The next morning Kommersant came out with a short front-page article which reflected the rage of most of its journalists. Its emotional pitch was not typical of Kommersant’s usual sarcastic and detached style. ‘RUSSIA HAS LOST $15 BILLION THANKS TO PRIMAKOV’ the headline screamed. The figure was derived from the sum of contracts and credit lines Primakov could have signed in America, but
as a true Bolshevik he decided to sacrifice the interests of his own country for the sake of some ‘internationalism’ which only he and other former members of the Communist Party can understand… There is only one conclusion that one can draw: supporting Milosevic’s regime, which is so close to Primakov’s heart, is more important to the needs of his country. But when the prime minister gets back to Moscow he will have no right to look in the eyes of the old people to whom he promised to pay out their pensions.7
Primakov’s U-turn was not just an expression of the government’s frustration with America’s policy towards Serbia and its disregard for Russia’s opposition to air-strikes. It captured something far more significant – a general change in attitude towards America and the West among the Russian general public. In 1988, when the Soviet era was drawing to a close, the Russian rock band Nautilus Pompilius had recorded a ‘Farewell Letter’ that captured Russia’s image of America as a promised land:
The idea of America as a utopia, literally a no-place, a dream, had long been engrained in Russian culture. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the characters, Svidrigailov, who is about to commit suicide, says to a guard: ‘When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.’ He then puts the revolver to his right temple and pulls the trigger. America was the other world.
For much of the 1990s America served as a model, an inspiration and an anchor. The 1998 crisis showed the futility of the dream. The bombing of Serbia crashed the dream itself. The West ceased to be an anchor. It turned out that there was no one happy post-Soviet space, that Russia was on its own. America turned into a scapegoat for all the troubles that the Russian people had experienced over the previous decade.
The outburst of anti-Americanism and nationalism was shrill. Massive rallies were staged outside the American Embassy in Moscow. Someone tried to fire at it from a grenade launcher, which luckily did not work, and then opened fire with automatics. A mob of football fans pelted the embassy with paint and eggs. Three men urinated on its door.
This did not so much reflect Russians’ concern for the ‘brotherly’ Slavic nation – most people had little knowledge about what was actually going on in Kosovo – but the need to take out the pent-up frustration, irritation and humiliation on traditional adversaries, America and NATO. It was as though the bombing of Serbia unleashed something that had been building up for years. It was a delayed reaction to the 1998 crisis, the bankers’ war or even deeper – to the Soviet collapse and the loss of Russia’s imperial status.
Some of the media went into a nationalistic overdrive. State television channels began to talk about American hawks and NATO aggressors. More surprising was the initial coverage by NTV. Its first news bulletins seemed anti-Western, made no mention of Kosovo refugees and drew parallels between NATO’s air-strikes and German bombings during the Second World War. ‘For the first time since 1941 there are German bombers with black crosses on their tails in the sky over Belgrade,’ an NTV news presenter said. The idea belonged to Oleg Dobrodeev who was in charge of news and current affairs. Both Gusinsky and Kiselev were shocked by the change of NTV’s tone that was as sudden as Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic.
When Kiselev confronted Dobrodeev a few days later, Dobrodeev was wound up and unapologetic. ‘He told me that I didn’t understand anything; that the situation in the country had changed, that public opinion was against NATO’s strikes and that we had to reflect that change or be left behind,’ Kiselev recalled.8 Dobrodeev’s outbursts of ‘statism’, said Kiselev, coincided with Primakov’s offer to move over to the government. He argued that if Malashenko was allowed to work for Yeltsin’s campaign, why should not he, Dobrodeev, be seconded to work for Primakov. Gusinsky, however, did not look favourably on the idea.
In the following Itogi programmes, Kiselev showed Kosovo refugees and reminded its audience of the ethnic cleansing which Kosovan Albanians had been subjected to. America might have lost a sense of reality and acted arrogantly, Itogi asserted, but this did not warrant the anti-American hysteria unleashed by Russia, which historically paid little attention to international norms. Using black-and-white footage from the 1950s and 1960s, Itogi reminded the audience how Soviet forces had pulled Eastern Germany into the socialist camp in 1953, how they had broken up the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and how they had invaded Prague in 1968. ‘The Soviet Union killed people where it wanted and how it wanted. Is America guilty of this? Of course it is. It is guilty that it lives better than us, that it has become richer than us and works harder than us, which makes it stronger than us. And we have spent all our energy looking for a third way – and we have found it in our boundless, vicious love for Serbia.’9
Yet, Dobrodeev, who had an unmistakable sense of the country’s direction, rightly assessed the shift in public mood. Russia was unable to match America, but it no longer wanted to hear that America was stronger, richer and better. Anti-Americanism would prove to be one of the most lasting and effective ideological narratives over the next decade and a half. America, as an unreal country, could be blamed for any trouble at home. A symbol of Russian hopes, it easily flipped into a symbol of their default. Utopia turned into an anti-Utopia.
Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic pushed his rating to new heights. In April 1999 he was the most popular politician in the country – while Yeltsin’s rating dropped to single digits, as a result of the crisis, disillusionment with the West and corruption scandals. Without any constitutional change, Russia was evolving into a parliamentary republic with a strong prime minister supported by the parliament. Primakov, as the head of the government, started to behave as an independent politician.
Even before the Balkan crisis in December 1998, Yeltsin, who had been in and out of hospital, had been sufficiently worried about losing levers of power to Primakov and his government for him to reaffirm his control over the power ministries, including the ministry of justice and the tax police. At the same time he met with the heads of television channels. ‘You can ask why the president is once again showing interest in the mass media,’ Yeltsin said. ‘It is because you are the fourth estate, you are siloviki,’ he said with a charismatic smile. ‘This is why you are under the president, under the president’s protection. This is super-important.’10
In January 1999, Channel One, which was effectively run by Berezovsky, launched a weekly Vremya programme presented by Sergei Dorenko. ‘We are witnessing a redistribution of power – the highest power in the country,’ Dorenko said alarmingly. ‘Primakov is trying to deprive Yeltsin of his right to sack him as prime minister… He is trying to take control over siloviki and the media, instead of dealing with the economy which is heading towards a new crisis.’ Primakov said he had no intention of introducing censorship, but Dorenko juxtaposed his comments with the old Soviet footage showing a Congress of the Communist Party, suggesting that this was where the country was heading.11