Blossoming at the age of sixteen, Tatyana, with her dark beauty, began attracting a flood of admirers, including, briefly, the Soviet hockey champion Stanislav Petukhov as well as my future father. Although she maintained contact with him after the American exhibition in 1959, their romance had cooled by the time he returned to Moscow for graduate study in 1961, and they drifted apart. Settling on studying foreign literature, she enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, housed in a sprawling neoclassical building across the river from Gorky Park.
Studying English emboldened her to frequent some of the city’s fanciest cafés, of which there were extremely few, such as those in the Art Nouveau–style Metropol and National hotels, off Red Square. Since meeting foreigners there was exciting but risky—or exciting because it was risky—she wore handmade clothes that weren’t easily identifiable as Soviet and made certain never to speak Russian. However, she forgot her cardinal rule one evening when talking to a classmate in the Metropol lobby. A large woman in a drab gray suit materialized and grabbed her arm. “Devushka!” (“Girl,” a standard form of address), she growled. “Come with me!”
After leading Tatyana along a corridor and into a dimly lit room containing a table and several chairs, she proceeded to grill her. “What are you doing here? Whom are you meeting?” Recovering from her shock, Tatyana felt queasy from a sinking feeling that the KGB would open a file on her, ending her carefree life. “Who do you think you are?!” the woman barked, clearly taking Tatyana for a prostitute, thanks to her unusual clothes and foreign boots, a gift from a well-connected suitor. She fixed her stare on Tatyana’s pillbox hat. “And where did you get that?!”
“It’s Soviet!” Tatyana protested, the only thing she could think of to say as the woman snatched it away. To her great good fortune, the hat was Soviet-made, which embarrassed the woman. “Khorosho” (“okay”), she said with a sigh. “Now, tell me what you’re doing here.” Tatyana’s luck extended to having remembered to carry her student identification. Many of her classmates who were studying to be interpreters were also being groomed to spy on foreigners, and her interrogator either took her for an agent or decided not to risk finding out because her manner suddenly transformed. “I’m sorry, my dear one!” she said in apology. “Let’s forget all about this.” Tatyana knew that getting off so lightly would have been impossible a few years earlier.
Immersion in literature soon began transforming her from an impetuous party girl into a resolute young woman with intellectual ambitions. After meeting a young painter named Yuri Kuperman in the National Hotel’s café, she fell in with a group of artists and other bohemian types. Most of the painters supported themselves illustrating books, but some—including Kuperman and his friend Ilya Kabakov, who would become Russia’s best-known conceptualist—were experimenting on their own, often starting by imitating pictures of Western art brought by visiting foreigners.
Although Tatyana rarely saw George—who eventually settled in London and made reporting trips from there to Moscow—they came to share mutual friends. Among them was Sergei Milovsky, the skillful Moscow lawyer whose unrivaled connections and sparkling charisma enabled him to live a highly atypical life as a kind of Soviet playboy. Not that one would have been able to tell by his appearance: there was nothing particularly distinctive about the middle-aged man with close-cropped graying hair. Milovsky’s epiphany had come during his service as a young conscript in the bitter Winter War with Finland in 1939–40, when Soviet forces attacking with three times as many men and a hundredfold more tanks were repelled by the far better equipped and trained Finns. Crack Finnish snipers picked off Soviet soldiers with frightening ease, often on open territory because the Red Army’s generals relied on their ability to sustain heavy losses as a favored tactic for overwhelming the enemy. Many who weren’t killed froze to death during that exceptionally frigid winter because they lacked tents.
Desperately cold and exhausted one especially freezing night in the open, Milovsky battled sleep for fear he would die and wondered why Soviet soldiers were kept in the dark about their every move. Envying the vilified enemy’s soldiers, glimpses of whom showed them to be far better dressed and equipped, he decided the war was a monstrous error that exposed the huge lie that life in the USSR was better.
Returning to civilian life, the natural charmer became expert in dispensing and soliciting favors and built a list of acquaintances that came to include privileged diplomats, journalists, actors and children of high-ranking Communist Party officials. Among them was a son of Anastas Mikoyan—a Party leader and close cohort of Stalin before becoming an important supporter of Khrushchev’s thaw—who brought Danish cheeses and salami to Milovsky’s legendary parties, which attracted legions of women bored by the monotony of their lives. Many came to him for help and advice, with which Milovsky was unstinting. It was thanks to him that Tatyana and George eventually reconnected and married a decade after their first meeting.
Milovsky was a shining example of someone who could work the system, an activity in which almost every Soviet engaged. Such schemes, in which unofficial networks are paramount, have required maintaining elaborate fictions, especially about the country’s leaders—a pattern set far before the seventy years of Soviet rule.
In medieval Muscovy, noble families whose wealth and power were sustained by the idea of a divinely appointed tsar wielding absolute power were disinclined to “leak” information to outsiders.12 The old adage “Don’t carry garbage out of the hut” helps explain why foreigners, who often found Russians’ activities puzzling, tended to attribute their behavior to their uniqueness and inscrutability. The absence of genuine evidence about the inner workings of Russian politics also fueled speculation and propaganda.
