What people remembered about the Soviet period did not, perhaps, bear much resemblance to what they had actually felt at the time. But memory, both individual and collective, is fickle, more dependent on the vantage point of the present than on the reality of the past. Viewed through the prism of the miserable 1990s, the previous decades took on a rosier hue.
Appeals to a visceral and intangible sense of the past, what the Russian emigre thinker Svetlana Boym labelled 'restorative nostalgia, can gain traction in any society: witness the taking back control' of Brexit, or Donald Trumps promise to 'Make America Great Again, with little explanation of when the exact period of previous greatness started and ended. In Russia, there were more specific historical hooks on which
to hang these appeals, most of all the Soviet collapse, which could be recast in peoples minds not as the juddering death of an untenable system, but as the nefarious dismantling of a great state by malevolent external forces and their helpers within.
This book charts Vladimir Putins mission to fill the void left by the 1991 collapse and forge a new sense of nation and purpose in Russia, though it is by no means a chronological history of the Putin era. The first section explores the curation of the past in the service of the present: the attempt to meld collective memory of the painful and complicated Soviet decades into something Russians could be proud of, particularly the elevation of victory in the Second World War to a national founding myth. Putin had no interest in resurrecting the Soviet system, but the sense of injustice over the way it collapsed would prove a powerful rallying point.
The later sections explain how this historical discourse, along with a parallel process in Ukraine, helped lead to the events of 2014, which left ten thousand people dead and changed the geopolitical map of Europe. By 2017, with record-high approval ratings at home, and much of the Western world looking towards Moscow with trepidation, Putin appeared to have succeeded in his quest to consolidate Russia, and turn a weak and traumatized country into a major world player once again. But with what collateral damage?
This book is not an apology for Putin s policies during his years in the Kremlin. Putins mission to unite Russia involved the manipulation of history and an aggressive stifling of dissent; the system he constructed also allowed his old friends and inner circle to become fantastically rich. But neither is the book an anti-Putin polemic. Putin, after all, is only one of a large cast of Russians featured in these pages. He too had his moment of personal trauma as the Soviet Union collapsed, which strongly influenced his later worldview and actions. Putin was, to some extent, the director of the post-Soviet story for modern Russia, but he was also very much a character in it.
11
There is a rather well known story about a lieutenant colonel of the KGB, who in 1989 was stationed in the East German city of Dresden.
His was just one of millions of individual experiences that would remain seared into the memories of those who had lived them for years or decades to come. But for the future direction of Russia, this particular one would have great resonance.
The thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Putin, watched nervously as angry crowds stormed Dresden's huge Stasi compound in December 1989. Overrunning the offices of the East German secret police, the crowds moved on to the KGB headquarters, the inner sanctum. Putin called for armed backup to protect the employees and sensitive files hidden inside, but was told there was no help on the way. 'Moscow is silent,' said the voice on the line. He had no choice but to go outside and lie to the crowds that he had heavily armed men waiting inside who would shoot anyone who tried to enter. The bluff worked, the mob dissipated, and the KGB's files on informers and agents remained safe. But the psychological scars ran deep, at least in Putin's own telling a decade later.
As delighted crowds in Berlin tore down the wall separating the two Germanies and drank in the new atmosphere of freedom, a shocked Putin set to work destroying the compromising documents of the KGB, an organization that had until recently seemed omnipotent. It would be another two years before the Soviet Union collapsed for good, but the way Putin recalled it later, his personal moment of realization that the game was up for the Communist superpower came that day in Dresden. He felt he was watching one of the largest and most powerful empires the world had ever seen unravel in the most pathetic and humiliating way. 'I had the feeling that the country was no more,' Putin remembered. 'It had disappeared.'1
It might seem strange that Putin would mourn the passing of the Soviet Union, given his life trajectory in its wake. Like millions of Soviet citizens, Putin grew up in spartan, even squalid conditions, his whole family crammed into one room of a communal apartment that had no hot water. Having worked his way up to what was only a middling position in the KGB by the late 1980s, he did remarkably well out of the decade following the Soviet collapse, inserting himself into the St Petersburg mayoral office at a time when being part of the government meant proximity to contracts and financial flows. In 1996 he was called
to the presidential administration in Moscow, and by 1998 he was made head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB.
In a few short years, Putin had made a spectacular rise from mid- ranking cog in the periphery to overlord of the whole sprawling organization. A year later, the ailing Boris Yeltsin made Putin his prime minister and, ultimately, successor. The 1990s were good to Putin, and he proved far more adept at rising through the post-Soviet system than he had the Soviet one.
But he never forgot that moment of helplessness in Dresden, and however well he did personally from the Soviet collapse, he was deeply angered by the manner in which the country had disintegrated. He seemed to mourn not the human cost or material tribulations, but the national humiliation of a powerful state simply imploding. He later claimed to have had a sense for some time that the collapse of Soviet power in Europe was inevitable. 'But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That's what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.'2
Even those who had been far less committed to the Soviet cause than Putin felt these pangs of regret at how the end of the seventy-four- year political experiment brought the country itself tumbling down with it. 'I was delighted that the end of Communism had come about,' Alexander Voloshin, chief of staff to Yeltsin and then to Putin, once told me. 'But the Soviet Union was my homeland. That was different. How can you be happy about your homeland collapsing?'
During Putin's early years in Moscow serving Yeltsin, he saw up close how weak the country had become. The Russian Army fought a miserable and bloody war to stop the southern republic of Chechnya from seceding, costing tens of thousands of lives and ending in de facto defeat for Moscow. Russian society was in turmoil, goods scarce, and the majority of the populace impoverished.
On the international stage, things were little better. In 1998, when President Bill Clinton called Yeltsin to tell him the United States was considering air strikes on Serbia, Yeltsin was furious. He screamed 4NeVzyCid'—something like 'it is impermissible!'—several times down the phone at the US president and then hung up. The bombing raids went ahead anyway. A country that had only recently been one of the
world's two major lodes of power was now utterly powerless to stop bombs falling on the capital city of an ally. American diplomats and politicians were constantly warned during the Yeltsin era that such a state of affairs would not last forever.