At the end of the film Danila and Dasha fly back home. An airport official checking their passports tells the Russian woman in astonishment: ‘But your visa expired years ago! You will never be able to return to America.’ By way of reply, she gives him the finger. The closing credits of the film were accompanied by the soundtrack of ‘Goodbye, America’, sung by a children’s choir.
The film was a product of art, not ideology. It did not tell people what they should think, rather it told them what they thought. It was not made to order by some official body. It was made to order by the public and appealed to some deeply rooted sense of injustice and humiliation that demanded satisfaction. Directed by Alexei Balabanov, the film had the strength, clarity and directness of a powerful beam that projected the country’s future. Danila did not live long enough to see it.
In 2002, two years after the film was made, Sergei Bodrov, the actor who played Danila, died in a freak accident. He was filming in the Caucasus when a block of ice fell from Mount Dzhimara and dislodged a glacier that moved down the ravine, burying the film crew alive under the mud and boulders it brought with it. A decade later some Russians retrospectively imputed symbolism to his tragic end, as though it had contained a warning about the dangerous forces that Danila had set into motion. At the time it was made, however, the country was in the grip of a postmodern malaise, in which nothing was real, particularly politics, and the film was not taken as the prophecy that it turned out to be.
One man who was in charge of constructing Russia’s political life in the 2000s was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s political adviser, who created a system of make-believe that dominated the country’s political reality. Surkov had trained as a director of mass theatrical events and had worked as a PR man for the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before moving to the Kremlin administration where he occupied the office that had belonged to the chief Soviet ideologists. Unlike his predecessors, however, he had no ideology. He was a master of an ‘as if’ world that consisted of simulacra and manipulations.
On the face of it, Russia had all the trappings of democracy: it had political parties and elections. But most parties were controlled by the Kremlin and elections – which are supposed to be a mechanism of orderly transfer of power – turned into a mechanism of retaining power. It worked like a house of mirrors. Those trying to challenge the Kremlin ended up fighting their own distorted reflection.
In 2003 Surkov set up and ushered into parliament a fake left-wing nationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) led by the demagogue and populist Dmitry Rogozin, who campaigned against immigrants and oligarchs. The party got 9 per cent in the parliamentary elections. Putin and his United Russia Party were marketed as the only alternative to the dark forces of nationalism.
Behind all these political games, which Surkov called ‘sovereign democracy’, was not a vision of Russia’s future or an ambition to restore an empire, but something far more primitive: personal enrichment, comforts and power. Money was the only ideology the Kremlin subscribed to. Unlike Danila, who believed that truth was more powerful than money, the Kremlin believed there was no such thing as ‘truth’ and that strength was in money, that there was no such thing as values and that the only difference between Russian and Western officials was that Western ones could hide their cynicism better. If the new Russian elite had money, it could buy itself a Western lifestyle and the loyalty of the population, without bothering with all those ‘values’ which it considered to be no more than just wrapping.
Whereas Yeltsin’s era bred the oligarch, Putin’s introduced a far more dangerous type – the bureaucrat-entrepreneur who used the powers of the state for personal enrichment. ‘Entrepreneurs’ who work for the security services or the police have done especially well, because they have the ultimate competitive advantage: a licence for violence. The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the appropriation of his vast oil firm Yukos was the biggest coup these men achieved and marked a turning point for the country, from one where universal human values were at least proclaimed to be at the centre of everything, to one where the state was proclaimed the top priority and people acting in its name had complete power over any individual, however rich or powerful. To justify their racketeering, Putin’s people portrayed themselves as great ‘patriots’ who served the interest of the state. And since they were the state, helping themselves to its riches seemed only fair. The public, which resented the oligarchs, approved.
For all his authoritarianism, Putin derived his legitimacy from popular support and while he did not believe in fair elections, he paid careful attention to public opinion.
Opinion polls in 2004 showed that the number of Russians who considered themselves no different from people in other countries had fallen, while the opinion that Russia was surrounded by enemies had grown stronger. ‘It is as though an invisible wall still counterpoises everything that is “ours” to everything “foreign”,’ wrote sociologist Yuri Levada.1 One of Russia’s oldest ideological constructions – the ‘besieged fortress’ – was also one of the most durable ones.
As a professional KGB operative, Putin ‘recruited’ people by telling them what they expected to hear. He told his core, traditionalist electorate that the state was the only provider of public good and that it was surrounded by enemies. But he also had a message for the middle class: don’t involve yourself in politics and enjoy life while we, in the Kremlin, deal with the dark and uneducated plebs which have neither desire nor taste for Western democracy.
While the Kremlin pumped people with anti-Western tripe, its close friends, who had enriched themselves, shopped in Milan, holidayed in France, kept their money in Switzerland and sent their children to the top private schools in England. Money and corruption, many thought, would prevent the Kremlin from nationalist ideology and serious confrontation with the West. High oil prices allowed Putin to satisfy alclass="underline" his friends became billionaires, the traditionalist paternalistically minded electorate got wage increases, while the middle class enjoyed low taxes and personal freedoms. Although money was the main mechanism of ruling the country, it was supplemented with entertainment: the show of Russia’s resurgence, be it a football match or a war in Georgia, was enthusiastically received by all.
By the end of the decade the middle class had grown to 25 per cent of the population and nearly 40 per cent of the workforce – and those proportions were higher in big cities. In less than ten years Russia had transformed into a mass consumer society. Most of what it consumed, however, was imported. Russians in big cities drove the same cars, wore the same clothes, bought the same iPads, ate the same food, saw the same films, worked in the same open-plan offices and hung out in the same stylish bars as their counterparts in the West. Moscow acquired all the trimmings of a normal European city, but something was missing: a sense of security and justice, respect for one’s achievements, the rule of law, property rights and healthcare – and none of these could be imported.
After the 2009 financial crisis, which exposed the fundamental weakness of Putin’s economic model, the middle class became restless and started to talk about ‘shoving off’ from the country. This was not so much a statement of intention but a sign of an approaching crisis. The frustration was exacerbated by a false expectation created by the Kremlin among the Russian public. In 2008, in order to circumvent a constitutional rule that prevented him from serving for more than two consecutive terms as Russia’s president, Putin made himself prime minister by installing the obedient sidekick and former lawyer Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s president. This was another of the Kremlin’s simulacra. Medvedev talked about modernization and freedom, tweeted and recorded video blogs creating an illusion of change. The purpose of this illusion, however, was to leave everything intact and allow Putin to reclaim the title of the president four years later. But when Putin broke the illusion of change by saying that he would simply retake his job as president, making Medvedev prime minister, the frustration of the middle class boiled over. Medvedev’s announcement that the ‘job swap’ had been planned all along added insult to injury. Many Russians felt duped and humiliated. By returning to the Kremlin, Putin was moving against the flow of time.