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RUSSIAPROFILE .
ORG
ISSUE 4 VOLUME VIII FALL / 11
SPECIAL REPORT: 20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
Soviet Disunion
SYMBOLS PEOPLE MONEY
The Red Goes Tricolor
8 14 25 31
Russia for the Soviets Flirting with the Market Rediscovering God
RELIGION
CHIEF EDITOR Andrei Zolotov, Jr. EXECUTIVE EDITOR Anna Arutiunova RESOURCES EDITOR Rosemary Griffin STAFF WRITERS Dan Peleschuk, Tai Adelaja, Andrew Roth CONTRIBUTING WRITER Dmitry Babich WEB SITE EDITOR Svetlana Kryukova DESIGNER Alexander Vasilyev INTERN Pavel Koshkin COVER Varvara Polyakova RUSSIA PROFILE INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD LEON ARON Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute YURI FOKINE Adviser to the Rector, Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry CHARLES GRANT, Director, Centre for European Reform KONSTANTIN KOSACHEV Chairman, International Affairs Committee, State Duma of the Russian Federation SVETLANA MIRONYUK Chief Editor, RIA Novosti ELENA NEMIROVSKAYA Founder and Director, Moscow School of Political Studies VLADIMIR POZNER President, Russian Television Academy ALEXANDER RAHR Director of the Berthold Beitz Center for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia, a Berlin-based think tank ANGELA STENT Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, Georgetown University MIKHAIL ZADORNOV President, Vneshtorgbank 24 NIKOLAI ZLOBIN Director of Russian and Eurasian Programs, World Security Institute PUBLISHED BY Russian News & Information Agency RIA Novosti www.rian.ru PLEASE CONTACT US AT 4 Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow 119021, Russia Editorial +7 (495) 645-6486, +7 (495) 637-3071 (fax) Advertising +7 (495) 645-6403 E-mail: info@russiaprofile.org Russia Profile, 2011 RIA Novosti, 2011 The comments in this magazine reflect the opinions of the sources and not necessarily those of the editors or publishers. Registration Number: 77-18138 Andrei Zolotov, Jr. Chief Editor
Dear Readers, the second half of this year marks 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The 20th anniversary of the August coup has already passed, and has been marked by a variety of recollections in the form of newspaper specials, television documentaries, academic conferences, exhibitions and street ceremonies. In just a couple of months, we will mark the 20th anniversary of the Belavezha Accords and Mikhail Gorbachevs resignation as president of the Soviet Union, when the Soviet red ag was lowered from the presidential residence in the Kremlin and replaced by Russias newly established white-redblue tricolor. We at Russia Prole joined in the collective soul searching, which is evidently a fact of todays Russian society and by far exceeds, both in scale and depth, what was happening ten years ago, when the 10th anniversary of this last major historical event in our part of the world was almost entirely ignored. Why is such attention being paid to this anniversary? We are at a point when the events of 1991 are no longer the politics of the day, and are becoming history that can be analyzed with less passion. At the same time, it gives us a chance to look at the past two decades to try to realize where Russia stands today. In other words, to look and see how Soviet we still are and how non-Soviet we have become. A period of 20 years is usually seen as a generation change. Indeed, my younger colleagues, including most of the Russia Prole team, have no personal recollections of the Soviet Union. For them, it is an abstract reality that comes from books and lms or an often romanticized past related by their parents or older peers. At the same time, for us, who are in their 40s and older, the events of 1991 represent the decisive turning point in the middle of our lives. It was an emotional highpoint full of bright expectations, many of which did not survive the past two decades. We know we have seen an incredible historical development, and try to record and interpret it at least for ourselves. The desire to simplify reality so characteristic of our profession would lead one to a statement that modern Russia remains Soviet, or modern Russia is clearly non-Soviet. For each of them, there is arguably enough evidence. But the reality is, of course, more complicated, and we have tried to squeeze this complexity into the articles in this special report. Some elements of the Soviet period are quickly disappearing and deserve a museum; others, including the ugly ones, like the penitentiary system or the courts, show incredible resilience. Moreover, new Russia has not been able to create a clear set of values and vision for its future; hence the Soviet past remains a dening factor either with a positive or with a negative sign. It can be very disheartening, but we still live in a post-Soviet period, and a whole set of factors makes the departure from the Soviet past more dicult for Russia than for other post-Soviet states. One consolation though comes from the Biblical term of 40 years it took Moses that long to lead the Jewish people wandering in the desert on their way from Egypt. That means we are half way there. Yours, Andrei Zolotov, Jr. Chief Editor
RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11
CONTENTS
Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall /11
3
20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
5 THE RISE AND RISE OF CAPITALISM
By Tai Adelaja The Number of Small Businesses in Russia Is Catastrophically Low. Russia had very little time to build a true market economy before it was beset by the oil curse, but even President Dmitry Medvedevs modernizing reforms dont seem to be making a difference.
SPECIAL REPORT
PARADE OF NATIONS
By Dan Peleschuk
25
The Nationality Question Still Haunts Modern Russia. Twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, experts differ in their opinions on whether it was a nation-building or a nationdestroying entity.
STARS VERSUS EAGLES

By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
(ANTI) SOVIET GOURMET

By Dmitry Babich
27
Russia Lacks a Unified Policy With Regard to Its Symbols. As a country in transition, Russia is undergoing a sort of symbolic crisis, struggling to reconcile its imperial, Soviet and modern symbols.
COULD HAVE, WOULD HAVE, SHOULD HAVE

By Dmitry Babich
12
Anti-Soviet Caf Blasts People Back to the Past. The controversy surrounding the name of this caf in the center of Moscow is indicative of a deeper rift that runs through the social memory of the Soviet Union.
LIVING LIKE COMMUNISTS

By Andrew Roth
29
Russian Historians Have Discovered a New Appreciation for Soviet History. While some say that modern Russia is trying to revive the Stalin cult, others say this interest stems from opportunities for new research.
Soviet Communal Apartments Arent Dead Yet. But despite seeming similarities to the Soviet model, the modern version is an entirely different phenomenon.
COLOR ME SOVIET
By Dan Peleschuk
14 THROUGH THICK AND THIN

By Alexey Beglov For Many Years, the Russian Orthodox Church Has Been Undergoing a Process of Enculturation. The church is now dealing with an entirely new society that it will have to adapt its ways and means to.
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Twenty Years after the Soviet Union Fell, the Homo Sovieticus Lives On. Although observers have long pondered the definition of Soviet and its current legacy in post-Soviet Russia, the debate continues to rage.
FREEDOM FIGHTERS LEGACY

By Alexander Daniel
17 WHATS IN A NAME?
By Rosemary Griffin
34
Soviet Dissidents Were Pioneers of Civil Politics. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, many did not go into politics because that was not their original aim.
Soviet Names Still Survive in Modern Russia. And surprisingly, the tradition of naming your children after outstanding political figures may even be undergoing a revival.
Photo: Sergey Guneev
20
KOMSOMOL 2.0
By Andrew Roth
Photo: Igor Palmin
A MODEST PAST
Photos by Igor Palmin Over the past 20 years, Moscow has become nearly unrecognizable, both in terms of people and architecture.
POST-SOVIET SYNDROME
By Pavel Koshkin Many Young Russians Are Nostalgic for the Soviet Union. But do the people born after the collapse of the Soviet Union really want to go back to a time of hardships they know little about?
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22 THREE CHAPTERS OF HISTORY

Comment by Fyodor Lukyanov The Next Presidential Term Will Decide Russias Destiny. Ever since Boris Yeltsin took over from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian president has come to symbolize the country.
Russia Has a New Youth Group to Replace its Soviet Prototype. But while many liken todays Nashi to the Soviet-era Komsomol, similarities between the two are debatable.
SPECIAL REPORT
Photo: Igor Palmin
Remains of an Epoch
SOVIET DISUNION
Over the past 20 years, has Russia gotten better, or worse? Was the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, or was it a true blessing, albeit in disguise? These are the questions everyones asking this year, as Russia marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. And although the questions are rhetorical and both sides can argue their cases equally well, it is still worth trying to analyze the many things that have changed (for better or for worse) in the country over the past 20 years.
And much has changed indeed. In the relatively little time that has passed since the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia has been experimenting with capitalism, albeit with mixed fortunes. Ethnic tensions seem to be on the rise, while the role that the discontented and the opposition play in contemporary political life is diminishing. Communal apartments, a dreadful relic of the Soviet epoch, survive to this day, while people who were born after the union collapsed exhibit a quixotic sense of nostalgia for the country their parents inhabited. As a newly emerging state, Russia is still grappling with a variety of issues that may at times seem paradoxical. While trying to reconcile inherited Soviet symbols with its present-day values, Russia is reveling in its newly discovered appreciation for Soviet history (and looking ever more like the Soviet Union, some say). We still reserve our place in lines while we drive our Mercedes, we eat marbled beef while we take offense at restaurant names, we march down the streets in support of the regime but refuse to be identied with the Komsomol. And some of us are even still named Vladlen or Engelisa.
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PARADE OF NATIONS
By Dan Peleschuk RUSSIA PROFILE
The Nationality Question Still Haunts Modern Russia

An interesting fact about Mikhail Gorbachev is that the handful of times the typically cool-headed general secretary raised his voice, it was over the nationality question in the Soviet Union. With his declaration of glasnost in the mid-1980s, Gorbachev had thrown open the oodgates that had long suppressed the expression of national identity, and unwittingly paved the way for the nationalist mobilization that helped topple the regime. After the fall of the Soviet Union, independent states emerged, wars erupted and ended, and the 15 former republics became free to chart their own ethnic course. But 20 years after the Soviet collapse emancipated these nations, the question still remains: was the Soviet Union a nation-building or a nation-destroying experiment? On the one hand, the regime created largely self-governing ethnic units (often in places that had little prior experience in governance), industrialized vast expanses of territory and laid the foundation for independent states for the years to come. But on the other, it also stied national ambitions and blurred ethnic identities through Stalinism and intermittent periods of Russication. Though scholars and observers the world over have debated the positive and negative legacies of Soviet nationality policy, a consensus is still a long way o. There were negative aspects to itrestrictions on political rights, on real sovereigntybut there was also a development of cultures, of national identities, said historian Ronald Grigor Suny. Its really a mixed picture. Nevertheless, after two decades of reection, its clear just how strong a role the Soviet Union played in shaping the states of modern-day Eurasia.
THE FATHER OF ALL STATES Probably the most visible legacy of Soviet nationality policy is the very existence of the 15 independent nation-states that emerged from the collapse. In many THE SUPREME NATION ways, the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Belarusians and others have the Soviet Union to thank for the virtual creation Yet the honeymoon of cultural development would not last long. With the ascension to power of Stalin, the onset of wideof their contemporary states.
The Soviet Union was not only a multinational empire, but one which consciously promoted and encouragedat the outset, at leastthe concept of national identity. Even during the unions embryonic stages, both Stalin, whose rst scholarly publication was 1913s Marxism and the National Question, and Lenin, had considered the concept of nationalism and the role it would play in a newly christened communist state. Nationalism, they believed, was a necessary evil which had to be overcome on the path toward socialism. As such, national identities were to be quickly embraced, so that the working classes of the Soviet Union could recognize their limitations and then forsake them in favor of internationalism. The result was a tremendous ourishing of nations throughout the 1920s, of a kind never seen before within such a vast empire. Somewhat curious was the unions conscious eort to downplay Russian identityto counter what Stalin believed to be the danger of Great Power chauvinismin favor of smaller and less-represented nations. In short order, native language schools, institutes and cultural organizations appeared in each of the republics and their smaller autonomous territories, transforming the Soviet Union into a crucible of nations, according to Suny. The Leninist period was a period of nation building, of the rooting of these cultures, and of reaching over backward to promote the non-Russians, said Suny, the author of The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. The communist government had to nd a way of integrating local interests with their overall interests, and they did this by making all kinds of concessions and encouraging national cultural development within the context of political unication in the Soviet Union. In addition to developing national identities, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of korenizatsiya (nativization) by promoting local elites to positions of power within their titular republics. For Moscow, the policy served a twofold purpose: to placate the republican populations with homegrown leadership while ensuring that leaderships loyalty to the center. Soon, Ukraine was led by Ukrainians, Armenia by Armenians, and so forthall of whom, however, remained answerable to Moscow. The arrangement, in principal and in practice, worked well; con ict remained low and the Soviet Union was able to rapidly industrialize while consolidating its political power.
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Experts still argue about whether the Soviet Union helped to build up separate nations, or, on the contrary, destroyed them, with some saying that by allowing independent ethnic units to govern themselves, it laid the foundation for future independent states, and others countering that it actually stied national identities.
Photo: Igor Vinogradov
spread terror and the outbreak of World War II, the ourishing of nations quickly turned into the destruction of nations. The great irony was that Stalin, the man who essentially formed the foundation of early nationality policy, would be the one to quickly reverse Soviet policy as he consolidated his grip on power. As the 1930s rolled on, Stalin grew increasingly worried that the nation-building project he had put into motion would soon overtake its creator. The original principle was to develop the literacy and intellectual capacity of various nations of the Soviet Union, so that they would become productive members of the communist state; nationalism per se, Stalin believed, was still among the greatest threats to the regime. According to Harvard University historian Terry Martin, Stalin began to perceive a rise in national communism, in which party leaders in the peripheries in some cases favored their own nationalities too heavily and posed a threat to centralized power. Stalin believed that national sentiments were a powerful mobilizing political force, said Martin. There would have been no point in building all these republics if nationalism wasnt a potentially powerful force. Moreover, as Stalin glanced at the European map, he saw the rise of extreme nationalist governments with potential claims to ethnic diasporas in the Soviet Union, among them Germans and Poles. As his fears grew, he took further measures to prevent a splin-
tering of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines. Stalin decided that existing policy wasnt providing enough national unity, so he moved toward this system that he called Friendship of the People, whereby the Russians were rehabilitated and were given a primary status, said Martin, who authored the book The Armative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 19231939. The outbreak of the war only made matters worse. The Nazi onslaught of 1941 only heightened the leaders paranoia, and as a result, he ordered the wholesale deportations of entire ethnic groupsamong them the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and othersfor their alleged collaboration with the Germans. It was the Russians, he believed, who could lay the foundation for Soviet unity and carry the state to victory. In a famous speech delivered shortly after the Nazi defeat, Stalin praised the Russian people above all and credited them with the historic victory. The Russians-rst legacy would last long after Stalins death. No subsequent leader ever truly attempted to revert to the Leninist policy of nation building. In fact, most leaders, according to Martin, viewed the early Bolshevik nationality policy as suspiciousNikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, among them. Years of intermittent waves of russication followed, further diluting the very national identities that the Soviet Union helped create, all in the name of centralization and consolidation of the Soviet state.
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PEACE AGAINST WILL For all its perceived failures and shortcomings, the Soviet Union could perhaps claim at least one key success: the virtual non-existence of ethnic conict throughout 70 years of rule. Given the countrys multitude of nationalities, as well as the potentially explosive power of nationalism, the regimes management of potential conict seems nothing short of impressive. The great irony, however, is that the very mechanism that kept ethnic animosities in check was what helped precipitate nationalist mobilization and ethnic war after the collapse: ethno-federalism. Closely related to korenizatsiya, ethno-federal management allowed Soviet authorities to organize and control their peripheral subjects by creating a hierarchal system of rule according to each territorys size and ethnic composition. At the top of the federal food chain were the union republics, followed by autonomous republics and autonomous regionseach with its own leadership structure. By hierarchically stacking its subjects, Moscow was able to keep ethnic groups separate from one another and delegate responsibilities to local leaders while still keeping an eye on their activities. In order to mitigate conict, Moscow stepped in as arbiter when tensions appeared. After all, according to Suny, the Soviet Union was in reality a pseudo-federal state: Power came from the center, and anyone could be removed by the center, he said. If a person was too nationalistic or, in some cases, too corrupt, then they would be removed and Moscow would send someone who would clean up corruption, end the nationalist expression and so forth. But glasnost changed everything. After Gorbachevs endorsement of greater openness, national movements in many union republics sprang up with one goal on their agenda: independence. Of these, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were the most vocal. Others, such as Georgia and Armenia, also expressed their desires for real sovereignty, but not without serious diculties. Within these Caucasian republics lay subordinate ethnic enclavesAbkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and the predominantly Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaanwhich Soviet policy created and endowed with the institutional and ethnic means with which to contend for power. As central authority eroded during late perestroika, conicts erupted over the rights to these territories and their groups national self-determination. Within only a couple of years, groups with clearly dened ties to territories found themselves engulfed in ethnic war with states that attempted to keep them subordinatedChechens against Russia, the Abkhaz and Ossetians against Georgia, Armenians against Azerbaan and Transdnestr against Moldova, among others. Their leaderships, meanwhile, played a key role in stoking violence. These conicts were clearly motivated by the commitment of the leaders to specic nationalist agendas that is, the desire by the secessionists to have states of their own, said Philip Roeder, a specialist in post-Soviet conict and professor at the University of California at San Diego. There really were conicting nation-state agendas between these states.
Today, many of these con icts remain frozen in an internationally unrecognized limbo, while Moscow has assumed a more dubious role not as an arbiter, but as an enabler. Tensions still simmer in Georgia, Azerbaan, Moldova and elsewhere and the Soviet legacy has only exacerbated these con icts.
CIVILITY VERSUS ETHNICITY The way in which the Soviet Unions successor states have behaved as independent states is also a direct result of Soviet legacy. Upon gaining independence, the 15 former republics were forced to construct their own national policies, accommodating both the titular nationality and the minority populations that remained in the states. Yet the sense of proprietorship Soviet policy instilled in the dominant ethnic groups over their republics, according to political scientist Mark Beissinger, has in some cases created signicant obstacles toward consolidating well-functioning states. One of the consequences of Soviet nationality policy has been the strong nationalization of the state, said Beissinger, the author of Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. There is a very weak sense of minority rights for those groups who are not a part of the titular group. The key dilemma involves two variations of the modern nation-state: civic and ethnic. The former denotes a state which values citizenship over ethnicitya state of which one can become a citizen relatively easily and without any stringent ethnic requirements. An ethnicity-based state, however, places a premium on a soleusually dominantethnicity and in doing so often carries the potential for disregarding or alienating minorities. The trajectories of the post-Soviet states have most often reected their Soviet- and pre-Soviet- era experiences. In places such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which had never experienced their own statehood per se until Soviet policy crafted one for them, the regimes are highly ethno-centric and regard the titular nationalities as dominant. In the Baltics and Ukraine, meanwhile, where some semblance of statehood and ethnic identity had existed prior to the Soviet annexation, the regimes tend to be more open to minority groups, not least because Russian political movements enjoy some popularity there. But for the most part, Beissinger said, many of the post-Soviet states remain civic in form and ethnic in content, in the sense that they make some pretense to be civic because they have some signicant minorities. But in essence, they tend to tilt toward the dominant ethnic group and they dont provide particular conditions for minority representation or voice. And if constitutions are the most accurate reections of states, then many of the successor states ambiguous constitutions leave plenty of room for uncertainty. Take, for example, Kazakhstan: Is it a state that belongs to residents of Kazakhstan, or is it a state that belongs to Kazakhs? Legally, its the state of Kazakhstanis, but in actual fact, its become the state of the Kazakhs, Beissinger said.
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STARS VERSUS EAGLES

