The proximity of Saint Petersburg (eventually renamed Petrograd, and then Leningrad following Lenin’s death in 1924) to the West, however, became risky after the Bolshevik Revolution. Then independent Finland and Estonia lay only twenty five miles away, which meant the Soviets would have little buffer space to fight back an army invading from either country. Moscow, on the other hand, stood more than four hundred miles from the nearest border. After Lenin reclaimed Moscow as the capital in 1917, the clock on the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower became the measure of all things temporal in Russia—the country’s “standard time,” as it were.
Moscow’s almost nine-hundred-year history has witnessed the transformation of the once-remote northern village of the twelfth century into the truly Byzantine capital of the Putin era. (The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, but one might not know this in Russia today, where Putin has often acted as though he were the direct descendant of a Byzantine emperor.) Founded, according to most legends, by the prince Yury Dolgorukiy amid bog and forest along the Moskva River, Moscow arose as Kiev began to lose its influence in the 1100s. The name Moskva, meaning “the place of marches” or “gnats,” is said to come from the area’s Finno-Ugric tribes.
At times you can’t help feeling that Moscow is Byzantium, its modernized version, with Mercedes and gourmet supermarkets. As did Byzantine emperors of centuries past, Putin and his supporters talk about Russia today as if it were a divinely ordained power, destined to withstand the moral corruption and decay supposedly emanating from the West. Hence, the Byzantine double-headed eagle emblem now not only graces government buildings but pops up everywhere, even on milk cartons and cell phone covers, produced outside Russia by wily foreigners. Byzantium and its leaders and symbols are discussed on talk shows, their imperial grandeur cited as an example for Russia’s own future glory. Orthodox priests with distinguished beards preach, in their sermons, about how Russia, if it is to regain its greatness, must look to its Christian predecessor’s past. The television station Spas (Salvation) not only reports on the history of Orthodox Christianity but also comments on foreign and domestic affairs. Spas has repeatedly shown a feature-length 2008 documentary called The Demise of the Empire: A Byzantine Lesson, with other major Russian networks following suit. The not-so-subtle idea behind all this nostalgia for Byzantium is that Russia can, and even should, exist only in opposition to the West, which supposedly hated Byzantium in the past just as much as it despises its spiritual heir, Russia, today.
Yet this is fanciful thinking. The old ideas and symbols that Putin has used to strengthen Russia’s self-image no longer correspond to today’s global realities, nor do they reflect Russia’s present capacities. And even though the double-headed eagle once again purportedly signifies imperial power, in reality it incarnates the country’s split personality, appearing to be a desperate attempt to mask a deep sense of insecurity—the anxiety of a former superpower torn between the old and the new.
During his first decade in power, Putin, financed by high oil prices, did indeed manage to transform Russia from the bankrupt, desperate loser of the Cold War into a wealthy country with an independent foreign policy often running counter to the interests of the West. But in 2011, Putin—prime minister from 2008, when Dmitry Medvedev formally (and temporarily) occupied Russia’s top post—faced presidential elections as the global financial crisis wrought havoc on Russia and oil prices collapsed. He thus announced that he needed to return to the Kremlin to “steer Russia in the right direction”[24] and unite the country. (It is worth noting that Putin had chosen not to become a traditional autocrat by amending the constitution so that he could run again in 2008, but allowed at least the appearance of democracy by stepping down from the presidency to assume the post of head of government.) This went down poorly, with a Russian electorate insulted by the Kremlin’s assumption that the people did not deserve to choose their leader. The 2012 presidential elections, as a result, did not go smoothly, with nationwide protests gathering hundreds of thousands at a time rocking Russia. Putin still took the Kremlin, his victory aided by the industrial regions of Siberia and Far East, but in view of uncertainty, Putin clearly decided that the path to future reelection lay through presenting Russia as threatened by an enemy abroad—as usual, the West.
He did take to heart his imperial project. In 2010, the Kremlin, then under President Dmitry Medvedev, declared modernization by reducing Russia to only nine time zones to streamline business relations with Moscow. But when Putin returned as Russia’s president, larger size began to loom anew. He swiftly canceled the time-savings calendar, reverting the country to its eleven-time-zone geography.
Since then, Putin further surrendered to the traditionally xenophobic, inward-looking approach of what we might call “Byzantinism”—the attitude of “us versus them,” with the Third Rome better than the First, and so on. Few Russian leaders have managed to escape such a pattern of interaction with the outside world. Stalin’s obsession with the grandiosities of power is perhaps the most relevant to understand Putin.
With Moscow as the capital of the (atheist) Soviet empire, Stalin could not, of course, declare it a holy city, yet the style and structure of the buildings he had erected was often nothing short of Byzantine. His imperial ambitions found expression in reinventing the palatial architecture of Saint Petersburg, though deriving a more modern inspiration from the 1914 Municipal Building on Center Street in New York City. After all, New York’s nickname was, Stalin knew, the Empire State. Victory in the Great Patriotic War required a victorious style of urban renewal. At home, Khrushchev recalled Stalin’s thinking of the time: “We won the war…. Foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and there are no skyscrapers. If they compare Moscow to capitalist cities, it will be a mortal blow to us.”
During the decade starting in 1947, the Soviet government oversaw the construction, on Moscow’s seven hills, of Stalinskie vysotki (Stalin’s high-rises), as the wedding-cake buildings came to be known, and a new eight-hundred-foot-tall headquarters for Lomonosov Moscow State University on Lenin Hills (Vorobyevy Hills before and after the Soviet era). The architects planned to grace the building’s central tower with a statue of the university founder Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov, or so the plan envisioned, was to resemble the victorious Stalin. In 1953, thousands of Gulag inmates completed the construction of the headquarters, which remained the tallest building of its kind in Europe until 1990. The statue of Lomonosov, however, was never mounted atop the tower, since Stalin died that year and soon fell into disgrace, following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization.
Some of the seven buildings provided spacious living quarters for the nomenklatura—the officials, artists, and scientists the Kremlin considered vital for the success of the regime. Most other Muscovites huddled by the dozens in communal apartments. Figuring among the high-rises was, and remains, the grandiose Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Smolensk Square, from which Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s seasoned foreign minister, often fires his salvos toward the United States and conducts diplomacy across the globe.