Their year-zero approach meant that they had an antagonistic relationship with almost anything that occurred before 1917. In the new society they were building, the thousand-odd years of Russian culture and history that preceded the revolution had little use outside of an oversimplified kind of pedagogy: the tsars (with the honourable exceptions of Ekaterina and Peter the Great) were presented as murderers and fools who had existed only to advertise the benefits of socialism.
Lenin and his followers were avid for the complete transformation of society, and the comprehensiveness of their ambitions for intruding into the lives of its citizens was unprecedented. They were not content with simply seizing the means of production, or control of the government – the Communists wanted to mould a new kind of human, Homo Sovieticus.
This process began in Russia and over the next seventy years would be replicated across the whole of Eastern Europe, as well as much of Asia, Africa and Latin America. All political opposition was crushed and the public sphere was colonised by a totalitarian incarnation of socialism that crept into every corner of the people’s lives. The Bolsheviks went to war against the pillars of civil society: the church, private enterprise and a free-thinking intelligentsia. Peasant traditions – the stories and memories passed on from one generation to another, which had always been a significant element in the transmission of cultural information in Russia – were another object of great suspicion. The press became a vehicle for propaganda, holidays simply an opportunity to conduct vast parades celebrating the regime’s benevolence. The old ways of education were infiltrated, banned or simply left to rot, and in their place the state stepped in to ensure that it alone was responsible for forming the minds of future citizens. Textbooks were rewritten; teachers, priests and professors who were considered to be in possession of reactionary tendencies were replaced with pliable, ideologically correct substitutes; and all organisations that were not directly controlled by the Communist Party were proscribed.
Although the revolution created a range of opportunities for the poor and dispossessed that would have been unimaginable before 1917, it also introduced restrictions on the lives of many who had flourished under the tsars. With the gift for coining macabre neologisms that distinguished them, the Bolsheviks dismissed these so-called class enemies as ‘former people’. A ‘clean’ autobiography became ever more important. For instance, life was made extremely difficult for Christians. Thousands of churches were destroyed, including the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (which was replaced with a swimming pool), and, very pointedly, no places of worship were built in the many new towns and cities that were being created across the country. Society as a whole was permeated with a very negative attitude towards religion: you would see it on television, hear it on the radio, read it in books – an atmosphere that seeped through your skin.
And while most Christians were not subject to outright persecution, if you professed your faith too publicly you would find your life pinched by a thousand tiny restrictions. The children of a priest could not join the Komsomol or the Communist Party, for instance, and church services were largely suppressed. A friend of mine, who is now a bishop, was not allowed during his military service to carry weapons because he was a believer. Instead, he was sent to a special construction regiment whose ranks were filled with the dregs of society. He was regularly beaten by the drunken men who were supposed to be his comrades, and when he was not the subject of their abuse he suffered under his unit’s savage discipline. But he endured it.
It was only later that Soviet leaders came to understand that it is not possible to fight history. During the Great Patriotic War, many previously incarcerated clerics were released so that they could perform church services for people whose morale had been shot to pieces by the shocking and humiliating sequence of defeats suffered by the Red Army after the Nazi invasion. This was complemented by the introduction of military awards that explicitly referenced heroic figures from the country’s past, such as Alexander Nevsky, as well as the reappropriation of the term ‘Motherland’. Yet even with these manipulative compromises, most Russians were alienated from their past. For example, party leaders under Nikita Khrushchev sold off sacred land that had once belonged to the Russian Empire. They had no connection to it and thus felt little compunction at doing so. A huge site in the middle of Jerusalem, formerly the site of the Russian Religious Mission, was given up to the Israelis in return for a small amount of cash. Unable to pay in cash, the Israelis offered oranges instead. The freedoms that accompanied Khrushchev’s reign were not extended to the church, which instead endured a renewed bout of repression at his hands.
By the time I was born, traces of the pre-revolutionary attitudes to faith and nationhood had survived, but they were only fragmentary and diffident. The ambiguous position Russia enjoyed within the Soviet Union meant that many Russians had a somewhat confused national identity. For years, the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ had been elided. And the vigorous repression of traditional identities meant that generations grew up with an unclear notion of what it really meant to be Russian – much of our heritage, with the exception of those elements that the Bolsheviks had coopted for their own purposes, had been suppressed or allowed to decay.
My mother had to arrange for me to be baptised in secret, an event that was hidden even from my father. As a Communist Party member, he could not be implicated in this conspiracy; if it had been discovered that he knew anything then he was at risk of punishment. I would not even say my mother was particularly religious, but I think she understood the importance of tradition. We would visit churches when I was young, and we would pray, but our engagement was as much about maintaining a connection with our country’s customs and heritage as it was about religious observance.
But I did not, at least to begin with, understand the scale of our nation’s loss, for I had been born into a happy generation. We were the children of the Khrushchev thaw, a period of openness and calm that was in stark contrast to the violence and cynicism of High Stalinism. The country had been in almost permanent turmoil since 1917, but the Civil War, the rural nightmare of collectivisation and the savage and uncertain years of the purges and five-year-plans were memories now. A nation ravaged by one of the most brutal and destructive conflicts in history – that between 1941 and 1945 had lost more than 26 million citizens – had been able to send a man into space just sixteen years later.
Like everyone around me, I grew up convinced that socialism was inevitable and that, within my lifetime, it would reign throughout the world, bringing with it peace, equality and a better standard of living for everyone. There was a true sense of community and cohesion and we did not worry about the future. Like my peers, I felt, more than anything, free. We were encouraged to follow our dreams, and the country in which we lived provided us with the tools to achieve them.
From an early age, we were all participants in a comprehensive programme designed to introduce the entire population to the socialist principles that underpinned our society. At twelve, we joined the Pioneers and then, when we were into our teens, the Komsomol. We were taught how to be good citizens: to make friends, to help each other, to take special care to help the elderly, to respect our parents, to love our country, to try and contribute to the wellbeing of the communities in which we lived.