By Andrei Zolotov Jr. RUSSIA PROFILE
Russia Lacks a Unied Policy With Regard to Its Symbols

It was May 2010, when a group of top ocials in charge of the Moscow Kremlin, both museum sta and presidential guards, joined Prime Minister Vladimir Putins close ally Vladimir Yakunin, head of Russian Railways and the inuential St. Andrews Foundation, at a press conference, convened to announce some sensational news: the historical icons on the Kremlins main towers facing the Red Square, long believed to have been destroyed by the Bolsheviks, were discovered behind a layer of plaster and would be restored to their former glory. It was presented as a highly symbolic case of historical justice on a national scale. Toward the end of the press conference, a young journalist asked: wouldnt there now be a contradiction between the icons and the ve-pointed red stars atop the towersthe symbols of the power that had fought God and old Russia? The luminaries were unprepared for the question. When was the last time you saw the towers? Yakunin retorted, while Yelena Gagarina, the director of the Kremlin Museum, nodded in agreement. Then you denitely did not see the stars there! The stars, of course, were there. They were there in the coming months, when President Dmitry Medvedev and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church christened rst the icon of Christ the Savior and then of St. Nicholas on the towers that bear their names. Between them, Vladimir Lenin continued to lie in his mausoleum as the chief communist relic and tourist curiosity. The white, blue and red national ag hoisted over the Kremlin in December of 1991 instead of the Soviet red banner continued apping over the presidential residence above. It is hard to believe that Yakunin and Gagarina had confused the Kremlin towers with those of the Historical Museum or Voskresenskie Gates anking the Red Square, where the double-headed eagles were returned atop the towers in the 1990s. Most likely, they
were simply not ready to tackle this issue and discuss what had become Vladimir Putins policy on symbols: mix up the Imperial Russian and Soviet symbols and ignore the contradiction between the two, thus instilling the idea of reconciliation and continuity of one historical Russia. To be fair, there is no sizable public movement to remove the stars from the Kremlin, or any other Soviet symbols visible elsewhere in Russia, including the ubiquitous Lenin monuments and Lenin street names. The Moscow Kremlin with its palaces, cathedrals and star-topped towers is not the least coherent or historically authentic seat of power in Russia. In Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, for example, one can see not only crosses and a star, but also crescents atop the newly built mosque and an old Russian-built tower, which became the citys symbol. Talk of removing Lenins body from the mausoleum arises every once in a while after some public gure broaches the issueand dies out just as quickly. The mix-up of old and new holidays, the combination of a slightly modernized version of the Imperial double-headed eagle as the national coat of arms and the Soviet-era national anthem with the new lyrics no one can remember bear witness to the fact that Russia does not have an overarching idea and employs a vari-
Russia doesnt have an overarching idea and employs mutually exclusive myths.
ety of often mutually exclusive myths. Reevaluation of the Soviet past has also stalled, and various degrees of nostalgia for the Soviet Union have become characteristic for many parts of society, including the young. But most people seem to be happy with this post-modernist multiplicity. It is not a political issue, its a cultural issue, and it is good, said sociologist Alina Bagina, the head of the Sreda Center. There was a time when only one thing was in fashion, and everything else was not. Today everything is in fashion that you like.
THE ONE AND ONLY MEANING It has not always been like that. As soon as public life reawakened during the perestroika years, national symbols became an important element of political struggle. But only marginal monarchist and nationalist groups carried around the doubleheaded eagle, while an attempt to re-introduce the white-bluered ag by one progressive deputy in the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990 spurred outrage among his fellow deputies.
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According to sociologist Boris Dubin, at the time half of Russians spoke in favor of the Soviet red ag and only one fth wanted to bring back the pre-revolutionary ag. The tide turned during the attempted coup in August of 1991. The tricolor ag appeared on the barricades around the White House, and on August 22 the Russian authorities opposed to the Soviet-inspired coup plotters adopted it as the republics symbol. It was hoisted over the building of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation as Muscovites celebrated the victory over the coup and marched through the streets carrying a giant ag. It thus came to symbolize freedom and became pretty much the only meaningful symbol of the new Russia, not just a recreation of old Russia. The only new Russian symbol that has vitality is the ag, said cultural crit- Symbolic contradictions are an everyday occurence in modern Russia: Soviet-era red stars that crown the ic and television host Alexander Arkhan- Kremlins towers cohabit with Russias tricolor and even with Muslim crescents and Orthodox crosses. gelsky. It was adopted at the last bout of Photo: Yury Somov, Alexey Nasyrov mutual love. From then on, the situation got more complicated. The SoviArkhangelsky believes that the vitality of the Soviet symbols et Union fell apart, and new Russia had to get a full set of new wasand remainsin the fact that they represent a certain set national symbols. Endless discussions in the Supreme Soviof values. Soviet symbols were symbols behind which there et began, with vigorous opposition to any attempts to introhad been some ideological reality, at least until the 1960s, he duce any version of the double-headed eagle and a seeming lack said. We lived without the coat of arms, without an anthem. I of any other possible non-Soviet symbol for Russia. First the like Glinkas musicit is very good! But I understand very well State Bank, having to begin printing money, adopted the symwhy the old Soviet anthem is much closer to many people. The bol it borrowed from the 1917 Transitional Government. Its ea- same is true of the holidays. For me, November 7 is a holiday gle without the crowns was too non-communist for the comof the enemy, but it has a certain meaningful core that can be munists and not suciently stately, without the crowns, for the mythologized. With November 4, it has not worked. It is a very proponents of a strong Russian state, yet it was good enough good day, except it has no connection to my life or the lives of for the bank. But what was to appear on embassies, governmy children. ment buildings and seals? Having failed to pass the law in the The introduction of November 4the Day of Russian Unity communist-dominated Supreme Soviet, President Boris Yelton the Orthodox Christian holiday of Our Lady of Kazan sigsin adopted the modernized version of the old Imperial Eagle nifying the ousting of the Poles from Moscow and the estabgolden on red instead of black on yellowand passed it by his lishment of the Romanov dynastywas part of a new bout of decree in 1993, after he shut down the Supreme Soviet and besymbolic manipulation, which came during Vladimir Putins fore the rst State Duma convened. As for the anthem, Mikhail era of stabilization. Glinkas beautiful but quite complicated entry into the 19th Early in his presidency, Putin decided to resolve the concentury anthem competition, known as the Patriotic Song, ict as part of his campaign to increase Russian patriotism and was picked, and a competition for lyrics was announced, which overcome the instability of the 1990s. He presented the State never yielded viable results. The Soviet national holidayRevo- Duma with a compromise: bring back the Soviet anthemthe lution Day on November 7was renamed the Day of Reconcili- music by Alexander Alexandrov written during World War II, ation and Accord, since people had got used to having a day o. but with a new set of lyricsand legalize the old eagle. This time around, it was the liberals time to protest against what EMOTIONALLY DISCONNECTED many saw as creeping re-Sovietization. But it workedand staAs a result, Soviet symbols were gradually and slowly pushed bilized the eclectic and contradictory symbolic space. back, by decree and by new symbols that sought to reestabThe past decade has seen a return to Russia, with military lish Russias connection to its non-communist past, but bore honors of the bodies of White Army generals and anti-comlittle connection to peoples immediate lives and experiences. munist philosophers, the reburial of the last Emperors moth-
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bolic space. In England, he said, there are monuments to both Charles I and Oliver Cromwellwho ordered his execution, in French heritage there are elements of the monarchist, republican and Napoleonic periods. One should take a broad historical approach to symbols and not look at them through a narrow political prism, he said. According to Vilinbakhov, the combination of stars and icons on the Kremlin towers is nothing but a representation of the countrys transitional character. The approach, he said, should be not to take the stars down, but to wait until they wear out and require replacement. At that point, eagles should be installed instead. The general trend, Vilinbakhov said, is to restore the eagles where the Bolsheviks took them down, in the course of Having to start printing money, the Central Bank adopted the emblem of the double-headed eagle from the the nearest reconstruction. Such was the case, for example, with the Grand Krem1917 Transitional Government, but many saw it as too non-communist or even as not sufciently stately. Photo: Alexey Kudenko lin Palace and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, or the Smolny Institute in St. er and continued building and reconstruction of new churches. Petersburgthe citys seat of power since the communist revBut the campaign to rename streets and towns, which began olution. Likewise, Soviet emblems should stay where they are part of the architectural dcorlike the State Duma building, here and there in the 1990s, has virtually stopped. It appears that the country will be left for a long time with a combination which used to house Gosplan, or the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow. When I am told that its new Bolshevism, I of St. Petersburg as the capital of the Leningrad Region and say that the Bolsheviks have removed the good and replaced Yekaterinburg as the capital of the Sverdlovsk Region, as well as with hundreds of Leninsks and Oktyabrskys. it with the bad, said historian Andrei Zubov, who is widely known for his strongly anti-Soviet position. These 20 years, POLITICAL COWARDICE with all the complications that came with them, have brought us liberation from the lies. These 20 years are just the beginEven in the commercial sphere, Soviet symbols are still very much alive. When Aeroot carried out vast rebranding in ning of change. The soul of the people was destroyed and it is 2004 it kept its hammer and sickle wing-logo. Thus its ight recovering very slowly. Arkhangelsky believes that the current symbolical mishmash attendants now wear stylish new uniforms with communist symbolsin a cool orange coloron their sleeves. is not going to last forever, though, because there are no values backing up the new Russian symbols, except the ag. The This poses an issue that is problematic for somebut not manyRussians. Arkhangelsky calls it political cowarddouble-headed eagle is not going to work as long as there is no ice. We are afraid to admit that what stands behind the Sovi- empire, Arkhangelsky said. Show me the empire, and I will believe in the eagle. The same is true of November 4, which is et symbols means death and violence, inhumanity and hollow etatism, he said. So people say they can reconcile the symthe mystical beginning of the Romanov dynasty. Show me the Romanovs and I will believe in November 4. The tricolor has bols. I disagree. I insist that the symbolic reality transforms a republican connotation and hence there is a value behind it into actual reality. There is no post-modernism, there is relthat we can share. I am convinced that if everything in Rusativism. Putins policy to give everybody his or her symbols sia will be ne, the eagle will die as a national symbol and will is a relativist policy. The only thing in which we are united is continue to live as a symbol for those remembering the Rusrelativism. sian Empire. November 4 will die as a national holiday, but Georgy Vilinbakhov, the deputy director of the Hermitage will remain a holy day for the Russian Orthodox Church, as it Museum in St. Petersburg, the head of the State Heraldry and has been for centuriesthe day of the Our Lady of Kazan. And thus the key author of all new Russian symbols, strongly dethe Soviet symbols will die. Independence DayJuly 12, Libfends another position. Are we supposed to be like the Bolerty DayAugust 22, and Constitution DayDecember 12 sheviks, who destroyed all the symbols of old Russia? he exclaimed. He argues that it is absolutely normal for countries to these are the values and days around which Russia can build have various periods of their history represented in their sym- its future.
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By Anna Arutiunova RUSSIA PROFILE
MEMORIES IN BRONZE AND GRANITE

