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by
Masha Gessen
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January 20 - January 20, 2020
Once cable and satellite television took hold a few years later, an entire channel was launched to show Soviet television twenty-four hours a day. It was called Nostalgia, and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.
In the years between the 1989 and 1994 studies, Russians had grown tired of thinking about the future. They were drawing their sense of identity from the past, and they were imbuing this past with an additional air of wholesome conservatism.
An element of the nostalgia that was becoming evident by the end of 1995 was the longing for a strong leader, capable of exerting the force for which Homo Sovieticus was ever prepared.
His army was fighting a hopeless, protracted war against Russian citizens in Chechnya, and Yeltsin himself, who had once seemed larger than life, was fumbling even this opportunity to demonstrate his resolve. On two occasions Chechen insurgents took large groups of hostages on territories adjacent to Chechnya, in an effort to force Russia to negotiate. The first time, Yeltsin went missing and his prime minister had to handle the negotiations; the second time, Yeltsin made incoherent televised comments.
In the population at large, the war was unpopular but not so unpopular that it could arouse protests of any scale—after a few attempts, efforts to organize demonstrations devolved into a weekly miniature rally, more of an information session held by a few activists staffing a table in central Moscow.
Yeltsin, democrat though he was, had a distinctly monarchical obsession with choosing a successor. In August 1994 he cruised into Nizhny Novgorod on a river liner sailing down the Volga and, stepping ashore to speak to the crowds, announced that he had settled on a successor: Boris Nemtsov. “I just want to say that he has grown so much that we can now set our sights on his being president,” said Yeltsin. The awkward phrasing showed that the decision was Yeltsin’s, not the younger man’s.
In 1996 the people of Nizhny Novgorod collected a million signatures against the war—with a population of 3.7 million, this meant that nearly all adults in the region signed. Nemtsov rode in a Nizhny Novgorod–made van to deliver the signatures to the Kremlin. He had the driver stop just outside the fortress and marched straight into Yeltsin’s office, one of the fat cardboard binders with petitions in his hands.
Nemtsov, who had been governor during four and a half years of struggle and extremely complicated reforms, was genuinely beloved in his region. Unlike Gaidar, whose name was associated with every unpopular move made by the Russian government and whose manner and looks made him seem aloof and condescending, Nemtsov was a natural politician, charismatic and attractive in an approachable way.
In the end, it looked like it would be Yeltsin against the Communists and he would lose. But the country’s newly rich rallied behind the president, as did the politicians he had patronized—including, in the end, the majority of the antiwar bureaucrats—and as did the newly free press. But most of all, it was Yeltsin himself who rallied. After a couple of years when he seemed to oscillate between depression and binge-drinking, the president mobilized to campaign.
Surveys conducted by Levada’s center showed that Russians wanted three things in this election cycle: an end to economic instability; an end to the war in Chechnya; and the restoration of their country to greatness.
If peace in Chechnya was a difficult goal, the other two—ending economic hardship and restoring Russian grandeur—were impossible. Yeltsin opted to fight directly against the rising wave of nostalgia.
YELTSIN WAS APPARENTLY AWARE THAT he had won by promoting an emotion rather than a program. Ten days after the election, he created a commission to look for a new Russian national idea.
Rumor in the Kremlin press pool in the fall of 1997 was that Yeltsin would unveil the Russian national idea during a visit to Nizhny Novgorod, which remained a post-Communist transition success story. Word was, Yeltsin would say that Russia was now a capitalist country working toward the glorious future of a “people’s capitalism.”
GUDKOV’S AND HIS COLLEAGUES’ RESEARCH suggested that no message about the present and the future could capture the hearts and minds of Russians, who now had their eyes set firmly on the past.
But what did that mean? Solikamsk began rebuilding a cathedral destroyed by the Bolsheviks. A men’s monastery, which had been repurposed as a Soviet jail, reopened as a monastery. Somehow, these events seemed to Lyosha to connect directly to Yeltsin’s speech in the glorious St. Petersburg cathedral, under an elaborate dome and majestic chandeliers to which the camera had panned after the president bowed his head.
