THE END OF THE Soviet Empire, the death of Communism, the birth in Russia and Ukraine of bruised democracy – it is hard to know how to think, let alone write, about change of this magnitude. Because to say ‘from then on everything was different’ is firstly to say nothing, and secondly to lie. So I keep coming back to Mikhail Jvanetsky and his timeless monologues, particularly the above written in the early 1990s soon after the Soviet Union stopped existing and Soviet ballet was replaced as a popular pastime by a renaissance of crime and by holidays overseas. (Fortunately, humour proved harder to give up than Swan Lake.) International travel, once the preserve of the Party nomenclature and artistic and scientific elites intimate with the KGB, was by now well and truly the opium of the masses. Sometimes, the more things change the harder it is for ‘a little-educated person such as, say, a writer or a military officer’ to tell the difference. In the cracks and fissures of the radical break from the past, the rejected past tirelessly reproduces itself.
I turn to Jvanetsky to see what words he finds to speak about the whole tragicomedy of transition, because I trust him. He is a rare specimen, writing with the sooty owl of black humour on one shoulder and the snow petrel of open-hearted lyricism on the other. Most of all I am drawn to the pitch of his voice, to the humility you invariably find alongside the exquisite economy and clarity of his vision. Humility is a big deal to me, and I do not know what to make of the fact that I’ve never been able to find an adequate Russian translation for the English word. (Smirenie comes closest, but it has distinct religious overtones and reeks of kneeling and prostrating.) Jvanetsky’s words are so precious because they do not ring with the irony of dissociation, with bitter disappointment, or anger or nostalgia – the types of emotional responses to the end of the Soviet Union that the writer Marietta Chudakova identified as dominant in the post-collapse society.
Chudakova, who at one point was a member of President Yeltsin’s Advisory Committee, takes the failed coup of August 1991 as the starting point for her reflection. The coup was indeed the turning point: the attempt by the Party true believers and KGB to go back into the heart of darkness was thwarted; people came out onto the streets to defend democracy and reform; and Yeltsin, sober, atop a tank, emerged as a hero. Within months the ‘patient’ (Soviet State) stopped breathing and was declared (for all intents and purposes) deceased. In another country, that defiant stand against the coup would have become the stuff of legends, marked by a national holiday, celebrated with sickening regularity, but in Russia, says Chudakova, ‘It has been mocked and dragged through the mud by the majority of the population.’ She notes how the first reaction against the events emerged very quickly, even before the barricades were dismantled. With a self-knowing smile, people dismissed what happened as nothing more than theatre. ‘The smart-arses,’ Chudakova writes, ‘refuse to believe that capital-h History can take place in Russia.’ There is no History here, they say, only ‘political technologies’ at play – staged coup, staged resistance to the coup; everything calculated, planned and manipulated. After all, what kind of History can happen here in our dump? Our ‘dump’, which of course is also our ‘Great (and greatly misunderstood) Nation’. Time and time again the two ideas, which might seem mutually exclusive to a bemused outsider – the inferiority complex and the megalomania – sit rather comfortably in many people’s minds. I wonder if this duality is, in fact, the essence of the much-vaunted Russian enigma. But why the urge to belittle and dismiss? When something so enormous and unexpected is happening, Andrey Dmitriev observes, ‘The main actors, caught naked in the icy winds of history, hastily throw onto themselves the first clothing they can lay hands on – decrepit, often gaudy,’ the kind that in the heat of the moment looks totally natural and even solemn. In hindsight, this clothing often seems ridiculous, even farcical, creating in many the desire to dissociate themselves from the loud colours of artless enthusiasm, of rose-coloured Utopianism, of unconditional and unsubstantiated beliefs in reform, Yeltsin, people power, you name it.
As an observer, not an actor in any way, thousands of kilometres away from my barely folded homeland, I was safe from oversubscribing to the beliefs and ideologies available in the wake of the collapse, safe from all the cringe-worthy outfits and from the need for sharp, high-speed U-turns. And in a way that would never be shared by my parents and, I suspect, by my sister either, I have felt bitterly short-changed by that safety.
And so I could never fully get how it happened that, only a few years after the events of 1991, so many people whole-heartedly succumbed to complete disappointment with the new order. Not just any kind of disappointment, but total, irreversible disappointment – the kind that Chudakova believes her compatriots are particularly adept at modelling. ‘We were such fools [sometimes slightly softened into “We were such foolish idealists”]. Democracy – are you kidding? The Soviet Union – who told you it had collapsed?’
‘We were convinced that as soon as the cannibal regime of the Communist Party bit the dust,’ writes Dmitriev, ‘from under its ruins there would emerge people in white clothes, pure and honest, smart and full of initiative, freedom-loving individualists yet obsessed with the idea of the common good.’ And in no time, these people would erect democratic institutions, and the self-regulating market economy they would introduce would not only bring abundance, but also create a robust civic society. ‘The world will witness the emergence of the New Russian Person: the real European, but with the Russian soul.’
I speak of this fantasy not to mock the Utopian idealism of those who believed that the end of the Soviet Union would bring freedom and prosperity (up to a point my family was among them), but to point out how only very few of us, so full of hope and enthusiasm in the beginning and so bitterly disillusioned later on, had any real appreciation of Western-style democracy as a historical process, a long painful road paved with arduous work, countless lives lost, terrible mistakes, hard decisions and divergent paths. And similarly, and perhaps even more importantly, hardly anyone understood that the West’s freedom and prosperity were not abstractly guaranteed by the system but had to be fought for daily by normal, ordinary people like us. Even Karl Marx, of all people, could see that ‘unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of peoples to bring it into being’. Most of us nursed at the breast of Soviet history couldn’t, not straight away. In the Utopia many clung to after the collapse of the USSR, democracy was like a perfectly made-up young woman in a glossy magazine, who you could not envision ill and dressed in her trackies, with a red crusty nose and puffy, watery eyes. The post-Soviet Utopian imagination, says Dmitriev, neither revered nor respected the West but simply envied it. To respect the West, he says, would be to try to understand it, not to copy it while being torn between envy and contempt.
For Marietta Chudakova, the most explicable reaction to the death of the regime was hatred directed at all those who dared to boogie on its grave. For people gripped by hatred, the collapse of the Soviet Union was, as Vladimir Putin would ultimately declare, unambiguously the biggest tragedy of the twentieth century (in contrast to its biggest triumph – the victory in World War II). Chudakova never had a problem with those who detested people like her for celebrating the end of the monstrous regime. All she felt was deep satisfaction: ‘What, and you thought it would never end?’ But there is, Chudakova continues, one more emotional reaction – a kind of a ‘dull melancholia’, a ‘sickly feeling of something important missing from the air’. And this something important is not simply the security that complete dependency on the State offered people provided they played by the rules, it is something intangible that existed then, in that air, but is now completely gone. Chudakova believes it is this emotional reaction (in all its countless versions) that now represents the dominant response to the death of the regime, uniting people from different social stratas with completely different life experiences and at times opposing political views.