sian and foreign culture. Besides monuments to individuals, the plan presupposed the creation of monumental allegorical compositions. From 1918 to 1921 more than 25 new monuments appeared in Moscow and over 15 in St. Petersburg. Although the monumental propaganda project never had an official, definitive end, it greatly influenced the development of Soviet monumental art and the domestic school of sculpture. While many of these monuments have not survived, Vladimir Lenin himself is still very much around: Moscow alone has over 80 statues of the proletarian leader, and like the monument in Sofia, they often fall victim to artistic vandals. The tallest statue of Lenin (27 meters) can be found in Volgograd, and the second tallest (25 meters)in the town of Dubna in the Moscow Region. At the moment there is not one unified strategy for dealing with the myriad of monuments that Russia inherited from the Soviet Union. Some say that old Soviet monuments and statues should also be painted over and given a new life. In my opinion, a lot of monuments have to be painted in bright colors; it will be funny. Its not like its wrong, its not disrespect for old people, its just renovation of monuments. I am 31 years old and I dont remember the Soviet Union. I really need contemporary art on the street, not something Soviet, Evgeny Bobrik, a young architect and an expert on social-realist art, told the Voice of Russia radio. Others believe that old Soviet monuments should be left intact, but endowed with new meanings that would be relevant to the current generation. Artist Natasha Cherkashin, together with her husband, organized a number of artistic happenings involving sculptures at the Ploshchad Revolyutsii metro station in Moscow: the sculptures were cleaned, privatized, and even married to real people. Our idea was that very soon memorials that were created in the Soviet times will be forgotten. Our attitude toward them will change, and even our children will not remember and will not understand what the Soviet Union was, said Cherkashin. When epochs change, people demolish a lot of monuments, because they hate the past that makes their lives so difficult. But after a while, for new generations, they might be really interested to see how it was, what it was, because it was something unconscious. When you look at these sculptures of workers and peasants, you feel something that you cannot explain in words, but it gives you an understanding of this suppression, of this hard time, of this impossibility to feel freedom. So I think its important to preserve them, but not everywhere, and not every single one, just the ones that really have artistic value. It costs a lot of money to restore monuments and statues: disassembling and restoring the Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman statue near the All Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow, for example, cost the city budget 2.9 billion rubles ($ 100 million), and many Muscovites arent happy with such money being spent on monuments instead of the citys other pressing needs. But preservationists and cultural historians stand their ground when it comes to deciding the fate of a monumentmonuments should be kept alive for researchers and anyone with an interest, they argue. We should preserve statues of Lenin because they indeed show us how the cult of Lenin evolved, they do not harm anybody, said Dmitry Lisitsyn, a member of the coordinating committee of the social movement Arkhnadzor, an NGO that coordinates various efforts aimed at preserving Moscows historical monuments and cultural heritage. Lisitsyn also believes that a monument is a genius of the place, and when one gets removed, the atmosphere and the architectural ensemble of a particular space get ruined. Alternatively, space for numerous Soviet monuments could also be found at museums, as is the case with the Felix Dzerzhinsky monument, which was removed from the front of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square during the putsch in Moscow in 1991 and relocated to the so-called forgotten monuments park near the Central House of Artists near the Moscow River embankment.
On June 18, 2011, the inhabitants of the Bulgarian capital Sofia woke up to find the monument to Soviet Army soldiers in the city center vandalized. The bronze flag at the center of the composition was spray-painted the colors of the American flag, while the figures of the Russian soldiers were turned into pop culture heroes, such as Superman, Ronald McDonald and Santa Claus. The monument has since been cleaned up and restored, but Russians are divided in their attitudes toward what happened. While some say that it insults the memory of Soviet soldiers who partook in liberating Europe from fascism, others claim that it is not an act of vandalism, but rather an expressive manifestation of contemporary street art. Russia itself can boast a large number of monuments and statues: Moscow alone has over 600 of them. While many Soviet-era monuments were removed or relocated following the collapse of the Soviet Union, others have simply weathered away with time. The ones still in place best known to foreigners are, among others, the Motherland Calls in Volgograd, sculptor Vera Mukhinas Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman and monuments to Yuri Dolgoruky and Yuri Gagarin, as well as one to other space conquerors in Moscow, and the monument to the defenders of the Subarctic during World War II in Murmansk. Vladimir Lenins Mausoleum on the Red Square or the three red anti-tank steel hedgehogs that greet all visitors on their way to Moscow from Sheremetyevo Airport are also part of Russias monumental inheritance from the Soviet epoch. In 1918 a decree issued by the Soviet of Peoples Commissars On monuments in the republic launched the implementation of Vladimir Lenins monumental propaganda plan, which presupposed using monuments as an essential means of revolutionary campaigning to promote the communist ideology. A list of 69 people who deserved a monument was compiled by the Visual Arts Department of the Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment, among them famous revolutionaries and social activists, as well as great figures in Rus-
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COULD HAVE, WOULD HAVE, SHOULD HAVE

By Dmitry Babich RUSSIA PROFILE
Russian Historians Have Discovered a New Appreciation for Soviet History

There are whole spheres of Russian cultural life that undergo a period of decline, but the Soviet period is a pleasant exception. The thousands of books, tens of thousands of newspaper stories and millions of comments on the Internet are a reection of the passions that still rage around the 74 years of Soviet history. Some even see all sorts of conspiracy theories behind this. Interest in the past is being articially pumped up by certain groups inside the ruling elite, blogger Alexander Baurov wrote on the Internet site www.liberty.ru, one of controversial spin doctor Gleb Pavlovskys projects. The share of historical discussions is disproportionally high in our political discourse. Certain groups inside the ruling elite, despite calling for civil reconciliation, support marginal groups of pseudo-scientists. These pseudo-scientists try to make people believe that their history is a bundle of blood and dirt. The subtext is that people with such a history are only worthy of being a fertilizer for the 20 years of ourishing liberalism that Russia went through between 1991 and 2011. So much for the liberal conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory that sees creeping Stalinism behind the unending ow of new books on that epoch is even more widespread. Its main hotbeds are the Memorial Society and the bureaus of foreign newspapers in Moscow, as well as several Russian liberal media outlets. The clichs of this theory are well known: Vladimir Putin, a former KGB ocer, is seen as a new Stalin and memories of the Soviet past are deliberately romanticized. Professionals are somehow less inclined to see politics and conspiracies behind these trends. For Yuri Borisyonok, the edi-
tor in chief of the Rodina historical magazine and a professional archive researcher, the interest in Soviet history is a reection of new opportunities for researchers. The interest in the Soviet period is quite understandable, since now you have a variety of sources available. Besides, there is a niche to be lled, because this period had not been properly studied for decades before the late 1980s, Borisyonok said. Before Mikhail Gorbachev, the 20th century was not a fashionable area of research for young Russian historians. The 19th century was seen as a lot more intellectually challenging and glitzy, with its aristocracy, great literature and intellectual debates. The reason for this ostracizing of the more recent history was not a lack of drama, but a lack of sources and political pressure. So, the 20th century was left to mediocre students, who limited themselves to safe topics and spent their lives writing about, say, the heroic labor of Soviet boot-makers in the days of the Great Patriotic War. So when restrictions on the Soviet period were lifted, there werent enough professionals, and lots of amateurs suddenly became historianswith all the ensuing consequences. Borisyonok rejects the widely-held belief that there is not enough archive material available. There are a lot of things you can nd in the archives. And there is tons of information already published in books, newspapers or on the Internet. However, the way people process this information in some recent publications leaves much to be desired, he said. Under the Soviet Union, texts went through a lot of lters before going to press. The works of historians then went through numerous academic councils, verication commissions and, nally, the censors themselves. This is not the case now, and this fact has both positive and negative consequences. People write what they think, but numerous mistakes and absurdities sneak into their texts.
POWER TO THE WRITTEN WORD Of course, freedom gave birth to all sorts of things, including some very bad ones. The biggest scandals have broken out around history textbooks, because they involve both state money and mandatory reading. The two most notorious cases were the school textbook on Russian 20th century history by Igor Dolutsky
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Some historians see the revived interest in the Soviet epoch that Russia is currently experiencing as a new opportunity for researchersas documents get declassied with the passage of time, more material becomes available for study at the archives.
Photo: Alexander Polyakov
and History of Russia: 19172009, a textbook for univerThe fact that the authorities only reacted to my textbook, sity students written by Alexander Vdovin and Alexander which mentioned the current top ocials in the country by Barsenkov. name, shows how little attention they paid to history education Dolutsky, a staunch liberal who said in an interview that in this country, Dolutsky explained. Boris Yeltsin, who ruled there was nothing to be proud of in Soviet history, includRussia for ten years, just did not pay any attention to history ed in his textbook a quote from liberal politician Grigory Yaveducation at school at all. Any man from the street could write linsky, who described Russia in the years of Putins presidena school textbook then. cy as an authoritarian police regime. Barsenkov and Vdovin, In fact, the ocial who rst expressed indignation at Dowho are on the nationalist side of the political spectrum, were lutskys book was none other than Mikhail Kasyanov, Russias accused of anti-Semitism in their text. Without making outprime minister from 2000 to 2003, now a leader of the unregright anti-Semitic statements, the two authors returned to the istered Party of Peoples Freedom (PARNAS). We may have Jewish theme in their 800-page long book several times, pro- to go through this period, when all sorts of amateur publicaviding lengthy and unveriable statistics on the proportion of tions ood the market, said Andrei Turkov, a veteran Russian Jews in various government institutions in the Soviet Union. literary critic. For too many years, we had one ocially regAt one point, Barsenkov and Vdovin made vague hints that the istered view on every subjectnot only in history, but also in, Jewish victims of Stalins repressions were somehow connectsay, literature. [Famous prose writer Nikolai] Gogol was a sated to U. S. interests and that the infamous Stalinist campaign irist, and nothing else, Alexander Pushkin was an indepenagainst rootless cosmopolitans was a reaction to American dent free-thinker, and nothing more. But they were both also hegemony. Orthodox Christian believers! So now, after many years of neIn both cases, the textbooks were not banned. They were just glect, the Christian character of Gogols writings is studied by no longer recommended to teachers working in both schools a whole new school of specialists. This does not mean that we and universities. Thousands of books and print editions with should forget Gogol the satirist. Life was always complicated much more radical views continue to be sold at bookstores. in the Soviet times and before. Lets look at all sides of it.
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COLOR ME SOVIET
By Dan Peleschuk RUSSIA PROFILE
Twenty Years after the Soviet Union Fell, the Homo Sovieticus Lives On
lective eort and distaste for all things capitalist were key features. Most of all, however, he was conceived as a product of Soviet ideological engineering, created by the regime during its early years to rally the masses from revolutionary fervor toward communist statebuilding. So omnipresent was the new man that he appeared across What did it mean to be Soviet? Did it describe a disall social channels, including in cultural spheres. Take the ciplined work ethic, hope for a bright socialist future Russian novelist Valentin Katayevs classic 1932 novel Time, and an unshakable faith in the state; or did it repreForward! It tells the story of a construction team in Magnisent careless passivity and a certain fealty to the rultogorsk, headed by Margulies, the units fearless and driven ing regime? Was it idealized, or was it a product of leader, racing the clock and overcoming various obstacles to real experience? After 70 years of communist rule and two decades of beat a cement-pouring record set by another team in Kharkov. The overarching theme was not only the Soviet labor forces post-communist transition, the answer remains unperceived dedication to meetingand exceedingproduction clear. Yet the regimes eect on the Russian psyche quotas, but its ability to persevere for the sake of progress. is still tangible today: It was an entire civilizationIdealized or not, it was roughly this spirit that was transmital structure, and not just a single attitude about propted to Soviet citizens throughout the early years of the regime. erty, capital or personal responsibility, said anthroThe tendency to be future-looking, according to Grant, was pologist Bruce Grant, a Russian specialist at New what made the Soviet mentality unique and instilled a great York University. It was a civilizational form that was deal of resilience in the Soviet masses. extraordinarily formative for anyone 40 and above, Though certainly propagandized through party channels and which is essentially most of the people in power today, and it remains a formative structure for anyone raised works such as Katayevs, this mindset was most often moldby parents of that agewhich is nearly everyone in the ed simply by peoples everyday experiences. Even if you were making sacrices and things werent working out well today, country. you were part of something which was forward-looking, you Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has were part of a plan, even if it didnt feel like it at the moment, been a country of contradictions, with symbols of the said Grant. People were always part of a ve-year-plan or a past hidden among the signs of a marketizing counsocialist competition, and regardless of how they viewed these try. Neon lights may glitter on multimillion-dollar competitions, positively or negatively, they were formed by the apartment complexes, with residents gallivanting beconstant presence of these things. low from one high-end fashion boutique to anothBut as the years went on and the regime passed through er. Yet just around the corner, there may be a monument commemorating the tireless yet dedicated Soviet phases of leadershipeach marked by its own developments, whether Nikita Khruschevs thaw or Leonid Brezhnevs stagworker, or a mural depicting a utopian vision of the bright communist future. Within this deeply ironnationthe mentality took on a life of its own. The new Soviet man turned from hopeful and idealistic to cynical and fatalisic mixture lies a statement about the social fabric of tic. The increasing strains on everyday life by an oppressive repost-Soviet Russia. The impact of the Soviet legacy, gime spawned more negative traits: resignation, passivity and however, remains a hotly debated issue. a lack of individual responsibilityall the result of simply coping with the realities of a totalitarian system. A BRIGHT FUTURE Boris Dubin, the head of the Levada Centers department for A staple of the Soviet regime was not only its intention to reach a socialist utopia, but to produce an entirely socio-political research, said the idealized Soviet man became more evidently part of ocial ideology, and less of a gennew type of person in the processa new Soviet man. Seless, disciplined and well-versed in Marxist- uine belief shared by Soviet citizens. As harder times grinded on, the Soviet man and his mentality were increasingly about Leninist doctrine, this cultural prototype was meant to pave the way for a communist future and help form adaptability. It was a person who was well-suited to adapt to various circumstances, and who lowered his standards accordthe basis of the new Soviet nation. Hard work, col-
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ing to the current situation and its realities in the hope that things wouldnt get any worse, Dubin said. Just as the cultural arena helped popularize the new Soviet man, so too did it help tear through ocial propaganda. Philosopher Alexander Zinovievs rst two novels, Yawning Heights and The Radiant Future, published abroad in 1976 and 1978, respectively, became famous for their satirical attack on what Zinoviev believed to be the idiocy of Soviet communism and its ideology. Though stripped of his party membership and exiled soon thereafter, he followed with 1982s Homo Sovieticus, which described the contradictions between the intended Soviet ideological product and its practical result. An often cited passage from the novel reveals a telling reality: If you want to get the truth, the rst thing to do is get into an argument with yourself.
NEW CHOICES In a setting where the state was so heavily present in all spheres of society, citizens could not help but develop a strong connection toand, ultimately, a heavy reliance uponthe regime. The command economy and generally closed nature of the Soviet society ensured that people were faced with fewer independent choices than their counterparts in the West. So while healthcare and employment were guaranteed and education became more accessible, this came with a caveat. For example, once a student entered university to pursue engineering, his career path was locked in. Once he nished his studies, he would join a factory or an institute, climb the The Soviet Man (and woman) was supposed to be seless, disciplined, hard-working and constantly looking professional ladder and retire with a pen- toward a bright future while being utterly indifferent toward material well-being. Photo: Dmitriev sion. It was what Russian cultural anthropologist and a professor at Princeton University Serguei Oushakine calls a cultural pattern that against a backdrop of shifting institutional capacity. Today, for guided Soviet citizens throughout their lives and, on the one instance, while the college attendance rates in Russia may be hand, drastically limited space for individual choice, yet on the higher, the experience simply doesnt provide what it may have other, provided a degree of social stability. 30 years ago. What is happening now is that while choices With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, many of have multiplied incredibly, a lot of social institutions have bethese safety nets disappeared. The welfare state had faltered, come monetizedinstitutions that didnt use to be monetized, and the new, post-Soviet Russia was not quite able to oer the like education, said Oushakine. For a long time in the Sovisame social services or, more importantly, the relative comfort et Union, education was seen as a mechanism for upward moof stability that the Soviet Union did. As a result, the notion of bility. A good education was seen as a way to change your life, greater choice became available, according to Oushakine, but to enter a dierent social or economic class. Now, when it is in-
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credibly monetized, these social institutions have become irrelevant for that purpose. Oushakine recalls one particular response by a journalism student during his eld research who, when asked what she wanted to do in ve years, responded: I want to enter a law faculty and start a real life. That kind of decision would have been almost impossible in the Soviet period. Your trajectory was set up only once, and for a very long period, and the negative consequences for making a wrong decision were much higher, Oushakine said. Basically, [younger generations] have to deal with the situation because the environment around them is changing very much, and they cannot make those decisions now once and forever. And where a wider range of choices is available, as well as an absence of state control over personal and professional trajectories, uncertainty becomes a prominent factor. According to Dubin, up to two-thirds of the adult Russian population can, at best, plan only for several months in advance, but more realisticallyonly for a few weeks. The current climate in Russiagreater choice, yet less predictabilityhas in turn resulted in a perception not of the bright future, Dubin said, but of the bright past. As idealized as the hope of a brighter future may have been, Soviet society had oered citizens a greater dose of stability. Now, Dubin said, many have reverted to the age-old tradition of the Russian avos: acknowledging the unpredictability of life and relying on luck to push through hardship or uncertainty.
to the latest installment of the Levada Centers Homo Sovieticus project, the residual eects can still be felt in Russian society. While post-communist Russia has indeed muddled through a long and drawn-out transition process, some experts point to the similarities between the old regime and the current one. Noted sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh said todays mentality is less a transition to the future than a return to familiar psychological territory. The inuence of the Soviet regime today is a result of the existing political regime in Russia, simply because [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putins regime is authoritarian, and for this reason it creates a climate of continuity between the Soviet regime and the existing situation, said Shlapentokh, a professor at Michigan State University. In an age of growing nostalgia for the Soviet past, this should hardly seem surprising. Since taking national oce more than a decade ago, Putin has steered his country ever more toward the Soviet model: power is heavily centralized, the security apparatus has returned to prominence and citizens are increasingly reminded that the state rules above all. From rhetoric, such as Putins widely-cited comment that the Soviet collapse was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, to action, such as his support for the nationalist youth movement, Nashi, it is clear how strong a basis the Soviet legacy forms for current governance. My image of Russia, said Shlapentokh, focuses on the role of the ruling elite and leadership, who create the rules, who create the mentality, who create the psychologiPARADOXICAL CONTINUITY cal climate in the country. In one of his late studies, prominent researcher Yuri Levada But as apparent as Putins Soviet nostalgia may be, craftfound in 2005 that 20 years of reform had failed to establish ing a new party line in a managed democracy is not exacta new social identity and, as a result, about one quarter of ly straightforward. Indeed, the chaotic 1990s and the current Russians still identied themselves as Soviet. Though that autocratic entrenchment threw the population for a loop and gure has recently dropped to around 12 percent, according have left many wondering what lies in store for the future. The seemingly constant shifts in social, political and economic paths, moreover, have made the creation of any single mentality today nearly impossiblefor society as well as for the state. According to Dubin, the current authorities lack a unied state ideology, and instead appeal half-heartedly at dierent times to various factions of the electorate in order to placate the population. And its a tactic that elicits a familiar reaction from the population. [The state] counts not on the support of the majority of Russian citizens or on their active mobilization through mass media or propaganda, but on a sense of apathy and passivity within the massesall just to maintain control, said Dubin. And the masses are ready to accept this, as long as they are not bothAs the Soviet Union evolved, being a Soviet Man became increasingly about adaptability, while the ability to adjust to harsh reality became even more important after the union fell and took most social safety nets with it. ered and, as in Soviet times, so long as Photo: Alexander Makarov theres no war.
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FREEDOM FIGHTERS LEGACY

