Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

The world saw something entirely different, and Putin learned a key lesson. Television—the very same television that had created him, a president plucked out of thin air—could turn on him and destroy him just as fast and with the same evident ease.

So Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of staff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich,’ and got up to leave. And I said, ‘Volodya, this is good-bye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos. When he left the room, I turned to Voloshin and said, ‘So, Sasha, what have we done? Have we brought the black colonels to power?’ Voloshin scratched his head and said, ‘I don’t think so.’” Testifying in a London court years later, Voloshin could not recall the meeting in detail, saying only that its purpose had been to inform Berezovsky that “the concert is over, the show is over.”

Berezovsky says he sat down and immediately wrote a letter to his old protégé, then asked the chief of staff to pass it on. “I wrote about an American journalist who said once that every complicated problem always has one simple solution and that solution is always wrong. And I wrote that Russia is a colossally complex problem and it is his colossal mistake to think that he can use simple methods to solve it.” Berezovsky never received a response to this letter. Within days he had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a warrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares in Channel One.

Three months after the inauguration, two of the country’s wealthiest men had been stripped of their influence and effectively kicked out of the country. Less than a year after Putin came to power, all three federal television networks were controlled by the state.

“I’VE ALWAYS TOLD PEOPLE there is no point in going to jail voluntarily,” Andrei Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, told a small group of journalists in Moscow in November 2000. Berezovsky, she said, had called her in the summer to ask for advice and she had counseled him to stay out of the country. “Back in dissident times, I always advocated emigration for those under threat,” she explained. She had called us in for a press conference announcing Berezovsky’s grant to the Sakharov Museum and Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was on the verge of closing.

“What a shitty time we’ve lived to see,” said the museum’s director, former dissident Yuri Samodurov, “when we have to stand up in defense of people we don’t like at all, like Gusinsky and Berezovsky. We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”

The political system changed so quickly that even political activists and political analysts needed time to get their bearings. In December 2000, I went to a roundtable discussion among political scientists, devoted to analyzing what had happened in the year since Putin was handed power in Russia.

“He has put Russia on ice,” said one of them, a man in his fifties with a beautifully chiseled face and tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s not necessarily bad. It’s a kind of stabilizing effect. But what happens next?”

“It’s like the revolution has ended,” said another, a former dissident with disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and beard. He meant that the society had reverted to its pre–post-Soviet state. “Old cultural values, old habits are back. The whole country is trying to apply old habits to new reality.”

“I don’t think anyone really understands anything anymore,” said a third, a short man with a very big nose and a deep voice. I personally held him to be the smartest man in the room—and he certainly should have been the most knowledgeable, because he worked in the presidential administration.

“But all the changes in the last year have occurred in the area of public consciousness,” said another, a liberal political scientist who had come to prominence during perestroika. “The nation has come out of a psychological depression. This is going to be the toughest political era yet, because nationalist ideology is always the strongest.”

“But he has to live up to expectations,” objected a scholar from a younger generation, a large man with bushy black eyebrows.

The last speaker clearly had not shed the assumptions of the 1990s, when the media or the parliament could call the president to account, as they had many times: Yeltsin had last faced an impeachment attempt in 1999. The older man who had spoken before him, who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s leading ideological adviser, saw the 1990s for what they had been: a brief period of quasi-democracy, a fleeting vision, a fluke. “They’ve won, my dears,” Alexander Tsipko said to those present. “Russia is a large state floating in an unformed political space. And they try to fill this space with their national anthem, their two-headed eagle, and their tricolored flag. Such are the symbols of Soviet nationalism.”

Russia’s uncertain identity in the 1990s had manifested, among other things, in its inability to settle on state symbols. Having secured its sovereignty in 1991, the country plunged, almost immediately, into some sort of revolutionary’s remorse, which made shedding old symbols and asserting new ones a painful and, as it ultimately turned out, impossible task. The Soviet red flag was immediately replaced with the white, blue, and red flag that had previously served Russia for eight months, between the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 and the Bolshevik revolution in October. The state seal, however, retained its red star, its hammer and sickle, and its stalks of wheat, which had unironically signified plenitude in Soviet times. The parliament debated the seal repeatedly but could not reach any decision except, in mid-1992, for replacing the abbreviation RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) with the words “Russian Federation.” At the end of 1993, Yeltsin finally created a state seal by decree: a two-headed eagle would serve as its main image, a symbol Russia shares with Albania, Serbia, and Montenegro, among modern states. It was not until December 2000 that Putin’s parliament finally voted to enshrine the two-headed-eagle seal in law.

The national anthem posed an even more implacable challenge. In 1991, the Soviet anthem had been scrapped in favor of “The Patriotic Song,” a lively tune by the nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka. But this anthem had no lyrics; moreover, lyrics proved impossible to write: the rhythmic line dictated by the music was so short that any attempt to set words to it—and Russian words tend to be long—lent it a definite air of absurdity. A number of media outlets ran contests to choose the lyrics to go with the Glinka, but the entries, invariably, were suitable only for the entertainment of the editorial staff, and little by little chipped away at the legitimacy of the anthem.

The Soviet national anthem that had been scrapped in favor of the Glinka had a complicated history. The music, written by Alexander Alexandrov, appeared in 1943, with lyrics supplied by a children’s poet named Sergei Mikhalkov. The anthem’s refrain praised “the Party of Lenin, the Party of Stalin / Leading us to the triumph of Communism.” After Stalin died and, in 1956, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced “the cult of personality,” the refrain could no longer be performed, so the anthem lost its lyrics. The instrumental version would be performed for twenty-one years while the Soviet Union sought the poet and the words to express its post-Stalinist identity. In 1977, when I was in third or fourth grade, the anthem suddenly acquired lyrics, which we schoolchildren had to learn as soon as possible. For this purpose, every school notebook manufactured in the Soviet Union that year bore the new lyrics to the old national anthem on the back cover, where multiplication tables or verb exceptions had once resided. The new lyrics had been written by the same children’s poet, who was, by now, sixty-four years old. The refrain now lauded “the Party of Lenin, the force of the people.”