The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

by Arkady Ostrovsky

A free man is responsible for his own actions. This is why such a life is considered natural, or, in other words, normal, or, in other words, happy.”28

He wore a baggy suit and was unburdened by intellect or education.

The only trouble was that none of this was real. MMM was a pyramid scheme and Golubkov merely a fictional character who advertised it. It was probably the most successful television project of the 1990s— it even beat Latin American soap operas.

In December 1991 the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate states. The formal dissolution of the union was a peculiar and relatively peaceful affair that happened in the course of four months following the August coup. The defeat of the coup shifted the power away from the Soviet government, still headed by Gorbachev, to Yeltsin, who as the president of Russia, the largest of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, had no desire or ability to keep the Soviet empire together. The empire did not implode; it expired quietly as a result of a decision taken by its founding members and core constituents.

On December 8, 1991, a few days after Ukraine voted for its independence, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, countries that had signed the Soviet Union into being in 1922, gathered in a forest lodge in Belarus and declared “the USSR as a subject of intentional law and geopolitical reality ceases to exist.”

Yet for nationalists and hard-core Communists, the loss of imperial status was a catastrophe. It did not help that George Bush, America’s president at the time, presented the dissolution of the Soviet Union as America’s ultimate victory in the Cold War.

The deep sense of loss of the Russian nationalists and chauvinists who extolled the imperial state and its geopolitical status as the ultimate good was far greater than that of ordinary people who mostly got on with their lives.

As was so often the case in Russian history, liberals were synonymous with Jews.

He was a patron of Sovetskaya Rossiya, which had published Andreeva’s letter and formulated the new Russian Communist ideology: it was still anti-Western but was now also antiliberal, nationalist and traditionalist, and allied with the Orthodox Church. Central to this ideology was the idea of the sacrosanct state.

Stripped of the rhetoric about equality and internationalism, Communist ideology seamlessly morphed into fascism. The first full Russian-language edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was printed and started to sell openly on the Moscow streets in 1992.

No other territory, not the Baltic States, not even Georgia, touched the nerve of imperial nostalgia as much as Crimea. It was a Soviet paradise, a place of cypress trees, pines and pebbled beaches, a Russian Côte d’Azur dotted with villas and sanatoriums for the nomenklatura and shrouded in memories of vacation romance and adventure for the intelligentsia.

Few people at the time, including the nationalists themselves, could have predicted that twenty years later this narrative would move from the pages of Den´ onto the main television channels, that Russia would annex Crimea, try to annihilate Ukraine and wage a war on the West.

The army was falling apart, flights were getting canceled, trains were grinding to a halt, the ruble zone was shrinking, former Soviet republics were fencing themselves off with borders and customs . . . but television in Moscow continued to broadcast across the entire former Soviet Union. . . . The very knowledge that people in Russia, Georgia, the Baltic States and Central Asia were watching the same programs helped many people feel part of one historic entity—even though it had lost its name.

The mob easily broke a police chain and marched toward the White House, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin. Kutsyllo watched in astonishment as the swelling crowd approached the parliament building: “Nobody tried to stop them.”21

Television screens had never gone blank in the Soviet Union, not even during the August 1991 coup. One of television’s key functions was to show that life just carried on. A sudden blackout was a sign of catastrophe and chaos, the collapse of the state.

“Yeltsin looked the part of a tsar. Tall, with sleek white hair, always dressed in a crisp white shirt—he appeared as a man in power—something that Russians respect,” Nevzorov recalled.28

As with Barkashov’s fighters who escaped through underground tunnels, the ideas and slogans that inspired these rebels continued to smolder under the surface, like a peat fire, occasionally letting off smoke or a nasty smell. The fire was never properly extinguished; it was simply covered up in the hope that it would die by itself. Twenty years later Vladimir Putin would fan the embers into the large flames that are now consuming parts of Ukraine and threatening Russia’s own future.

As Kommersant wrote at the time, “The only thing that citizens want from big politics is the possibility of calmly making money and as calmly spending it to their hearts’ content.”

The shelling of the White House was adopted as a “plot” for an interactive video game. It was featured in a Vzglyad program that was relaunched by Alexander Lyubimov after a four-year break.

In December 1993 Russia adopted a new constitution that installed supreme powers in the president and held new parliamentary elections that delivered a nasty surprise to anyone who thought democratic forces were the winners of Yeltsin’s standoff with the old parliament.

With hindsight, Zhirinovsky’s electoral coup was only natural. The liberals, and particularly the media, bore a large share of responsibility. The media did not try to educate or engage the majority of the country in politics. Despite being owned by the state, they performed no public duty.

Golubkov’s investment suffered the same fate: in 1994 the pyramid scheme finally collapsed. Inevitably the families who had been conned blamed not those who designed the pyramid scheme but Yeltsin.

What Yakovlev had dreamed of at the beginning of perestroika, he wrote, was that once people were given freedom, they would elevate themselves and start arranging their lives as they saw fit.

NTV was the first Western-style television station in Russia. It was based on an American model, producing its own news and buying everything else from outside. In searching for a name, Malashenko went through a list of abbreviations—along the lines of BBC, CNN, ABC, CBC—until he settled on NTV.