By Alexander Daniel Special to RUSSIA PROFILE
Soviet Dissidents Were Pioneers of Civil Politics
ple, the trial of Yury Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky) or brought fake criminal accusations against them (as in the case of Joseph Brodsky). The emphatically negative reaction to this litigation in the country and beyond, which actually triggered protests that later developed into the human rights movement, compelled the state security services to refrain from criminal prosecution of objectionable writers. Instead of being arToday, anybody who openly clashed with the Sovirested, well-known people were subjected to administrative et government is indiscriminately labeled a dissident: the avant-garde, hipsters, human rights advocates, re- repression. However, the authorities did not dare to legalize indepenligious activists of all kinds (if their activity led to a conict with the authorities), Jews seeking emigration dent literature as they did with non-conformist art. They established a delicate balance: dissident writers could publish permits, nationalists from the Soviet Unions republics and so on. So dissident can refer to a wide range their pieces as samizdat or abroad with the risk of being ousted from the literary establishment. They could be denied the right of people, from those who signed petitions against to ocial publication (temporarily or permanently), as was the political harassment from the 1960s to the 1980s, to case with Fazil Iskander, Bella Akhmadulina, Semyon Lipkin those who raised funds for political prisoners, nonand Inna Lisnyanskaya; they could be expelled from the Union conformist artists, samizdat distributors and writers who had their books published abroad without ocial of Writers, like Lidia Chukovskaya; or forced to emigrate, like Viktor Nekrasov, Vladimir Maximov, Alexander Galich, Vassipermission. ly Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich, Lev Kopelev and Georgy During perestroika (and in some cases even earlier), these dissidentsa contradictory community that Vladimov, to name but a few. They could even be expelled from the Soviet Union, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn was. But alterfelt united, but at the same time renounced unicanative literature continued to exist right up until perestroika, tionbecame fragmented, with each group meeting when the system of government oversight over literary work its own fate. eventually disappeared. Thus non-conformist artists, who were at one time At any rate, the heritage of dissident writers and non-conthe trailblazers of dissident activity and lifestyle, manformist artists resides in their creativity rather than their civaged to carve out a niche for themselves in the bedil conduct, and belongs to the common treasury of Russian culrock of Soviet power as early as the mid 1970s, folture. The artistic and literary output of former dissidents is not lowing the famous Bulldozer Exhibit: an open-air in high demand in contemporary Russiabut neither is anyshow staged by a group of non-conformist artists thing else, besides popular culture. on September 15, 1974 in a vacant lot in Belyayevo, On the other side of the coin there were civil activities and and razed to the ground by bulldozers. Surprisingindependent collective and individual initiatives, which outly, the Soviet governments response during the enside observers tend to interpret as political action. In the Sosuing scandal was quite rational. The state legalized the artistic underground, allowed non-conformists viet years, 90 percent of political action consisted of protests against the political harassment of dissidents, and the monito stage a number of shows, and before long, provided them with permanent premises at the Moscow City toring and dissemination of information about this persecuCommittee of Graphic Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya tion. These protest monitoring activities, and the agencies that conducted them (independent public and expert groups and Ulitsa. Therefore, by the time of perestroika they had been doing what artists are supposed to dopainting agencies that printed information bulletins) are usually described as the Soviet human rights movement. for ten years. They had already forgotten about their dissident past and hated being reminded of it. The modern Russian civil community, primarily human rights organizations, are carrying on the cause of their Soviet Because of the special signicance of literature in predecessors. Guided by the same principles, they are employRussian culture and society, writers had little chance ing the same instruments and discussing the same problems. of such a happy outcome. In the mid 1960s, the authorities tried to stage show trials of dissident writers, The debates mainly center on guring out what is still releaccusing them of anti-Soviet propaganda (for exam- vant from the dissident heritage and what should be revised.
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The dissident experience of civil action, with all its virtues and, perhaps, its shortcomings as well, has not been wasted. It has been inherited by Russian civil society, rst and foremost by its traditional vanguard: the human rights community.
AN APOLITICAL CAUSE But lets not dissemblethose who ask where the dissidents have gone are usually referring to the political aspect of their heritage. This implies that dissidents, regardless of what kind, including artists, were ghting against the Soviet government, and represented a kind of political opposition. A comparison between the dissident legacy in former Soviet republics and the rest of Eastern Europe is interesting. After 1991, former dissidents joined the political elite in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Azerbaan, Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine, Estonia and Lithuania. They occupied leading government positions in some of these countries. And what happened in Russia? The number of these people who have entered political life in Russia can be counted on one hand. Human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov was Russias ombudsman for a short time, having remained a human rights champion, rather than becoming a politician. Die-hard oppositionist Valeria Novodvorskaya, the founder and leader of the Democratic Union, which played a substantial role in politics during perestroika and in the early 1990s, eventually became a journalist. Vladimir Bukovsky recently made a symbolicthat is, a strictly dissidentattempt to run for the presidency. Vyacheslav Igrunov, a samizdat publisher from Odessa, was at one time among the leaders of the Yabloko Party. The only dissident who has made it in politics is Gleb Pavlovsky, a former member of the editorial board of the samizdat magazine Poiski (Quests). But even he didnt become a politician in the true sense of the word, but rather a high-ranking political technologist in government service. And thats about it. Why do former dissidents refrain from taking part in politics in Russia today? Because they have never taken any part in politics. Even the protesters among them never represented a political opposition movement. The slogan observe your own laws cannot be considered a serious political program. It goes without saying that the dissidents did not like the Soviet authoritiesbut then, who did at the time? (It is only in retrospect that so many have suddenly fallen in love belatedly with the Soviet system). There were some people who considered it to be their mission to struggle against the regime, but even these steady ghters did not expect the abrupt collapse and self-destruction of the Soviet system, and viewed their struggle as symbolic rather than aimed at concrete political results. As for dissident socio-political projects, they were based on the most diverse ideological assumptions, representing the entire spectrum of 20th century political thought, from anarchism to monarchism, dierent avors of communism, socialism, European-style liberalism and imperial national patriotism. Its even possible to nd rudiments of fascist utopia
The only Soviet dissident to become a political gure in modern Russia is Gleb Pavlovsky, who now serves as the president of the Fund for Effective Politics.
Photo: Sergey Pyatakov
in the ideology of some marginal dissident groups. All of these projects had one thing in common: they all resembled paper architecture, in that they arose not out of practical political life (what practice could there be in the Soviet era?), but out of pure ideology that was conned to the mind. Therefore, political thought was never a strong point in the activities of dissidents, and this is why their political projects have not been in demand.
FOR FREEDOM OF THE MIND Dissident activities in the Soviet Union (at any rate, in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) emerged and developed as a form of cultural life rather than a political alternative. Russias monstrous history in the 20th century discouraged the educated community from dealing with politics for a long time. Dissidents came into being not by socio-political collisions, but by the vicissitudes of the literary process, by the confrontation of free speech with political madness. The landmarks of pre-dissident history encompassed literature and the artsthe war of magazines, the Lianozovo community of artists and poets, the reading of verses on Mayakovsky Square
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Oppositionist Valeria Novodvorskaya, the founder and leader of the Democratic Union, and Soviet dissident writer Vladimir Bukovsky, are among the few heavyweights who have attempted to inspire change in post-Soviet Russia.
Photo: Ruslan Krivobok, Alexey Nikolsky
and printed poetic almanacs. They also reected the harassment of Boris Pasternak and the abstractionists, as well as the Brodsky case and the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The human rights movement began as a public protest in defense of the freedom of creativity. Politics had no place there. The Soviet government regarded the dissidents, probably sincerely, as political opposition and dealt with them accordingly, based on its ideas of how to deal with the opposition. To some extent its approach was justied, because all dissidents, from artists to Baptists and from Jewish refuseniks to the publishers of the national patriotic magazine Veche, were encroaching on the foundation of the regime that was established in the Soviet Union in the 1920sthe governments absolute monopoly over any meaningful public initiative, whether civil, cultural, religious or any other. Andrei Amalrik described the gist of the Soviet dissident movement as The conduct of free people in a non-free country. Andrei Sakharov expressed the same idea in a dierent way: Implementation of human rights and freedoms without permission. Personal independence, rather than public freedom, was the main motto of Soviet dissidents.
In other words, in their public conduct dissidents ostentatiously ignored the political reality. This manner of conduct can produce examples of high civil duty, but it is unlikely to develop into a political movement. Dissident movements in Eastern Europe tended more toward political opposition to power. In Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic countries and the South Caucasus, dissidents were primarily nationalists ghting for the political independence of their republics. Their participation in political life proves only one thing: nationalism has been and remains a major political factor in their countries. As usual, Russia is following its own path. Russian dissidents have not turned into politicians simply because the majority of them never had any desire to take part in politics. This idea can be expressed in a dierent way: in this country, dissidents have broadened the very understanding of politics. Now that we are no longer afraid of words, we can and must speak about civil politics that may or may not include competition for powerbut in any case, it does not boil down to the struggle for a place at the helm. The dissidents were the pioneers of this form of civil politics.
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A MODEST PAST
Photos by Igor Palmin Special to RUSSIA PROFILE
Photo: Igor Palmin
Over the Past 20 Years, Moscow Has Become Nearly Unrecognizable

