Missiles are a vital part of our mentality: ‘But we build missiles’, as Yuri Vizbor sang in a humorous song in answer to a foreigner’s criticism of the Soviet Union.[10] The missile is the carrier of the Russian myth, from the theorist of interplanetary travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, to the constructor of the first space rocket, Sergei Korolev; from the jet-propelled ‘Katyusha’ rockets of the Second World War to the submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile, Bulava. The missile is the child of the limitless Russian space, and it is also the state’s answer to the challenge of this space: a huge phallic symbol of might, in contrast to the horizontal and amorphous flat plain. The missile is the Russian dream; it compensates for the imperfections of life on earth by producing a reckless flight and the wide smile of the first cosmonaut, Yury Gagarin.
At the start of the twenty-first century, when Western countries consider parades of military hardware as an exotic anachronism, we remain one of those ambitious developing countries which still hold them. Columns of heavy technology rolling across Red Square – causing the icons to shake in St Basil’s Cathedral, the tea cups to tinkle in the shops in GUM, and the bones to quake of Stalin in the Kremlin Wall and of the holy mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum – put us on a par with India and Pakistan, with the oil monarchies of the Arab world, and with unbending North Korea, which, full of bluff and blackmail, from time to time shows the world its Taepodong ballistic missile. All these countries are united by a patriarchal picture of the world, which is seen through the prism of fear and strength. Instead of holding parades of inventors and Nobel laureates, of GPs and school teachers (who, according to Bismarck, were the ones who won the Franco-Prussian War), we choose to roll out our huge missile as our final and main argument.
For eighteen years, from 1990 until 2008, Russia lived without demonstrations of military hardware in the capital; tanks appeared on the streets only at the time of the coup in August 1991 and the street battles in October 1993.[11] Vladimir Putin brought the ‘heavy parades’ back to Moscow alongside other traditional attributes of sovereignty just as the curtain was coming down on his second presidential term at the start of 2008. Just three months after the Victory Parade on Red Square, Russian tanks were flattening South Ossetia during the war with Georgia – the first time for many years that Russia had carried out a military operation outside its borders. Of course, these were different tanks; but such a demonstration of strength is sooner or later put into practice.
Muscovites know about the costs of these ‘heavy parades’ – and not just through gossip: roads are closed on rehearsal days and there are restrictions on aircraft flying into and out of Domodedovo Airport because the air force is preparing for the parade. There is also the dismantling of the overhead wires for the trolleybus network and other electricity cables, the reinforcement of the ceilings of some metro stations and the checking of all the subways along the route taken by the columns of military hardware. Then, of course, there is the main part of the costs: the resurfacing of the roads. When the parade was revived in 2008, the Moscow Mayor’s Office costed the repair work to the almost one million square metres it covered at over a billion roubles (twenty-five million dollars). Today, the total cost for holding the parade, including clearing the clouds from the sky, is around forty to fifty million dollars.
All this leads me to have a theory about who it is that really wants the parade. It is not the military-industrial complex, trying to gain new orders; neither is it the patriotic general public; it is not even the state, in an attempt to scare the West. It is the Moscow road-builders, who have learnt in recent years how to extract billions from the city budget, by resurfacing the same stretches of road three times in a year. It is this sector, which has been given to Vladimir Putin’s friends, the oligarchs Gennady Timchenko and the Rotenburg brothers, who are most interested in the destructive procession of military hardware over Moscow’s streets. Because, in the first instance, patriotism equals business.
TANK INVASION
The biggest hit of summer 2015 in Russia were tanks! The season opened with the parade on Victory Day, 9 May, and the unveiling of the new Russian tank, the T-14 ‘Armata’ (which, it has to be said, broke down right opposite Lenin’s Mausoleum) and the excited discussion of this event in the media and on social networks. The parade passed off; but the love for military hardware did not diminish, and on 12 June, Russia Day, patriotic mothers in Tambov formed their own parade by making up their children’s pushchairs as plywood tanks, complete with guns, and dressing their children in soldiers’ tops and military side caps. On the same day, a tank-themed Disneyland for older children was opened in Kubinka, near Moscow. The military park, called ‘Patriot’, cost twenty billion roubles (three hundred million dollars), displays the latest types of weaponry, puts on tank shows and even has a facility for those who wish to sign up for contract service in the army.[12] Twenty thousand people visit ‘Patriot’ every day.
Traditional summer festivals and public holidays are transforming themselves before our very eyes into exhibitions of military hardware. In the last couple of years, the main Russian rock festival, Nashestvie (‘Invasion’), has evolved into a military-patriotic show – the main sponsor of which is the Russian Army. It has become Woodstock in reverse: in Russian rock, the culture of protest and pacifism has been replaced by conformity, militarism and a love for weaponry – and all paid for by the state’s money. The same has happened with the Grushin bard song festival. At a meeting of the festival’s ‘military council’ it was decided that ‘alongside the festival site there should be set up an interactive historical-patriotic and technical exhibition for young people’; in other words, those same tanks are coming to this festival, too.
What next? Holding the Usadba Jazz Festival in the Arkhangelskoye estate outside Moscow to the accompaniment of artillery salvoes? Afisha Magazine’s hipster picnic supplied by field kitchens? The Tchaikovsky Music Competition with a review of military orchestras? We see tanks on our streets and in our parks; they roll across our TV screens, from ‘Tank Biathlon’ (not seen anywhere else in the world of entertainment) to documentary films; on state TV channels, films have been shown justifying the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. These films showed with pride Russian tanks on the streets of Budapest and Prague.
The degree of military-patriotic hysteria in Russia today is reminiscent of the USSR in the second half of the 1930s: a time of physical fitness parades, mock-ups of tanks and airships, shaven heads and creaking Sam Browne belts. Once again, today the country gladly lines up wearing soldiers’ shirts, has its photo taken on a tank and is preparing for war. Russia is bombarded by a continual liturgy of ‘the Great Victory’; in the arts, the most important performance of all has become the military-patriotic show; and the war in Ukraine, with its columns of military hardware marching to the border, is simply a continuation of this endless military parade that has hypnotized the nation.
10
https://texty-pesen.ru/zato-my-delaem-rakety.html. Yuri Vizbor, ‘But we build missiles’, words and music (in Russian).
11
In August 1991, hard-liners in the Communist leadership tried to seize power to prevent the President, Mikhail Gorbachev, from signing an agreement with the constituent republics of the USSR, which, they believed, would lead to the break-up of the country. Their so-called coup lasted less than three days and had the effect of speeding up the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1993, there was a stand-off between the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and his opponents in Parliament. After fighting on the streets of Moscow had left dozens dead, Yeltsin took the decision to send in the tanks and bombard the Parliament building, where his opponents had barricaded themselves in.
12
The Russian (and before that, Soviet) Army used to be staffed by professional officers and conscript soldiers. Under President Putin a category has been introduced of ‘contract’ soldiers, who sign up for a specific period and who are paid, unlike conscripts.