In October 1993 Russia had few of the attributes one would expect of such a country. It had no proper banking system, no independent court and, after the shelling of the White House, no parliament. Its police and its army were in a sorry state. Television was supposed to deliver its makers and its viewers to that “normal” country—Westernized, energetic and bourgeois.

In Soviet times, a television set was a peaceful and domesticated object. People knitted special covers for it and put porcelain statuettes on top. Mass production of TV sets began after Stalin’s death, and they populated the first separate flats that Khrushchev had had built. After the years of Stalinist mobilization, television worked like a tranquilizer. It provided background noise, like radio.

Television watching was a collective and calming experience. “Sleep well, the state is looking after you” was its message.

Unlike the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan did not crush any illusions because there were none left.

“Information as such is not needed by the authorities,” he complained; “they see it as an instrument of instantaneous influence and rapid reaction.”

In his excellent and thorough book The Oligarchs, David Hoffman describes Gusinsky as a fartsovshchik, a huckster.10

One of the key attributes of a Russian oligarch in the early 1990s was a large security service that could fend off gangsters and racketeers. Instead of paying for protection, oligarchs recruited policemen and KGB staff.

They were professionals who lived in the present, free of any state ideology. They had education, skills and confidence in their own abilities, and as a result, they made a seamless transition from the Soviet to the Russian elite.

Malashenko was no dissident. Solzhenitsyn did not interest him much. The book that made the strongest impression on him was Orwell’s 1984: Psychologically, it rang completely true. This country, this galaxy [described by Orwell] was not supposed to exist in reality, but it did. I lived in it, I tried to learn its double-speak in order to talk coherently and convincingly about the Soviet Union, but it was impossible. Our official dogma said that two plus two was ten. At the more liberal US and Canada Institute, we were (informally) allowed to say that two plus two was eight, sometimes that it was seven. But in the end it did not matter as both were lies.13

He was not typical of his generation. He had an odd combination of cynicism and idealism, of misanthropy and respect for other people (perhaps as a form of respect for himself).

The beginning of the war in Chechnya coincided with the launch of NTV’s satirical show Kukly (Puppets). Based on Britain’s Spitting Image, it featured rubber latex puppets of all of Russia’s top politicians and was unabashedly irreverent.

Russia had a long tradition of political satire but not of turning its leaders into funny puppets.

The slogan Malashenko came up with was simple and powerful: “News is power. Power is in truth.” Behind this statement, as armor, was the large and growing empire of one of Russia’s top oligarchs.

A few months later Dobrodeev left NTV, which he had helped to set up, and was appointed head of the state television. It was from this high and comfortable chair that he watched Putin destroy NTV and expel its founders. The time of pro-Western individualists who had put themselves above the state was coming to an end.

It was an emotional and moving speech. Yeltsin asked to be pardoned by those who “believed that we could, in one big swing, in one thrust, jump from a gray, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future. I believed this myself. . . . It seemed one thrust, and we would do it. We did not. . . . I’ve done all I could. A new generation is coming to replace me—a generation of those who can do more and better.”

In contrast to Yeltsin, who for better or worse saw Russia as a nation, Putin saw it first and foremost as a state and himself as its guardian.

Personal rights and freedom were all well and good, but they could not provide the strength and security of the state. Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America, where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own core values. These were patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost—a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries—and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.

Putin’s KGB past did not worry liberal Russian journalists much. Stigmatizing Putin for his former intelligence work seemed like a form of social discrimination. Those who did object to Putin on the basis of his KGB past were considered marginal dissidents, intelligentsia, or demshiza or demskitz—a pejorative shortening of “democratic schizophrenics.”

Putin, whose grandfather had been a cook in Stalin’s court, did not cringe. For him, Stalin was not a symbol of repression but the ultimate expression of state power. Putin was neither a Stalinist nor a liberal. Trained to be a spy, he was nondescript and a skilled mimic. He could assume whatever personality best suited the situation to win the trust and sympathy of his interlocutor. His ability to perform and to blend in made people who talked to him feel that he shared their views.

The central and simple message of Putin’s rule was, We will give you security, stability and a sense of pride, shops full of goods and the ability to travel abroad without bothering you with ideology. It was the dream of the late 1980s come true.

Essential to the narrative of “stabilization” was a portrayal of the 1990s as an era of total chaos and banditry. The irony was that this image was formed as much by the television programming of the 2000s as it was by the reality of the Yeltsin era.

The fact that Putin was the flesh and blood of the 1990s and had served in the St. Petersburg administration precisely at the time in which Gangsters’ Petersburg was set was negated by the narrative of stabilization.

One of Putin’s first symbolic steps as president was to restore the Soviet national anthem, originally composed in 1938—at the height of Stalin’s great terror—as a hymn to the Bolshevik Party.

To say that the Russians were longing for the restoration of the Soviet anthem was untrue. Most people did not care.

In fact, NTV opposed the war in Chechnya both in 1994 and in 1999, based on the premise that a state that kills its own people would break any law.

But August is a dangerous time in Russia: once the rest of the world goes on vacation, things start happening—political coups, financial defaults, wars in the Caucasus. The year 2000 was no exception. On August 12 two powerful explosions ripped through Kursk, a Russian nuclear submarine, with 118 crew members on board. Most of the men died instantly, but twenty-three managed to seal themselves off in a rear compartment of the vessel while it sank into the sand 350 feet below the sea’s surface.