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By that time Russia had a former KGB man for a president who marked his first anniversary in the Kremlin by restoring the Soviet anthem and who began to bring back the Cold War order.
Old-fashioned nationalism in neo-Stalinist garb has become the most powerful force in Russian society, threatening its own citizens as well as its neighbors.
The production, which is still being performed in Moscow, is a reminder that there was a time when patriotism did not translate into xenophobia, when pragmatism did not justify dishonor and when irony did not rule out love for your country.
There was no one single event after the collapse of the Soviet Union that made Russia’s current condition inevitable, and while it may be tempting to blame everything on Putin, that would be missing the point. While he bears enormous responsibility, he is as much a consequence as a cause of Russia’s ills.
Russia is an idea-centric country, and the media play a disproportionately important role in it.
But in Russia, he remarked, “we are mostly interested in words and have little concern for reality.”3
As with any utopia, Communism disregarded reality, and as a pseudo-religion, it operated through words and images. It is not for nothing that Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who sacrificed the country to the Communist idea, described himself as a “journalist.”
The Bolsheviks began by taking over the printing presses and guarding their monopoly over printed words. Words were used to conceal facts and to construct an alternative reality.
The Bolsheviks began by taking over the printing presses and guarding their monopoly over printed words. Words were used to conceal facts and to construct an alternative reality. Orwell 1984
The Soviet Union expired not only because it ran out of money but also because it ran out of words.
Whoever controlled the media also controlled the country. “To take the Kremlin, you must take television,” Alexander Yakovlev, the main ideologist of perestroika, once said.4
Television has been the main tool of his power, his magic wand that substituted a counterfeit image for reality. As Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi once said, “What is not on TV does not exist.” Putin took this one step further: things that did not exist could be turned into reality by harnessing the power of television. This alchemical power was displayed vividly both in the annexation of Crimea and in the war in Ukraine.
“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” William Randolph Hearst famously told his correspondent in Cuba in 1897. As is often the way in its history, Russia pushed this concept to its extreme.
They are sophisticated and erudite men who started their careers during Gorbachev’s perestroika and prospered in Yeltsin’s 1990s but who now act as demiurges—creators of reality.
The president of CNN, who had flown to Moscow to interview Gorbachev on his last day in office, held out his pen. Gorbachev accepted it and, with a journalist’s pen, signed his abdication from power. Nobody in the room noticed the moment.
The country that had come into being after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 had ceased to exist. Minutes later Gorbachev passed the nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin.
The Western media, which prioritized the personal over the ideological and had already elevated Gorbachev to a world figure, of course treated his resignation as a huge moment, even a tragedy. The Russian public did not see it in those terms.
Yakovlev had mediated an eight-hour-long meeting between Gorbachev and Yeltsin at which power was transferred from the last president of the USSR to the first president of Russia. Yakovlev recalled the resolute step of Boris Yeltsin as he walked down the long Kremlin corridor “as if on a parade ground” (“It was the walk of a victor”) and the weakness of Gorbachev. When Yakovlev walked into Gorbachev’s office, he found him lying down on a sofa.
The irony was that it was Gorbachev and Yakovlev who had set this history in motion.
As Khrushchev told Soviet writers in 1957, “Just as a soldier cannot fight without ammunition, the party cannot conduct a war without print. Print is our main ideological weapon, and we cannot pass it into unreliable hands. It must be kept in the most reliable, most trustworthy hands which would use this weapon to destroy the enemies of the working class.”
The Soviet collapse was determined not so much by the economic meltdown, by a revolutionary uprising in the capital, or by a struggle for independence on the periphery of the empire (at least, not directly) as it was by the dismantling of lies. Without lies, the Soviet Union had no legitimacy.
As Yegor himself put it, “This was a completely unique period in the history of the Russian, and possibly world, press. What we wrote was aimed at liquidating this state. At the same time all the newspapers were fully subsidized by the state.”7
Like the sixteenth-century Protestants in Europe, they rose up against the priests who had inserted themselves between God and the people and who, they believed, had corrupted his teaching.
His evolution from Soviet apparatchik to liberal freethinker was perhaps the most deliberate of any high-ranking Soviet official, Gorbachev included: “I came to hate Lenin and Stalin—these monsters who had cruelly deceived me and crushed my romantic world of hopes.”10
From the very beginning of the Bolshevik rule in 1917, words were nationalized and guarded by the party. Nothing could be printed without its permission. The first “black” lists of banned books were compiled by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and included the Bible as well as many children’s books. In the 1930s a librarian was tried and exiled for issuing philosophical works that were not even banned but that simply did not fit into the Marxist view of the world. Libraries had “closed” sections and special permission was required for reading books there.
The fear of the written word penetrated deep into the system. The secret police who carried out arrests and executions were specifically banned from issuing written statements to the relatives of those who were murdered. The relatives could only be told verbally (lied to) that a father, a wife, a son, a sister, had been sentenced to “ten years without the right to correspondence” when he or she was, in fact, dead.
Only in 1989—three years into perestroika—did the KGB allow the true dates and information about executions to be printed in formal documents and death certificates.11 The letters of those who were not executed but sent to the gulag were censored. Words equaled life. The denial of words equaled death.