For the last ve years, I have been sorting out my photo archive. I live in the virtual world of the past, rediscover it. I go out very rarely and when I do, I am astonished. It is amazing how much Moscow has changed, how much everything has changed. In my world, it is a completely dierent city with dierent people, to say nothing about the absence of advertising. The rhythm of the city has changed. I have a picture, which is on the cover of my latest book, where there are women near a shop; one is looking for something in her bag. Today nothing of the kind is possible. Peoples motion is dierent, the colors are dierent, clothing is dierent. One would say that in the old days all people wore the same kind of grey clothes. Its true. When I was a student in the early 1960s, I had just one set of clothes, and it was a ski suit. But these clothes on people were domesticated, if I can say so, made part of their lives. Now everything is more colorful, but standardized.
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Advertising has simply destroyed the city. Especially the nets that cover entire faades. How can you shoot Fyodor Schechtels house thats covered with advertising? It is an absence of culture, an absence of architecture. I see architecture as a living space, that can grow old and fade something that is impossible with modern architecture. There is a group on Flickr called La Photographie Modeste. I like it modest photography. My attitude is just looking at the trivial, day-to-day life. The picture of Dmitry Krasnopevtsev and Svyatoslav Richter is very much mine. I dont like aectation and gestures. I am happy with just looking, peering. I observe a building, just like I observe people who sit in front of me. I would wait for a certain light. I once heard about a dissertation on slow reading. What I do is slow looking.
Igor Palmin, born 1933, was part of the circle of nonconformist artists, and eventually concentrated on architectural photography. His book and personal exhibition Past Perfect were released in 2011.
1. 23. 4. 5. 6.
Melancholy Building on Yauzskiy Boulevard Artist Vasily Sitnikov The Window into The Studio Isakovs commercial apartment building on Prechistenka. Architect Lev Kekushev. 1904-1906 7. Pianist Svyatoslav Richter (left) and artist Dmitry Krasnopevtsev (right) 8. Ceramic panel on the National Hotel 9. Artist Oskar Rabin (left) 10. Arbatskaya Metro station
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KOMSOMOL 2.0
By Andrew Roth RUSSIA PROFILE
Russia Has a New Youth Group to Replace its Soviet Prototype
nal nail in Going Togethers con when he left and founded Nashi in its place. Yakemenko remained largely out of the spotlight, only heightening speculation that he was co-opting and manipulating youth into doing the Kremlins bidding. Journalist Oleg Kashin, who was beaten to within an inch of his life last year and sued by Yakemenko for defamation of character, described the scene at the Bolshoi Theater in 2006, when Going TogethSince its inception in 2005, Nashi, Russias anti-fascist, pro-Vladimir Putin youth group, has seen a mete- er protested a play by novelist Vladimir Sorokin that it considered pornographic, in an article for Kommersant: In the oric rise and a quiet fall. The harshest criticism of the group has likened it to both the Hitler Youth and the end, Vasily Yakemenko, the leader of Going Together, himself Soviet Komsomol. The latter of these accusations is as appeared on Teatralnaya Ploshchad, but didnt approach the much an indictment of the Russian government as of fountain where the main events of the protest were happening. He quietly stood at the side, watching the events unfold. the group itself, however, and serves to subtly spread Yakemenko had made several unsuccessful business venthe idea that ultimately not so much has changed in the government since the collapse of the Soviet Union. tures in the 1990s, but with youth groups he caught a certain whi of which way the culture was going, noted political anaYet considering the history, structure and philosophy of the group, does Nashi really have a link to the Sovi- lyst Dmitry Babich. The discourse of the press in Russia was et past, or are its purported similarities to the Komso- very self-critical, like we live in the worst country in the world, mol just skin-deep? said Babich. When Yakemenko came out with the slogan that the generation of the defeatists must go, it resonated among young people. GOING TOGETHER When Nashi was created in 2005, it was neither The zenith of Nashis activity in Russia was in 2007, when against the backdrop of a sinking relationship between Rusmodern Russias rst experiment with youth groups, nor the rst pro-Putin group. Yet for many opposition sia and its western neighbors Nashi organized protests against the Estonian and British ambassadors, while its Seliger sumpoliticians in Russia, Nashis formation was a sign that the government was building up muscle for later mer camp, attended by thousands of young people each year, use. Ilya Yashin, who now heads the youth wing of the was seen as a tool for brainwashing students into supporting the government. By then the rhetoric had largely been estabopposition Solidarnost party and held a similar position in the left-wing Yabloko party, told the BBC in lished that a new youth group, even a new Komsomol, had been formed to execute the Kremlins will. 2006 that Nashi was a direct response to the possibility of a Ukrainian-style Orange Revolution in Russia. When the x hour comes, theyll be brought out to the WHICH KOMSOMOL? Kremlin and used as cannon fodder, he said. Thats The basic problem with any comparison between Nashi and the the only aim of Nashi. Then it will be disbanded and Komsomol today is that in its 70 years of existence in the Soviet Union, the very identity of the Komsomol was in ux, retherell be nothing left for it to do. They have an ofcial aimto change those in power in the country. sponding both to the changing whims of the unions leadership and the makeup of Soviet society. Very roughly, the history of But their real aim is to preserve the status quo when power is changed. the Komsomol can be broken up into two, almost diametrically opposed periods: the Komsomol before World War II and after. The groups foundations are closely tied with a predecessor that emerged after Boris Yeltsin appointIn the pre-war years, the Komsomol was an organization ed Putin as the president of Russia. Idushiye Vmeste, heavily dominated by political activism, with a young, radical group of communist enthusiasts actively seeking to further the or Going Together, was the rst sizeable pro-Putin youth group to draw public attention and bear the de- class struggle and overthrow the old power structures in society. When the country came under greater control during the risive title of the Putinjugend, an epithet equating it with the Nazi-era Hitler Youth. Behind the group Stalin period, the leader began to rein in the Komsomol, limiting many of its activities. stood Vasily Yakemenko, who ve years later put the
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The Communist Union of Youth, also known as the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party, was rst established in 1918 with the goal of creating a mass of indoctrinated, obedient young people, free from pre-revolutionary inuence, which would guarantee the stability of the Soviet regime.
Photo: Dubinsky
By the post-war period in Russia, the ranks of the Komsomol had swelled to include the majority of the countrys youth, and the Komsomol began to tone down its political rhetoric. Instead of harassing class enemies or holding demonstrations, it began to increasingly focus on cultural activities, including workshops with topics ranging from folk dancing to sports groups and even to technical training for future service in the military. This period of change, noted Gleb Tsipursky, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University, was in many ways a response to a change in the Soviet reality around the Komsomol. The Komsomol was being transformed from something that promoted a cohesive centralized ideology to something that promoted youth socialization into society, said Tsipursky. So it wasnt that it lacked an idea, but that the idea changed, the point of the Komsomol changed. The Komsomol transformed from being an organization that tried to change society, something that we could say Nashi is trying to do right now, into something that stabilized society. It wasnt mobilizing so much as stabilizing the Soviet way of life.
A WAY TO BE SOMEBODY Nashi has never made any secret of supporting a political agenda, yet what likens it most to the Komsomol may be the
groups larger social agenda, which encourages individual contributions to combating major societal problems of the time. Facing a society that underwent sweeping changes during the 1920s, the Komsomol supported larger movements to reinstate family values in the Soviet Union. By 1928 and 1929, under Stalin, the state had begun to go back against the policies that had taken place, noted Tom Hooker, a Harvard graduate student who is writing his thesis on daily life in the Soviet Union. They reinstituted marriages in the Komsomol to promote stability at that point. Nashi, in one of their more eclectic campaigns, was also rumored to have supported marriages and consummations of those marriages at the Nashi summer camp Seliger, as a similar means of approaching Russias current demographic crisis. Yet the far more burning question about Nashi is whether they actually represent any serious political stance in the rst place. While Tsipursky noted that the attempts by Nashi to change society held perhaps some relation to the Komsomols early, active period, Alexander Shubin, the head of the Center of History of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the lack of enthusiasm for a political platform makes Nashi more similar to the later years of the Komsomol, when the communist ideal began to give way to ca-
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2008, with fear of a Russian Orange Revolution quickly disappearing, interest in the group fell and many of their programs were cut. Seliger is still held yearly, but its inuence has also waned. Yet Nashi has continued to be able to cause a small amount of trouble. When it set out to oust the presidents head on human rights, Ella Pamlova, she said by radio that the group had sold their souls to the devil. Despite vast dierences in ideology and in structure, however, the late Komsomol and Nashi do have one important linkparticipants became increasingly interested in using the party structures to make careers for themselves. No one exemplies this concept better than Yakemenko himself, who built his career from Going Together to Nashi and was appointed the chairman of the State Committee for Youth in 2007. Nashis ideological examinations for their Seliger summer camp and special courses for their leaders, in Yakemenkos own words, were meant to create a set of managers to begin to take on the management of the country and top leadership positions. That runs parallel to the Soviet reality in the later period, where participation in the Komsomol was not exceptional, but non-participation was. When you get to the later Komsomol, its already someAlthough the Nashi youth movement, which often holds anti-corrpution demonstrations such as White Aprons, is reminiscent of the Soviet Komsomol, experts argue the similarities are rather supercial. thing that has lost a lot of its enthusiasm, Photo: Konstantin Chalabov it is not so much about excitement for any cause, and it becomes far more heavily a question of careerism, said Shubin. You want to make a reerist ethics. The thing is that the Komsomol, at least early on, was in particular dened by its enthusiasm, said Shubin. career in the government, or in any other way, you have to be in the Komsomol. And even though Nashi is a much smaller This was enthusiasm for the preservation of the current poworganization, it nonetheless has that same element of careerer, the current system, the political projects, and it was maintained somewhere up until the Great Patriotic War. Theres ismpeople who want to be in the government join Nashi. already a dierence here because the Nashi members dont understand any current power, the existing system or any projSUPERFICIAL LIKENESS Ultimately, despite the possibility of drawing some parallels ects. When you ask them what they stand for, they say, well, were ghting against those who threaten Putin. Where Putins between a modern Nashi and the long history of the Komsomol, the change from a totalitarian system to a weaker one going, or why hes doing it, they really cant say. means that youth groups have naturally evolved over time. Does Nashi have a driving idea, or any kind of philosophy? Each expert noted that although these youth groups have Babich believes that while the groups earlier protests against, for instance, the removal of a statue to a Russian soldier in Es- something in common, they ultimately cant account for the fact that modern Russia is not the Soviet Union. tonia, might have been linked with some concepts of protectWhile Nashi has taken its share of criticism from the Western ing Soviet cultural heritage, their modern actions are becompress, the use of the Soviet image of the Komsomol is so politiing increasingly confused and even self-defeating. In an article for the Russian academy of sciences, Dmitry Gro- cized that it is, nonetheless, a hyperbole. The analogy [between Komsomol and Nashi] denitely has its limits, said Shubin, mov noted that support for the group rose and fell with the but when the authorities get so close to repeating the Soviet election seasons, calling the groups participation in the 2007 elections the culmination of their existence and noting that in structure, I think that comparisons are bound to be made.
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THE RISE AND RISE OF CAPITALISM

By Tai Adelaja RUSSIA PROFILE
The Number of Small Businesses in Russia Is Catastrophically Low
Despite Gorbachevs strong support for the co-ops, however, a number of events that unfolded in the early days of the movement provided a lot of ammunition to skeptical party apparatchiks, who had adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Most Soviet citizens were quickly dismayed by high prices in the private shops, which typically were at least twice the going rate at state stores. Many had grumbled about their economic sysIt seems plausible to presume, with the benet of tem, but they were nonetheless wary of any experiments that hindsight, that the economic inertia that accumulatcould allow some individuals to reap huge prots at the exed during 70 years of communist rule over the Soviet Union was positive proof of the empires inevitable de- pense of others. In December 1988, at least two Moscow cafes were vandalized, and in January 1989, thugs attacked anmise. Yet the cascading economic events that precedother private restaurant, kning customers and setting it on edand in some cases, outlivedthe collapse of the Soviet Empire, had been so overwhelming that neither re. Faced with violence and extortion threats from organized economists nor the main protagonists expected such a criminal groups, some co-op owners started paying bribes to the racketeers or oered them phony jobs in return for protecdisconcerting nale. When Mikhail Gorbachev, the rst and last president tion, or krisha (a roof)a practice which set a perfect stage of the Soviet Union, announced a series of half-heart- for what would later be known as Russias Wild East of the early 1990s. ed stop-gap economic measures as part of his perestroika, Communist Party apparatchiks were quick to warn that opening capitalist oodgates would unleash THE RISE OF OLIGARCHY economic and political forces way beyond his control. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of economic desperation with a dangerous mix of organized Well aware of the disruptive potential lurking in the countrys command economy, Gorbachev in 1987 pro- crime, political cronyism and fantastic business deals forged overnight. The main challenge facing Boris Yeltsin, who beposed the formation of privately owned, prot-oriented cooperative enterprises to supplement and even came the rst president of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Republic in 1991, was converting the worlds largest command compete with state-run projects. The thrust of his economy into a free-market one through a program of radical proposal, like Lenins quasi-capitalist New Economeconomic reform and privatization. To achieve this, he turned, ic Policy of 1921, was to revitalize the Soviet Unions in late 1991, to the advice of Western economists, including laggard consumer goods and services industries. Western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, But the move, as innocuous as it now seems, the World Bank, and the U. S. Treasury Department. A standlaunched the Soviet Union on the long and tedious ard policy recipe that came to be known as shock therapy journey toward capitalism. The new co-ops, Gorwas put together, intended, as it were, to liberalize prices and bachev thought, would pay taxes and might even stabilize the state budget. forestall large-scale social discontent by absorbing Yeltsin doggedly pushed his package of shock economic resome of the 15 million workers who might lose their forms even as his critics alleged that, with the help of his top jobs in a much-needed pruning of the bureaucraalliesYegor Gaidar, a 35-year-old economist, and Anatocy. By 1989, the ranks of Soviet co-ops had swelled to ly Chubais, a leading privatization advocatestate enterpris48,000. Though they accounted for just one percent es and natural resources were being sold for bargain prices, of the countrys economy, the co-ops employed some while the rest of the Russian population combated starvation, 770,000 workers who provided an odd assortment of services, ranging from animal grooming, auto repairs, homelessness and destitution. Yeltsin launched a program of free vouchers in late 1992 as a way to give mass privatization computer maintenance, hairstyling, plumbing, and a jump-start and create political support for his economic retranslating to operating pay toilets. In essence, Gorforms. Under the program, all Russian citizens were issued bachevs co-operative movement was the foundation of Russias democratic capitalism and also the bane of vouchers, each with a nominal value of around 10,000 rucommand-and-control economy, said Vladimir Prib- bles, for purchase of shares in former state enterprises. However, the vouchers were quickly snapped up by wheeling-dealylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank.
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ing intermediaries, leaving both the program and the economy in tatters. Chaos ensued. Russias GDP fell by 50 percent, vast sectors of the economy were wiped out, inequality and unemployment grew dramatically and incomes plummeted. In 1995, Yeltsin prepared for a new wave of privatization, offering stock shares in some of Russias most valuable state enterprises in exchange for bank loans in a desperate eort to nance Russias growing foreign debt and gain support from the Russian business elite for his 1996 reelection bid. Though the program was promoted as a way of simultaneously speeding up privatization and ensuring the government a much-needed infusion of cash for its operating needs, many Russians saw the deals as giveaways of valuable state assets to a small circle of tycoons who came to be known as oligarchs in the mid1990s. Seventy-ve year-old Tatiana Pivovarova, a retiree who lost her investment in privatization vouchers, called the program a conspiracy against Russia. Call it what you will, it was a scheme, a pyramid, Pivovarova said. A tricky possession of our vouchers simply gave way to an even trickier possession of our properties.
In the absence of a role model, goal and incentive for economic reforms, authoritarian regimes emerged in some of the ex-Soviet Republics. Most of the post-Soviet states are corrupt states that have as their purpose allowing the elites to enrich themselves through corruption, said Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who advised the Russian and Ukrainian governments in the early 1990s. Authoritarianism is the means of making sure that they can maintain this.
FROM DISUNION TO CUSTOMS UNION Rebuilding broken economic ties between former Soviet states has been the preoccupation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin since he assumed the Russian presidency in 2000. He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head, Putin once said. In 2000, Putin signed an agreement with half a dozen countries to create the Eurasian Economic Community, or EurAsEc, which has largely remained a talking shop, Thornhill said. But since 2009, Putin changed strategy, pursuing a deeper integration with a few former Soviet states by luring them into a Customs Union modeled somewhat after the European Unions common market. Kazakhstan has joined by conviction, Belarus, through persuasion, while Ukraine continues to rebu the invitation to join. Russia wants a single common economic space that will not only bring the former Soviet states closer together, but could Meanwhile, some businessmen, including Boris Berezovsky, also serve as a buer against global economic crises and a safe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Bogdanov, haven for potential investors. Therefore the leaders of Russia, Rem Viakhirev, Vagit Alekperov, Alexander Smolensky, VicKazakhstan and Belarus took further practical steps toward tor Vekselberg, Mikhail Fridman and later Roman Abramovintegration at the beginning of July this year by abolishing ich, who controlled major stakes in former state enterprises, customs controls on the unions internal borders and moving were believed to be Yeltsins strong supporters, but not withcustoms control of goods and vehicles crossing their territories out help from the media. But support from the oligarchs did to what have now become the unions external borders. By Jannot help Yeltsin avert political and economic crisis in 1998, as uary 2012, the member-states are expected to transform the his government defaulted on its debts, causing nancial marunion into a common economic space that would ensure free kets to panic and the ruble to collapse. In the eyes of his most movement of goods, services and capital across a single marvicious critics, the 1998 nancial crisis was retribution for all ket of 165 million people representing 60 percent of the former that was wrong with Yeltsins reforms, in particular, his irtaSoviet population. tion with capitalism. Removing the customs checkpoints is not just a technical The seismic changes in Russia rippled across the wide expanse formality, Putin said in July. This is truly an event of great of former Soviet republics, where most newly emerging states interstate and geopolitical signicance. For the rst time since were struggling to swap central planning for market economies. the collapse of the Soviet Union, a step has been taken to reFor many, it was to be a mission impossible. Having long been store economic ties within the post-Soviet space, he said. part of the tsarist Russian empire, most of the independent na- Writing for the Financial Times, Neil Buckley said the deeption states lacked elements of private business and ownership, ening Customs Union has the typical advantages of stimulatlet alone traces of independent civil society. As in Yeltsins Rus- ing business development by removing trade barriers. It could sia, private businesspeople and rent-seeking ocials found also help restore horizontal links between industries and enways to exploit the situationand imperfectly designed privaterprises severed when the Soviet Union collapsed. Moreover, tization programsto amass huge wealth, wrote John Thornby tying Kazakhstanformer Soviet Central Asias most suchill in the Financial Times. As a result, an emergent oligarchy cessful economyto Russia, it counters growing Chinese inof business-political clans was able to capture the state in Rusuence in the region. Neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan sia and other post-Soviet nations, Thornhill said. have also expressed interest in joining, Buckley said.
Many Russians saw privatization as a giveaway of valuable state assets to a group of tycoons.
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Leading experts contend that a sudden surge in global energy prices in the early 2000s has allowed Putin to achieve more in foreign and domestic policies than either Gorbachev or Yeltsin. But windfall oil revenues could also be a double-edged sword for countries wanting to build fully-edged capitalism. Economic reforms were well underway in the rst three years of Putins presidency, said Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. But as the state became awash with revenues from oil and gas, the leadership decided there was no longer a need to undertake new reforms. The classic discord between sudden auence and economic reforms, known as the oil curse, has also been plaguing other resource-rich ex-Soviet states. With the possible exception of Kazakhstan, which carried out some market-friendly reforms, non-energy sectors in other countries such as Turkmenistan and Azerbaan have languished as their leaders resisted fullscale economic reforms. New realities of global capitalism, however, may have persuaded countries like Russia to have second thoughts about economic reforms, despite windfall oil revenues. Russias current leader, President Dmitry Medvedev, has vowed to reform,
modernize and diversify the countrys resource-based economy to avert the kind of economic stagnation that knocked down the Soviet system. This alone would not mean that capitalism has reached a point of no return. There are certainly no comparisons between then and now, said Peter Necarsulmer, the chairman and CEO of the PBN Company and one of the rst Americans to discover capitalist proclivities in Russia in the early 1990s. However, the Russian leadership still needs to pay more than lip-service to the development of the countrys limited capital markets. What still sets Russia apart from many other developed and developing capitalist systems, Necarsulmer said, is the small, almost insignicant number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It is not only because they generate the most sustained economic activity, but so many of the innovations and modernizations and diversication aspects of the economy that the Kremlin commits to come out of smallsized businesses, he said. However, Medvedevs main challenge may yet be how to infuse new economic thinking into a people brought up to expect much from the state. Thats the toughest part, Necarsulmer said. And it is amazing how much of the old thinking stu continues to this day.
(ANTI) SOVIET GOURMET

