a young reporter for Kommersant, who spent two weeks inside parliament, put in a call to Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Sergei Filatov. ‘You said you were not going to let people through, so don’t! You have put guards around the building but people are wandering to and fro! And anyway, how long are you going to wait? This crowd, in front of the White House – can’t you clear it? The crowd is growing bigger by the day – it is not going to dissipate. There are people with weapons in the crowd – and also inside…’⁴⁷

While Nevzorov took the side of the opposition, the liberal journalists obviously took the side of the Kremlin. Those who were inside the White House, like Kutsyllo and Parkhomenko, acted almost like undercover agents on enemy territory. ‘There was no distance or etiquette between the Kremlin and the liberal journalists at the time. We got too close to each other,’ Sergei Parkhomenko recalled a decade later.⁴⁸ At some point Parkhomenko got so close to the Kremlin that he was able to impersonate its chief of staff.

As Parkhomenko walked into the Kremlin, he was struck by the atmosphere of utter confusion that reigned there. ‘Kremlin officials seemed to have lost control over the situation in the country: aides were arguing with one another but nobody had any information or idea of what to do next,’ he recalled. Parkhomenko asked one of the aides about the strength of the Kremlin’s defences. The aide had no idea and irritatingly told him to find out for himself. Parkhomenko walked into Filatov’s empty office and called the Kremlin’s chief of security, asking him how many people were guarding the Kremlin in case of an attack by the rebels. ‘Where are you calling from?’ the security chief asked. ‘Filatov’s office,’ Parkhomenko replied. ‘Two battalions… do you think I should ask for reinforcements?’ ‘Go ahead,’ Parkhomenko replied.⁴⁹

‘I don’t know and may never know what played a greater part in the events of 3–4 October: confusion of the authorities or cynical calculations,’ Kutsyllo wrote in the introduction to her published diary. ‘Both sides needed blood: the parliament side – because it hoped that after the blood of at least some peaceful civilians, the people and part of the army would come to the defence of the constitution; the president – because only the blood of the same peaceful citizens could justify the storming of the White House.’⁵⁰

Few people in Moscow during those days cared about the lawfulness of Yeltsin’s decision to disband the parliament. (In fact, most events that occurred at the time of the Soviet collapse were dictated by the logic of a revolution rather than legal procedure.) As Maxim Sokolov wrote in Kommersant, what mattered to the ordinary man was which side posed the biggest threat to his own safety and the security of his family. In October 1993, the threat of chaos and violence clearly emanated from the White House. And if there was one thing that Yeltsin was blamed for, it was his slow response in dealing with those who terrorized the city during the next few days.

On 2 October an anti-Yeltsin crowd led by Anpilov clashed with the police in the centre of Moscow, throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding metal rods at them. The following morning Anpilov’s mob, numbering some 4,000 people, gathered in October Square, which was dominated by a vast statue of Lenin. The mob easily broke a police chain and marched towards the White House, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin. Kutsyllo watched in astonishment as the swelling crowd approached the parliament building: ‘Nobody tried stopping them.’⁵¹

The riot police around the White House retreated. ‘Either I don’t understand something, or they are fleeing,’ Kutsyllo wrote. This caused jubilation among the rebels in the White House. Rutskoi emerged from the White House and addressed the crowd: ‘We have won! Thank you, dear Muscovites! Men, form fighting detachments! Keep the momentum, forward, to the mayor’s office!’ Minutes later, two trucks barged through the windows of the mayor’s office next to the White House.

The main target of the rebels, however, was not the government buildings, but the television centre. ‘We need [television] air waves,’ Rutskoi declared. The fighters climbed onto the trucks left by the police and drove at high speed along the empty Moscow streets to Ostankino. As Gaidar wrote, ‘The opposition had made an apt choice for its first strike. Its leaders had rightly assessed the potential of television, in this case the most powerful medium for influencing the situation. For as long as Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and their allies were off air, they were rebels and outlaws shouting their slogans in a megaphone whom no military would support. But as soon as they were on air, they were the power in the country.’⁵² ‘To “take” the Kremlin you must “take” television,’ Alexander Yakovlev said a year later.⁵³

