As someone who had observed Soviet economic failure, who, as a KGB officer in Dresden, understood the advantages of the capitalist West Germany over the socialist East Germany (the GDR) and was exposed to business as a deputy mayor in St Petersburg in charge of foreign trade, Putin had few illusions about the planned economy. His early economic programme, including a low flat-rate income tax system, was arguably more liberal than anything Russia had had in the past. His economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, was a convinced libertarian and his Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin, a member of Chubais’s and Gaidar’s circle. Putin did not set out to dismantle capitalism – far from it.
The first years of Putin’s rule filled the Russian middle class with optimism, even exuberance. The oil price started to rise; Russian economic growth surged at 10 per cent; disposable incomes were growing even faster. The central and simple message of Putin’s rule was: we will give you security, stability and a sense of pride, shops full of goods and the ability to travel abroad without bothering you with ideology. It was the dream of the late 1980s come true. All that the Kremlin asked in return was for people to mind their own business and stay out of politics – something that they gladly did. Lifestyle changes were more interesting than politics. The first IKEA store had just opened in Moscow and middle-class Russians, like everyone else in Europe, were too busy assembling their Scandinavian-style homes to care about politics.
Suddenly there were coffee shops where people could sip cappuccinos while reading Vedomosti – a Russian business daily part-owned by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. There were new Western-style cinemas, home-grown musicals, skating rinks and fitness clubs. To guide people through the new lifestyle opportunities there was a new glossy weekly called Afisha (Playbill). It was conceived as Russia’s equivalent of Time Out but, as ever in Russia, it was more than that. In the same way that Kommersant had ‘programmed’ the ‘new Russians’ and NTV had shaped the tastes and values of the middle class and self-reliant businessmen, Afisha drafted the image of a young, educated, urban and Europeanized class of people – the children of the intelligentsia, who shunned the very word along with the preoccupations of their parents.
As Ilya Tsentsiper, one of the founders and first editors of Afisha, said, his readers were somewhere in between a creative media class and young urban professionals – yuppies. Afisha described Moscow as a European capital city – no different from, say, Berlin or Madrid. ‘In many ways Afisha itself was a confirmation that Moscow was the same [European] city as others,’ Tsentsiper argued. ‘All this coincided with Putin’s era – everyone around us started to get richer and some different narrative emerged after the years of chaos and uncertainty. People started to think about their long-term future. People started to have children and dogs and all this “live fast, die young” lost its attractions. On the ruins of an empire a new life started to grow, full of extraordinary energy.’4 Soon Afisha started to publish guidebooks for mobile, English-speaking and independent travellers. The readers of Afisha and Vedomosti and the voters of the Union of Right Forces considered themselves liberals, but they wished for the state to provide their liberties, comforts and stability.
Essential to the narrative of ‘stabilization’ was the portrayal of the 1990s as an era of total chaos and banditry. The irony was that this image was formed as much by the television of the 2000s as it was by the reality of the Yeltsin era. In May 2000, NTV aired one of its most popular soap operas called Banditskii Peterburg (Gangsters’ Petersburg) about organized crime bosses, known in Russia as ‘crowned thieves-in-law’, contract killings and bent cops. It was a true carnival of banditry in which the only positive figure was a local journalist who tried to solve crimes but ended up getting people killed. Russia in the 1990s had certainly provided rich material for crime fiction – the Soviet collapse opened up opportunities for colourful gangsters – but it was the TV dramas of the 2000s that turned crime into the dominant characteristic of the 1990s. The fact that Putin was the flesh-and-blood of the 1990s and had served in the St Petersburg administration precisely at the time in which Gangsters’ Petersburg was set was negated by the narrative of stabilization.
One of Putin’s first symbolic steps as president was the restoration of the Soviet national anthem which was originally composed in 1938 – the height of Stalin’s great terror – as a hymn to the Bolshevik Party and later adopted as an anthem. Yeltsin abandoned it along with other Soviet symbols, replacing it with Mikhail Glinka’s wordless ‘Patriotic Song’. After meeting Russian sportsmen, who apparently complained that they could no longer sing along to the national anthem, Putin proposed bringing back the old tune, albeit with new lyrics that were promptly supplied by the author of two previous Soviet versions. To say that the Russians were longing for the restoration of the Soviet anthem was untrue. Most people did not care.
The act of restoring something that had been once abolished for ideological reasons carried its own meaning. Alexander Yakovlev saw it as a sign of disrespect for the country’s past, of a lack of ‘Christian feeling of repentance’. ‘For as long as I live I will neither sing nor stand up to this music. This is not my anthem. It is the anthem of a different country – different not just in name but in its substance. We are a new country, a free Russia, and we want to be free people.’5 In fact, neither Yeltsin nor Putin saw Russia as a new country, but as a continuation of the old one. But while Yeltsin and his ideologues searched for symbols of Russia’s statehood in the pre-Revolutionary era, rejecting the Soviet period as something ideologically alien, Putin made the next logical step: he incorporated the Soviet past into a narrative of Russia as a great state.
The liberals who rejected Soviet history and demanded repentance were cast as sectarians. ‘Perhaps I and the people [of Russia] are mistaken, but I want to address those who disagree with this decision [to restore the Soviet anthem]. I ask you not to dramatize events and not to build unbreachable barriers, not to burn bridges and not to split society once again,’ Putin told the Duma.6 Putin’s formulation, ‘I and the people’, was, in fact, more alarming than the anthem.
The revival of the old Soviet anthem, previously known as the hymn of the Bolshevik Party, coincided with the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks and was restored by Luzhkov. The clash of symbols did not bother Putin. Both were symbols of Russian statehood. This is why, perhaps, one person who did not object to Putin’s decision was the Russian patriarch, Alexei II. The media-savvy middle class, the readers of Afisha, cringed, but saw in it the spirit of a postmodernist political game where nothing could or should be taken seriously, since everything was just an imitation, be it the cathedral or the anthem. The revival of the Soviet anthem did not signal a return to the Soviet Union, but it signalled the beginning of restoration as a historic trend that usually follows a revolution.