Across Russia's multiple time zones, there were endless towns and villages where similar scenes played out. In Alexandrovsk, a small town on Sakhalin island in the far east of Russia, an eight-hour flight from Moscow followed by an overnight train, the roads were made of mud and stray dogs howled relentlessly. Alexandrovsk's only point of interest was a museum that marked Anton Chekhov's visit there a century previously, after which he had written at length about what a miserable hellhole it was. Half the town seemed to be drinking spirt, chemical ethanol, because they could not afford vodka. A friendly drunk explained the drilclass="underline" you had to exhale fully before drinking; if you didn't, it would burn a hole in your oesophagus. Millions of Russians drank ethanol, window cleaner, perfume, or other industrial spirits that were marketed more cheaply than vodka. There was both an economic and an existential sense of hopelessness, interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
IV
Putin's task, as he took over from Yeltsin, was to imbue this vast, creaking country with a new vitality. Shortly before he became acting
president on the eve of the millennium, Putin wrote a lengthy, programmatic text about the challenges facing Russia. It touched on poverty, social upheaval, and other human issues, but its main thrust was a worry about the health of the Russian state rather than that of its people. Russia, Putin wrote, was undergoing one of the most difficult periods in its long history.
'For the first time in the past 200-300 years, Russia faces the real danger that it could be relegated to the second, or even the third tier of global powers,' the article's conclusion warned. Tn order for this not to happen, we will need a huge mobilization of all the intellectual, physical and moral strengths of our nation. We need unified, constructive work. Nobody else will do it for us. Everything now depends on our ability to understand the level of danger, to unite, and to set about carrying out the long and difficult task.'6
The poverty and divisions of the 1990s were a symptom of this broader malaise, Putin believed. The health of the state was the most important thing: if Russia could regain the global importance the Soviet Union once possessed, then people's well-being would automatically improve. Putin's article tapped into a long line of Russian political philosophy that fetishized the strength of the state and sovereignty.
To facilitate this renaissance, Putin faced the enormous task of creating a sense of nation and national pride among Russians. At his inauguration, on 7 May 2000, Putin explicitly laid out the mission ahead of him as he saw it: T consider it my sacred duty to unite the people of Russia and to gather citizens around clearly defined tasks and aims, and to remember, every minute of every day, that we are one nation and we are one people. We have one common destiny.'
But what was this common destiny, and what was this new 'first- tier' Russia meant to look like? Should it be a neo-Soviet superpower, and strive to resurrect as much as possible of the Soviet past? Or was the Soviet period, in fact, a horrible error and thus the new Russia should be a continuation of the tsarist empire, with its triple ideology of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality? Was Russia a bastion of 'traditional values' in opposition to a decadent West? A 'Eurasian' power that could bridge the gap between East and West? Or simply a 'normal' European nation, albeit one of dramatically bigger size than
the others and with a more traumatic past, that could in time integrate with the democracies of the continent's western half?
Putin, and those around him, at various times appealed to elements of all these visions of Russia. Foreign leaders who met Putin in the early years say he floated the possibility that Russia could join the EU at some stage. In one of his first interviews in 2000, he suggested Russia might even become part of NATO one day.7
The Russian president was a political chameleon in both domestic and foreign policy, but whatever the changes in backdrop and mood music, his various political incarnations were all designed with the broader goal in mind of restoring what he believed to be Russia's rightful place on the global stage, lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. If the West would play by Putin's rules, the quest to regain status as a first-tier nation could be achieved through cooperation. If it would not, confrontation would be required.
v
Leaders of all stripes, faced with the task of rejuvenating wounded nations, have looked to history to do so. Back in 1882, the French thinker Ernest Renan recognized that for a sense of nation to take hold, shared glories and common suffering were far more important than customs posts or heavily guarded borders.
The fifteen nations to emerge from the Soviet collapse all took different approaches to dealing with their pasts as they built new national identities. In the three Baltic states, where Soviet rule had been imposed only in 1940, and large swathes of the populations had always been strongly antipathetic to rule from Moscow, new governments worked feverishly to undo the Soviet legacy. Museums opened that equated the Soviet period with the Nazi occupation. The old KGB archives were opened, and monuments erected to the victims of the occupying regime. The national narratives saw 1991 as an unequivocally celebratory date: the end of oppression, the restoration of a past, interrupted independence, and a return to the European family.
In Belarus, by contrast, President Alexander Lukashenko offered his people the limited but comfortable 1970s version of Soviet power: high on tractor production and agricultural targets, low on political
freedoms. It was as if nothing had changed; 1991 was an irrelevance. In the new ethnic republics of Central Asia, where there was little in the way of pre-Soviet ethnic-based statehood to hark back to, new national identities were manufactured that traced the nations back centuries on semi-historical or pseudo-historical grounds. Lenins were replaced by portraits of the smiling, geriatric local autocrats, just as ubiquitous and just as hagiographic. The Soviet past was quietly excised from the official narrative, neither demonized nor nostalgized, a historical elephant in the room that was simply ignored, despite the fact that the dictatorial leaders were all former party bosses in a new nationalist guise.
The only two of the fifteen countries not to come up with a coherent, unifying national-historical narrative in the first two decades after the collapse were Russia and Ukraine. The events of 2014—the revolution in Kiev, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the war in eastern Ukraine—were, at least in part, a clash between competing Russian and Ukrainian attempts to transcend the conundrum of 1991 and mint new national identities.
By the time Putin took over, Russian attitudes to the Soviet past were ambivalent and confused. Back in 1991, crowds in Moscow had toppled the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police that would later be called the NKVD and then the KGB), which stood outside the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters in central Moscow. Leningrad reverted to its imperial name, St Petersburg. But after this initial flurry of activity, the disposal of the iconography of the Soviet past came to a halt. Most cities still had a Lenin striking a stirring pose in their main squares; many streets retained their Soviet names. There were Lenin, Marx, Komsomol, Red Partisan, and Dictatorship of the Proletariat streets across the country. Russia was like a party host who awoke the morning after, started making a cursory effort to clean up the mess all around, but after a while simply gave up and slunk back to bed to nurse its hangover.
The visual representation of history was dizzying and disorientating. Lenin's mummified corpse remained on display in a glass case inside his marble mausoleum; stern soldiers watched over visitors to ensure they treated the embalmed Soviet leader with respect (no talking, no hands in pockets). Meanwhile, on the other side of Red Square, the new rich dropped obscene amounts of money in the upmarket boutiques of a flashy department store. The last tsar and his family were made saints by the Russian Orthodox Church, and yet a Moscow metro station still bore the name of Pyotr Voikov, the man who was directly responsible for organizing their execution.