At the Kremlin the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, taking with it the illusion of a people’s Utopia. The seductive dream that had shaped the country was exposed as a deception and Russians found themselves with no ideology to cling to, and no vision for the future.
Individuals, often young and cynical, always with connections, stepped into the moral vacuum. Power and public property fell into their hands, weakening the state. They positioned themselves as the new ‘authorities’, forming the only bodies to hold society together. Bribery and violence consolidated their position. Critics and competitors were ruined, killed or co-opted into the profiteering new elite.
As food costs tripled and inflation wiped out nominal savings, Moscow became the global capital of inequality (the richest 10 per cent came to own 87 per cent of all the country’s wealth). Ordinary people began to long for their Soviet past. Their nostalgia was manipulated – by the compliant media – into a public acceptance of the restoration of Soviet political practices. The apartment building bombings perpetrated the myth that enemies surrounded Russia. Once again NATO was cast as an aggressor thrusting into Russia’s historical buffer zone.
Of course the propaganda worked because people needed something to believe. Russians were in trauma, their collective memory racked by historical suffering and guilt. There was no appetite for the Freudian idea – which had so transformed Germany after the Second World War – that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker until it is brought to light.
Hence in Russia there were no Nuremberg trials. No one accepted responsibility for the gulags, for carrying out Stalin’s orders, for KGB snatch squads, for snitching on a neighbour to save one’s own skin. Any idea of collective repentance vanished.
Instead, in their need for a new identity, Russians embraced a mythologised version of history: deifying Stalin, welcoming the restoration of the Soviet national anthem, printing school textbooks that glorified the Red Army and condemned its withdrawal from Germany as a ‘fatal mistake’. They accepted – or at least considered possible – untruths such as the idea that it was Gorbachev who destroyed the Soviet Union, that Ukrainian nationalists crucified ethnic Russian children and Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 had been pre-loaded with ‘rotting corpses’ in Amsterdam. Their sense of belonging was restored by old blood-and-soil nationalism.
‘DON’T LIE! DON’T PARTICIPATE IN LIES, DON’T SUPPORT A LIE!’ the novelist and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had written in an open letter after the publication of Gulag Archipelago. ‘In our country, 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 dozen to each man.’
No one listened.
At the start of the twenty-first century, many Russians – and then many Westerners – lost their appetite for the truth. They chose not to ask questions, preferring the easy choice of falsehood, of being fed simplistic solutions to complicated problems, of championing leaders who had – who have – the power to reshape reality in line with their stories.
Lies became the glue that held people together.
7
Stranger in Moscow
Kremlin means fortress. For almost a thousand years the Moskovskiy Kreml has been a bastion. Slavic tribes, grand dukes and tsars made it their citadel. Stalin envisioned it as the sacred heart of his supreme world capital. As the self-proclaimed ‘father and the sun of the nation’ he occupied its Corpus No. 1, until his wife Nadezhda shot herself on the building’s third floor. Once a boggy, thirty-metre-wide moat separated it from the bydlo – the rabble – of Moscow town. Today only the moat is gone.
I circled the fortress, stepped onto the trim grass verge and strode forward to touch the looming walls, until driven back to the pavement by a policeman’s whistle. In 1839 the French traveller Marquis de Custine described the sixty-eight-acre stronghold as a ‘satanic monument… that would suit some of the personages of the Apocalypse’. Its bricks, mortar and iconic spires still radiated a demonic air, and not only in my buzzing brain. The dead permeated the place. Myriad mortal remains festered in its earth and walls; in the bones of beheaded boyars and disgraced patriarchs, in the ashes of murdered servants and charred cosmonauts, in the dust of Bolshevik revolutionaries dumped by the hundred into mass graves. Lenin lay in his dark mausoleum, a fallen Soviet god in glass sarcophagus with right hand clenched into a fist. Stalin was here too, his cursed – yet revered – skeleton entombed beneath a stone bust with eyes downcast in false humility.
Beyond its walls, within which Uncle Joe had signed sheaves of death warrants, the body count defied reason: a million ‘enemies’ imprisoned or exiled during his first years in power, ten to twelve million peasants forced off their land in his murderous collectivisation programme, six or seven million starved to death during his artificial famine, yet more executed or dispatched to forced labour camps during the Great Terror, ten to twelve million innocents then relocated in the Second World War, and a final million arrested for ‘political crimes’ in the months before Stalin’s own death. All of them, all of Russia’s victims and victors, its duped and deified, haunted this place, magnifying its air of menace, casting a shadow over the city and the country.
‘Glory! Glory to the victorious people!’
In Red Square I stopped and stared, stopped and stared and shivered for – beneath those looming walls – Russian day trippers ate double-scoop chocolate ice-cream cones and laughed. In the summer sunshine I was shocked by their casual smiles, by their careless pleasure, by their forgetfulness.
It was then that my journey turned, in one serendipitous moment, in a rush of emotion and good fortune. I looked across Red Square and recognised the man I’d seen with the bird on the metro. He was scurrying around the edge of the crowd with his head down and shoulders hunched, hobbling like a wounded animal, wearing headphones.
I dropped my haunted thoughts as he vanished behind the newly revised State Historical Museum. I darted between school groups, organised tours and a pair of Lenins in characteristic flat cloth-worker’s cap. Next to them other unemployed actors were dressed as Stalin, smoking cherry-root pipes as they worked the happy-go-lucky crowd, posing for photographs and pocketing dollar-bill tips. I jogged on, elbowing aside Genghis Khan, the genocidal ruler preferred by Chinese visitors, but lost sight of the hobbling stranger in the crush at Resurrection Gate. On a whim I turned right towards Revolution Square. That was the nearest metro station and, I guessed, his destination.
Across the square, beyond Moscow’s last remaining monument to Karl Marx, stood the Hotel Metropol. Over the years Lenin and Trotsky had given speeches in its Great Hall. Bertolt Brecht, Mao Zedong and Marlene Dietrich had stayed in its luxury suites (although not at the same time). It was here that the Russian lyric poet Sergei Yesenin had declared his love for Isadora Duncan, and John Steinbeck worked with Robert Capa on A Russian Journal. I don’t know why I noticed the hotel now but as my eyes slid across its art nouveau facade, I spotted the man again, descending a flight of steps in front of it. With Putin’s Pecker still swelling my courage, I shot after him, back under ground and, at the head of the escalators, I reached out to tap his shoulder.