The generalized admiration of the president became self-reinforcing, giving rise to a stiflingly conformist climate in which it became outlandish as well as pointless to criticize the authorities. This shift was rendered all the more effective by the postmodern capaciousness of the broader culture: ideas and beliefs were mashed together in wildly incongruous combinations that made their substance hard to pin down, and hence difficult to argue with or oppose. Soviet nostalgia blended with folksy echoes of medieval Muscovy; Western philosophy and critical theory were digested alongside Russian nationalism and religious texts. A ‘sickening aesthetic atmosphere’ had taken hold of the country, according to the leftist poet Kirill Medvedev, who described ‘the average cultural consciousness’ as ‘a putrid swamp – half-Soviet, half-bourgeois – in which Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Josef Stalin, the pop star Alla Pugacheva, and Jesus Christ all lie side by side, dead and decomposing’.{52}
There was also, of course, a material basis to the cultural consensus behind Putin. The burst of economic growth in the 2000s created a glossy, flashbulb-lit world of consumption, evoked by the borrowed English word ‘glamur’. There was an ever greater need for PR experts, salespeople and advertising gurus, while the arrival of the web created new positions of its own: programmers, webmasters, bloggers. Many of these posts were poorly paid and insecure, and most ‘culture workers’ of the 2000s had to take on other jobs to make ends meet. But it seemed as if the predictions made in the 1990s – that the market would slot people into steadily more specialized, ‘professional’ niches – were being partially realized. As Kirill Medvedev put it, ‘there is no intelligentsia in Russia any more. There are just fragments, moving around Moscow and the other large and smaller cities, remnants, shards’.{53}
Yet although the intelligentsia seemed to be dissolving as a distinct social category and self-conscious group, traces of its former historical function and identity lingered. A handful of cultural figures and intellectuals became increasingly uneasy with the Putin regime, and in their criticisms they laid claim, in an attenuated form, to the Russian intelligentsia’s oppositional role. Anna Politkovskaia was among the courageous few who objected to the slaughter unleashed in Chechnya. Meanwhile others grew disenchanted with the tightening of Kremlin controls on the media, the rising corruption, and the hostile climate generated by various official campaigns – against ‘terrorism’, against NGOs working as ‘foreign agents’, and so on.{54}
It is striking, too, that within Russian society as a whole a series of moral-ethical assumptions about the intelligentsia persisted. In a 2008 survey carried out in the provincial city of Voronezh, more than half of respondents named ‘honesty’ and ‘cultured behaviour’ as qualities essential to a member of the intelligentsia – ahead of educational qualifications, and far ahead of professional background. Hardly any, though, questioned the intelligentsia’s existence.{55} The Russian intelligentsia of the 2000s, in fact, seemed to inhabit parallel realities: in one, it had been replaced by a loose assortment of people holding ‘creative’, academic, technical and service-sector jobs; in the other, it retained some sense of a collective identity and purpose. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it was simultaneously dead and alive. In this, its experience was representative of the broader parallelism evoked earlier: the persistence of older ideas, attitudes and expectations alongside new ones generated by the arrival of the market.
The continued presence of Soviet social structures helped to mute discontent across Russian society during the 1990s. More than an accidental, temporary overlap, the coexistence of old and new played an active role in enabling the post-Soviet order to take shape; the past gave a hidden subsidy to the present. In the 2000s, this parallelism continued to pay out for Putin. Its effects were less obvious than those of Russia’s economic upturn in the new century, which brought millions relief after a decade of deprivation and crisis, and which clearly accounted for much of the regime’s lasting popularity. But the Putin government also benefited from the persistence of the past, in ways that become more apparent when we look at the emergence of a ‘new middle class’.
By the mid-2000s Russia was only one of a number of countries thought to be experiencing a similar ‘rise of the middle class’. The BRICs, for example – Brazil, Russia, India and China – between them supposedly had a ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ some 400 million strong.{56} According to the mainstream press and an extensive political science literature, these middle classes not only drove consumer spending, they would also act as a stabilizing political force in future, blocking the extremes of left and right.[7] The Russian political elite clearly shared these assumptions: United Russia chairman Boris Gryzlov said in 2005 that the party would be ‘relying on the middle class and acting in the interests of this class, of those who need no revolutions – either financial, economic, cultural, political or orange, brown, red, or blue’. Vladislav Surkov hailed the middle class as the country’s ‘silent heroes’, while Putin called for measures that would expand its ranks to between 60 and 70 per cent of the population by 2020.{57}
Was there any sociological basis to these ideological fantasies? The empirical evidence was puzzling, to say the least. Between 2000 and 2008, several Russian scholars tried to gauge the size of the country’s middle class using various objective criteria – income, occupational status, level of education – and also the purely subjective one of how people chose to define themselves. Measured by income alone, the middle class was thought to comprise a fifth of the population; by education alone, the figure was in the range of 22 to 29 per cent. Based on how respondents defined themselves, the figure rose to between 40 and 80 per cent. But when all the different measures were used together, it dropped to between 7 and 20 per cent. Depending on the criteria used, then, Russia had a middle class consisting of somewhere between 7 and 80 per cent of the population.{58}
What was going on? Russia, of course, is far from the only place where the ‘middle class’, when subjectively defined, accounts for the majority of the population. In the US, for instance, the term essentially refers to what in other countries would be called the working class. In Russia, there are other factors that produce a similar effect. Firstly, consumption patterns rather than property ownership are held to be most decisively indicative of class status: spending on items like cars, white goods, clothes, imported high-end electronics, or on leisure activities like foreign holidays and restaurant meals. The emphasis on consumption means that the threshold for joining the Russian middle class is relatively low: acquiring a refrigerator or even a car is significantly more affordable than buying an apartment. State entities relying on these kinds of measurements effectively boosted the numbers; for example, the state insurance company, Rosgosstrakh, defined the middle class as those able to buy their own car.{59} It’s not hard to see why the authorities would do this, given that the size of the middle class was at the time widely seen as a measure of governmental success. But, of course, it wasn’t just the state that saw middle-classness as a desirable status. It was at the heart of the whole ideological climate and culture, which made the middle class the ‘leading class’ of the day, just as the proletariat had been in the Soviet Union.
7
The actual historical experience of interwar Europe, when the middle classes of several countries were among the most energetic supporters of fascism, was apparently neither here nor there.