‘We did not know the history of the country well. We saw the whole of the Soviet period as one muddy stretch and we wanted to reconnect, to establish a connection with an era of common sense and normality,’ said Vladimir Yakovlev.8
Kommersant fought against Soviet ideology but its own rejection of Soviet culture – dissident or official – was deeply ideological. Anything that was touched by the Soviet aesthetics was out – regardless of its content or artistic merit. The ‘sons’ were not only disposing of wooden Soviet language, newspaper headlines and party-minded literature, they were throwing out an entire layer of culture that contained, among other things, strong antidotes to nationalism and totalitarianism. By doing so, they severely damaged the country’s immunity to these viruses, making it easier, a decade later, to restore the symbols of the Soviet imperial statehood.
Kommersant readers and authors treated the Soviet civilization not as an object of study or reflection but as a playing area for postmodernist games and mockery, a source of puns and caricatures. The written Soviet language, which had long lost its connection with literature, had become so petrified that it easily lent itself to this exercise. The post-communist Russia lacked its own serious language to describe the biggest transformation of the century. Words such as ‘truth’, ‘duty’ and ‘heroism’ were completely devalued. In 1990, the year when Kommersant started to publish, literary historian Marietta Chudakova noted in her diary: ‘Do our people expect any “new word” from themselves? No. Nobody expects anything. What could come out from such a total absence of pathos?’9
What came out was styob – jeering, imitation and denigration of anything remotely serious. Styob became a house-style for Kommersant headlines loaded with wordplay and double-meanings: ‘THE CITY COUNCIL ORDERS MEAT TO GET CHEAPER. MEAT REFUSES’; ‘HOMOSEXUALS ARE MAKING ENDS MEET’; ‘SOCIALISM WITH A HUMAN END’. Styob was infectious and spread through the Russian media like a rash. It pricked and deflated the fake pathos of the Perestroika era, but it contributed nothing in terms of new ideas and meanings. The smirk and imitation concealed emptiness.
In the early 1990s, however, Kommersant emerged as a new type of newspaper that not only described reality differently, but also aimed to shape it. To do so, it needed a new language. A man who was largely responsible for creating this new language, not just in Kommersant but in much of the post-Soviet media, was Maxim Sokolov, its chief political columnist. ‘At the time when I started writing for Kommersant, there was either the canon of the Soviet Communist Party print, or the revolutionary “auf Barrikaden, auf Barrikaden” which called to the struggle against the forces of darkness.’10 Sokolov introduced a third one: detached, ironic, drawing on the tradition of nineteenth-century popular prose.
Maxim Sokolov was not a journalist. He was an intellectual and a liberal conservative. Both in his writing and his appearance Sokolov cultivated the image of an erudite individualist and sceptic who belonged in a pre-Soviet era, who had been asleep for the last seventy years of Soviet history and who had been catapulted by a time machine into the present day and was now trying to make sense of a contemporary Russia through a nineteenth-century monocle. Each issue opened with his column called ‘The Logic of the Week’ (later becoming ‘What Happened This Week’). Unlike the columnists of Moskovskie novosti, who always took a stand and expressed their position, Sokolov sounded nonchalant and detached from the subject: the only stand he took was that of an impartial observer, looking at current affairs and their main actors from the height of historic wisdom. He placed political events into a traditional church calendar and applied words that did not suit them, making them sound comical and absurd. His columns were laced with nineteenth-century phraseology and peppered with Latin words, quotes from literature and hidden allusions.
The fact that his articles were for the most part impenetrable for those who were supposed to be Kommersant’s main audience – the nascent class of businessmen more versed in prison slang than in Sokolov’s Latinisms – was part of his selling point. It created a sense of exclusivity and belonging among the new rich. Although it would be hard to imagine Sokolov’s column in any Western or Soviet newspaper, it was a perfect match to Kommersant. His literary ‘monocle’ was as much an imitation as Kommersant’s ‘long tradition’.
Kommersant exemplified the contradiction of the 1991 transition. As a product of a revolutionary era, it rejected the immediate past. At the same time Kommersant shunned revolutionary aesthetics, mainly because, as Sokolov himself wrote ten years later, ‘Revolution is a time when people say and write an unbelievable amount of banalities.’11 Its coverage of the August 1991 coup was completely devoid of any revolutionary pathos. Whereas Moskovskie novosti came out under the banner ‘We Will Live!’, Kommersant came out under the headline ‘THANK GOD, PERESTROIKA IS OVER’.
Sokolov’s lead article was preceded by a silly ditty: ‘I woke up at 6 a.m. and felt a wave of joy / The elastic in my pants was gone and so was Soviet rule.’ ‘The past two days in Moscow have been a funeraclass="underline" the idiotic regime died in an idiotic way. The coup turned out to be foolish, because people stopped being fools,’ Sokolov summed up his impressions.12 A week later, in the Markets & Exchanges section, Kommersant wrote: ‘An attempt to stage a coup by a group of people on 19 August was so short-lived that it has not had an impact on the prices of goods which were defined by orders placed beforehand.’13
The end of the Soviet Union produced none of the cultural vitality which accompanied its birth in 1917. The energy of the 1920s was sustained by the emergence of a vision of a great utopia, even if it turned out, like all utopias, to be a deception. In contrast, August 1991 was the end of utopia and the end of ideology. As Sokolov wrote phlegmatically, all he wanted to do after three days in the White House was to ‘have a bath and sleep’. In Chudakova’s words, what could come out from such a total absence of pathos?
Lacking a new project, or even a vision of a future country, Russia searched for a mythical past. Those who came to power after the Soviet collapse, both in the Kremlin and in the media, portrayed themselves not as revolutionaries but as keepers and followers of the tradition that had preceded the Soviet era. (The inauguration of Yeltsin as Russia’s first-ever president was announced, absurdly, as being carried out in the style of long historic tradition.)
Alexander Timofeevsky, a young belletrist who articulated the ideas of the thirty-something generation, enthused about Kommersant’s conservatism, its deliberate and measured tone, its sense of solidity which ‘like in a thick, British paper implies a centuries-long stability of life, which has been set and planned for centuries’. In reading articles with enigmatic foreign words such as ‘leasing’ and ‘banking clearing’ and ‘exchanges’, ‘one gets an illusion not just of common tone, but of something infinitely bigger – an illusion of a different life which has been watered and mowed for 200 years’.14
The fact that this life was a pure invention did not bother him. Kommersant, he wrote, ‘unfolds a different life on its pages – charming and desirable. The common reproach that Kommersant lies a lot, is irrelevant. It does not matter. What matters is that it lies confidently and beautifully.’ After that article was published, in December 1991, Vladimir Yakovlev invited Timofeevsky to be his personal, in-house critic. Timofeevsky’s article was headed ‘Bubbles of the Earth’ and was pre-empted with an epigraph from Macbeth: ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them…’ The line in the play refers to the witches whose lures are as deceptive as their appearances. It applied both to Kommersant and to Timofeevsky himself.