Andrei Sakharov, Russia’s great humanist and nuclear physicist, once argued that a country which violates human rights at home poses a threat to international security. In fact, it was partly Sakharov’s knowledge of the potential impact of his thermonuclear device that turned him into a human rights activist. Russia today has no Sakharov. It has propagandists who talk about the use of nuclear arms with a flippancy unimaginable in the Soviet period.
‘Russia can reduce America to nuclear ash,’ boasted Dmitry Kiselev – the anchor on the main television channel Rossiya. After Stalin’s death, the personal power of Soviet leaders was checked by the collective Politburo. Now, Kiselev said a decision to use nuclear arms ‘will be taken personally by Putin, who has the undoubted support of the Russian people’. In a documentary about the ‘return of Crimea’, Putin admitted he was ready to make such a decision if NATO forces tried to interfere in the peninsula.
The situation is more dangerous than the Cold War. The Soviet Union and America both emerged as winners from the Second World War and did not suffer from an inferiority complex. Russia’s current rulers, on the other hand, were shaped by what they consider to be a loss in the Cold War and by feeling rejected by the West despite all their fabulous wealth.
A mixture of hostility and jealousy has triumphed in Russia thirty years after Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War, opened up the country and proclaimed the supremacy of human values over the interests of the state. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, which is today deemed a fatal mistake in official textbooks, was greeted with approval not just by the West, but by Russia’s own people. The end of communism gave hope that Russia would become a normal country and join the civilized world. As a drama student in Moscow at the time I remember that feeling of hope.
The attempted communist coup in August 1991 seemed like a last spasm of the regime and its defeat was a celebration of freedom. On Christmas Day 1991 I watched the Soviet flag go down over the Kremlin towers and listened to Gorbachev bid farewell to the Soviet Union:
Destiny so ruled that when I found myself at the helm of this state it already was clear that something was wrong in this country… We had a lot of everything – land, oil and gas, other natural resources – and there was intellect and talent in abundance. However, we were living much worse than people in the industrialized countries… suffocating in the shackles of the bureaucratic command system. All the half-hearted reforms… fell through, one after another. This country was going nowhere and we couldn’t possibly live the way we did. We had to change everything radically…
Gorbachev could not save the country, but he paid tribute to what had been achieved:
Free elections have become a reality. Free press, freedom of worship, representative legislatures and a multi-party system have all become a reality. Human rights are being treated as the supreme principle and top priority… We’re now living in a new world. An end has been put to the Cold War and to the arms race… We have opened ourselves up to the rest of the world, abandoned the practices of interfering in others’ internal affairs and using troops outside this country, and we have been reciprocated with trust, solidarity, and respect. We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts.2
In 1992, a year after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I left to do my PhD in English Literature at Cambridge, grateful to Gorbachev for giving me the freedom to travel, study and write. A decade later, I returned to Moscow as a journalist, first with the Financial Times, then with The Economist – a foreign correspondent in my native land. By that time Russia had a former KGB man for a president who marked his first anniversary in the Kremlin by restoring the Soviet anthem and began to revise the Cold War order. In the process of ‘restoration’, Russia has not returned to the Soviet past; but it has arrived at a new junction. An old-fashioned nationalism – in neo-Stalinist costume – has become the most powerful force in Russian society, which threatens its own citizens and its neighbours.
How did Russia get from 1991 to 2015? Has a counter-revolution taken place in Russia? When did it happen and how did I miss it? Over the past quarter-century Russian thinkers have often been obsessed with trying to find a particular point in time at which the country went wrong: they viewed history as a tape that could be wound back and forth in order to identify that crucial junction, so that a different route could then be tried. Yet while the history was not reversible, it was not pre-determined either. There was no one event after the collapse of the Soviet Union that made Russia’s state today inevitable, and while it may be tempting to blame the state of Russia on Putin that would be missing the point. While he bears enormous responsibility for it, he is as much a consequence as he is a cause of Russia’s ills.
In this book I have sought an answer to the question of how Russia got here by following its story, narrative and dominant ideas over the past quarter-century, hoping to illuminate the turning points in its history. The main characters are not politicians or economists, but those who generated the ‘meaning’ of the country, who composed the storyline, who produced and broadcast it and in the process led the country from freedom to war. They are ideologists, journalists, editors, television executives: people in charge of the message and the media.
From the time of Gorbachev’s Perestroika onwards, journalists have been more than transmitters of ideas and designs conceived elsewhere. They became a source of these designs and ideas and, as such, they are responsible both for Russia’s emergence from authoritarianism and its descent back into it. This book is not the history of Russian media, however; rather, it is the story of the country they have invented.
Russia is an idea-centric country and the media play a disproportionately important role in it. As Ivan Pavlov, Russia’s Nobel Prize-winning physiologist famous for his work on conditional reflexes, observed in a lecture he gave in the cold and hungry Petrograd of 1918, the task of every mind is to comprehend reality accurately. But in Russia, he remarked, ‘we are mostly interested in words and have little concern for reality’.3 He blamed the mind of the intelligentsia – ‘the brain of the country’ – for leading Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution.
As with any utopia, communism disregarded reality and as a pseudo-religion it operated through words and images. It is not for nothing that Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who sacrificed the country to the communist idea, described himself as a ‘journalist’.
The Bolsheviks began by taking over the printing presses and guarding their monopoly over printed words. Words were used to conceal facts and construct an alternative reality. Lies and repressions were the two main pillars that upheld the Soviet system. Words justified repression. Repression enforced the words. It worked like an arch. The mind dealt with the disconnection between signals and real life by developing double-think – a condition described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the system which emerged ‘by the word’ also vanished by the word. The Soviet Union expired not because it ran out of money – after all, it could have turned into a North Korea – but because it ran out of words.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrestled with the Soviet system, knew there was only one way to defeat it: ‘Live not by lies’, as he wrote on the day of his arrest. The paradox was that the opening-up of the media could be achieved only by engaging in half-truths. But when reality burst through that opening in the form of live television broadcasts and uncensored publications, the Soviet Union crumbled.