Remaking the past
Putin understands that the post-Soviet spiritual void has to be filled. What he has to offer is a mix of history and religion, of enemies at the gates and enemies within the walls. History, from the ancient Rus to the more acceptable exploits of Stalin, is carefully and selectively reconstructed in schoolbooks and on TV screens to remind Russians of glories past and present: Gagarin without the Gulag. The great national holiday is no longer Red October (7 November 1917, when Lenin ousted the moderates through a coup) but 4 November 1612, marking the end of the time of troubles, dual rule and foreign occupation – in this case by Polish invaders.
The evil spirits of the Soviet past are being exorcised without too much noise. Both the Kremlin’s chief ideologist Victor Suslov and Metropolit Cyril emphasized that this day marked ‘the greatest historical event in the history of the nation’. A day of unity of the people exceeding in importance even 9 May 1945, the day of triumph in the Great Patriotic War, for four decades the unassailable pinnacle of Russian remembrance and Soviet self-congratulation. The Metropolit stated on TV: ‘What happened in the seventeenth century was worse than the events from 1941 to 1945 because in the Great Patriotic War the enemy did not occupy Moscow, Hitler did not set foot in Moscow, the Germans did not destroy the vertical of power, the enemy had not provoked internal struggle which would have paralysed our country. In those distant times everything was different, and that is why they are called the time of troubles.’4 November holds many lessons – not so much about the past but about the future, Putin style.
2007 was the year not only to celebrate the glorious resistance to Polish invaders but also to remember ninety years of the Bolshevik revolution and seventy years of the Great Terror. While the founding myth of Soviet rule was passed over in official silence and only the diehard communists found something to glorify, the memory of Stalin’s terror was hardly more visible. There were a few mourners who flocked to the silent dialogue between the Solovietsky-granite boulder in front of the Lubyanka and the resurrected monument to ‘Iron Felix’.
Ambiguity lingers on concerning the inheritance of Lenin, his standard statue still present in many a city square across the country, showing the way to a glorious future. Uncertainty surrounds the Russian pantheon, while Russian greatness is promoted as the unifying principle. All the Russian heroes qualify for their new role by triumphing over foreign enemies, like Alexander Nevsky over the Teutonic Knights, Ivan the Terrible over the Tatars, Peter the Great over the Swedes. Stalin in all of this is a great embarrassment – not displayed in stone or bronze but very much present in people’s hearts and minds. The Christ Redeemer Cathedral on Red Square in the centre of Moscow and Russia; torn down by Stalin in a brutal act of destruction was recreated, in concrete, under Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, with generous contributions from oligarchs who wanted to be in the good books if not of God Almighty then at least of the mayor. To this day there is no national, as opposed to local, monument to Stalin’s – and the NKVD’s – horrors, and there is not much chance that there will be one any time soon. The FSB, having risen from the ashes of the KGB, is not likely to press for an agonizing reappraisal.
In the absence of a national consensus on the meaning of seventy years of communist rule, an open and outspoken intellectual discussion will have to wait for a long, long time. Remembering the Great Terror and the Gulag archipelago will remain in the private domain, rather than the public sphere. What has survived is the memory of the victims – even among the New Russians one can suddenly come across the memory of a grandfather who was shot or an uncle who was taken away in the early hours never to be seen again. To ask who the perpetrators were and what they bequeathed to Russia’s present and future is not fashionable, and possibly hazardous to people’s health. There are books and films. It is not a forbidden discourse. But there is wide consensus, whether victims or victimizers, that it is best to forget. So the trauma lingers on.
Russia today is a country of mixed feelings. But, together with the timeless reassurance offered by religion, visibly embraced by Yeltsin and even more so by Putin, a narrative of Greatness is being celebrated in the form of both great suffering and great triumph. In pre-Revolutionary times the Tsar, the Orthodox Church and the people were united in a Holy Trinity. But this is a thing of the past, as twenty million Muslims within Russia would make it a recipe for disaster if the state were to embrace, wholesale, the Orthodox Church. Kremlin leaders have to manoeuvre carefully, having seen after 1990 that things can fall apart overnight. At present, an uneasy coexistence prevails, but with the numbers of ethnic Russians going down and the numbers of Muslims going up, not much more than uneasy coexistence is to be expected. Putin and his people are not interested in precipitating a showdown.
An empire no more
Nation building or state building? It is a very real dilemma. The ambiguity was born with the new Russia when the Soviet Union went the way of all flesh. Putin and whoever follows in his footsteps will have to avoid ever being forced into a decision which can only produce problems and, in fact, a crisis of state and society. How can one consolidate the state and the nation when there is no congruence or anything close to it? Ethnic and religious diversity, accentuated by the Islamic revival in the south, stands in the way of straightforward political doctrine. Compromises are dictated by reality from within and from without. Therefore the common denominator is rather Greatness than Russianness and, with regard to the present and future, standing together against the enemy.
‘Normalization’ is the new key term, announced in all directions and all dimensions. It sounds reassuring to most Russians, but what counts as normal is defined from above. This would also serve to bolster the Kremlin’s claim to ‘sovereign democracy’, as Putin calls the particular blend of authoritarianism and public acclaim developed under his presidency.
In this situation holding serious elections could amount to risking the whole blend of authority from above and democracy from below. United Russia, the ‘party of power’, as it was called, offered the most pragmatic of answers to an impossible question. In fact the December 2007 elections, or rather the confirmation of the party of power by not-so-secret ballot, were characterized by three striking political features.
Saviour of the nation
First, Putin had everybody guessing as to his own plans for the future: anything but a third term. Referring to the constitution and his respect for its letter, he repeated time and again that he would not be available for first manipulating the constitution and then accepting a third term. Was he bluffing? Or was he revealing his innermost feelings and aiming for otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity), as the Romans would have called a retreat from the Forum Romanum and the centre of the state to the margins of power? Putin even went so far as to indicate a certain philosophical weariness with having to nudge the country towards a post-Soviet promised land without being able to effect change at a stroke. At times, he seemed to prefer the presidential palace near Sochi to the Moscow Kremlin, running the presidency and the country from his more convenient southern headquarters. This period of serenity, pretended or genuine, was visibly over when the election campaign began to get under steam. Putin allowed United Russia to adopt him as their ‘national leader’ and number one without, however, joining the party. A strange ambiguity indeed, suiting a tsar more than a democratic politician. Meanwhile, United Russia was elevated to the rank of party of power.