The attack on Ostankino was led by Anpilov and Makashov, a virulent military commander who intended to clear it of ‘Yids’ and give the air waves to the ‘legitimate president’ Rutskoi. The television centre was defended from the inside by thirty or forty soldiers from the Vityaz unit, part of the Dzerzhinsky Division, usually deployed for putting down prison mutinies. Anpilov tried to talk them into laying down their arms, and even succeeded partly, but after the rebels rammed the glass building with trucks and fired a grenade launcher decapitating one of the soldiers inside, the Vityaz soldiers opened fire. Soon a fierce fight raged around Ostankino; tracer bullets cut through the night sky, people ducked and scrambled for the bushes. Within seconds several dozen people, including journalists and onlookers who were caught in the crossfire, were dead.

Just before 7.30 p.m., in the middle of a football match, Channel One, as well as all other channels broadcasting from the Ostankino television centre, went off the air. Television screens had never gone blank in the Soviet Union – not even during the August 1991 coup. One of television’s key functions was to show that life just carried on. A sudden blackout on television was a sign of catastrophe and chaos, the collapse of the state.

In fact, there was no reason to stop broadcasting. A plan had been worked out in advance to ensure that the rebels could not transmit from the studio even if they broke into the television centre. Moreover, the actual broadcasting was carried out from a building across the road, which was not under fire. News could have been broadcast from a reserve studio, even if the main ones were damaged. As one of the strategic objects in the Soviet Union, television had several reserve broadcasting facilities, including one that could withstand a nuclear explosion. The idea to switch off the signal belonged to Bragin, the head of Ostankino, who erroneously claimed that rebels were inside, working their way towards the television studios. In fact, Bragin himself was in a different building.

Bruce Clark, the author of An Empire’s New Clothes,⁵⁴ a perceptive and detailed book about those events, argues that the bloodshed in Ostankino as well as the clashes before the White House were not so much, or at least not only, the result of confusion but part of Yeltsin’s plan to draw the rebels deeper into the fight and give them a false sense of victory so that they could be dealt with once and for all. Whether or not this was the intention, the television blackout certainly had that effect. Inside the White House parliamentarians started to celebrate victory. Khasbulatov spoke calmly: ‘I think that today we must take the Kremlin… Ostankino has been captured. City Hall has been captured. We need to develop a strategy – to complete the victory.’

One reason the attack on Ostankino failed, Nevzorov reflected later, was that it was led by Anpilov and Makashov who were ‘as “red” in their views as a flame in hell’. ‘They carried statuettes of Lenin in their hearts and spoke in party slogans, which nobody wanted to hear,’ he said. Nevzorov himself was not at Ostankino. ‘A few hours earlier I was stopped on the approach to Moscow as I led a few dozen armed men who had fought in Vilnius in 1991 to the defence of the White House.’ His ‘detention’ was most probably staged. As Nevzorov recalled twenty years later, ‘There was a good reason why I did not go to Ostankino that night, even though I knew about the plan to storm it well in advance.’⁵⁵

While Nevzorov was always in the mood for a bloody spectacle – a coup, a revolution, or a full-out war – as a professional television man he could also see the limitations of the material he was dealing with. Anpilov did not look like Che Guevara or Fidel Castro. ‘He looked like a guest from Soviet folklore who prompted immediate questions about whether Soviet people suffer from excessive drinking. The answer was certainly yes,’ said Nevzorov.⁵⁶

Anpilov bore an uncanny resemblance to the main character from a popular television adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a phantasmagorical novella in which a stray dog is implanted with the half-dead brain of a petty criminal stabbed to death in a drunken brawl a couple of hours earlier. The ruffian produced as the result of this medical experiment, called Sharikov, talks, walks and acts like a new proletarian man. He terrorizes the professor who created him, forcing him to reverse the experiment.

