Moscow changed as a social world. Paranoia about Balkanization died as a conversation topic. Travelling, getting up to speed with and ideally owning current London and Manhattan trends was cool. These were the years of ‘glamour’. The gangster chic of the 1990s was replaced by a fashion for velvet jackets and opulent clubs with aggressive ‘face control’. There were dreams of Italian fashion, sophistication and glasses of Cristal. The highest compliment you could pay someone was to say he was ‘successful’, whilst to call someone ‘political’ was practically an insult.
Out in the provinces, copying what was happening in the capital was cool. The websites of small opposition factions were generally quiet as vast numbers of fan pages for London or Paris sprang up. In Moscow ‘the theory of small deeds’, a tsarist-era philosophy that urged Russians to concentrate on small civic acts and forget political overhaul, was popularized by Vasily Esmanov, the founder of a fashion portal with a name that rang with the age: lookatme.ru. The twentysomethings who were addicted to this website felt they had left the 1990s behind: ‘We are different,’ said Esmanov, ‘we are the first Russian generation raised on global culture.’
Moscow lost the 1990s feeling of free fall and zero gravity. One could be forgiven for believing that the city was deliriously passing through three time-historical zones at once: Berlin in the early 1930s, Chicago in the mid-1930s and Paris in the mid-1960s – the marching of boots, the ever-presence of crime and the dreamy, mocking rejection of a post-imperial regime by an experimental new generation.
One young man who captured the post-post-Soviet groove was Filip Dzyadko. In 2007, at the height of the boom, fortune handed him the editorship of the Moscow free-sheet Bolshoi Gorod (‘Big City’). It had been going for a while but never quite found its voice. Dzyadko did. The magazine began trying to build a new aesthetic and was left to collect in the ‘free cafes’ of the city. He wanted to fight Putin’s ‘greyness’ and the messed-up, ugly symbolism of his regime that mixed up banal, dated Soviet icons and practices – from the saucer-like hats worn by the police, the hammer and sickle flag of the army, to the advertising hoardings exhorting people to have more children, right down to the hydroelectric plant on the 100 ruble note. To do this Bolshoi Gorod exploded into colour, restylized Cyrillic and glorified social activism.
A new fashion was sweeping Moscow. ‘Glamour’ was giving way to hipster chic and the cult of ‘creativity’. This began in the ‘free cafes’. These were a new ‘underground’. It was centred on the fake French bistro Jan-Jak, the 1930s ‘intelligentsia’ themed Mayak and Materskaya. ‘It’s like we created our spaces,’ said Esmanov from lookatme.ru, ‘but we wished we could teleport between them, not have to go through dirty and badly maintained streets that we feel don’t belong to us.’ Here Bolshoi Gorod became a crucial identity marker for young Muscovites to show they were not ‘grey’ people like those in the Kremlin; it was left in these places as an alternative marker. Its whole aim was for Dzyadko to fight what he called ‘a time without ideology, a grey time without ideas’.
An archipelago was emerging in Moscow of ‘free places’, but without politics. Dzyadko explains: ‘It was not political. The whole thing can be summed up in the popular photographs of the time – for example, a woman looking into the distance with sad eyes, let’s say in Tokyo – and people would look at it and go, oh, how sad, how beautiful… but it was absolutely without meaning. But there was longing in it.’ Dzyadko thinks the boom in foreign travel was crucial. ‘People started going to Europe and seeing how things were there, and they came back with the desire to create their own nice spaces, attractive spaces inside Moscow. The boom was enabling young Muscovites to globalize and modernize themselves, in spite of the regime’s incompetent institutions.’
It seemed Putin had nothing to worry about. These people were a ridiculous small minority and their new fashion didn’t have political edge. ‘There was nothing rock and roll about this,’ remembers Dzyadko. ‘This was not about standing up and announcing things, but saying them softly. There was no “loudness” – it was about dancing, quietly.’
But a whole network of new media was growing in Moscow, linked into this new beauty-seeking youth culture. These publications – not Nashi – were the winners of the 2000s that defined a generation. They were materialistic, stylish, inward-looking and anti-political – the self-portrait of a new middle class that wanted to be ‘successful’. Afisha magazine became increasingly popular when its owner took a bet on a talented twenty-one-year-old editor in 2008, reaching a circulation of over 183,000.63 A Russian version of Esquire was founded in 2005. The crowning ‘hipster media’ achievement was Dozhd the online, independent TV channel, launched in 2010. With its funky studios it looked like it was broadcast from Shoreditch in London, even Williamsburg in New York, but not Moscow.
This was derided by the controlled media as ‘dem-shiza’ or democratic schizophrenia. Prior to the outbreak of financial turmoil in 2008, it seemed like the Kremlin propagandists were wasting their time. The ‘free cafes’ were vacuous places, where talking about either Putin or Khodorkovsky was looked down on as ‘not cool’. This attitude was more useful to the Kremlin than any censor. Even one of their most fashionable and politically minded frequenters, the celebrity journalist Leonid Parfyonov, was saying things like, ‘I am a professional journalist, not a professional revolutionary. My job is to report and not climb the barricades.’64 It was a sign of how far Muscovite culture was to change that both Parfyonov and the writer Boris Akunin became powerful orators of the December 2011 protest movement.
The keenest observers of society were getting agitated. Gleb Pavlovsky began to show signs of this, telling me, ‘The hipsters are very interesting… there is a new “youth” way of behaving… I think Moscow is changing.’ But those in universities, such as Vyacheslav Glazychev, who had written widely on the ‘unshakable nature’ of the ‘Putin majority’, felt a change under way in the world of the ‘golden youth’ that ran so close to the world of power in Moscow. But he wasn’t sure what it was. In his ‘den’ of weird objects under a picture of Dubrovnik he sighed:
‘The generation that became adults under Gorbachev and Yeltsin are burnt out completely. Nobody knows what’s coming with the new generation, for the moment, they are just babes in the wood. But it will be very different. It always is.’
He was right. It was in the ‘free bars’ of Moscow that the first seeds of a new opposition began to germinate but had not yet sprung to life. One evening I sat on a cracked balcony with a friend, smoking cigarettes with the names of Soviet space missions. ‘I’m fed up of Moscow,’ she complained, flicking our Apollo-Soyuz butts off the dusty ledge, ‘I can’t stand this social scene anymore. It’s all glamour and no substance. It’ll never amount to anything.’ And for the remains of the decade, she was right.
Dreaming with BRICs
As Moscow changed socially, it changed politically. By the late 2000s feelings of vulnerability had evaporated. A hubristic mood had settled over the barons of the city – stability had been secured. Now Russia was resurgent. Fired up by surging oil prices, a booming middle class and high growth rates, the elite felt that Russia was rising with China. Taking at face value the 2001 Goldman Sachs pamphlet that classed Russia together with Brazil, India and China as the world’s four largest emerging economies – the BRICs – the establishment came to believe that the country would continue to grow rapidly until it had caught up with the West.65 The highbrow magazine Ekspert even predicted that the ruble would join the US dollar and the euro as a global reserve currency, whilst Putin predicted that Russia would ‘overtake Britain and France’ in GDP terms in 2009.66