Ivan IV’s reputation as “the Terrible” was enhanced by foreign visitors not privy to the clan struggles behind the facade of his absolute rule. One of the main sources of information was an English merchant named Jerome Horsey, who became Queen Elizabeth I’s envoy to Moscow. Describing Ivan’s sacking of the independent principality of Novgorod—secondhand information at best—Horsey wrote that his cruelty bred intense hatred and inspired many plots to kill him. Sniffing them out, Ivan proceeded to “ransacke and spoill and massacre the chieff nobillitie and richest officers, and other the best sortt of his merchants and subiects; his hands and hart, now so hardened and imbrued, did put many of them to most horrable and shamfull deaths and tortors.”13
Such accounts fed a myth that probably developed after the accession of the first Romanov, Mikhail I. Seeking to reinforce the legitimacy of a weak ruler whose family hadn’t been among the most powerful, its supporters encouraged an account of Ivan’s reign as divided into two stages. During the first, he built up the principality under the influence of a wise tsarina, Anastasia. According to the conventional wisdom, her early death sent him into a deep depression that led to madness and earned him the moniker grozny—which is actually best translated as “fierce,” not “terrible.” Anastasia, of course, was a Romanov.
The foreign stereotypes reinforced domestic fictions. Russians “imitated European historical reasoning for the same reason that they imitated wigs and portrait painting and ballet,” Edward Keenan argued. “Because their own was, or seemed to them to be, somehow deficient. In particular they acquired, and developed, an obsession with the juxtaposition of native and foreign culture that has distorted their perception of both.”14 In the nineteenth century, Keenan added, Russians developed “more complex forms of rejection of the European treatment of history,” including the idea of the Russian “soul,” which foreigners were deemed unable to understand. So it went and so it goes.
Despite the appearance of his great personal authority, however, Putin’s ability to govern in the Western sense—to institute structural economic reforms that would help wean Russia from its dependence on natural resources, establish a rule of law, rebuild infrastructures and generally act in the interests of the state
and its people—is feeble at best. Outside Moscow, regional leaders govern their provinces largely as they see fit, acting with impunity as long as they remain loyal to the Kremlin. In that sense, the Russian state is weak because the center has little leverage beyond its administrative coercion and is rarely serious about doing more than that. However, as the gap between Putin’s promises and reality has widened, maintaining the central fiction of his all-powerful rule has become a growing challenge.
It was still relatively easy in 2007, when Putin’s United Russia Party won more than 70 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. (Some regions, such as Chechnya, gave the party the old Soviet-era 99 percent.) Although independent monitors reported systematic abuses—including harassment of opposition campaigners, stuffing of ballots and forced voting—very few voters seemed to care. Young Russians, including some I interviewed at a popular industrial-looking hangout for Moscow’s artsy young crowd, told me they weren’t concerned about the lack of democracy. “Russia is stable and on the right path,” a museum curator named Katya Kaytushina told me. “Anyway, I’m not really interested in politics.” A few tables away, an eighteen-year-old student named Alexei Aksandrov said he’d voted for United Russia. “I was a little concerned about the cult of personality being built around Putin,” he admitted. “But I like the president’s course. I mean, he looks good on television, and he’s respected. Maybe there is a dictatorship in Russia, but I’m not worried about it.”
The mood was very different at a roundtable discussion across town between some embattled Kremlin critics. Among the morose participants was the veteran corruption expert Georgy Satarov, who said he’d come to the conclusion that society was afraid to voice, or vote for, its own interests. “Russian public opinion no longer exists,” he declared. “People vote how they’re expected to. They say what they believe they’re expected to say.”
Medvedev’s nomination to succeed Putin hinted at how little the prime minister’s ascent would change the status quo. The president formally appointed the successor he had personally groomed after receiving the heads of four political parties, all essentially pro-Kremlin, in his office so they could unveil “their” unanimous choice. Saying that their pick of Medvedev represented the opinion of a wide variety of Russians wasn’t simple hypocrisy. The imitation of democracy was central to Putin’s maintaining power. Since no observer could have believed it was legitimate, the importance lay in the display. As he prepared to leave office in 2008, he took part in more of the publicity stunts for which he was widely ridiculed abroad: riding horseback shirtless, flying in fighter jets, shooting wild leopards with tranquilizers. They helped burnish the perception of his personal authority that would be crucial for maintaining power. When he stepped down, an astounding 80-plus percent of the population said he’d done a good job.
From the beginning, the cruder his persona became, the tighter was his connection to the conservative majority on whom he increasingly depended. During a 2002 news conference in Brussels, he responded to a reporter’s critical question about Chechnya by inviting him to come to Moscow to be circumcised. Later, he dismissed newspaper reports about him as gossip “picked out of someone’s nose and smeared onto little bits of paper.” Rude as such outbursts appeared to foreigners, and even to many Russians, they were popular. When I attended several annual Kremlin news conferences for more than a thousand reporters crammed into a Kremlin auditorium, Putin owned the room, keeping the increasingly weary journalists fixated for hours by alternating between threats, jokes and flirtation.