Nevzorov, who fancied himself as a knight and conquistador, had no wish to speak on behalf of Sharikov and of Makashov, a half-mad remnant of the Soviet Empire. ‘A month earlier I was still hoping that people’s frustration and the humiliation suffered by the army, penniless and disrespected, could have detonated the situation and turned into a vast fire that would have consumed Anpilov and Makashov. But by the end of September I realized that the masses were not catching fire,’ he said. ‘It was too late to call people to come out under communist flags and too early to call them to come out under nationalist ones.’⁵⁷

The opposite side had a better cast, said Nevzorov. ‘Yeltsin looked the part of a tsar. Tall, with sleek white hair, always dressed in a crisp white shirt – he appeared as a man in power – something that Russians respect,’ Nevzorov recalled.⁵⁸ But if people did not come out on the side of the rebels, they also did not exactly rush to Yeltsin’s defence either. Most adopted the role of spectators even if the overall sympathy was on the side of Yeltsin. This political apathy was part of people’s self-preservation mechanism. They saw the stand-off between the two sides as a struggle for power and refused to be drawn in.

This made the situation extremely dangerous. As the 1917 Bolshevik coup showed, one did not need vast crowds to grab power if the army and the police were demoralized. Gaidar, whose grandfather had fought in the civil war after the Bolshevik coup, understood the danger better than many. Seeing the blackout of Ostankino, he rushed to the Russia Channel which was broadcast from a different location in the centre of Moscow. Its studio seemed completely improvised with dishevelled reporters reading news from stacked-up sheets of paper. As he walked into the studio, he paused for thought and asked to be left alone for a minute.

On the night of 3 October, television was the only way to mobilize the public and, most importantly, the army. ‘The Russia Channel, the only one that stayed on the air, saved Moscow and Russia,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs.⁶⁰

Several thousands of people responded to Gaidar’s ‘call to the barricades’ and turned up in the centre of Moscow, lighting bonfires for the night. These were the same people who had come to defend the White House in August 1991 against the communist putsch, some of whom were now leading a new attack on Ostankino. This display of popular support was addressed first and foremost to the army which, just like in 1991, was reluctant to interfere in a conflict the outcome of which was still unclear, and was waiting to see how events would turn out. Throughout the night, journalists, actors and academics flocked to the improvised studio of the Russia Channel.

Gaidar’s appeal was countered not by nationalists and communists but by those who had most benefited from his reforms. The journalists from Vzglyad told Muscovites to ignore Gaidar’s advice, stay at home, not put themselves in harm’s way, leave the politicians and the police to do their jobs, and follow their example and go to bed. Chudakova, a biographer of Mikhail Bulgakov, rebutted this nonchalance: ‘Don’t believe those who are trying to persuade you to leave it all to the politicians. If you stay at home tonight, you will be ashamed of yourselves – in a few hours, in a few months, in a few years!’⁶¹

But it was the emotional words of the popular comical actress Liya Akhedzhakova that made the biggest impact on the audience: ‘Those who today look at these snarling, bestial faces of the mob and share their anger, have learned nothing in the past seventy years… For the third day in a row innocent people are being killed… And for what? For the constitution? What kind of constitution is this – may it rot in hell! It is the same constitution under which people were imprisoned… Where is our army? Why is it not defending us from this cursed constitution?’⁶²

Yeltsin, who watched the Russia Channel in his office, wrote in his memoirs: ‘I will always remember Akhedzhakova – shocked, fragile, but firm and courageous.’⁶³ Yeltsin did not make a television appearance himself that night. At 2.30 a.m., he went to the ministry of defence to ‘shake up his generals who were paralysed by stress and hesitance’. He was accompanied by Alexander Korzhakov, his bodyguard and confidant. Everyone had a drink. Then Yeltsin presented them with a plan worked out by one of Korzhakov’s men. It was a very Russian plan: to bring in the tanks, position them in front of the White House, fire a few shells ‘for psychological effect’ and then send in the commandos to clear the rebels out.

At Gaidar’s request, Yeltsin also flew to meet army commanders outside Moscow to boost their confidence. It was not clear whether an order from Yeltsin alone would be sufficient to get the officers to clear out the rebels from the White House. On the night of 3 October, Russia’s richest businessmen – soon to be known as oligarchs – were called upon by Chernomyrdin, who effectively took charge of the crisis, to help with money. They did not have to be asked twice. Some even went to negotiate with military commanders – cash in hand – although Pavel Grachev, the defence minister, later denied that this money ever played a part.

Finally, at 9 a.m. on 4 October, Yeltsin came on television and addressed the nation. ‘Those who have acted against a peaceful city and unleashed bloody fighting are criminals… I ask you, respected Muscovites, to give your support to the morale of the Russian soldiers and officers… The armed fascist–communist mutiny in Moscow will be crushed within the shortest time limit.’

