A people's tragedy

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected to the pressures of the market, the intelligentsia proved far smaller and less influential than it thought it was, and lost its credibility as the people’s moral voice, a role it had assumed since the nineteenth century: it lived in a world of books at a time when power and authority were increasingly defined by the state-controlled mass media. In the quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet regime, the development of public bodies in Russia has been pitifully weak. Where are the professional societies, the trade unions, the consumer organizations, the real political parties? The problem for democracy in Russia lies as much in the weakness of civil society as in the state’s oppressive strength.

But the biggest problem for the democratic project in 1991, as it had been in 1917, was the simple historical fact that the Russians had no real experience of it. Neither the Tsarist nor Soviet governments had given them a taste or even an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty, government accountability or legally protected liberties. The popular conception of ‘democracy’ in 1917 was not as a form of government at all, but rather as a social label, equivalent to ‘the common people’, whose opposite was not ‘dictatorship’ but instead ‘the bourgeoisie’. On this basis, for the next six or perhaps seven decades, people could believe that the Soviet system was ‘the most democratic in the world’ insofar as it provided, more or less, universal employment, housing, health care and social equality. In such a view, the economic crisis that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system undermined the credibility of the capitalist versions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that were offered in its place.

For the majority of ordinary Russians, especially for those of a certain age who identified themselves as ‘Soviet’, the 1990s were little short of a catastrophe. They lost everything: a familiar way of life; an economic system that guaranteed security; an ideology that gave them moral certainties, perhaps even hope; a huge empire with superpower status and an identity that covered over ethnic divisions; and national pride in Soviet achievements in culture, science and technology. Struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of the new capitalist way of life, where there was no great idea, no collective purpose defined by the state, they looked back with nostalgia to the Soviet period. Many yearned for the mythic past they remembered or imagined under Stalin, who, they believed, had presided over times of material plenty, order and security, the ‘best times in the country’s history’. According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’.

From the start of his regime, Putin aimed to restore pride in Soviet history. This was an important part of his agenda to rebuild Russia as a great power. The rehabilitation of the Soviet past, including Stalin, sanctioned Putin’s own authoritarian government, legitimizing it as the continuation of a long Russian tradition of strong state power, going back before 1917 to the Tsars. The order and security provided by the state, according to this myth, are more highly valued by Russians than the Western liberal concepts of human rights or political democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.

Putin’s historical initiative was popular in Russia, particularly when it gave encouragement to nationalist feelings, patriotic pride about the Soviet victory of 1945 and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. When he declared to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2005 that ‘the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’, Putin was articulating the opinion of three-quarters of the population, who, according to a poll in 2000, regretted the collapse of the USSR and wanted Russia to expand in size, incorporating ‘Russian’ territories, such as the Crimea and the Donbass, which had been ‘lost’ to Ukraine. In 2014, volunteers with neo-Soviet flags would cross the border from Russia to fight for the return of these two Ukrainian territories.

The positive rewriting of Soviet history also came as a relief to those Russians who had resented the ‘blackening’ of their country’s history in the glasnost period, when the media was full of revelations about ‘Stalin’s crimes’, which undermined the Soviet textbook version they had learned at school. Many had been made uncomfortable by the questions they had been forced to ask about their families’ actions in the period of Stalin’s rule. They did not want to listen to moralising lectures about how ‘bad’ their country’s history was. By restoring pride in the Soviet past, Putin helped the Russians to feel good as Russians once again.