So when Kiselev and Dobrodeev came through his door with their idea of a television production company, he was ready and waiting, but he was thinking on a completely different scale from Kiselev, who simply was looking to sell his programme. Half an hour later, Gusinsky’s office was swarming with aides and lawyers who were told that they were setting up a new private television channel. It was like a scene out of a 1950s Hollywood movie. Money was not an issue.
With the state being poor and pitiful, oligarchs created their own parallel infrastructure which substituted for a state. Gusinsky’s holding, called Media Most, comprised a small army, a bank, a foreign service, his own newspaper, radio and a television channel. In time he would also try to get hold of an airline and his own telecommunications business. He was driving around Moscow in a cortège of cars with blue flashing lights, using a lane reserved for senior state officials.
Had the Soviet Union survived, Kiselev would have likely gone on to become the main commentator on foreign affairs in Soviet television and Dobrodeev would have climbed into the chair of the head of Soviet television. Like the older generation of ideologues, they were part of the Soviet elite. But unlike their Perestroika predecessors who had lost their status in the process of economic liberalization, they seized opportunities generated by the destruction of the Soviet command economy. The privileges and perks that were earlier provided by the party were now provided by Gusinsky. They got free flats in special houses, country dachas, chauffeur-driven cars and pay cheques well above market rates. They emerged as the winners because they were not burdened by communist principles – like Anpilov or Nina Andreeva – or obsessed with the Russian national idea or its past. They were professionals who lived in the present, free of any state ideology. They had education, skills and confidence in their own abilities and, as a result, made a seamless transition from the Soviet to the Russian elite. It was only natural that when Gusinsky asked Kiselev and Dobrodeev who would be the best person to lead the new channel, both named Igor Malashenko – their former boss who had served as the deputy head of the state-owned Ostankino and was widely considered to be one of the smartest and most able people in television.
Malashenko’s first encounter with Gusinsky, the man who changed his life, was a meeting of two parallel universes which, had it not been for the end of the Soviet Union, would probably never have collided. ‘He made a strange impression on me, and I am sure I made a strange impression on him,’ Malashenko said.11 A son of a Russian general and a member of the nomenclatura, he certainly had little in common with a Jewish millionaire, a former huckster, who had a strange way of showing off by hiring senior former KGB officers. Accidental as it was, there was an historic logic in this encounter.
It was a union of two different social milieux: big business that grew out of co-operatives and Soviet-era meritocracy. Malashenko, who despised the notion of the ‘intelligentsia’ as a measure of liberal and moral values, was nonetheless a quintessence of the intelligentsia as a professional, educated and skilled class bred by the Soviet system. He had studied philosophy at university and eschewed Marxism and Leninism in favour of Dante’s political philosophy. He wrote a dissertation on De Monarchia, a work that dealt with the relationship between religious and secular powers. A proud and ambitious man, he soon realized that the field was too narrow for him, so he started to climb the career ladder of secular power. He got a job at the US and Canada Institute, harbouring no illusions about socialism with a human face. ‘All this stuff that Lenin’s ideas were being distorted – I never bought it.’12
Malashenko was no dissident. Solzhenitsyn did not interest him much. The book that made the strongest impression on him was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Psychologically, it rang completely true. This country, this galaxy [described by Orwell] was not supposed to exist in reality, but it did. I lived in it, I tried to learn its double-speak in order to talk coherently and convincingly about the Soviet Union, but it was impossible. Our official dogma said that two plus two was ten. At the more liberal US and Canada Institute we were (informally) allowed to say that two plus two was eight, sometimes that it was seven. But in the end it did not matter as both were lies.13
Like many smart, energetic and ambitious people in the Soviet Union, Malashenko was faced with a problem: how to use his energy and talents without losing his self-respect. A talented mathematician or Latinist could carry on their studies with the minimum of sacrifices – the state did not interfere unless they tried to challenge it politically. But what if your energy and talents were in politics, media, or public relations? ‘I understood very clearly that either I would waste my life or the system had to change.’14
Thirty years old when Andropov died and Chernenko was given office, Malashenko ‘felt that we did not deserve this humiliation’. So when Gorbachev started to dismantle the system, Malashenko felt like joining in and giving him a hand. At the time when many, including Yeltsin, were heading out of the Central Committee, Malashenko went in. This was a peculiar career move – and it was underpinned by Malashenko’s realization that his future depended on the dismantlement of the Soviet system. Yet, when on 25 December 1991 Malashenko stood in the Kremlin along with Yegor Yakovlev, watching Gorbachev sign his resignation, he was dumbstruck:
In front of me, the last ruler of Russia in its imperial borders of the Soviet Union was signing off the empire to history. I was hypnotized by it. I did not try to say or do anything – I just watched. It was like being in a dream, watching a huge cliff coming down on you. I knew that the Soviet Union was going to collapse sooner or later – this was inevitable. But when I realized that what had been produced by several generations of the Russian elite was coming down, I could not jump up and down in joy.15
When the dust settled, it became apparent that the landscape looked like ground zero, a barren place. It did not have a grand design (nor did it need one after a seventy-year-long experiment), but it did not have as much as a simple blueprint. ‘Yet, there was also a feeling that things would work out, that despite all the demoralization and ruin, something new would grow in its place,’ Malashenko said.16 What would grow in place of Soviet ideology depended largely on people like him.
Malashenko did not believe in a state or in ideology. He believed that an individual, himself or herself, valued dignity and freedom. Perhaps it was his studies of medieval and Renaissance philosophy that infected him with the idea of individual will and self-respect as the base of European civilization. He was not typical of his generation. He had an odd combination of cynicism and idealism, of misanthropy and respect for other people (perhaps as a form of respect for himself). He did not share the ideas of the 1960s generation, but nor did he want to settle scores with it. He valued the bright, independent-thinking people like Yegor Yakovlev who had invited him to work as his deputy at Ostankino, not as members of a generation but as individuals.
When Yegor got fired, Malashenko publicly stuck up for him and, a few months later, handed in his own resignation. ‘I don’t like my own generation,’ he told a Russian newspaper. ‘I found working with Yegor easy, simply because I myself have traits which I too consider anachronistic. And although I understand the sarcasm… about the ’60s generation, many of these people are close to me – at least the strong and bright figures like [Yegor] Yakovlev.’17