When tanks appeared in the centre of Moscow, they were greeted with relief rather than resentment and apprehension. As Gaidar wrote, ‘Anyone who did not live through the evening of 3 October and did not see the terrible danger that loomed over the country, who did not have to call people out onto the streets of Moscow, may have difficulty understanding my feelings when the first round of tank fire resounded over the White House.’⁶⁴

The tanks were operated by selected officers and personally commanded by Grachev. They fired ten duds and two incendiary shells that set the upper floors of the White House on fire. Nobody was actually killed by the tank fire (those who died on 4 October were killed by a gunfire exchange between the two sides). But the damage caused by the symbolism of tanks firing at the parliament was far greater and more lasting.

The tanks provided a captivating television picture. Russian television relayed live footage from CNN which had its cameras fixed on the nearby rooftops. This created a certain degree of detachment and made the spectacle doubly surreal as if the events were happening not in Russia, but in a foreign country. On a cold, crisp October day, people strolling along Kutuzovsky Prospect were able to watch the spectacle live while Barkashov’s snipers on the roof took out people in front of the White House. Theatre critic and historian, Anatoly Smeliansky, called it a ‘Russian matinee’. Certainly, people felt like spectators rather than participants in those events.

Within a few hours, the fighting was over. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, along with the thousands of people inside the White House, were bundled into police vans and taken to jail (though not for long). After many days without any running water or a change of clothes, they had a nasty smell about them. But many of the fighters, including Barkashov, melted away, using underground tunnels and the sewage system as an escape route out of the White House. The nationalist and communist newspapers were briefly banned. Nevzorov’s 600 Seconds was taken off air for ‘whipping up national, class, social and religious intolerance’. Alexei Simonov, a documentary film-maker who ran a foundation for the freedom of speech, recalled the vindictive triumphalism of some of the ‘democratic’ journalists. This triumphalism was ill-placed.

Parkhomenko, who protested against banning nationalist newspapers, wrote a couple of days later: ‘Nothing is over. Everything is only starting. The deformed White House is an impressive symbol. But it is only a symbol. The large armed gang that terrorized the city for twelve hours is not destroyed but only dispersed…’⁶⁵ The use of tanks against the White House caused more harm to the liberal idea than it did to the nationalists inside the White House. Instead of projecting the image of putting down an armed mutiny against a democratically elected president, it conveyed an image of heavy-handed disregard for the parliament as an institution. It elevated the fighters in the White House from thugs to political martyrs.

Even if the tanks had helped to smoke out the rebels, they could not defeat the nationalist and imperialist ideas that had led to the bloodshed in Moscow. Unlike the events of August 1991, which at least entered history as a failed coup, October 1993 never gained a definition and ambiguously remained in history as ‘the events of October 1993’. Just like Barkashov’s fighters who escaped through underground tunnels, their ideas and slogans have continued to smoulder under the surface of Russian political life, like a peat fire, occasionally letting off smoke or a nasty smell. The fire was never properly extinguished, but simply covered up in the hope that it would die by itself. Twenty years later it was fanned by Vladimir Putin into the large flames that are consuming not only parts of Ukraine, but also Russia’s own future.

In 1993, nationalist and communist ideas seemed defeated not so much by tanks but by life itself. Nevzorov, who was driven in a police car through the centre of Moscow to be put on a plane to St Petersburg, recalled watching Moscow life carry on as normal. ‘People walked their dogs, strolled with their children, changed money, bought food, posed for pictures with the blackened White House as a background and I suddenly felt that I was on the margins, that nobody really cared about all these politics any more.’⁶⁶ As Kommersant wrote at the time, ‘The only thing that citizens want from big politics is the possibility of calmly making money and as calmly spending it to their hearts’ content.’

As the late Yuri Levada, Russia’s leading sociologist, wrote at the time, people minded their own business, their small dacha plots, their incomes and vouchers. ‘Perhaps for the first time in the history of our country, daily life scored such a convincing victory over politics.’⁶⁷ But as Levada warned, this victory had its reverse side. The dominance of domestic life had a very different nature from Europe where democracy was ensured by political institutions and the elites. In the absence of such institutions and elites, the dominance of private life inevitably brought any important public issue to the level of ‘bread and circuses’, to simple consumerism, entertainment, game shows and soap operas.

