Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Brezhnev probably deserves his plaque on the wall. A whole generation grew up under him, and you can’t wipe out that memory. But Gorbachev also deserves a memorial, as a man who decided to make changes. He was the one who first threw open the windows in that great musty henhouse known as the Soviet Union. In the cold light of day, it turned out that the henhouse was built crookedly and awkwardly, and in the ensuing panic it collapsed. The fact that it fell apart was not Gorbachev’s fault; it was the fault of those who planned and built the henhouse in the first place. But Gorbachev’s merit is that this miserable project, which was not fit for purpose, was closed down, and collapsed into a multitude of national stories with the minimum of victims (if, for example, you compare it to the collapse of Yugoslavia), without major wars, uprisings, starvation or nuclear incidents.

Even more important still is that Gorbachev remained a democrat to the end. He didn’t go down the route of authoritarian changes and didn’t stage a Soviet Tiananmen (although a few individual cases of breaking up protest meetings in Vilnius in January 1991 and before that in Alma-Ata in December 1986 and in Tbilisi in April 1989 occurred during his rule). Tanks were brought onto the streets not by Gorbachev, but against him, in August 1991, but they turned out to be as fake and powerless as the dying system that had sent them. Gorbachev has passed into history not as a reformist dictator such as Pinochet or Park Chung-hee, but as a reform-minded idealist. His attempt to preserve the system, by building ‘socialism with a human face’ in the spirit of the Prague Spring of 1968, failed. But paradoxically, that failure cleared the way for the new institutions that followed and in which we live now; it allowed Russia to get in the last carriage on the train leaving for the twenty-first century. Without Gorbachev, there would have been no Yeltsin, no Putin, no post-Communist Russia. At some point, Russia will realize this and put up a monument to Gorbachev, and name streets, schools and airports after him. But that’s not going to happen any time soon. For now, the majority of my fellow citizens prefer to live with the fairytales of kindly old uncle Brezhnev, under whose bushy eyebrows they slept so sweetly.

He was an awkward fellow. He was too big, too bulky, even the sweep of his arms was too wide. And he remains awkward, even in death: awkward for the current leadership (it’s difficult to separate yourself from someone who personally put you in power), and awkward for the majority of the population, for whom (along with Gorbachev) he is seen as equally responsible for the collapse of the greatest country in the world, the mythical USSR. Boris Yeltsin died more than ten years ago, but he remains a figure who worries us, annoys us and bursts out of the frame. It’s as if he’s an illustration to the words of Dmitry in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov : ‘Yes, man is broad, too broad indeed. I’d have him narrower.’ [6] English language version, Andrews UK Ltd, 2012, p. 266.

Yeltsin always had the capacity to surprise us, such as when he criticized Gorbachev at the Communist Party Central Committee Plenum in October 1987; or when he clambered up onto a tank outside the White House during the coup in August 1991; or when, with a weak heart, he danced on stage at a rock concert before the uncompromising presidential elections in 1996. He had a wide Russian nature the size of his personality, and to match it he had the broad scope of his gestures, the energy of a ram; he was sincere in his delusion – and just as sincere in his very Russian ability to forgive and to ask forgiveness, as he did in his final address to the nation on 31 December 1999, when he announced he was stepping down.

We shall probably never agree about Yeltsin, just as sensible Chinese people officially declare themselves about Mao: 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong. We can’t give such a balanced assessment; we can’t reach a consensus for the sake of calm in society and universal harmony. We don’t know the proportions and the half-tones: Russia is a country with a binary, black-and-white way of thinking. In our social and political structures this binary nature inevitably leads to polarization and clashes, to revolution and explosions. That’s why today we are living in a transformer box, in a humming electric field, where all ideas and historical personalities that come within the focus of public discussion lead to instant polarization. We can’t agree about Crimea, or about Ukraine, or about Lenin, or about Stalin, or about gays, or about migrants. Our arguments instantly divide society, splitting it into two irreconcilable camps; they cause splits in families and among friends and colleagues. ‘The Yeltsin Test’ is just such a marker of irreconcilability, a symptom of social schism.

A symbol of this eternal Russian binary nature is the memorial to Nikita Khrushchev in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The work of the sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny, it has black tiles clashing with white tiles. This is exactly how we look at Yeltsin: black and white, no room for grey. For some, he is Judas and an agent of American imperialism; for others, the grave-digger of a rotten state that was ridiculed by the world. For some, like Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the USSR was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’; for others, it was the breakthrough to freedom. There is no middle view.

No one loves grave-diggers, but ultimately we can’t avoid them. By the end of the 1980s an explosion was building up in the Soviet Union; the atmosphere was stifling and fraught with thunderstorms. The thunder roared and the turbulent flow of the nineties cleaned out the Soviet stables and threw us forward onto the banks of the twenty-first century. Yeltsin was that explosion of a man who broke the bounds of the possible. It is no coincidence that one of the nicknames that stuck with him from the time he was First Secretary of the Reginal Committee of the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg was then called) was ‘the Bulldozer’. In reality, he reminded one more of a bear – not the caricature of the Russian bear, but a real beast from the Taiga, clever, threatening, but ultimately the eternally good hero of Russian folktales. There is an almost certainly apocryphal story about how, one summer, the fifteen-year-old Yeltsin became lost in the Taiga with a pair of younger schoolboys, how they wandered around lost for a month, living on berries and roots, before eventually Yeltsin brought them out to their people. He was a powerful beast with a natural instinct for survival, a true ‘political animal’, zoon politikon , in Aristotle’s terms, a mythical totem of the Russian forests.

And even if the victory achieved by Yeltsin over the dying USSR in August 1991 turned out to be only temporary, it did at least give us a breathing space for almost two decades, when we could live with the air of freedom in our lungs. The atmosphere in Russia today is once more stuffy and fraught with thunder, like in the 1980s, but there’s no new Yeltsin visible on the horizon ready to burst out like a ram and break this rotting system; there are no demonstrations of almost a million people on the streets of Moscow, as there were in 1990–1, no nationalist ferment on the edges of the empire. But even if Yeltsin’s energy for change is largely forgotten, we can always remember two of his characteristics which can forgive much: his ability to ask for our pardon, and his ability to leave on time. These are, sadly, lacking among the present leadership.

Unmentioned in official propaganda and half-forgotten by the people, yet another anniversary passed of the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which was carried out by the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP in Russian, made up of certain members of the Soviet government) in August 1991. The only ones to remember it were the liberal media and a couple of dozen of the old democrats, who laid flowers at the monument to the three young men who died under an armoured personnel carrier on the Garden Ring Road in Moscow on the night of 20–21 August 1991. In fact, this event could have become the main holiday for modern Russia – the day of its founding and independence, our Fourth of July or Bastille Day, but the total oblivion surrounding it these days is no less significant.