By Dmitry Babich RUSSIA PROFILE
Anti-Soviet Caf Blasts People Back to the Past
singing poets from the 1970s, such as Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich. All of these ideas worked, but the name Antisovietskaya insulted people from the Moscow Committee of the Veterans of War, Labor and Law-Enforcement Bodies, headed by former Politburo member Vladimir Dolgikh. There is nothing surprisAlexander Podrabinek and Mikhail Konovalenko are ing in this: in the Soviet era, the word anti-Soviet was a danboth worthy of respectin their own ways. But they gerous insult that could land you in prison. Article 58 of the Soare tied in a bitter conict, which reects almost all of viet Criminal Code punished anti-Soviet propaganda with jail the controversies of the Soviet Unions 73-year-long time. And the veterans of law-enforcement bodies were then history. The conict started in September of 2009. At in charge of implementing this article of the Criminal Code. the time, an old caf on Leningradsky Prospekt, conDolgikh wrote a letter to the city authorities, saying that veniently located (right in the center, on the way to the name insulted the veterans who respect the Soviet periSheremetyevo airport), opted for a provocative marod of our history. The big letters with the new name were takketing trick. In the Soviet era, this cafe was one of the en down by the citys workmen. The caf, whose owner refused few places in Moscow where one could get a shashlyk to comply with the mayors order to remove the name at his (kebab). Since it was located right across the street own expense, gained much-needed PR and more visitors. But from the Sovietskaya (Soviet) hotel, the caf was unthere was another person who refused to accept the fait accomocially referred to as Antisovietskaya (anti-Soviet). pli57-year-old (anti-) Soviet dissident Alexander Podrabinek, So, the owners decided to capitalize on the old joke, who also happens to live nearby and who took the removal of making this the eaterys new name and putting a sign the sign close to heart. with big letters over the cafs entrance. It was part of Again, he had lots of reasons to react. In 1978, 25-year-old a larger plan of turning a regular diner into a place Podrabinek was sentenced to a long prison term for seditious with character, where one could see pictures of antilibel against the Soviet social order. Almost ten years of livSoviet dissidents and listen to not very Soviet songs by ing outside his native Moscow followed, as Siberian exile was
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replaced by a much less severe exile to a village in the Vladiyears, but your time is nished. Your motherland is not Russia. mir Region. All his life Podrabinek honestly earned his daiYour motherland is the Soviet Union, which is no more. You ly bread by working in an ambulance; in 1977 he turned down are Soviet veterans, and your country, thank God, has been the KGBs oer to emigrate, saying that Russia is his country. dead for 18 years. I know Russia is unhappy and doomed to suering, he wrote Whatever Podrabineks intentions were, he made a mistake of then in an open letter. And this is the reason why I stay. bundling up soldiers and Stalins secret police ocers. Nashis Podrabinek wrote an impassioned letter to the pro-Soviet actions certainly crossed the line of civilized debate and probveterans in an online publication Weekly Magazine. You were ably even legality, but from a legal point of view, Podrabinek insulted by this anti-Soviet name simply because it was you, was not entirely in the right, either. Who gave him the right to most likely you, who worked as guards in prison camps and label Vladimir Dolgikh as a criminala person who was never jails, you lead the special troops ring on retreating soldiers, sentenced by any court? You, Vladimir Ivanovich, are a memyou were members of ring squads, he wrote. ber of a gang of communist criminals, who tried to ruin our Mikhail Konovalenko, Dolgikhs deputy in organizationcountry, and later managed to avoid court trial and punishal matters, did not put anyone in jail, however, and during the ment. Now you want to resurface to justify your past, Podrabwar honestly served in the tank forces, becoming a colonel by inek wrote in his article. the end of the war and working as a civil engineer in post-war These accusations made Konovalenko especially angry. At peacetime. His anger at Podrabineks letter was immense, but 86 years old, he said he was ready to return to his tank to ght he decided to ght back by means of civil society. We have people like Podrabinek. We won the war, why should we be 60,000 veterans of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow alone, afraid of small sh like this? he asked, having learned that Konovalenko told journalists. If you add people who got varNashis action stirred bloggers to participate in a symbolic acious awards working behind the front lines or participated in tion called I am Podrabinek, too, aimed at letting Nashi unlater wars, you will get two million. We can just ood the auderstand that their victim had support, too. thorities with complaints, Konovalenko said. Isnt there a way, though, to understand both Podrabinek and The loyalist youth group Nashi went much further than the Konovalenko? To admire these two colorful people, ready to go veterans, setting up pickets before Podrabineks apartment to great lengths to defend their views? Foreigners can do this building. Seeing a group of young people in red jackets closing we know it from the experience of many journalists working in in on his apartment, Podrabinek preferred to go into hiding, Moscow. Why cant we Russians do the same? leaving his wife to explain herself to the picketers. It was this escape and not the article itself that made me think less of Podrabinek, said Yuri Vasiliev, an online journalist who monitored bloggers reaction to the highly-publicized story. Having written this highly controversial article, he hid behind his wifes back, leaving her and his home to the mercy of Nashi members and other ri-ra. Many other bloggers, however, did not agree with Vasiliev, saying that Podrabinek was right not to risk physical confrontation with Nashi, who might not limit themselves to posters if they had a chance to meet Podrabinek in person. Nashis conduct demonstrates that they could not counter his word with a word, wrote a blogger under the nickname BB. So, his word is stronger, and he won. Podrabineks words were indeed strong, but they were not entirely justat least they indeed insulted a lot of people who rightly or wronglydevoted their lives work to the country they lived in. It only seems to you that you enjoy universal re- The owners of the Antisoviet kebab house in Moscow took down their sign after the Moscow Committee of War Veterans found the name offensive and sent a complaint to the city authorities. spect, Podrabinek wrote in his letter to Photo: Sergey Savostyanov veterans. You were told this for many
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LIVING LIKE COMMUNISTS

By Andrew Roth RUSSIA PROFILE
Soviet Communal Apartments Arent Dead Yet

Before 1917, when the worker became king and the cityhis domain, over 80 percent of the Russian population did not live in cities. At the time of the Soviet Unions fall roughly 70 years later, that ratio had been reversed, with the vast majority having at some point lived in a cramped communal apartment (kommunalka.) Following Russias capitalist revolution, some remained there. With a unique mixture of communist and capitalist elements permeating the modern kommunalka, does it still produce the same citizen who lived there in the 1950s and 1960s, and how much longer can the kommunalka persevere on a capitalist real estate market? Hidden among the ve and six story houses located near Sukharevskaya metro station in central Moscow is one of the citys remaining communal apartments, the interior of which is instantly recognizable by the chipped paint and dim lighting that became the hallmark of shared spaces in the Soviet Union, and, by inheritance, Russia. Yet as Mayram opens the door to one of the three occupied rooms in her ve-room kommunalka, the juxtaposition couldnt be more evident; her apartment is spacious, with clean wooden oors and a well-kept balcony renovated several years ago. Linas room, located next door, is far smaller, with just enough space to maneuver between a bed and a small desk. Its just girls here, said Lina. That makes it easier, and of course we split up the chores, but we think that we live together as if we were in a dormitory. When she asks for interviews, she walks down the hallway amiably knocking on her neighbors doorsone pokes her head out, sleepily blinking her eyes, smiles, and then turns back to bed without even a word of reproach. From the Soviet perspective, the modern kommunalka at Sukharevskaya is entirely unrecognizable, yet it represents the last phase of the long transformation in housing in Russia that began with the revolution. The communal apartment emerged in Russia as a product of Lenins uplotnyenie (packing) proposal to pack
workers into the homes of former aristocrats in the city centers. The Soviet authorities accordingly distributed spaces in large, multi-room apartments, dividing them up among families who then shared utilities, including bathrooms and kitchens, as well as equipment such as the telephone. During the years of purges that followed Stalins rise to power, the kommunalka was also one of the staples of the Soviet Unions obsessive fascination with the surveillance state. It was a very planned thing, and far more than just a way of fullling the class goals of the uplotnyenie. This was a system designed to force people to spy upon one another, said Paola Messana, a French journalist and author of Soviet Communal Living, a collection of oral histories charting the development of the communal apartment. During the dicult years of the 1930s and 1940s, the communal apartment was one of the best tools to allow the political police to nd out who was listening to Voice of America and who had ties to the aristocratic classes. In the 1950s and 1960s there was somewhat of a reversal of fortune for communal apartments, as the government attempted to move families into separate apartments, correctly gauging that the population was fed up. Under Nikita Khrushchevs leadership, the Soviet Union began construction of ve-story houses that quickly became known as khrushchyovki, after the leader. Messana described one woman who had long been living in a communal apartments attitude to this new housing, made from pre-fabricated concrete. They were trash, they were terrible apartments, but for her it was a dream to get in to the khrushchyovki. Kommunalki survived the Soviet period, but by the 1990s, privatization had led to government-supported depopulation whereby developers bought out residents of kommunalki, renovated them and sold them on for the kind of prots that property booms in Russias major cities were making possible. The fact that at certain points during the Soviet Union, the majority of its citizens lived in a communal apartment, meant they became a shared, cultural phenomenon of the Soviet period. Vladimir Vysotsky, arguably Russias greatest folk singer, also penned a few lines on his experiences living in shared apartments. Long before his sojourn to Bolshoy Karetny, which he famously recalled in his song of the same name, Vysotsky moved into a communal apartment on Meshanskaya Street, roughly in the same neighborhood where Mayram and Lina have their new, spruced-up apartment. Behind the wall there, behind the wall, behind the divider, neighbors spoiled each other with vodka. Everyone lived equally, humbly: the hallway system, 38 rooms and just one bathroom. Teeth chat-
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nal apartments is increasingly being left to the Soviet era. As Ilya Utekhin, the founder of the virtual museum of Soviet Everyday Life, wrote, for most of the younger generation, a kommunalka is what they see in movies that are set in the Soviet Union.
EVERYONES AND NO ONES St. Petersburg, the birthplace of the revolution, was also the birthplace of the communal apartment in Russia. With thousands of sprawling, pre-revolutionary apartments, and an inux of workers into the city, the state divided them up with gusto. Today, the city remains the undisputed king of the communal apartment in Russia. Though their number has decreased precipitously in all Russian cities since the fall of the Soviet Union, over 650,000 Petersburgers still live in communal apartments, according to data from the St. Petersburg Housing ComMany communal apartments still exist in St. Petersburg, and some can still be found in the former dwellings mittee. One of the citys 100,000 or so remainof the aristocracy - the one pictured above is located in the Muruzi House on Liteyniy Prospekt. Photo: Alexey Danichev ing kommunalki is an eight-room apartment on Mokhovaya Street, on the top tering from the cold, no overcoat would warm you, here I truly oor of an old, pre-revolutionary building. Entering the dim corridors of the apartment, a long, dusty hallway leads past a found out a kopecks real worth, he sang in his Ballad about former anteroom to the right, which houses a young couple, Childhood. Sitting in Lina and Mayrams self-styled dormithen two empty rooms. With no direct sunlight, the hallway tory, its hard to imagine Vysotsky moodily droning on about is dark until rounding the corner into the rear of the apartsurviving Meshanskaya. ment, where a beam of light comes in from a small window in the bathroom. The back of the apartment holds another four THE GENERATION PAST Ultimately, the older generation of communal apartments and rooms, housing several students and a family of four. Slowly but surely, thanks to the dual processes of capitalism residents are dying out. In Lina and Mayrams apartments, and human mortality, the communal apartment itself is dying there are ve rooms in all. Mayram lives closest to the front out, with vacant rooms like Lyubov Petrovnas becoming more door, Lina is next, and then the young neighbor who sleepily and more common. Zhenya, who has lived here since she inpoked her head out of the door, refusing to be interviewed. There are also two empty rooms in the apartmentone belongs herited the room from her late mother, said that until recently she had been content living in the old apartment despite the to Linas ex-husband, which is currently vacant. The door to the other room is padlocked shut and painted white. Lyubov lack of hot water. But the recent deaths of two pensioners in the room adjoining hers and across the hall have imbued the Petrovna, the spirit of the old kommunalka, as Mayram apartment with a feeling of death, and she is now looking to called her, lived here until she died several years ago. move out. We had tried at one point to get a boiler in here, so that we Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the onset of privatizawould nally get hot water in the apartment. I remember the arguments that we used to have over that, over anything in the tion, the modern communal apartment has become a strange kitchen and anything that required us to get her approval. She hybrid of the communist and capitalist systemseach person opposed any kind of change to the placeshe lived in kommu- owns a room in the apartment, but the apartment itself has no owner, meaning that in an eerie way, the apartment belongs to nalki for her entire life, Mayram recalled. everyone and no one at the same time. As long as each resident After her death, Mayram released a short documentary lm doesnt sell his right to a room in the communal apartment, no on Lyubovs life, where the camera fruitlessly chases after her one can sell the space in its entirety. as she resolutely moves about the kitchen and discusses her The result is that there are similar problems with the upkeep life in the apartments. Ultimately, her death was indicative of for collective spaces from the Soviet period, but that the room a cultural shift in which the particular heritage of commu-
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has become a veritable efdom of the ownerin other words, Soviet Union there was no property, said Dyak. Some saw his property. Privatized rooms have begun to take some of the their communal apartments as private property, which some communal out of communal living, notes Utekhin. With comexperts are now noting. Yet with so little privacy, it became all plete ownership over the rooms, new owners dont need to ofthe more clear in the communal apartment just how little you cially notify or negotiate with their neighbors to rent out had. rooms, or, in an extreme case he writes about, can partition their rooms into ve sleeping areas and then rent them out to DYING A SLOW DEATH a troop of Moldovans. The behavior of the Moldovans led to What is increasingly developing is a stalemate between the items disappearing around the house, and eventually a note current dwellers, who want to take advantage of rising prices from another dweller threatening to call the immigration serin rooms to sell them o at a healthy prot and enough to get vices if a spray bottle was not returned to the kitchen. an apartment, and developers who want to renovate many of Yet far more important is that the end of communism has de- the apartments, which are often located in prime real estate in prived the kommunalka of the shared experience that an encity centers. Mayram, who bought her room about six years tire generation of Soviet people had. The kommunalka toago, said the price had doubled and it is now worth $ 100,000. day is the remnants of what the kommunalka was in the Soviet Yet why would I want to move out of here, away from the Union. In the Soviet Union it still had an ideology, so you had center and into some apartment on the edge of Moscow? I am something that was keeping the whole thing together. Then ev- planning to stay here, said Mayram. erything collapsed, the system collapsed, and in came the new I am convinced that people will stay in those apartments unvalues, and they are money. So if you have money, you can live til they die, said Messana. Yet when they do, their relatives very well, and if you dont have money, you can live in a comwill not be so quick to ll those spots, and what their deceased munal apartment, said Messana. grandparents would have sold for a quarter of a million dollars In the Soviet Union, noted Soa Dyak, the director of the they might be willing to part with for a fth of that. Center for Urban History of Eastern Europe, despite popuThis is a process that is not just happening in Russia, but lar conceptions that the Soviet Union was a property-less state, all over the former Soviet Union, as the old apartments slowthere were dissenting voices that apartments which gave a ly disappear. Dyak noted that in Odessa, for instance, the marsemblance of privacy and were transferrable to their kin were ket had slowly begun to wear down some of the last remaining the closest that one came to property. Its not true that in the communal apartments in Ukraine.
THROUGH THICK AND THIN