Natalia Muraviova, the rector of Moscow’s Academy of Communications and Information, sees such performances as coming from a highly talented actor. “He uses a lot of repetition that builds to a crescendo,” she told me. “And his widely reported aphorisms are like gems. They’re few and far between, and everyone remembers them.” Muraviova praised Putin’s speechwriters for enabling him to connect emotionally with his supporters by using images to support his statements. “He understands how language is used,” she said, “and does it very consciously.”
Putin’s skills have enabled him to play the part of political pundit in addition to his other roles. Inevitably, after corruption scandals and airline and other disasters that reflect very poorly on government oversight have come to light during his many years as leader, he has appeared on television dressing down one or another minister, or all of them, as if he himself had had nothing to do with the failures. Doing so has helped presumably outraged viewers to identify with him as well as place him within the traditional image of Russia’s rulers: “good tsar, bad boyars.” That is, the leader’s beneficent intentions are undone by the self-interested maneuverings of his crafty advisers.
In 2011, however, after more than three years as prime minister, Putin’s pumped-up persona began deflating. An archaeological diving excursion from which he emerged holding antique vases obviously planted earlier appeared ludicrous, as did later missteps. To make matters worse, his stern but relatively youthful visage, one of his biggest assets, seemed to be aging—paradoxically the result of Botox injections, many believed. Dorian Gray–like, his face took on an artificial-looking, impassive gloss reminiscent of a well-fed but declining dictator. When he appeared at a martial arts fighting match, an audience that would normally have been expected to support him booed. New accusations that he was out of touch, living in a bubble surrounded by sycophantic advisers, dented his authority.
Putin didn’t stand idly by. After opposition leaders scored a rare coup by rebranding United Russia with Navalny’s slogan—the party of “crooks and thieves”—he promptly launched a new vehicle called the Popular Front that all manner of organizations and celebrities were strong-armed into joining. The language of military mobilization extended to a newly manufactured social-networking group called Putin’s Army that juxtaposed the martial symbolism with sex by producing bizarre Internet videos of buxom young women preparing to rip open their tank tops and staged events with models in bikinis washing cars “for Putin.”
Their hero nevertheless continued compounding his public relations blunders by bungling the announcement that he would run for a third term as president. The widely expected announcement came during a televised United Russia conference, during which Medvedev humiliated himself by announcing he would step down. Then Putin declared that the two of them had agreed on the decision years earlier. It was a watershed moment. Its level of cynicism insulted ordinary Russians who had previously played along with the facade of democracy. Even though United Russia won 20 percent less of the vote in parliamentary elections that December than it did in 2007, tens of thousands of protesters who weren’t willing to ignore the blatant rigging this time around took to the streets holding white ribbons, mimicking the “color revolutions” that had recently overthrown old administrations in Georgia and Ukraine.
Nothing if not consistent, Putin responded by taking another page from his old playbook, insulting the protesters by saying he thought the white ribbons were condoms. Maintaining that only he could steer his country through the shoals of anarchy and stagnation, he dismissed opposition leaders’ wise decision to advocate clear steps toward gradual reform through fair elections and other measures that would reintroduce political competition, characterizing the call as an urge for revolution, a “constantly recurring problem in Russian history.”
He proceeded to use much of his political toolbox to try to discredit, disorient and undermine the opposition. President Medvedev, paying condescending lip service to the opposition’s demands, was trotted out to issue another call for easing restrictions against political parties. That served only to draw attention to his central dilemma: crack down and risk bigger demonstrations or ease up and undermine the carefully cultivated perception of authoritarian dominance. The discerning political columnist Yulia Latynina pointed out that Putin’s apparent belief that concessions to public opinion displayed weakness meant “you actually do show weakness when you compromise, something the pu
blic perceives just like a shark senses the blood of a wounded fish.”15 Putin nevertheless won reelection in March of 2012 with more than 60 percent of the vote amid a huge police presence on the streets. Protests continued but were greatly diminished.
Still, reaction to the two elections showed that civil society continued to display some vital signs after a decade of steady decline. It also showed fixing elections to be Putin’s main challenge. Almost thirty thousand people turned up at polling stations to observe the presidential vote. They were joined by formerly compliant politicians, television personalities, journalists and activists, who blogged and tweeted about many instances of fraud, especially schemes to bus factory workers and provincial residents from one voting station to another so they could cast multiple ballots. For once, a small grassroots opposition raised the prospect, however distant, of a struggle for the country’s future.
The Kremlin’s concessions were largely for show. One of Medvedev’s electoral reforms, the return of direct gubernatorial elections—which Putin abolished in 2005—allowed the president to hold “consultations” with candidates and regional lawmakers to ban independents from running, which virtually neutralized the measure. A new law effectively rescinded it altogether in 2013 by allowing each region to revert to Kremlin appointments. However, another change, which lowered the number of signatures required for new parties to qualify for registration (it used to be forty thousand; now it’s five hundred), gave hope by easing a rule previously used to sideline rival political groups. As opposition leaders scrambled to form new parties and alliances, jailed oligarch Khodorkovsky praised it as a “step forward, which could change something in Russia, but most important possibly become the main catalyst for a change of political generations.”16
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