The reasons why the people love Brezhnev are clear. He falls into that archetype of the kindly old uncle, who lets you get away with mischief and gives you sweets. Brezhnev was the very embodiment of the Russia dream of khalyava:[4] living stress-free, changing nothing and not rocking the boat. That was how the country lived: we squandered the interest from the imperial inheritance and took out credit on the next generation (indeed, so generously, that to this day we are paying for the illusory well-being of the Brezhnev years), tearing off with a certain melancholy the pages of the calendar: Miners’ Day, Militia Day, Day of the Paris Commune.[5]
Brezhnev’s popularity in folklore, and even a certain sympathy brought out by jokes about his weaknesses, forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (for example, there is a joke that he once mistook Margaret Thatcher for Indira Gandhi because it said so in his speaking notes), bears witness to the deep resonance he had with the Russian folk element, with the inescapable entropy of the Russian character. Gorbachev, on the other hand, was very untypical for Russia. It is no surprise that Margaret Thatcher immediately liked him. He didn’t drink, he was charming and loquacious (in Russia, people who speak well automatically make people suspect them of being insincere); and the main thing was that he was unusually alive, in contrast to the iron faces that we were used to seeing in the presidia and on the front pages of the newspapers. Gorbachev smashed the stereotypes and had an inexplicable – and for Russia a totally unusual – desire for change. He could simply have sat tight in his chair, perhaps remaining General Secretary to this very day, receiving delegations and awarding himself medals; but for some reason he felt the need to move this chair, and with it the whole power structure. Perhaps it was because he understood that this throne and the whole palace of Soviet power looked like a ridiculous anachronism in a world that was getting faster and more complex, where change was going to be the only way to survive.
In Ivan Goncharov’s classic novel Oblomov (1859), there are two central characters: the dreamy and inactive landowner, Ilya Ilych Oblomov, and his friend, a German on his father’s side, the practical, strong-willed and active Andrei Stoltz. Brezhnev and Gorbachev: here we have Oblomov and Stoltz, two faces of Russian power, the immovable-patriarchal, and the reform-minded, Peter-the-Great-like, clean-shaven, foreign face. Anthropologists confirm that there are two types of nations: those that adapt to their surroundings and those that change them. The first group includes most of the Asiatic countries and, clearly, Russia. The second type are cultures of the West – Faustian, predominantly Protestant, with a thirst for action and change. Brezhnev responded to the traditionalist aspirations of the population: let’s just leave everything as it was. Gorbachev, like many Russian modernizers, represented the second group, which was why he wasn’t accepted by the people. They don’t love Gorbachev because he was different, because he gave us freedom. But we hadn’t known for such a long time what to do with it, and, as a result, we gave it back to the state.
Once again today we are living in Brezhnev’s kingdom of simulation and self-deception, falling into insanity, allowing the years to slip by, years that have already turned into decades, calling up the ghosts of the Stalinist and late-Soviet eras. Putin the reformer, Putin the German, Putin like Stoltz, who presented himself not as a tsar but as a manager (‘providing services to the people’, as he described his role in the 2002 census): all this came to an end in 2003 when he arrested Khodorkovsky. A typical Russian timelessness settled over the country, with the round Botox face of the state above it, which reflects not even Oblomov’s absent-mindedness, but the indifference of a Chinese Bogd Khan, with a desire to change nothing. As the political scientist, Stanislav Belkovsky, recognized: ‘Putin is the ruler of inertia. You can never demand that such a person should move history onwards.’ Under Putin, just like under Brezhnev, the country is simply standing still, while history moves on. How such a situation ends we know only too well.
Brezhnev probably deserves his plaque on the wall. A whole generation grew up under him, and you can’t wipe out that memory. But Gorbachev also deserves a memorial, as a man who decided to make changes. He was the one who first threw open the windows in that great musty henhouse known as the Soviet Union. In the cold light of day, it turned out that the henhouse was built crookedly and awkwardly, and in the ensuing panic it collapsed. The fact that it fell apart was not Gorbachev’s fault; it was the fault of those who planned and built the henhouse in the first place. But Gorbachev’s merit is that this miserable project, which was not fit for purpose, was closed down, and collapsed into a multitude of national stories with the minimum of victims (if, for example, you compare it to the collapse of Yugoslavia), without major wars, uprisings, starvation or nuclear incidents.
Even more important still is that Gorbachev remained a democrat to the end. He didn’t go down the route of authoritarian changes and didn’t stage a Soviet Tiananmen (although a few individual cases of breaking up protest meetings in Vilnius in January 1991 and before that in Alma-Ata in December 1986 and in Tbilisi in April 1989 occurred during his rule). Tanks were brought onto the streets not by Gorbachev, but against him, in August 1991, but they turned out to be as fake and powerless as the dying system that had sent them. Gorbachev has passed into history not as a reformist dictator such as Pinochet or Park Chung-hee, but as a reform-minded idealist. His attempt to preserve the system, by building ‘socialism with a human face’ in the spirit of the Prague Spring of 1968, failed. But paradoxically, that failure cleared the way for the new institutions that followed and in which we live now; it allowed Russia to get in the last carriage on the train leaving for the twenty-first century. Without Gorbachev, there would have been no Yeltsin, no Putin, no post-Communist Russia. At some point, Russia will realize this and put up a monument to Gorbachev, and name streets, schools and airports after him. But that’s not going to happen any time soon. For now, the majority of my fellow citizens prefer to live with the fairytales of kindly old uncle Brezhnev, under whose bushy eyebrows they slept so sweetly.
A BEAR OF A MAN
He was an awkward fellow. He was too big, too bulky, even the sweep of his arms was too wide. And he remains awkward, even in death: awkward for the current leadership (it’s difficult to separate yourself from someone who personally put you in power), and awkward for the majority of the population, for whom (along with Gorbachev) he is seen as equally responsible for the collapse of the greatest country in the world, the mythical USSR. Boris Yeltsin died more than ten years ago, but he remains a figure who worries us, annoys us and bursts out of the frame. It’s as if he’s an illustration to the words of Dmitry in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Yes, man is broad, too broad indeed. I’d have him narrower.’[6]
4
5
For a description of ‘The Red Calendar’ and the special days, see Part I, note 21. The type of calendar referred to is printed as a block on cheap paper, with each day being torn off as you go through the year.