As Natalia Narochitskaya, one of the ideologists of state nationalism, wrote in Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), a right-wing literary journal, ‘Russia was a unique, giant Eurasian power “with an Orthodox nucleus and the cosmic spirit of its stately idea”’. ‘The future of Russia is in the creation of an organic state where an individual is not opposed to society but is a manifestation and carrier of the state idea,’ she wrote.32 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.
The consolidation of imperialist, nationalist and communist forces was taking place against the background of Russia’s withdrawal to its current borders and a series of conflicts that flared up between Russia and its former vassals, including Georgia and Moldova. The nerve point for the imperialists was the loss of Crimea which had been transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev – a symbolic act that commemorated the 300 years of union between Russia and Ukraine.
Since the times of Catherine the Great, Crimea had been at the heart of Russia’s imperial project. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Crimea stayed within Ukraine. No other territory, including the Baltic states or even Georgia, touched the nerve of imperial nostalgia as much as Crimea. The nationalists exploited the dispute between Moscow and Kiev over the fate of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to lay claim to Crimea. This was one of the main subjects of the nationalist press, including Den’ (Day), ‘a newspaper of spiritual opposition’ as it was called by its editor Alexander Prokhanov, a writer devoted to the idea of Russian imperialism who reconciled nationalists and communists in the struggle against Yeltsin and his Westernizers.
One of Prokhanov’s regular authors was Igor Shafarevich, a distinguished mathematician, an ideologue of Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism, and a friend of Solzhenitsyn. Shafarevich wrote in early 1993:
Sebastopol is a key to the resurgence of the country… First of all – it is one of the historic shrines of Russia. Khersones is where Saint Vladimir was baptized, where admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov were buried… Secondly, Sebastopol is key to the Black Sea Fleet. Thirdly, Sebastopol is a key to Crimea, which has been torn from the body of Russia by the unconstitutional and voluntaristic decision of Nikita Khrushchev. People in Crimea have an acute sense of belonging to Russia and have the will to fight for this belonging. Fourthly, Crimea has great influence on what is happening in all of the southern lands – in Novorossiya [Russian imperial territory north of the Black Sea]. The plan for the unification of Sebastopol, Crimea, Novorossiya and Russia is not some treacherous plan of Russian imperialism. It is an attempt to define a natural and organic form of Russia’s existence after the current catastrophe.33
The disintegration of the Soviet Empire was blamed on the West and its agents of influence in Russia. An émigré Russian philosopher, Alexander Zinoviev, wrote in Nash sovremennik: ‘The West wished to destroy Russia by the hands of [Nazi] Germany. It failed. Now it is trying to do the same under the guise of a fight for democracy, human rights etc. This is a war of two civilizations.’34 The only reason the American and Western economies were still afloat was because of cheap natural resources supplied by Russia. ‘Without our resources, the well-being of the West will immediately collapse,’ asserted Den’. America was not just parasitic, it was suffering from an innate sin that started with the elimination of its indigenous people and which had led to the bombing of Hiroshima and the killing of 150,000 Iraqis, wrote Shafarevich.
Few people at the time, including the nationalists themselves, could have predicted that twenty years later this narrative would move from the pages of the extremists’ Den’ newspaper onto the main television channels, that Russia would annex Crimea, try to annihilate Ukraine and carve out Novorossiya, and wage a war on the West.
In parallel with the ideological conflict between the red–brown coalition and the liberals, a power struggle unfolded between Yeltsin and his government of reformers, on the one hand, and the parliament, on the other. Formed before the Soviet collapse and still known as the Congress of People’s Deputies, the parliament was dominated by Soviet factory bosses, who had been pushed out of the way during the privatizations, and representatives of the military and industrial complex and the powerful agricultural lobby, none of whom fitted into Gaidar’s market reforms. Out of more than a thousand deputies, only 200 were Yeltsin loyalists. The rest opposed him either openly or covertly. The parliament was chaired by its Speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, a clever and manipulative deputy from Chechnya who played the deputies like a fiddle.
Khasbulatov’s ally in his stand-off with Yeltsin was Alexander Rutskoi, a former air force pilot and a hero of the Afghan war – a man of limited intelligence and imposing looks. In 1991 Yeltsin chose Rutskoi as his vice-president to capture the ‘patriotic’ votes and melt the hearts of Russian women and Khasbulatov as his deputy to appeal to ethnic minorities. A former economist, Khasbulatov had his eye on the job of prime minister and felt snubbed by Gaidar. He played on Rutskoi’s vanity, luring him to his side. They publicly attacked Gaidar and his government, whom Rutskoi called ‘boys in pink pants’, for moving too fast in building capitalism and Americanizing the Russian economy.
The red–brown coalition used the parliament as a way of legitimizing itself. In the meantime, Khasbulatov was using the communists and nationalists as a force that could bring people out on the streets and help him come to power.
As Alexander Yanov, a historian of Russian nationalism, argued, an outburst of imperial nationalism under Yeltsin was inevitable. ‘The collapse of a 400-year old empire and, even more importantly for Russia, the loss of a utopian, but great national goal, could not but produce “patriotic hysteria”.’35 The whole question was whether this ‘hysteria’ could turn into regime change. By the end of 1992, the nationalists’ opposition was laying out plans for the overt throwing-over of Yeltsin’s government. What it needed was a powerful amplifier in the form of mass media.
Being a truly conservative force, the nationalists consolidated not around television but around old literary magazines such as Nash sovremennik and Prokhanov’s newspaper Den’. Television was in the hands of the liberals. At the helm of post-Soviet television was Yegor Yakovlev who was appointed to the job by Gorbachev (with Yeltsin’s approval) almost immediately after the August 1991 coup. His first step was to clear the television centre of the KGB staff who worked both openly and under cover. His second step was to dispose of Vremya – the main nine o’clock evening news programme – replacing it with the plain-sounding Novosti [News]. The change of title, theme tune and format was as symbolic as the lowering of the red flag over the Kremlin or the change of the Soviet anthem.
Vremya had a sacred status in the Soviet Union. Its two serious-looking, buttoned-up presenters were the oracles of the Kremlin. It did not actually report the news, but told the country what the Kremlin wanted its audience to think the news was. It was a nightly ritual in which nothing ‘new’ or unpredictable could ever happen. Vremya, a name that in Russian means ‘time’, was as regular as the chimes of the Kremlin clock that preceded the programme. Like time, Vremya seemed infinite. By changing the format, Yegor was removing the sacred function of television and desacralizing the state itself.