Words, like people, were kept behind the iron curtain. Publishing a book in the West without the permission of the state was considered no less a crime than illegally crossing the frontier without a special “exit” visa.
In the West, Gorbachev is often seen as a visionary historic figure solely responsible for the liberalization of the Soviet Union. In fact, he was a man of his generation, which determined his sensibilities and choices.
“Day and night we live in an orgy of death. They keep talking in the name of some ‘bright future’ that will supposedly issue forth from this satanic gloom. There have already appeared on this earth an entire legion of specialists and contractors who seek to fashion human well-being,” Bunin wrote.17
The harshness of the revolutionary years was dictated not by cruelty but by “the purity of the revolution and its ideals” and by “neterpenie [intolerance or impatience]—the most wonderful quality of a revolutionary,” Yegor concluded in a short book published in 1965.18
British timber yards received logs that had markings and inscriptions made by the gulag prisoners as it was their only way of communicating with the outside world. “With suffering you get this timber,” read one such inscription.
Such was the scale of the purges that nobody living in the Moscow of the 1930s could claim ignorance. The show trials of the enemies of the people were public; the stories of those who returned from the labor camps were plentiful. But seeing the arrests, or hearing about them, was not the same as comprehending them as evil. That required a remarkable independence of thought, and few people possessed it.
In the first days after his death, the country seemed numb. His death was greeted with a mixture of disbelief, fear and grief. Gods cannot die the way mortals do. His cult had hypnotized the brightest minds. Andrei Sakharov wrote to his wife at the time, “I am under a spell from the death of a great man. Thinking about his humanity.”21 Sakharov cited this letter in his memoirs, struggling to explain his own reaction.
The paralyzing fear that had enveloped the country during the years of Stalinist rule began to lift. “People were still scared to make any sharp move, but the nooses around their necks suddenly got looser.”23
Yegor remembered the sensation of walking back at night along Moscow’s main streets. “For the first time we walked the Moscow streets like masters, aware of our strength.”24
Three weeks after Stalin’s death, the nineteenth-century trading galleries facing the Kremlin, which had been occupied by state offices in the 1930s, became the main department store in the country—GUM.
Just as, during the war, newspapers had been glued over windows for protection against flying shards, the role of newspapers in the Soviet political system was to block out information and protect the facade of the state. A few hundred copies of Khrushchev’s speech were printed for internal use and marked “strictly secret.” The first public text appeared in English a few weeks later in The New York Times, but it did not make it into the Russian press until 1989.
As William Taubman, Khrushchev’s biographer, wrote, it was partly “a way of reclaiming his identity as a decent man by telling the truth. On the night he gave the speech, he later recalled, he could ‘hear the voices of comrades who perished.’”27
Khrushchev opened up the Kremlin—both physically and figuratively—to a new generation that had been too young to serve under Stalin.
As Alexander Bovin, one of the young Communist reformers in the Kremlin, wrote in his memoirs, “A critical mass started to form, a mass that a quarter of a century later blew away the mightiest totalitarian regime of the twentieth century.”28 An invisible shift of the generations—the engine of all big social changes in Russia—was taking place.
In 1954 the first post-Stalin Hamlet was full of vitality and determination: as he delivered “To be or not to be,” he viciously shook the iron bars of what looked like a prison gate.
While the Soviet system still barred private ownership of land and property, it now allowed space for privacy, for intimate feelings and thoughts.
The impact of the transformation from communal to private living can hardly be overestimated. Individual tape recorders and individual television sets now populated individual flats. With them came the artists, poets and bards who filled up the intellectual space of that era. Their works were designed for an intimate audience rather than for the echoing public halls.
The Bolsheviks did not nationalize only private land and assets; they also nationalized humankind and individual consciousness.
One Day and Vasily Tyorkin had a common theme: human resilience under all circumstances. Be it in the gulag or in the wartime trenches, life—both physical and artistic—had its own proclivities that could not be squeezed out by politics.
But having let thousands of such Ivan Denisoviches out of the gulag, Khrushchev was not prepared to give them economic power. He allowed individual thinking but not individual action, private ownership of land or economic freedom. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, having achieved a spiritual breakthrough, Khrushchev did not dare to touch the economic foundation of socialism.
“People were forced to physically bend down to the authorities: a cellar where a person could stand up to his full height was prohibited.”35
The biggest change of all was a recognition that the country could no longer be held together by terror, nor be completely isolated from the rest of the world. Although the iron curtain was still very much in place, it worked more like one-way tinted glass than a brick wall. The Soviet people could not be seen by the West, but they could see out to the West, and they liked what they saw.
Unable to travel abroad, Soviet youths started roving around the country with rucksacks on their backs and guitars in hand, spurring along the way an entire subculture of tourism. Journalism transcended the domain of official party ideology and became romantic and fashionable.
Yegor’s generation tried to square the circle: how could one reconcile socialism, which rejected private ownership, with individual initiative, and the idea of a “party-minded” media with the free flow of information? This was not a philosophical question but a highly practical one. These people had an allegiance to the Bolshevik ideas of social justice and equality, but they wanted a good life for themselves and for their children, a life no worse than the lives of their counterparts in the “decaying” West.
