‘I wanted to create a matrix that would indirectly affect the whole country,’ said Ernst.46 This was the invention of Russia. It had the same mythological function as Stalin’s 1930s Exhibition of People’s Achievements (VDNKh) that served as a matrix of Soviet life. The exhibition, which turned into a permanent display of Soviet achievements, presented a model of a cornucopia and fertility in a country where farmers had been eliminated as a class. Live bulls were paraded on the site, supposedly to inseminate growth. It was no accident that a year after the Olympics opening ceremony, its sets were displayed at VDNKh.
Receiving the Man of the Year award in 2014 from the Russian edition of GQ, a men’s fashion and style magazine, Ernst said that his opening of the Olympics was the happiest and scariest moment of his life. ‘I got a chance to confess my love to the country in front of three billion people on earth and what is probably even more important, for two hours to bring my compatriots together in one emotion, even though many of them cannot be brought together in one emotion…’47 The question is what kind of emotion.
For all its technological modernity and scenes of the avant-garde, Russia’s present was its past. There was no sign of Perestroika or the 1990s or the 2000s. It was as though the Soviet Union never collapsed. Ernst effectively stopped the story of the country in the early 1960s, the time of Krushchev’s Thaw and when Ernst was born. ‘The time after the war is the time we live in,’ Channel One commentators told their television audience.
As Grigory Revzin, an architecture critic and columnist, noted, the choice of Krushchev’s Thaw as the last ‘historic’ period reflected the spirit of the time when the ceremony was conceived – in the short period of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential rule, which was perceived as a brief ‘thaw’ and which proposed ‘modernization’ as its main goal. Yet when the show opened the times had changed and its optimistic mood clashed with the tone of a military-style mobilization created by Ernst’s television news. Channel One rebranded itself as ‘First Olympic’, and dressed its presenters in the Russian team’s uniform. Any critic of the Olympics who dared to mention corruption during its construction was deemed an enemy. Every Russian medal was celebrated as though it was a military victory.
Parallel with the show in Sochi, another far more dramatic but no less colourful show was unfolding in Kiev. Thousands of people on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) rose against a kleptocratic, dysfunctional and authoritarian post-Soviet order that was personified in Ukraine by the thuggish, corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych. People waved EU flags as a symbol of the dignified life they wished to have. Riot police tried to disband protesters who set up a camp in the square after Yanukovych dumped an agreement with the EU under pressure from Russia.
At night, faced with the very real prospect of being beaten up or killed, the people in Maidan came together in one emotion. On the illuminated stage, projected on a screen, protest leaders called for calm and defiance, priests read out prayers and Ruslana, a popular Ukrainian singer and the winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, led the national anthem: ‘Ukraine has not yet perished, nor her glory, nor her freedom.’ Thousands of Maidan protesters struck up the chorus line: ‘Souls and bodies we’ll lay down, all for our freedom.’ It looked like the birth of the nation.
By the time the Sochi Olympics had finished, blood had been spilled in Kiev. Riot police stormed Maidan. Officers threw percussion grenades taped up with nails and bolts at protesters, who responded with Molotov cocktails. Snipers shot protesters with live ammunition. The centre of Kiev went up in flames and Yanukovych flew to Sochi to consult Putin. The picture of Kiev’s inferno spoilt Putin’s spectacle in Sochi. He was furious. The revolution in Kiev, he was convinced, was staged by the West which wanted to undermine him and turn Ukraine away from his sphere of influence. ‘The Olympics’, Ernst said, ‘goes well beyond sport. It is geopolitics. We staged a good Olympics and it produced a strong counter-reaction. One day we will turn up all kinds of documents and write a true history of 2014.’48
Three days after the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics – also staged by Ernst – Russian ‘polite green men’ in unmarked military uniforms staged a coup in Crimea. Russian naval vessels that guarded the coast around Sochi set course towards Sebastopol. The Kremlin began the annexation of Crimea and stirred a war in the east of Ukraine. Television was at the forefront of that attack and Ernst and Dobrodeev were commanding the information forces. It was a television show whose cost was no longer calculated in billions of dollars but in thousands of lives.
Epilogue: Aerial Combat
In May 2000, two months after Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president, Danila Bagrov, the main character of Russia’s most popular blockbuster Brat (Brother) returned to the screen in Brat 2. If Brat had been an instant hit, its sequel became an instant cult.
The film follows Danila and his brother as they travel to America to take revenge for the death of a friend, Konstantin, whose twin brother was being blackmailed by an American businessman who also deals in drugs and violent sex. Danila spares the life of the Russian banker who was responsible for Konstantin’s murder, and instead decides to track down the banker’s American partner and deliver justice. After killing a few Ukrainians and ‘niggers’ and saving a Russian prostitute, Dasha, the Russian Robin Hood shoots his way through the American’s office. ‘Tell me, American,’ says Danila, putting his gun on the table, ‘do you think power is in money? I think power is in truth. The one who has truth is stronger.’
Made according to the canon of a Hollywood thriller, the film discerned and accurately captured Russian national instincts, thoughts and prejudices. When Danila’s brother, before shooting a Ukrainian gangster, shouted: ‘You will answer to me for Sebastopol!’ audiences in Russia erupted in a slightly embarrassed laughter of recognition and approval. This and many other lines instantly turned into popular catchphrases. ‘Are you gangsters?’ an American woman asks Danila and Dasha as they barge into her flat. ‘No, we are Russians,’ Dasha, the Russian prostitute, replies.
The film had the charisma of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Danila shot people with the calm coolness of the character played by John Travolta. But it also made some serious points. It divided the world into ‘ours’ or ‘brothers’, and ‘others’ or ‘aliens’. ‘Brotherhood’ was established through blood rather than ideology or values.
Preparing to fight for justice, Danila buys his weapons in Moscow from a freak collector of Second World War trophies who dresses in an old Nazi coat and goes under the nickname ‘Fascist’. ‘Willing or not, we are all brothers,’ he says to Danila, who meekly tells him that his grandfather died in the war. ‘It happens,’ the ‘Fascist’ replies peacefully.
After years of futile search for a national idea and common values, Brat 2 provided a simple and highly enticing answer: Russians are strong because they are moral and have truth behind them, while Americans are weak and hypocritical because they are all about money. Russians who were sucked into America, like Konstantin’s twin brother, were corrupted morally. Just like the Soviet maxim, ‘the teaching of Marx is all-powerful, because it is right’, it required no further proof. Russians are better simply because they are.