Whoever controlled the media also controlled the country. ‘To take the Kremlin you must take television,’ Alexander Yakovlev, a good man and the main ideologist of Perestroika, once said.4 This was no metaphor, for the fiercest and often deadliest battles that unfolded in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Soviet disintegration were for the television tower. In the 1990s television and main newspapers were in the hand of pro-Western liberals who set out to project a new reality by the means of the media. But in the end they used the media to enrich themselves and to consolidate their power.
Television turned Putin, an unknown KGB operative, into Russia’s president within months of his eruption into the national consciousness. His first step as he settled in the Kremlin was to take control over television, only then could he seize the commanding heights of the economy. It has been the main tool of his power, his magic wand that substituted a TV picture for reality. As Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi once said: ‘What is not on TV does not exist.’ Putin took it further: things that did not exist could be turned into reality by the power of television. This alchemical power was displayed vividly both in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine.
I was in Crimea when ‘polite green men’, as Russian soldiers with no markings would soon be known, turned up under the pretence of protecting the local Russian population from Ukrainian ‘fascists’. In Sebastopol, a large crowd of people waved flags and danced along to old Soviet songs in celebration of their liberation. Yet the ‘enemy’ was nowhere to be seen. ‘We saw them on television,’ one man explained. Signals and reality swapped their places: words and images no longer signalled reality, rather reality was constructed to validate signals or, to put it simply, provide the right picture. ‘You furnish the pictures, I will furnish the war,’ William Randolph Hearst famously told his correspondent in Cuba in 1897. As is often the way in its history, Russia pushed this concept to its extreme.
Television has been the primary weapon in Putin’s ‘hybrid war’ against Ukraine. It has created a narrative that is enacted on the ground at the cost of thousands of lives. Television news has turned into a war serial. Yet those who conduct Russia’s aerial battles are not some crazy nationalists bent on the idea of world domination. Nor are they the helpless pawns in the hands of a despot. They are sophisticated and erudite men who started their careers during Gorbachev’s Perestroika and prospered in Yeltsin’s 1990s, but who now act as demiurges – the creators of reality. The purpose of the show they have staged is to perpetuate the power and wealth of Putin and his elite, of which they are a part. In doing so they have stirred the lowest instincts and intoxicated the country with the aggression, hatred and chauvinism that made Boris Nemtsov’s murder possible.
Shortly before Nemtsov was shot dead, he was handing out leaflets for an anti-war rally he had organized. But the rally turned into his funeral march. Two days after his murder, I walked with my wife and nine-year-old son among tens of thousands of Muscovites to the place where he was killed. It was a silent procession.
PART I
FIRST WAS THE WORD
ONE
The Soviet Princes
The Last Supper
Five minutes before 7 p.m. on 25 December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev walked briskly along a Kremlin corridor into a wood-panelled room teeming with photographers, technicians and cameramen to record his last speech as president of the USSR. Gorbachev sat at the desk, put down his papers and looked at his watch. ‘Oh, we still have plenty of time,’ he told the cameramen who were too overwhelmed with the historic significance of the moment to appreciate the irony. The Soviet Union was about to expire and Mr Gorbachev’s presidency with it.
Waiting for the clock to strike the hour, a large, grey-haired man energetically approached the desk and leaned over Gorbachev. ‘Don’t sign it now,’ he told him. ‘First you will [say] “I want to sign a decree relinquishing my duties”. The camera will show a close-up [of you signing it] and will then move back. Then you will start your speech.’1 The man was Yegor Yakovlev, the head of Soviet television and a former editor of Moskovskie novosti (The Moscow News) – the mouthpiece of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Yakovlev had persuaded Gorbachev that his final days in office should be recorded by Soviet and American television crews and turned into a documentary, Ukhod (Departure).
Yakovlev and Gorbachev had spent the past hour in Gorbachev’s office reminiscing about their mutual Soviet past. Now Gorbachev looked up at Yakovlev as if he was seeing him for the first time. Gorbachev leafed through the papers. ‘I’ll simply sign it now and we will move on,’ he said, turning abruptly to his press secretary for a pen and trying it on an empty sheet of paper. ‘A softer one would be better,’ Gorbachev said.2 The president of CNN, who had flown to Moscow to interview Gorbachev on his last day in office, held out his pen. Gorbachev accepted it and, with a journalist’s pen, signed his abdication from power. Nobody in the room noticed the moment. The clock struck 7 p.m. and Gorbachev began to speak. At first his voice sounded soft and forced, almost trembling, but gradually it became more controlled.
As one of the people present in the room recalled, once Gorbachev had finished speaking, Yegor Yakovlev rushed up to him. He was unhappy with Gorbachev’s intonation and suggested that the speech should be re-recorded. Gorbachev looked at Yakovlev in astonishment. It did not just seem tactless – it was absurd. A historic event was not a staged performance. It could not be repeated, just as the empire could not be restored or the clock turned back. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, to be replaced with the Russian tricolour.
The country that had come into being after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 had ceased to exist. Minutes later, Gorbachev passed the nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. Most of the television journalists who followed Gorbachev around in his last days were foreign – the Russian ones had lost interest. Bizarrely, the film about Gorbachev’s departure was shot by an ABC crew, with some assistance from Soviet television, and narrated by an American journalist, Richard Kaplan. This was partly the result of a difference in attitude between Russian and Western journalists towards Gorbachev, but also towards ‘historic’ media events. Soviet training did not leave space for the proclaiming of a historic event of this kind since historic events were defined by the party and the state. The Western media, which prioritized the personal over the ideological and had already elevated Gorbachev to a world figure, of course treated his resignation as a huge moment, even a tragedy. The Russian public did not see it in those terms.
A few hours later, in an empty and largely dark Kremlin, Gorbachev and five others gathered around a table in the Walnut Reception Room for a simple meal that resembled a wake or a last supper. Among them was Alexander Yakovlev, the chief ideologist of Gorbachev’s Perestroika.
The role played by Alexander Yakovlev in the dismantling of the Soviet Union was second only to Gorbachev’s. He was the spiritual leader of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. One of the most senior figures in the Soviet Politburo, Yakovlev was formally in charge of propaganda and ideology and in effect responsible for smashing both. He was also the author of Glasnost – the most successful part of Gorbachev’s reforms – which opened up the media by removing ideological constraints, knocking out one of the key elements of the Soviet construction.