By Alexey Beglov Special to RUSSIA PROFILE
For Many Years, the Russian Orthodox Church Has Been Undergoing a Process of Enculturation
For the Russian Orthodox Church, the post-Soviet period began in October of 1990, even before the Soviet Unions ocial collapse, when the government adopted a new Soviet law on the freedom of conscience. This law cancelled the registration of clergymen with BOOSTING NUMBERS the authorities and turned the Council for Religious First of all, this was a time of quantitative growth for churches, Aairs (one of the main institutions carrying out Somonasteries, dioceses, religious schools and clergymen. The viet religious policy) into a consultative, rather than number of parish churches in Russia increased almost tenmonitoring body. This act put an end to the entire sys- foldfrom 3,000 in 1990 to almost 30,000 today. The number tem of controlling the countrys religious associations, of monasteries grew from several dozen to more than 800 which the Soviet government had built up since 1918. over the same period. However, there is still one church per This 20-year period almost fully coincides with the thousands of believers, which complicates their meaningful rst post-Soviet patriarchate. Holy Patriarch Alexy II communication with clergymen. There are still not enough
(Ridiger, or Ruediger) held his post from 1990 to 2008. His patriarchy was a whole epoch in the life of the church. At that time, the church was breaking out of the isolation imposed on it by Soviet power and sustained the consequences of the political, economic and social disintegration on a par with the rest of the country. Lets recall the main events in the life of the church during this period.
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churches and clergymen to meet the spiritual needs of all those In parallel there was a new exodus from Russia, Ukraine, Bewho have turned or are ready to turn to the church. larus and Moldova. For the Russian church this meant the apThe reconstruction and construction of churches required pearance of its ock all over the world. Congregations of the huge nancial expenditures. The search for funds became a Moscow Patriarchate around the world multiplied, which reheavy burden on the shoulders of priests and abbots. The conquired the formation of new parishes and construction of new tributions of rank-and-le believersthe foundation of the churches. But this changed the composition of the Moscow Pachurch economy throughout the Soviet years (and still account- triarchates old foreign parishes. Their former parishioners, ing for the bulk of the church budget at parish level)plummet- who were brought up in religious tradition, turned out to be ed in the atmosphere of an almost permanent economic crisis. in obvious minority amidst the mass of religiously incompeSo the deans, abbots and even bishops had to nd spontent migrs. New conicts ared up within the church, some sorsnewly-rich people who could help restore churches. of which compelled part of the congregation to withdraw from Some of these people were oligarchs, whereas others reprethe Moscow Patriarchates jurisdiction. sented small and at times semi-criminal business. Their contacts with the church were not easy and sometimes cast a shad- A LESSON IN ESCHATOLOGY ow on the clergymen, but relations between the church and All these processes took place against the backdrop of eschatobusiness played a crucial role in the restoration of church logical attitudes that were stirring up the church in the entire infrastructure. post-Soviet space. They became particularly widespread on the The church and society were also broadening their relations. eve of the year 2000. For the most part, they were expressed People in Russia were getting used to seeing clergymen on as a morbid reaction to such government undertakings as the television and radio. Central television networks were master- introduction of new domestic passports to replace the Soviet ing a new genrebroadcasting religious services. documents and the Individual Taxpayer Number (INN), as well as the national census in 2002. These eschatological exA NEW REALITY pectations had become so widespread among Orthodox circles At the same time, in Russia (and other CIS countries) these that the churchs hierarchs had to make special statements on contacts did not lead to the formation of a strong and indethis score. pendent Orthodox laity. The movement of Orthodox brotherFertile grounds for the spread of the alarmist attitudes were hoods that evoked great hopes in the late 1980s to early 1990s created by the so-called young elders, or mladostartsy, lost its religious character very quickly. It became politicized, phenomenon. It was through these charismatic pastors who with the majority of brotherhoods turning into extreme monexcessively interfered in the personal lives of their followers archist or nationalist groups. This became a big headache for and formed groups of fanatics around them that such ideas the hierarchy for a long time, and compelled it to restrain all were propagated. By the middle of the 2000s eschatological atlay movements in every possible way. As a result, today practi- titudes had become less widespread, but still remained radical. cally any grassroots religious or public activities are taking Suce it to recall the drama that unfolded in the Penza Region place at the periphery of church life, and very often overlap in 2007 to 2008, where a group of 35 (including four children) with eschatological movements. radical believers spent six months in a man-made cave awaiting the forthcoming end of the world.
BACK TO THE NEW Such attitudes appear to be a form of socio-psychological adaptation on behalf of the population to the excessively radical social and cultural transformation that Russian society went through. The church is also aected by it. Today observers The Russian Orthodox Church encountered major diculties usually describe what is happening with the church by uson the world arena as well. The Soviet Unions collapse led to ing the term revival, meaning a return to what was lost or the invigoration of dierent groups within the church, which destroyed after the 1917 revolution. Some people think that wanted to proclaim their independence from the Moscow Pathe last 20 years saw natural and steady growth of the churchs triarchate following the national independence of their repub- inuence on society and the state. Others believe that this was lics. These conicts ared up in Ukraine, Estonia and Moldova. a time of mistakes and lost opportunities for full-scale revival. They escalated and drew other Orthodox churches into their However, a close look at the events taking place in church life orbitthe Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and shows that they least of all resemble a recovery of what was the Church of Romania. By the end of the rst post-Soviet delost. cade, the church had managed to restrain the centrifugal forcIn reality, every single sphere of religious life demonstrates es by making considerable concessionsit had to grant de fac- new phenomena that did not exist in the early 20th century. to semi-independent status to its dioceses on the territories of Take new religious schools, such as academies, seminaries and newly independent states. other theological institutionsbefore the revolution, they pri-
There is still one church per thousands of believers.
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The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the tallest Orthodox church in the world, was rebuilt in Moscow in the late 1990s after its predecessor was demolished to make room for the Palace of the Soviets in 1931, in what many saw as a sure sign of the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Photo: Vladimir Vyatkin
marily educated the ospring of the clerical order that no longer exists today. Religious schools are actively developing and avidly absorbing the achievements of European theology. They are even getting ahead of Russias secular schools in the Bologna Processa gradual unication of academic standards for European bachelors and masters degrees. A similar situation exists in icon painting. In the early 20th century, Viktor Vasnetsovs mystical and romantic modernism was seen as the inaccessible acme of religious painting. Even well-educated contemporaries did not know or understand East Christian icons with their deeply-ingrained symbolism. What is happening now is not a revival of the Vasnetsov School, but a return to icon painting per sein all of its dierent periods and styles. Church architecture has also been reborn in the past 20 years using new technology and catering to new tastes. These are just the most striking examples of the trends seen everywhere in church life, showing that what is happening is not the mechanical recovery of something lost, but a process of enculturationthe creative entry of the church into the modern and post-modern culture of Russia and other CIS countries.
This process began in the 1970s, when educated young people displayed their interest in the church and its culture for the rst time. In the 1980s, during the festivities devoted to the Millennium of Christianity in Russia (1988), this interest became legalized, and in the 1990s and 2000s it was further and logically developed. A new church culture is being born in the course of this process, and a new language of communication between the church and society at large is developing. The Russian Orthodox Church is dealing with this kind of society for the rst time in its history. Russian society is now urban (rather than rural), secularized and well educated. It is part of the global information society. These features of our society are objective reality, and the church will have to engage all of its creative potential in order to translate its eternal teaching into modern language. It is abundantly clear that enculturation is a long-term process, and we will see its results only in several generations. However, one of its most active phases seems to have taken place in the past 20 years.
Alexey Beglov is a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of World History.
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WHATS IN A NAME?
By Rosemary Grifn RUSSIA PROFILE
Soviet Names Still Survive in Modern Russia
in and Stalin) and Melsor (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, October Revolution). In an interview with Ogonyok in May of 2005, Alexandra Superanskaya, co-author of Russian Names and Russias leading anthroponomy expert, described where some of these names came from. On the corner of Kuznetsky Most Street and Neglinnaya Street there was a commission, which invented and registered new Soviet names. From 1924 to 1930 they First names inspired by the October Revolution and issued calendars with recommendations. There you can nd its leaders appeared as a way of demonstrating comgirls names, such as Electrication, and boys names like Tracmitment to the cause in the early years of the Soviet Union. Often acronyms of the initials of Soviet lumitor, as well as many others. Engelisa Pogarelova was born on August 5, 1934the anninaries, revolutionary events or achievements, from the late 1910s onward children of the Soviet Union wore versary of her namesake Friedrich Engels death. I think my parents wanted to give me an original name, something unusutheir parents political beliefs, aspirations or fears on their birth certicates. For the countrys orphansof- al, she said. Nobody else in my family had a Soviet name. My brother is called Valery and everyone else had normal Russian ten the children of disgraced enemies of the people names. Although Pogarelova said she has always been happy politicized names were a way to reinvent themselves as model Soviet citizens. Although the popularity of with her name, it has caused her a few small problems. Many people make mistakes because I have an unusual name, they Soviet names peaked in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and living with such a name had its pronounce or spell it incorrectly. On all of my documents now it is spelled Engilisa, not as it should be spelled, Engyelisa. drawbacks, people continued to give their newborn She also felt that at times her name restricted her social life children Soviet names into the 1980sguaranteeing that this quirk of the Soviet Union will remain a small growing up, although she found ways to get around this. I was sorry not to have a name day, everyone else had one as well part of Russian life for many years to come. The practice of naming newborn babies in honor of as their birthday, but I didnt have one. And then my birthday falls in the summer, when nobody is around, so I decided to do the revolution and its heroes rst appeared in the late 1910s. In some cases, it reected parents enthusiasm something about it and have another celebration on November for the regime change and in others, their fears about 28the date of Engels birth. I got a bit carried away then and decided to celebrate Marxs birthday on May 5 as well, but that how their past may be interpreted by the new authorities. It was fuelled by the Soviet authorities clampdidnt really take o. down on bourgeois and Orthodox Christian traditions, Pogarelova is the director of The Central House of Arts which cast doubt on many previously popular names Workers (Tsedri). Always interested in the arts, she started her career working in cultural clubs attached to factories, deand encouraged parents to choose ones that reected the new values. signed to both entertain and educate the workers. This meant Some parents simply gave their children the rst she had to take ideology courses at the university, where her name turned out to be a disadvantage. At the Institute we had names of prominent peopleVladimir in honor of Lenin, for example, which was the most popular boys Marxist-Leninist Pedagogy and my teacher was horrible to me. He used to call me Marxisa and say With a name like that, you name in Moscow between 1924 and 1932. But others were explicit and easily recognizable tributes to Sodont have the right to get less than ve. So I had to work extra hard in that class and it was really boringI was always more viet heroes, with Lenin again leading the way. Boys names honoring the father of the revolution include: interested in creative subjects. Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), Vilor (Vladimir Ilich LenBut the confused response to her name has also kept her entertained over the years, with even those who worked alonginorganizer of the revolution), and Leninid (Lenins ideas), while girls were called Ninel (Lenin backside her sometimes making the odd Freudian slip. Once when I was working as the director of one of the culture clubs my wards) and Lenora (Leninour weapon). Names formed from the initials of a string of soviet heroes husband came to pick me up. He asked for the director and the woman on duty called out Evangelisa Georgievna. When I were also popular, such as Mels (Marx, Engels, Len-
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Pogarelova herself never considered changing her name. My parents gave me this name and I respect their choice, she said. To some extent I wished I could change my surname more. For a long time I was in charge of the re safety department, which with a surname like Pogarelova (derived from the Russian verb to burn) led to quite a lot of teasing from my colleagues. But not all Soviet names have died out, particularly those which are more exible. Damir existed before the revolution, but was reinvented by the Soviets to mean Hello world revolution! This gave the bearer more exibilityto acknowledge it as a Soviet name, a pre-revolutionary name, or both. Alexei Dmitriev was born in 1986. Two of his classmates at school in St. Petersburg had Soviet namesDamir and Vladlen. But it wasnt until the class was in eighth grade that they realized what the names meant. We were told by some teacher that these names are synthetic. We were reading Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. We didnt think that you could just call a child whatever you wanted, when we understood that it was a normal thing in the Soviet Union we went through culture shock. Damirs classmates had always just thought that Damir was a Tatar name. But its both. His parents are Tatars, but they also wanted their son to have a Soviet name, Dmitriev said, adding that Vladlens parents were teachers, who were perhaps slightly more committed communists than the average citizen. I think his parents just liked Lenin. It was rather unusual to give the boy such a name when it had already gone out of fashion though, he said, adding that Vladlens two brothers did not Vladimir Lenin was a key source of inspiration behind Soviet names, with have Soviet names. Unlike Pogarelova, Damir and Vladlen were numerous Vladlens and Ninels registered throughout the Soviet period. Photo: Nappelbaum not happy with their names growing up. Vladlen sounds girly and Damir sounds weird, so no, they did not like them, Dmitcame out he told me things had changed and I was now named riev said. after the Gospels! The novel, which rst brought the students attention to Soviet names, Mikhail Bulgakovs Heart of a Dog, reects the NAME DROPPING reception these names received from some quarters when they By the 1950s some bearers of Soviet names had become promi- were rst introduced. In one scene bourgeois surgeon Filnent public gures, such as prima ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina ip Preobrazhensky is arguing with the dog he has successfuland Vladlen Bakhnov, co-author of the script for the classic ly turned into a man about the name he has chosenPoligraph Soviet comedy Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession. But Poligraphovich Sharikov: Your name seemed a bit strange, it most Soviet names did not take o and have since died out, if would be interesting to know where you found it?The house they ever existed, particularly the more creative ones, such as committee gave me some advice. We looked at the calendar Pyachegod (the ve year plan in four years), Pridespar (hello and I chose a name.No name like that can be on any calendar. delegates of the party congress) and Smersh (death to spies). Thats surprising, the man smiled, When its on the one hangNames easily identiable with political gures who subseing in your consulting room. Without getting up, Filip Filiquently fell out of favor also struggled to survive. Those that povich leaned over to the bell on the wall and Zina appeared. venerated Stalin are a good example of this. After his death Bring me the calendar from the consulting-room. After a many men called Mels and Melsor dropped the s from their pause Zina came back with the calendar and Filip Filipovich names, and girls named Stalina changed their names to alterasked: Where? The name-day is March 4. Show me grrr.. natives that were not associated with the dictator. Pogarelodamn. Throw this thing on the re at once! va experienced this second hand. There was a singer that I used to work with called Stalina. Im not sure when exactly she FICTIONAL CHARACTERS changed her name, but by the 1970s, she was already called Heart of a Dog marked the beginning of a minor trend in SoPolina. It was not hard to change your rst name; you just had viet literature to use Soviet names to convey information about to send an application to the registry oce. It was much harder contemporary values, or the battle going on between those to change your surname, she said. values in the Soviet Union. Andrei Platonov began writing
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his unnished novel Happy Moscow in 1933, by which time Soviet names were an established part of life. In the opening pages the main character, Moscow Chestnova (derived from the adjective honest), who has been wandering the streets as an orphan and is unsure of her real name, is given a new one in a childrens home. They gave her a rst name to honor Moscow, a patronymic in memory of Ivanthe ordinary Red Army soldier fallen in battle, and a surname as a sign of the honesty of her heart, which had not yet become dishonest, although it had been unhappy for a long time. This trend in ction also survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Viktor Pelevin gave a Soviet name to the central character of his novel Generation P. The book, which was written in 1999, deals with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of a new Russian society, through the world of advertising, psychedelic drugs and the main characters ideological and career progression. Vavilen Tatarsky is named after 1960s counterculture writer Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Lenin by his father: Tatarskys father evidently could easily imagine that thanks to what he understood from Aksyonovs uninhibited page, the eternal Leninist could grasp that Marxism had stood for free love from the beginning. Embarrassed by his name Tatarsky, starts to introduce him-
self as Vova, before pretending his father was in fact fascinated by Eastern mysticism and named him with the ancient city of Babylon in mind. Despite this brilliant reinvention, at the age of 18 Tatarsky happily lost his rst passport and his second one read Vladimir. While they may remain a convenient literary device, Soviet names are not popular among parents of Russian newborns today, who are overwhelmingly opting for traditional Orthodox or Slavic names. Evgenia Smirnova, a spokesperson for the Moscow Registry Oce, said that three names have dominated in the capital over the last two decades. Alexander is in a stable position at the top of the most popular list for boys. The rest of the top ten changes quite a lot, but Alexander has been the most popular for the last 20 years. For girls in the same period, Maria and Anastasia have shared the top spot, and in the last two years Maria has come out top. But there is evidence, albeit slight, that the idea behind the communist nameshonoring a system, idea or hero in the naming of a childhas not completely died out. Among the legions of Sashas and Mashas born across Russia in 2011, one little girl born in Omsk, Siberia was given the curious name of Medmiaa combination of the rst letters of the current presidents surname, rst name and patronymic.
POST-SOVIET SYNDROME
By Pavel Koshkin RUSSIA PROFILE
Many Young Russians Are Nostalgic for the Soviet Union

