Like any good producer, he unmistakably sensed the demands of his audience and in the 2000s the country craved a show of resurgence. People whose incomes kept going up because of the increase in the price of oil, rather than because they had to work harder, had plenty of free time for entertainment and demanded a display of Russia’s greatness to explain and supplement their improving fortunes. In the mid-2000s, this demand was largely satisfied through sport, entertainment and parades.
In June 2008 the Russian football team won a quarter-final against the Netherlands in the European championship. Nearly 80 per cent of the country watched the match – a record rating in Russian television history. At night, Moscow erupted into a mass patriotic frenzy with cars hooting, flags waving and bikers parading – the same ones who would a few years later wave Russian flags in Crimea. At first glance, it seemed a copy of European football events, but while in Europe sport has long turned into a substitute for war, in Russia it was only a starter.
The victory was number one news on Russian television. Popular talk shows could not get enough of sport. ‘Russia – forward!’ became a national slogan. The celebration of victory coincided with an escalation of a propaganda campaign against Georgia which was portrayed as America’s proxy. A few weeks later Russian tanks and aeroplanes invaded Georgia. It was Russia’s first fully televised war, scripted as a copy of NATO’s action in Kosovo, and it produced a similar reaction to the one after the football match.
This was the ultimate show of Russia’s resurgence. Television channels were part of the military operation, waging an essential propaganda campaign, spreading disinformation and demonizing the country Russia was about to attack. The war started on 7 August 2008 – the day of the opening of the Summer Olympics in Beijing – with Georgian forces responding to fire coming from the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia with heavy artillery. According to the Russian propaganda, Georgia was a reckless and dangerous aggressor and Russia had an obligation, as a peacekeeper, to protect the victims. Russian television talked about genocide, 2,000 civilian deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. (The real figure of South Ossetians killed in the conflict was 133.)
Putin, in a light sports jacket, talking to South Ossetian women, performed the role of superman in a special effects drama staged by Ernst and Dobrodeev. He flew to the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range straight from Beijing to hear hair-raising stories from refugees:
First woman: They burnt our girls when they were still alive.
Putin (surprised): Alive?
First woman: Yes, young girls! They herded them like cattle into a house and burnt them…
Second woman: They stabbed a baby, he was one and a half. They stabbed him in a cellar.
Putin: I cannot even listen to this.
Second woman: An old woman with two little kids – they were running and a tank drove over them.
Putin: They must be crazy. This is plain genocide…
The rumours spread by Russian television – of Georgian troops targeting women and children and performing genocide – later proved to be untrue, but at the time they inspired ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages by South Ossetian irregulars. The main target for attack by Russian television, however, was not Georgia – which was an obvious enemy – but Russia’s own audience which was bombarded with anti-American propaganda.
Judging by the picture, Russia was fighting not against a tiny, poor country that used to be its vassal, but against a dangerous and powerful aggressor backed by the imperialist West. One Russian Duma deputy reflected the mood in a television interview: ‘Today, it is quite obvious who the parties in the conflict are. They are the US, the UK, Israel who participated in training the Georgian army, Ukraine who supplied it with weapons. We are facing a situation where there is NATO aggression against us.’45
In the following few years, as America proposed the so-called ‘reset’ – a form of détente policy – and Dmitry Medvedev, who acted as Russian president, talked about modernization under the slogan ‘Russia – Forward!’, patriotic urges were satisfied by military parades and song contests. On 9 May 2009, fresh from watching the annual Second World War victory day parade, Putin went to inspect the readiness of the Eurovision Song Contest that was staged by Ernst and opened three days later. The two events occupied equally important places in Putin’s schedule and in the Kremlin’s narrative of resurgence. As Ernst said at the time, it was the ‘external political effect’ that mattered. The main ‘geopolitical show’ of Ernst’s television career was still to come.
Ernst was entrusted with staging one of the crowning moments of Vladimir Putin’s rule – the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics – a project that Putin cared about deeply and which was supposed to legitimize his return to power as Russia’s president in 2012. No expenses were spared for the Olympics – $50 billion was thrown at the project. A special arena was built for the opening and closing ceremonies; the world’s top technicians, designers, architects, riggers and musicians worked around the clock. The result was the most grandiose pageantry Russia had ever seen, a staggering display of the country’s comeback, staged with panache, style and imagination.
Ernst called the show Dreams about Russia. The ‘dreams’ defied the forces of gravitation as the show unfolded both on stage and in the air – the heavy sets were suspended and moved along rail tracks attached to the roof of the stadium. The sky was no limit. Seven islands – each representing a piece of the country – drifted through the air like clouds, accompanied by a song from the opera Prince Igor about a promised land of the free where ‘the sun shines so brightly’, where ‘roses bloom luxuriously’ and where ‘nightingales sing in the green forests and sweet grapes grow’. It was a captivating and grandiose utopia.
At the centre of the show’s narrative was a history of the empire and the state – not of its people. Rather than celebrating the diversity of the country’s population, as the Olympic rules prescribe, it celebrated unity under the state flag. A troika of horses made of white light floated through the sky; the colourful domes of St Basil’s Church (balloons filled with hot air) bounced joyfully along with jesters and acrobats in a medieval fayre; subtle engravings of Peter the Great’s construction of St Petersburg morphed into a choreographed display of the Russian imperial army; a captivating ball scene from War and Peace gave way to a constructivist study of the Bolshevik Revolution drowned in red light. A steam engine, suspended in mid-air, pulled along the wheels and clogs of Stalin’s industrialization. The scene was set to a tune called ‘Vremya Vpered’ (‘Time, Forward!’) which has long been used as the theme tune of the Vremya television programme. Time moved seamlessly on to the optimistic and humane 1960s filled with humour and nostalgia – as though inspired by Ernst’s and Parfenov’s project Old Songs about Important Things.
Ernst exceeded himself. No country had ever staged such a technically complex show in the air. He watched the opening in the command centre. At the sound of the final firework, Ernst jumped from his seat, shouting in English ‘We’ve done it!’ The country that Ernst had conjured up on the stage was not a place of Russian dolls and Cossack dances, but one of avant-garde artists, great ballet, Tolstoy, Nabokov and Gogol; a sophisticated European country proud of its culture and its history: ‘the country I want to live in,’ tweeted Ksenia Sobchak, a