The end of the Soviet Union left the new Russia with many dilemmas. One of them was very basic: What is Russia? And what is to be the political ideal to cement the state? In the Yeltsin years the government struggled with this issue largely by itself, for society was essentially flattened, desperate merely to survive. In theory, the ideology of the new regime was democracy, but for most Russians that simply meant the public pronouncements of the people in power. When the Russian air force bombed Grozny in 1994, one of the older Russian residents told Western reporters, “I survived the Nazis, now I have survived the democrats.” A variety of intellectuals and political groupings tried to come up with new ideologies to replace Marxism, most attempts being a Russian nationalism similar to that propagated by Ziuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The Yeltsin government realized that “democracy” meant to ordinary Russians nothing more than kleptocracy and anarchy and tried to fill the vacuum, often to comic effects. The television stations, then entirely in the hands of pro-government oligarchs, ran endless programs about the Romanov dynasty and often imaginary pre-1917 traditions. Yeltsin not only renamed the parliament the Duma, in recognition of the 1906–1917 institution, he also restored the double-headed eagle as the state symbol of Russia, a dynastic emblem of autocracy, not democracy. The government decided that Russia needed a “state ideology” and appointed a committee headed by a nationalist mathematician to come up with one. After a year the committee dissolved itself because it could not come up with anything reasonable.
The Putin presidency inherited a state that had little legitimacy with the population. The Soviet Union after the war had been legitimate to most people; that is, they may have thought all the policies were wrong but it was still their state. The new Russia was nobody’s state, even if most people approved of Putin. Many Russians believed that the new elite was even further from the population than the Communists had been. Ordinary people said of the new elite, “they don’t ask us” about what they were doing. As the years passed, the population began to look back more positively on the Soviet era, and the Putin government responded by memorializing Soviet heroes from the war or the space race, and suggesting that history textbooks should be less negative about that part of the Russian past. Increasing segments of the population were better off after 2000, but in what country did they live? What was Russia? The boundaries that collapsed in 1991 were not created by the Soviets, but the Russian Empire centuries before. These were not abstract questions. Millions of people had personal ties with the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and even more remote areas. They still lived in terms of the former Soviet space, not just Russia. Narrow Russian nationalism turned out to be a failure with no wide echo in the population, young or old. The new Russia moreover did not reflect the social values of substantial parts of the population. At least the new state did not become an ethno-state, like most other ex-Soviet republics. At Putin’s 2000 inauguration the Russian Orthodox clergy were seated in the audience alongside the rabbis and imams, an arrangement that in a strange way retained the traditions both of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. If the Caucasus remained a problem, official terminology included all citizens of Russia as “rossiane” (roughly, people of Russia), not just “russkie” (Russians in an ethnic sense), a terminology impossible to translate but highly significant for its attempt at inclusiveness.
In the Perestroika era, a popular joke was that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world with an unpredictable past – a comment on Soviet historical ideology and the speed and superficiality of its replacement. Indeed Russia had been a land of thinly populated northern forests for the first eight or nine centuries of its existence, but it turned into one of the world’s most populous countries and is still the world’s largest in area. It was the world’s fifth industrial power in 1914 while still overwhelmingly rural. Then it embarked, or the Bolsheviks embarked it, on a utopian scheme to realize a new socialist order of society, one without classes or exploitation. At the same time they sought to become a fully industrialized modern state. In the latter goal it largely succeeded, if at colossal cost. For a short time, the Soviet Union was a superpower, or was almost one. For most of the twentieth century Russia was even a major player in world science and in literature, even if these never reached the heights achieved in the era of the tsars. The fate of the socialist dream is more a matter of irony than tragedy: the ruling party that was to create the new order, after seventy years of effort, effectively decided that wealth was better than power, that inequality was better than equality and it privatized itself. The result was a hybrid society, with private businesses that are not quite private and government institutions not quite governmental. The smaller and less powerful but (for many) richer state that succeeded the Soviet Union appeared on the scene mimicking the old Russia, with an ambiguous place in the world and in the eyes of its people. Whether or not it can realize the potential created by the previous millennium of Russian (and Soviet) history remains to be seen.
Further Reading
Russian history has never been blessed with an abundance of accessible works on its history and culture in English. Much of the existing literature is now seriously out of date and is not being replaced quickly. Hence the following is by no means an exhaustive list; rather it attempts to provide the general reader with accessible literature where possible though it occasionally includes academic studies. Reference works such as the Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols. (2006) provide full bibliography. RUS AND EARLY RUSSIA
For the earliest centuries of Russian history, to the time of Peter the Great, the situation is particularly bad. The best overall introduction to the earlier centuries is Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584 (1995). John Fennell’s History of the Russian Church to 1448 (1995) covers the medieval period. Translations of the devotional and other literature of medieval Russia are Serge Zenkovsky, ed., and trans., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (1974) and Michael Klimenko, ed., Vita of St. Sergii of Radonezh (1980). Medieval Novgorod has never inspired the works in English that it deserves, especially after the decades of archeological excavation. An introduction is Henrik Birnbaum, Lord Novgorod the Great (1981). For the Mongol invasion and rule the foundation is Charles Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (1985).