The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the end, it looked like it would be Yeltsin against the Communists and he would lose. But the country's newly rich rallied behind the president, as did the politicians he had patronized— including, in the end, the majority of the antiwar bureaucrats—and as did the newly free press. But most of all, it was Yeltsin himself who rallied. After a couple of years when he seemed to oscillate between depression and binge-drinking, the president mobilized to campaign. "The people suddenly saw an entirely different president, one they had forgotten: it was Yeltsin as he had been in 1991, with his unique ability to talk to people, to attract support through his energy and drive," Gaidar wrote later.¹⁰

Surveys conducted by Levada's center showed that Russians wanted three things in this election cycle: an end to economic instability; an end to the war in Chechnya; and the restoration of their country to greatness. Among themselves, the sociologists began talking about the trauma caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the Kremlin, they wrote memo after memo. Gudkov wrote one in which he claimed to prove that if Yeltsin did not find a way to end the war in Chechnya, he would lose the election. Yeltsin called Nemtsov

to summon him to a government airport in Moscow: they were going to Chechnya, together, to signal the beginning of the end of the war.¹¹ Yeltsin dispatched a negotiation team to Chechnya with the mandate to broker peace at any cost. Watching television reports on negotiations that quickly proceeded from ceasefire to treaty, Gudkov marveled at the real-life consequences of sociology.

If peace in Chechnya was a difficult goal, the other two—ending economic hardship and restoring Russian grandeur—were impossible. Yeltsin opted to fight directly against the rising wave of nostalgia. His campaign endeavored to drown out Old Songs About the Most Important Things with a barrage of messages, most of them frightening. Cartoons imagined a future under the Communists, with nothing in the refrigerator and only one program on television. A rock star implored his fans to vote for Yeltsin because "I don't want my country to turn into a communist concentration camp again." A clip composed of black-and-white footage from the 1918-1922 civil war said, "It's not too late to prevent civil war or famine."¹² In July 1996, Yeltsin won the election.

yeltsin was apparently aware that he had won by promoting an emotion rather than a program. Ten days after the election, he created a commission to look for a new Russian national idea. He appointed a close aide, Georgy Satarov, to run the commission, and gave it a year to produce a result. The government newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta announced an essay contest with a handsome top prize—10 million rubles, or about $2,000, for the best national idea in seven pages or less. Satarov, an intellectual and a liberal, rushed to reassure the public that the commission would not be crafting an ideology and forcing it on the population, Soviet style. Rather, it would aim to help articulate an idea on which the nation could agree, and perhaps already agreed on. Satarov himself proposed to the commission that it could borrow a page from West Germany's post- Nazism playbook, combining a program of economic healing with what he called "national penitence." The proposal flopped. The essay contest fizzled, and the grand prize was never awarded.¹³

"Rumor has it, government dachas outside Moscow are filled with dozens of Russia's 'best minds,'" wrote the leading nationalist magazine, Nash sovremennik ("Our Contemporary"), in May 1997. "They've wasted tons of paper trying to formulate the idea. But it seems something is not working."¹⁴

Rumor in the Kremlin press pool in the fall of 1997 was that Yeltsin would unveil the Russian national idea during a visit to Nizhny Novgorod, which remained a post-Communist transition success story. Word was, Yeltsin would say that Russia was now a capitalist country working toward the glorious future of a "people's capitalism." The construction paralleled the old Soviet propaganda paradigm, when the country was said to be "socialist," working toward a glorious communist future. A catchphrase had apparently been coined to express the essence of the new national idea: "equal- opportunity capitalism," as opposed to what much of the population perceived to be Russia's current state of enrichment for the well- connected.

The rumor may have been false, in whole or in part, or Yeltsin may have thought better of the plan. On the visit to Nizhny Novgorod he did make liberal use of the phrase "equal-opportunity capitalism," but he did not present it as the new Russian idea. The press pool concluded that conservatives in the Kremlin had scuttled the proposal, once again winning at palace intrigue.¹⁵