Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Way back in 1984, on the eve of perestroika , the film Repentance hit our cinema screens from the Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze. Naive and honest, like all films of that period, the subject revolved around a single metaphor: the recently buried corpse of a dictator, bearing the characteristics of both Joseph Stalin and his powerful security minister Lavrentiy Beria, was dug up from its grave every night and taken to the home of his son. This is exactly what is happening to us now: for sixty-five years we have been digging up the corpse and dancing around it, with ritual curtsies, curses and declarations of love.

We ought to bury this corpse, drive a wooden stake through its heart, raise monuments to his victims over the whole of Russia, and declare 5 March as a national holiday, the Day of National Salvation. How many lives were spared because Stalin died? How many people were able to return from the camps? In mid-March 1953 the antisemitic ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was due to start (it is rumoured that Stalin had already prepared a list of Jews who were to be sent to camps in the Far East). There was bound to be a new wave of repressions, a new twist in the Cold War, and the paranoia of the dictator who was rapidly losing his judgement could have resulted in nuclear catastrophe. What a joy it is for mankind that Stalin didn’t live to see the thermo-nuclear bomb! And if a national idea is possible for the Russia of the future, then – albeit with a delay of seventy years – this should be de-Stalinization, just as de-Nazification became the idea of post-Hitler Germany.

Nothing stirs up passion in Russia more than the battle for our own past. Taking down and replacing memorials, renaming streets and towns, retouching photographs and wiping out names from history books: these are all part of the favourite national game. Here’s a current example. In Moscow, on the famous House No. 26 on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, they have reinstated the memorial plaque to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. The plaque was up on the wall for ten years after the leader’s death, but was taken down during the anti-Soviet 1990s, and for a long time all that remained was a dark patch and four holes, before the building was refurbished. Now it has been decided to smooth over this historical injustice.

At about the same time as this became known, we learnt that a group of left-wing activists had put forward a proposal to strip Mikhail Gorbachev of the Order of Andrei Pervozvanny, which he had been awarded by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in honour of his eightieth birthday. Social media exploded with the usual abuse directed at Gorbachev, who ‘sold out the country to the Americans’. Sociology confirms that the people have fond memories of Brezhnev, but they don’t like Gorbachev. According to a poll conducted by the Levada Centre, Russians named Leonid Brezhnev as the best leader of Russia in the twentieth century (56 per cent replied positively, 28 per cent negatively). At the other end of the scale, Gorbachev came out top: 20 per cent considered him positively, 66 per cent negatively. It should be remembered, too, that when Gorbachev stood in the Russian presidential elections in 1996 he received only a humiliating 0.5 per cent of votes.

The reasons why the people love Brezhnev are clear. He falls into that archetype of the kindly old uncle, who lets you get away with mischief and gives you sweets. Brezhnev was the very embodiment of the Russia dream of khalyava : [4] Khalyava is a peculiarly Russian concept. Basically, it means getting something free, especially if it comes from the state, misusing state funds, having a sinecure job, etc. living stress-free, changing nothing and not rocking the boat. That was how the country lived: we squandered the interest from the imperial inheritance and took out credit on the next generation (indeed, so generously, that to this day we are paying for the illusory well-being of the Brezhnev years), tearing off with a certain melancholy the pages of the calendar: Miners’ Day, Militia Day, Day of the Paris Commune. [5] For a description of ‘The Red Calendar’ and the special days, see Part I, note 21. The type of calendar referred to is printed as a block on cheap paper, with each day being torn off as you go through the year.

Brezhnev’s popularity in folklore, and even a certain sympathy brought out by jokes about his weaknesses, forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (for example, there is a joke that he once mistook Margaret Thatcher for Indira Gandhi because it said so in his speaking notes), bears witness to the deep resonance he had with the Russian folk element, with the inescapable entropy of the Russian character. Gorbachev, on the other hand, was very untypical for Russia. It is no surprise that Margaret Thatcher immediately liked him. He didn’t drink, he was charming and loquacious (in Russia, people who speak well automatically make people suspect them of being insincere); and the main thing was that he was unusually alive, in contrast to the iron faces that we were used to seeing in the presidia and on the front pages of the newspapers. Gorbachev smashed the stereotypes and had an inexplicable – and for Russia a totally unusual – desire for change. He could simply have sat tight in his chair, perhaps remaining General Secretary to this very day, receiving delegations and awarding himself medals; but for some reason he felt the need to move this chair, and with it the whole power structure. Perhaps it was because he understood that this throne and the whole palace of Soviet power looked like a ridiculous anachronism in a world that was getting faster and more complex, where change was going to be the only way to survive.

In Ivan Goncharov’s classic novel Oblomov (1859), there are two central characters: the dreamy and inactive landowner, Ilya Ilych Oblomov, and his friend, a German on his father’s side, the practical, strong-willed and active Andrei Stoltz. Brezhnev and Gorbachev: here we have Oblomov and Stoltz, two faces of Russian power, the immovable-patriarchal, and the reform-minded, Peter-the-Great-like, clean-shaven, foreign face. Anthropologists confirm that there are two types of nations: those that adapt to their surroundings and those that change them. The first group includes most of the Asiatic countries and, clearly, Russia. The second type are cultures of the West – Faustian, predominantly Protestant, with a thirst for action and change. Brezhnev responded to the traditionalist aspirations of the population: let’s just leave everything as it was. Gorbachev, like many Russian modernizers, represented the second group, which was why he wasn’t accepted by the people. They don’t love Gorbachev because he was different, because he gave us freedom. But we hadn’t known for such a long time what to do with it, and, as a result, we gave it back to the state.

Once again today we are living in Brezhnev’s kingdom of simulation and self-deception, falling into insanity, allowing the years to slip by, years that have already turned into decades, calling up the ghosts of the Stalinist and late-Soviet eras. Putin the reformer, Putin the German, Putin like Stoltz, who presented himself not as a tsar but as a manager (‘providing services to the people’, as he described his role in the 2002 census): all this came to an end in 2003 when he arrested Khodorkovsky. A typical Russian timelessness settled over the country, with the round Botox face of the state above it, which reflects not even Oblomov’s absent-mindedness, but the indifference of a Chinese Bogd Khan, with a desire to change nothing. As the political scientist, Stanislav Belkovsky, recognized: ‘Putin is the ruler of inertia. You can never demand that such a person should move history onwards.’ Under Putin, just like under Brezhnev, the country is simply standing still, while history moves on. How such a situation ends we know only too well.