In his brief inauguration speech the president offered the young “a new quality of life, well-being, security, and health.”[55] He even ordered the government’s youth agency Rosmolodezh to report directly to him so as to court this youth away from Navalny. That move has further disclosed the Kremlin’s hypocrisy. During his swearing-in ceremony when thousands of those young came out to protest the president’s more years in power, they were brutally beaten by the Cossacks. These descendants of the militant conquerors, who once served the czars in defense of the throne and imperial expansion east, today have no formalized role but are used by the Kremlin as a historic militia of sorts. The Cossacks claim a role of policing patriotism, performing the violent jingoistic pro-Putin duties when the actual police are still restricted by law.
At the same time, Putin’s vision of a Great Russia remains enormously popular. If he were to disappear, his policies would likely survive. Russians have long believed in the “great man” theory of history; they remain convinced that individuals at the top more than circumstances or trends below determine the course of events. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which describes how the Russian empire repelled Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, typifies this kind of imperial thinking.
The well-known Russian tolerance for repression has baffled Western journalists, economists, and political consultants for decades. As they suffered through tyranny inflicted on them by some of the worst despots in world history, Russians, one can say, developed an almost apocalyptic fear of change—and especially changes of power. A regime’s demise births not hope but dread. Among Russia’s ruling class, this has encouraged, almost more than anywhere else, a reliance on inertia—just the right environment for autocracy. Stalin could count on this; this was also the secret behind the reelection of Boris Yeltsin, despite his abysmal popularity ratings. “Better the devil you know” may be a cliché, but it applies to Russian voters.
If Russian rulers are expected to act in the interests of the country, the Russian people, too, bear a responsibility—to serve their God and their czar. In this, Russia has followed the Byzantine tradition, in which there was only the ruler and his serfs. The ruler provides not guarantees or laws, but gives amnesty, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins. The de facto absence of the rule of law in Russia and the overwhelming influence of the Supreme Leader over one’s freedom or lack thereof—even, in extreme cases, over whether one lives or dies—has left Russians ever in search of the Good Czar, whose reign would usher in, if not paradise, then prosperity and justice for all. Yet, with the state unrestrained by institutions, with civil liberties weak and the czar presiding over all, the result of such an approach to governance is often less than paradisiacal.
Should Russia be classed as European, as Western? Based on our travels from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka we have come to three conclusions. Russia is “coherently incoherent”—in other words, suffering from a split personality disorder. It is driven by its history. It is, for the most part, homogeneous politically, despite its geographic and even ethnic diversity.
The double-headed eagle symbolizes Russia’s coherent incoherency. Putin, no fan of revolutions, has kept alive, at least in bronze effigy on squares across the country, Vladimir Lenin, the Father of Revolutions. (Nostalgia felt by the older generation, as well as a justifiable reluctance to destroy historical monuments, have also helped to keep these statues intact.) Devoid of political value today, the Lenin statues stand for continuity, for the century during which Russia, in its Soviet incarnation, was a strong country, a superpower that made the world tremble. Some Stalin images and statues—the bust in Yakutsk, for example—have been thrown in, to firm the memory and aspiration of that superpower status. Then there are the two monuments to Prince Vladimir we saw. The old one in Kiev, commemorating the Ukrainians’ own Prince Volodymyr. Another one in Moscow—the new statue, erected in 2016 on Putin’s orders and designed to stick it to the Slavic, formerly fraternal country to the south. Even Ivan the Terrible (who famously “gathered”—or retook—Russian lands occupied by the Mongols in the Middle Ages) has been memorialized, with a statue of him raised in Oryol, a town about three hundred miles south of Moscow.
These statues may well be understood as monuments to Putin himself—they represent strong leaders, leaders gathering age-old Russian territories and standing against enemies foreign and domestic. Stalin enjoyed a cult of personality that saw monuments to him built around the USSR during his lifetime. Putin’s cult of personality has taken a more creative approach, expressing itself through the publicly displayed likenesses of other “greats” such as Peter, Catherine, and even Ivan the Terrible.
Russians, we saw, generally accept all these manifestations of power and the contradictory messages they send, picking and choosing from the patriotic kasha in which they dwell. Perhaps this is a survival mechanism. Russians, as we have noted, resemble snowdrop flowers, durable and adaptive. Shaken by crises coming almost as regularly as the seasons, they manage to survive, steering their individual lives across the turbulent sea that is their country, Great Russia.
Russia lives in the past and offers its citizens a less than rosy future; the growing power of the outdated Cossacks is just one example. Russia’s frames of reference are old victories or involve settling old scores such as winning World War II or retaking the Crimean Peninsula. The authorities attempt to mold the past to fit the present, with the future also presented as reflecting the past. At the inauguration, the president promised his people a new future, not because it is time for change but because, he said, he felt “responsibility toward Russia, a country of magnificent victories and accomplishments, toward the history of the Russian state that goes back centuries, and toward our ancestors.[56]
“The country’s security and defense capabilities are reliably ensured,”[57] Putin stated, his victory parades getting more and more elaborate and symbolically grand with every passing year. In 2017, to public cheers, a new Christmas decoration graced store shelves in GUM, Moscow’s Red Square department store—a collection of glass balls titled “Our Heritage,” with tanks and fighter jets painted as a theme.
Putin may not believe that war with the West is imminent, but the possibility that it might happen at all only helps him. He certainly gets help from the United States, the former Cold War foe that has now developed its own obsession with Russia. Indeed, Putin possesses a fascinating ability to bring extremely diverse yearnings together—yearnings for monarchy, for the Soviet past, for Russian military glory, for a revived Russian national spirit.
In 2017, by Moscow’s main thoroughfare, Sadovoe Koltso—the Garden Ring Road—the Russian Military History Society sponsored the building of a monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47. From his pedestal overlooking the road Kalashnikov seems to be ready to shoot at anyone who comes near—yet another striking example of Russia’s militant national pride. Part of this composition is an image of the globe, displaying a bas-relief of the Kalashnikov rifle, on top of which stands Archangel Michael slaying a dragon, backset by an imposing Stalinist skyscraper—another sign of Russia’s split personality, of Soviet and saintly military greatness aligned.
Russia is largely a homogeneous country, despite its demographic and geographic diversity. Russia does not constitute a separate civilization—it has borrowed too much from the West for that—but in its own way, it seems a world of its own. The multitudinous peoples and cultures composing the country dissolve in a sort of imperial homogeneity. Non-Russians—from the Chechens in the Northern Caucasus to Buryats of Ulan-Ude to the Yakuts of Sakha—make it a diverse land, but they do not influence politics or drive social changes. We saw this from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.