Yeltsin’s brief speech contained two key messages: the need for national unity and the need for national penitence. Only the unity part had traction, though, perhaps because it had been heard before, paired with “agreement and reconciliation.” The ideas of redemption and of accepting the blame for Soviet-era crimes sounded from the national pulpit only once, on that day in St. Petersburg, and they remained suspended somewhere under the beautiful painted dome.
In this version of the speech, blame was entirely externalized. The theme of shared responsibility, as well as the idea of the historic significance of the moment, was omitted. Both sets of omissions—Nemtsov’s and Yeltsin’s—showed the extent to which, for both politicians, the symbolic sphere took a backseat to the material.
Basically, he loved the Great Patriotic War. So did most Russians. The 1994 survey showed that, after all the upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s, they clung stronger than ever to the one event that seemed to occupy an unambiguous place in the nation’s memory. Reading survey responses, Gudkov imagined this war as an ideal vehicle.
What Gudkov could not yet quite imagine were people like Lyosha, born in the year perestroika began but identified entirely with a war that had ended forty years to the day before he was born.
In protest against her mother’s protest, Masha joined the Young Seamen Club, which somehow deigned to accept a girl. The club offered target practice, endless talk of Russian military greatness, and computer-programming lessons, which were the reason Tatiana allowed Masha to join up.
Clinton came, as did the United Kingdom’s John Major, France’s François Mitterrand, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, and many others—the first meeting of the Allies on Russian soil since 1945, and one of the largest gatherings of dignitaries in Moscow, ever.19 Military bands from all over the world paraded just next to Red Square, in front of the History Museum, and this was the part of the festivities that Masha got to attend.
One came here to buy the journal Nash sovremennik and other publications that advertised themselves as “patriotic.” Folding tables buckled under the weight of books on Russia and the Russians, which ranged from works by men who had left on the Philosophers’ Ship to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Gumilev’s central idea was the concept of ethnogenesis, a process by which, according to his theory, different ethnic groups came into being and acquired distinct characteristics that were passed on from generation to generation. An ethnic group, or an ethnos, as Gumilev called it, was shaped by two major forces: the geographic conditions in which they lived, and radiation from outer space.
Gumilev was barely tolerated by the Soviet academic establishment after he was released and his name was cleared, and his ideas were largely shunned. But he enjoyed a year or two of popularity and even celebrity before his death in 1992: he recorded a series of lectures that millions saw on television, and later the press runs of his books, originally written for an academic audience, beat all conceivable records.
Gumilev’s intellectual quest could be seen as the essence—or as a caricature—of the fate of the social sciences in the Soviet Union: decades spent working in a hostile environment, isolated from the ideas of others, struggling to invent the wheel in the dark.
Ethnos entered everyday Russian speech, as did other concepts of Gumilev’s coinage, such as passionarnost’, a measure of the degree to which an ethnos was initially receptive to radiation and eventually possessed of ethnos-specific powers.
Other schools of thought that offered totality and scientific language were also gaining a foothold in Russia. Scientology, for example, was particularly popular among small-business men and bureaucrats in smaller cities. But two attributes made Gumilev’s ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia’s unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.
In his story, history was shorter and more accessible: in the Middle Ages, the world was a giant empire with Russia at its center; before that, there was hardly anything. Conventional history was fiction, concocted by the Russians-who-ruled-the-world for their own entertainment.
This was yet another reason for family fights: Masha’s grandmother held forth on ethnogenesis, Masha’s mother screamed at her about the math that proved that everything was something else, and Masha’s grandfather shouted the loudest that all of it was a Jewish conspiracy.
DUGIN ABSORBED ALL of Gumilev as his foundational science. Gumilev’s language became his language, and he used Gumilev’s premises to launch his own new ideas.
The German theorist Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favorite legal scholar, became a source of inspiration, but so did Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who created the concept of an “open society.” George Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire who was opening foundations and learning institutions throughout the disintegrating Eastern Bloc, had been taken with Popper for decades and included the words “open society” in the names of most of his organizations.
In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called “extremist humanism”—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society.
Figures.
Limonov had been an underground poet in the Soviet Union, a gay-identified hobo in 1970s New York, an avant-garde writer in 1980s Paris, and he had returned to Russia by way of Yugoslavia, where he had spent time traveling with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and firing at Bosnian Muslims for fun.
National-bolshevism is a worldview that is built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.