The shelling of the White House was adopted as a ‘plot’ for an interactive video game. It was featured in a Vzglyad programme which was relaunched by Alexander Lyubimov after a four-year break. To compensate the audience for the ‘missed-out’ years, the well-groomed Lyubimov put together a pastiche of the events that had happened over the previous four years, played in a fast-forward, black-and-white mode accompanied by Scott Joplin’s ‘Ragtime’ tune. It was a new reality, in which ideology no longer mattered and in which Nevzorov and Lyubimov happily coexisted on the same television channel that was soon to be hijacked by Boris Berezovsky, a future oligarch and chief manipulator of Russian politics. Berezovsky immediately reached out to Nevzorov as Russia’s best showman, making him an offer Nevzorov readily accepted. ‘A mercenary is like a tank: its cannon rotate in any direction,’ Nevzorov said.⁶⁸

As Nevzorov said, ‘Lenya Golubkov’ won over Anpilov and Barkashov and even himself. But this was a poor guarantee against the populism that had manifested in the December 1993 parliamentary elections when millions of Golubkovs voted for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a charismatic populist and ultra-nationalist. (He too would soon turn into a showman.)

Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party won 23 per cent of the votes. The democratic Russia’s Choice, led by Gaidar who shunned populism, refusing to make any promises that he could not keep, got 15 per cent of the proportional representation votes (although it did much better in the single-member districts). Sociologists, and much of the Russian political establishment, were stunned. On the night of the elections, state television channels, in anticipation of the Democrats’ victory, staged an all-night show, called The Celebration of a New Political Year. It was a New Year’s celebration come early. There was almost no analysis, but plenty of entertainment from pop singers, actors and folk groups. ‘Let us drink to the new constitution,’ the main presenter beamed with a smile. ‘And let’s not talk about politics today.’

Moscow’s great and good were sipping champagne and congratulating each other on the new constitution that placed enormous powers in the hands of the president. The main computer that was supposed to relay the results of the parliamentary elections was said to have been infected with a virus. Instead of reading out results, the presenter of the show read out telegrams from the provinces. In fact, the only person who had reason to be in a good mood was Zhirinovsky. When it became clear that he and the communists had got a strong showing, the camera caught the shocked face of a Russian liberal essayist and Dostoevskian scholar, Yuri Karyakin. ‘Russia, think hard, you have lost your mind!’ he said to the camera.

With hindsight, Zhirinovsky’s electoral coup was only natural and the liberals and particularly the media bore a large share of responsibility for it. The media did not try to educate, explain and engage the majority of the country in politics. Despite (or because of) being owned by the state, they performed no public duty. They kept ‘Lenya Golubkov’ on a diet rich in Latin American soap operas (whose main heroine even made an appearance in one of MMM’s commercials) and game shows. The most popular of these was Pole chudes (Field of Miracles) – a carbon copy of The Wheel of Fortune, set up by Vladislav Listyev, a popular TV journalist who in the 1980s was one of the founders and presenters of the Vzglyad show. The Russian name of the game show was borrowed from the adaptation of Pinocchio in which a boy made out of wood is fooled by a scheming cat and a fox and buries his coins in a Field of Miracles in the Country of Fools, hoping that more coins will grow overnight. Golubkov’s investment suffered the same fate: in 1994 the pyramid scheme finally collapsed. Inevitably Golubkov blamed not those who designed the pyramid scheme, but Yeltsin. The result of the 1993 elections followed the same logic.

The liberals, whose democratic illusions were shattered by the 1993 conflict, also blamed Yeltsin, rather than themselves. The sneering or styob was aimed not at the Soviet past, but at Russia’s present. In December 1993, after the democrats’ defeat in the parliamentary elections, Yeltsin made a strange appointment. He did not turn to Lyubimov or Listyev for support. Instead he turned to the seventy-year-old Alexander Yakovlev, asking him to become the chairman of Ostankino. But the ideologue of Perestroika, who had fought nationalists and communists all his life, suddenly felt powerless.

What Yakovlev had dreamt of at the beginning of Perestroika, he wrote, was that once people were given freedom they would elevate themselves and start arranging their lives as they saw fit.