The ‘Old Russian’ was represented in Kommersant by the caricature ‘Petrovich’ – a humorous Soviet character trying to adapt to modern reality with a mixture of naivety, cunning and the dumb insolence of the good soldier Svejk. The New Russians almost immediately turned from a model into a caricature – the subject of popular jokes and stories. (One New Russian shows off his tie to another New Russian: ‘I paid a hundred bucks for it.’ The second New Russian replies with contempt: ‘You’ve been done. I bought exactly the same one for a thousand.’) One reason was the actual behaviour of the New Russians. Another was that the image did not fit into a national tradition where the commercial and entrepreneurial spirit was never seen as a virtue and the rich were mostly hated. The most entrepreneurial men in Russian literature were Chichikov who traded in dead souls in Gogol’s poem, or Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard who chopped the old trees down to make way for dachas. Kommersant was clearly trying to challenge that perception.
Kommersant conveyed and projected the energy and optimism of this new class. It published a regular column under the bold rubric ‘What is Good’. ‘NOTHING BAD HAS HAPPENED. AND COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED’ read one headline. ‘EVERYTHING IS NORMAL’, read another. Vladimir Yakovlev’s wife, a Kommersant editor, wrote: ‘We think that everything that is happening around us is logical and therefore right. If this is called looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, so be it. They are better than dark glasses… A free man is responsible for his own actions. This is why such life is considered natural, or, in other words, normal, or, in other words, happy.’29 The optimism was supposed to extend not just to New Russians, but also to the old ones. The benefits of the market economy seemed so obvious compared to the planned one, that it was hard to imagine that anyone would disagree.
In the early 1990s a new character burst onto the Russian screen and conquered the minds of millions of Russians. His name was Lenya Golubkov and he was a tractor driver who beamed with optimism over his capitalist future. He had greasy black hair, closely set eyes, a large flat nose and a metal tooth. He wore a baggy suit and was unburdened with intellect or education. But he had done well. He had fixed a pair of leather boots and a fur coat for his wife and was aiming to buy a car in a few months’ time with the money he had got from MMM, an investment company that offered 1,000 per cent profits.
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 and beat Latin American soap operas. The Russian Ponzi was Sergei Mavrodi, a bespectacled mathematician turned con artist who devised a scheme that financed itself by issuing shares in an empty shell company and repaying earlier investors with new ones. The price of MMM shares which became ubiquitous in the early 1990s was set by Mavrodi himself. By the time it collapsed, the scheme had attracted some 15 million people.
It was the commercial created by Kazakh film director Bakhyt Kilibaev that kept the scheme going. MMM’s ads consisted of short skits set to a jolly foxtrot tune and featuring the same characters. Apart from Golubkov, these included Rita, Golubkov’s chocolate-crazy, plump wife with a beehive hairdo, his older brother Ivan, a tattooed coal miner from Vorkuta, the lonely spinster Marina Sergeevna and a newly wed couple.
The middle-aged Golubkov was a Soviet joke character: a lazy simpleton and free-loader, a product of the Soviet paternalistic system who embraced the easy reaches offered by Russia’s dysfunctional capitalism with an enthusiasm that horrified Russian market reformers. With the use of a pointer, he showed his wife a chart that marked the stages of family happiness: new furniture, a car and a house. ‘A house in Paris?’ asked Rita as she gobbled up another chocolate. ‘Why not, Lenya?!’ intoned the voice of an announcer. Another episode showed Lenya and his brother Ivan sitting at a kitchen table over a bottle of vodka and a large jar of pickled cucumbers: ‘You are a khaliavshchik [free-loader], Lenya. You forgot what our mother and father taught us: to work honestly. And you are running around buying shares. Khaliavshchik!’ said Ivan. ‘You are wrong, brother. I am not a khaliavshchik, brother… I am a partner,’ said Lenya. ‘That is right, Lenya, we are partners,’ said the MMM voice.
In the Soviet era, Lenya would have been a character of a Soviet satire condemning infantilism and the petty bourgeois lifestyle. In the early 1990s he became a household name whose popularity exceeded that of any Russian politician, including Yeltsin, who grumbled that Lenya was getting on his nerves: ‘We have too many touts of every ilk who promise fantastic dividends in the future or homes in Paris. But very often there is no basis for this. They are just conning the people.’
Very few people shared Lenya’s enthusiasm in the early 1990s. Opinion polls in 1992 showed that only 5 per cent of the country felt optimistic, some 40 per cent felt stable and half of the country experienced anxiety, frustration and tension.30 The dominant sentiment, however, was one of defiance: while life is going to be difficult, we can manage.
The Battle for the Nuclear Button
In 1992 Maxim Sokolov wrote an essay called ‘So Which War Did We Lose?’ ‘The paradox is that while the most vulnerable [people] more or less agreed with Gaidar’s “draconian reforms”, the least vulnerable turned into a state of fury.’31 To understand this ‘paradox’, Sokolov argued, one has to look at the spiritual and aesthetic side of reforms and here the loss of the Russian nationalist-communists and chauvinists who extolled the imperial state and its geopolitical status as the ultimate good that trumps universal human values was far greater than that of ordinary people who mostly got on with their lives.
Sokolov drew parallels between contemporary Russia and Germany after the wars. The key question was whether Russia resembled Germany after the Second World War, when it was forced to rebuild its economy and move towards democracy? Or was it more similar to the 1918 Weimar Germany that had led to fascism? There was certainly no shortage of populists and demagogues after 1991 willing to exploit the frustration of ordinary Russians under the nationalist, communist and imperial flags for the sake of their own revanchism.
The nationalists and communists openly embraced each other to form a red–brown coalition. Whatever differences they had had in the past, they were united in their struggle against a common enemy: the West, with its liberal democracy, and those who tried to impose it on Russia – Yeltsin and his Zionist government. As often in Russian history, liberals were synonymous with Jews.
The leader of the Russian communists was Gennady Zyuganov, a second-tier communist functionary who worked in the ideology department of the party and was one of Alexander Yakovlev’s main adversaries. He was a patron of the Sovetskaya Rossiya newspaper which had published Andreeva’s Stalinist letter and formulated the new Russian communist ideology as anti-Western, anti-liberal, nationalist and traditionalist, allied with the Orthodox Church. Central to this ideology was the idea of the sacrosanct state.