AFTER WINNING THE ELECTION, Yeltsin again began casting about for a successor. The task was now less symbolic and more urgent. The 1993 constitution dictated that his second term would be his last.
It had the opposite effect, that of showing that the battle for power in Russia was waged between clans, a war in which victory depended on the effectiveness of mobilization on either side.
In the five years that had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, no new institutions for producing leaders, public politicians, or even government bureaucrats had emerged. If anything, the opposite had happened: younger people, like Gaidar and the members of his cabinet, who had come to government from structures adjacent or tangential to the Party, had been pushed out of government and had mostly gone into private business.
That left Boris Nemtsov. His designated-successor status had been suspended after his protest against the war in Chechnya, but now that the war had ended, Nemtsov could be restored to favor. Yeltsin’s attitude toward the younger Boris had always been paternal—caring and condescending at the same time—and this made it easier to return Nemtsov to favor.
The students were the daughters of an aluminum king, a game-show host, a media magnate. Zhanna was thirteen, awkward, and provincial. Her clothes were ordinary, and she knew nothing about luxury brands. She also did not know anything about expensive cars. She did not vacation abroad and had given no thought to a future at some fancy Western school. She did not belong.
Nemtsov coined two terms: “oligarchs” and “robber-baron capitalism”; the usages stuck.4 He conjured a plan for getting the rich in line once he arrived in Moscow. After five years of wielding power effectively in Nizhny Novgorod, he was sure that in his new post getting the federal government’s house in order would be a simple matter of will.
Nemtsov’s “nationalization” involved measures big and small. The oligarchs’ Kremlin-issued identification cards, which allowed unrestricted entrance to the fortress, must be taken away, along with their Kremlin-issued license plates and flashing blue lights, which made them exempt from traffic rules. Privatization, going forward, should be transparent, creating a level playing field for all potential investors. The practice of loans-for-shares auctions must be discontinued. These auctions allowed investors to take possession of large companies by granting them credit guaranteed by a majority
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Nemtsov had misjudged the situation badly: he thought that he could use against the ascendant oligarchs the tools he had honed at home, dealing with old Soviet-style bosses whose power had waned. He had also banked on his authority as a government official, not realizing that in Moscow power was never fixed but always contingent on one’s proximity to Yeltsin, and on his favor.
Nemtsov had insulted the oligarchs by calling into question their legitimacy and their talents, and now he wanted to take away their political influence and their prospective wealth. They owned the media. They often used it to fight one another, but now they united against him.
One of the country’s most popular television anchors, Sergei Dorenko, reported that Nemtsov had taken part in a sex party with strippers hired for the occasion—and failed to pay them.8 Nemtsov later wrote that after a few years Dorenko told him that he himself had hired the sex workers to defame Nemtsov on camera.
Someone had told Tatiana about a new field called “actuarial science”—it was new for Russia, that is: the market was ushering it into existence, but very few people were qualified to work in this area. Tatiana figured that with her background in statistical physics, she could succeed, fast. Then, through her studies, she met a man from the Military Insurance Company, and he gave her a job.
Tatiana had not exactly changed her view on the subject of a future in Russia—she had simply adjusted her expectations by one generation. She herself would never make a life elsewhere, but her daughter would.
Then, one day in August 1998, Tatiana’s bank card stopped working. All the money they had in the world was in that account. The word was “default.” Russia had stopped paying its bills, and this meant that the ruble tumbled, prices skyrocketed, panic set in, people ran to the banks to get their money, and the banks cut off clients’ access to their own accounts. In several cases, this still could not keep the banks from collapsing.
She had recently started menstruating, and Tatiana had told her that back in the USSR, they had had to use cotton during their periods (she omitted the fact that even cotton was not reliably available).
I mean so would I.
Within a couple of months, Tatiana was getting paid regularly and they were sending out the wash again. They owed their family’s speedy recovery to the improved fortunes of the Military Insurance Company, which had just secured a lavish new contract with the Federal Security Service, the FSB, where Yeltsin had just appointed a new boss. He was a colonel from St. Petersburg, by the name of Vladimir Putin.
Her husband was still drawing a salary at the mine, but it was Lyosha’s mother’s potato garden that kept them going. When they were not eating potatoes, it was pasta with sugar—a stomach-fooling dish from Galina’s childhood.
