The tank is one of the principal inventions of the age of steam and metal, a deadly miracle of the period of industrialization, a child of the twentieth century. It was born in the protracted battles in the trenches of the First World War, created almost simultaneously in Britain, France and Russia, and first saw fighting in September 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. Along with mustard gas, the aeroplane and the Maxim machine gun, it was yet another example of the technology of the mass society; a means of killing on an industrial scale. A little under thirty years later, armoured vehicles decided the outcome of the Second World War: two million men and six thousand tanks took part in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943.
World War Two was both the peak and the start of the decline of the might of the main battle tank. The Soviet Union continued to maintain a massive group of tanks in the centre of Europe, with the aim of following up a tactical nuclear strike by defeating NATO forces in a tank battle in the Fulda Gap in the middle of Germany, then pressing on to reach the English Channel within three days. But military planners were already moving on from the idea of the mass tank battles of the industrial era to the post-industrial technology of the ‘third wave’, as the futurologist Alvin Toffler called it: precision ‘smart’ weapons, rapid deployment forces, space and information technology, and cyber warfare.
At the same time, in the so-called Third World, low-intensity conflicts started to break out: ethnic and religious wars, in which tanks were superseded by fighters with Kalashnikovs who would simply melt into the landscape and be lost among the local population. The USSR experienced this in Afghanistan, where tanks were useless at exercising control over mountainous terrain. And then Russia had a similar experience in Chechnya, where tanks got stuck in the streets of Grozny and were easily shot up from within buildings. Today, Russian army tanks, with their identifying marks wiped out, cannot bring victory in the Donbass, leaving us to read the reports about Russian conscript soldiers being burnt to death in their armoured vehicles, like the twenty-year-old tankman from Buryatia, Dorzhi Batomunkuev. Tanks have not won a single battle for Russia in the past thirty years, but they still remain an important symbolic resource.
In reality, the tank has become one of the symbols of the new patriotism. One of the pillars of the regime is the Uralvagonzavod Tank Factory in Nizhny Tagil in the Urals. In 2012, the head of the assembly shop, Igor Kholmanskikh, promised to bring his workers to Moscow to sort out protesting intellectuals; and soon after this he became the Presidential Representative in the Urals Federal District. This was the factory where the ill-fated Armata tank was built, the one that broke down on the 9 May parade. Indeed, Putin’s Russia has slipped back to the Battle of Prokhorovka, one of the principal engagements on the Kursk Salient in 1943, and has got stuck in the age of geopolitics, mass armies, tank battles, annexation and occupation. Putin sees himself in the role of Stalin, standing over the map of Europe at Yalta or Potsdam in 1945, waving a hand over the territory to be taken over, deciding the fate of the world. And the post-Crimea majority in Russia believe in this archaic illusion, idolizing the Topol and Iskander strategic missiles, creating the cult of the ‘little green men’ (the special forces soldiers who seized Crimea in 2014), snuggling up to the saving armour of the tanks and the BTRs. Putin has created in Russia a nation at war, which has battened down the hatches and is looking at the world through the sights of a tank.
Early on the morning of 19 August 1991, I was woken by the ground shaking. The cups in the sideboard were ringing as they knocked against each other, and the glass in the windows was vibrating. Along the Kiev Highway, not far from our dacha, a column of tanks was heading at full speed for Moscow. Every television channel was showing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; then they started to show the press conference of the Emergency Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), which had seized power in the country. I quickly finished my breakfast and hurried into town.
Tanks were drawn up on Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin. The sun was shining, people stood around gawping, the militiamen looked bored; alongside the old building of Moscow University, the tanks did not look at all frightening. I went up to one, climbed on it and knocked on the hatch. To my surprise, it opened and, blinking against the sunlight, a puny blonde lad of about nineteen climbed out. ‘Have you got a fag?’ he asked uncertainly. I gave him a packet of cigarettes and one of the leaflets signed by the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, which called on the people to oppose the coup. Having thought about it, the tankman took the leaflet, climbed back into the tank and closed the hatch behind him.
One of those who helped with the defence of the White House, the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet (or Parliament), and who set up the headquarters of the protest, organized the radio link and prepared a possible escape route for Boris Yeltsin, was Reserve Lieutenant Sergei Shoigu. For this he received the medal, ‘Defender of a Free Russia’. How times have changed. Now Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu commissions research on how to oppose ‘colour revolutions’. In his words: ‘We do not have the right to repeat the situation of the collapse of 1991’ and ‘We must not allow the army to stand to the side, as happened in 1991.’[13] Apparently, the best guarantee against ‘the orange threat’ of revolution is to bring the tanks onto the square; in other words, create a Russian version of Tiananmen Square.
I think about how quickly time flies and the world changes. Since that moment in 1991, the USSR has collapsed, as has Yugoslavia; the USA has elected a black President; in the West they have defeated AIDS; the fourth industrial revolution is under way; Elon Musk is building electric cars and private spacecraft; Google is preparing to spread the Internet to the four corners of the world by satellite; and Russia… what of Russia? We are still sitting in the same old tank, playing at war and fighting with imaginary fascists.
Until someone knocks on the armour from the outside.
PURVEYORS OF THREATS
It was in our Basic Military Preparation classes in school that I first heard from our military teacher, a major of the reserve, the phrase, ‘the threat period’. It was at this point in our training sessions for nuclear war that we were supposed to grab our gas masks and march to the Civil Defence Headquarters.
It seems that we have reached that point now in Russia. From all sides we hear cries about threats: the Motherland is in danger! We are threatened in turn by all sorts of things: paedophiles, homosexuals, Westerners who adopt Russian children, ‘foreign agents’, ‘the fifth column’ of the Russian opposition and the US Sixth Fleet, Western ecologists and Russian separatists, the Kiev junta and the American State Department – even, in recent times, Western food products, against which Russia has introduced sanctions: beware Italian parmesan, Spanish ham, Polish apples and Norwegian salmon!
Every threat has its own lifecycle, its sell-by date. A couple of years ago none of these threats was even on the horizon. As a rule, threats appear out of nowhere (such as ‘foreign agents’ or Russian separatists). Suddenly there’s a concentrated attack in the media and the degree of public hysteria is raised. On a wave of popular anger, a draft bill is introduced into the State Duma, is instantly approved in three readings (sometimes without even the approval of the appropriate committee or a call from the government) and straightaway is signed by the President. After this, the hysteria immediately dies down and everyone quietly forgets about the threat. Who now remembers the ‘separatists’ whom we were fighting against at the end of 2013: Karelian, Siberian, on the Kurile Islands, North Caucasian, or in the enclave of Kaliningrad? Now, the separatists are held in high esteem – in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk – but these are the ‘right’ separatists in neighbouring Ukraine. From time to time we even forget about ‘foreign agents’, as a warning closing down a few NGOs. What remains on the battlefield are sick Russian orphans, some of whom have already died because foreigners were not allowed to adopt them; discriminatory, indeed fascist, anti-gay laws; blocked websites and banished media outlets. But no one remembers this now, because Russia has new enemies: Barack Obama, the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel…
13
https://ria.ru/20150619/1079035580.html. ‘Russian Defence Ministry Orders Research on ‘Colour Revolutions’ (in Russian), 19 June 2015.