Contrary to popular belief, the tight grip that 70 years of Soviet indoctrination exerted on the popular psyche was not limited to the older generations of Soviet citizens. Many of todays young peoplewho were not even born when the Soviet Union still existedare showing symptoms of grief and pining for the good old days. While experts continue to unravel the mystery behind ex-Soviet citizens love for the good old former union, more and more young people say they too are casting some nostalgic looks at the Soviet past. For many young people, the fabled social guarantees and safety net that the Soviet regime provided were the keys to their hearts. It was good that the government provided people with the necessary living conditions and social benets, there was more condence about tomorrow, 20-year-old Maria Skorik,
who studies PR at the Journalism and Philology Faculty of the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, said. For her, social welfare is what was cool about the Soviet Union, even though she said that her idea of those times was based on bedside stories. Maxim Rudnev, aged 23, who studies at Russias Academy of Law and Governance, also said recreational storytelling by his parents formed his opinions about the Soviet past. My opinion is based on stories I was told by my grandparents and good Soviet movies, said Rudnev, who was born in East Berlin and never lived in the Soviet Union. For me, the Soviet past is associated with victories in World War II, the achievements of the space programs, science and the labor movements, such as Stakhanovism. Rudnev is now one of the patriotic young fellows in the pro-Kremlin Molodaya Gvardiya political movement, which, among other things, groom the young generation to look at the Soviet past with admiration and some veneration.
THROUGH ROSE-COLORED GLASSES A recent study by Valeria Kasamara and Anna Sorokina at the Laboratory for Political Research at the Higher School of Economics found that nostalgia for the Soviet past is still quite common among Russians, including the younger generation.
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The study, which polled 300 high-school and university students aged between 13 and 32, found that young people with little or no memory of the Soviet Union also tend to be nostalgic for the past. Young Russians didnt live in the Soviet Union and only know about it from stories they have been told by their parents, grandparents and teachers, or Soviet movies, Kasamara said. These tend to concentrate on positive experiences and dont reect the gloomy Soviet reality. Sorokina added that those who remember the Soviet Union tend to focus on its achievements. To appeal to teenagers, parents only reminisce about the Soviet achievements and the positive side, and try to compare today with the past within an alluring context. For instance, the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow is compared with the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and the Nashi political movement is compared with the Pioneers and Little Octobrists, she said. The degree to which people are willing to idealize the past, experts say, depends to a large extent on their social status, upbringing, education and movies. Tough social and economic conditions Good Soviet movies, such as The Irony of Fate, which traditionally airs on Russias state television every since the collapse of the Soviet Union can New Years Eve, often make young people feel a longing for the good Soviet times pictured on the screen. Photo: V. Alisov also lead people to idealize the past, according to experts. The diculties people faced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the liant and ready to suggest a compromise because they are in 1998 economic crisis, the threat of terrorism, and the collapse demand among employers, Kasamara said. of orderwhich had been so typical of the post-Soviet era, outBut not all students t in with this broad categorization, parweighed the problems of the Soviet period, Kasamara said. ticularly when it comes to perceptions of certain aspects of Although Soviet citizens didnt like the gloomy Soviet reality, the Soviet Union. Skorik claimed not to suer from post-Soviwhen shock therapy was implemented in response to the colet nostalgia at all, despite her positive impression of the Sovilapse of the Soviet Union people started to recall the romanet welfare system. I was born before the collapse of the Sovitic and still air of the Soviet Union when they had government et Union, but I dont remember this period, she said, I did not support and condence about tomorrow. belong to Soviet society like I do not belong to American soSuch a line of thinking is also winning over young Russians, ciety, because I live in modern Russia. Its my aquarium and I many of whom, Kasamara said, suer from a lack of condont want to live outside of it. dence and a sense that they are dependent on circumstances. If somebody is not condent, has low self-esteem and is reliant LONGING FOR A STRONG HAND on government support alone, they want to shift responsibility The researchers from the Higher School of Economics believe onto somebody else, Kasamara said. For many, the social wel- that to some extent, post-Soviet nostalgia is symptomatic of a fare or state guarantees that they will nd a job after graduayearning for the strong and inuential rule that characterized tion are essential, because they are unable to act independent- Soviet power. Reliance on a strong government and leader ly, she said. helps to boost a persons ego, Kasamara said. The grandeur Among the younger generation, students from regional and and inuence of Soviet power is what they are proud of, not second-tier universities are more likely to suer from post-So- great literature and scientic achievements. While Americans viet nostalgia. Students from top Moscow universities are take pride in their freedoms, the average Russian is yearning more condent about their future, more open-minded, self-refor a strong and controlling government.
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Come 2014, many will be comparing the Olympic Games in Sochi with the positive experience they had at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
Photo: Sergey Guneev
This desire for strong leadership is also noticeable among young people who claim not to feel nostalgia for the past. Skorik sees a strong government as much more important for Russia than a close relationship with the West. While supporting friendly ties with other countries, she thinks that national interest and security should remain top priorities. Concessions that may result in negative consequences for the country are not always a good way to deal with geopolitical problems, she said. Suspicion toward Western countries is also quite common among the post-Soviet generation, which Kasamara believes indicates it is yearning for the Soviet Unions inuence in the international political arena. A poll conducted by the Levada Center in 2011 revealed that 70 percent of respondents believe that Russia has a lot of strategic rivals and enemies abroad. Rudnev also supports a strong government, but does not rule out the possibility of mutual understanding and collaboration. Russia should work on building friendly partnerships with the West, but, concurrently, we should be prudent and avoid manipulation. In other words, we should be an equal partner for the West, but not a second-rate one. But young peoples perceptions of the Soviet Union are far from overwhelmingly positive today. Although he feels nostalgia toward Soviet grandeur, power and the countrys achievements, Rudnev would not like to live in the Soviet Union. He describes himself as a representative of a new generation that is focused on improving todays Russia, not the past. Try to
make your own contributions to Russias development and wellbeing before asking something from the government, thats my principle, Rudnev said. And this makes me dierent from Soviet generations. Rudnev also believes that the lack of competitiveness as well as reliance on the government and social welfare hampered the development of Soviet society on both international and domestic levels. Other young people, such as Skorik take a negative view of the uniformity that pervaded the Soviet Union. Her view is shared by 22-year old Aznavur Dustmamotov, who was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in 2007 to study at Harvard. The thing I most dislike about the Soviet Union is its uniformity. There was one ocial ideology, one path to success, even one taste in music, clothes, and lm, he said. Despite having a negative opinion of the Soviet Union, Dustmamontov said it would certainly be curious to live there for a short time to witness such a radically dierent society. Dustmamotov, who described the Soviet Union as a doomed experiment and a failed state, based on coercion and false social theory, also believes there is a ne line between pursuing national interests and reclaiming imperial ambitions. He personally never felt part of Soviet achievements, even though he grew up in the Yaroslavl Region, because he is not an ethnic Russian. I was always treated as an outsider, and I simply cannot identify with Soviet achievements, such as victory in World War II or the creation of the thermonuclear bomb, in the same way ethnic Russians do. I was always told, This is our success, not yours. Whatever the greatness of the Soviet Union may have consisted of, I have no share in it and do not feel sentimental about it. Reinhard Krumm, the head of the Moscow bureau of the Friedrich Ebert Fund, an inuential German organization promoting democratic values in Russia, is skeptical of how widespread post-Soviet nostalgia is among young Russians. I have been teaching Russian students and I havent noticed that they want to go back to the Soviet Union. They have a lot of opportunities to study wherever and whatever they want. But whether Russian youth feels nostalgia toward the Soviet Union primarily depends on their level of education and social status, Krumm said, adding that those who are better educated are more condent and more comfortable in modern Russia and feel less nostalgia for the Soviet Union. An expert on Soviet and post-Soviet history, Krumm said that in contrast to their Soviet predecessors, consumerism and attachment to Western culture are characteristic of the current generation. Now young people understand they will not be able to prot in an isolated society. In a globalized world Russians dont want to stand apart, they want to participate. Krumm also believes that the post-Soviet generation diers in its perception of ideas of freedom, pluralism and responsibility. He said that European countries make certain distinctions between Soviet and post-Soviet generations partly because of this. There is a lot of sympathy toward the new generation. Its more open-minded and condent. Russian youth is the same as youth is in the rest of the world.
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Three Chapters of History

Comment by Fyodor Lukyanov Special to RIA NOVOSTI
The Next Presidential Term Will Decide Russias Destiny

Twenty years ago, on June 12, 1991 Russia elected its rst president, Boris Yeltsin, with a convincing majority. This fact predetermined the events of the following months and became the nal prerequisite for the Soviet Unions imminent disintegration. The federal center was weakening and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was rapidly losing support. He never dared hold direct elections. In this context, the popular vote gave Yeltsin a qualitatively different level of legitimacy. Given the split in society and escalating struggle for power, this was to play the decisive role. However, although this change in signicance was clear inside the country, in the global arena the Russian president was not perceived as the number one gure until the fall of that year. It was only after the August 1991 coup and the total collapse of the Soviet state structure in September to November 1991 that Gorbachevs friends and colleagues among the worlds leaders realized that he was no longer in the driving seat. Since then the Russian president has symbolized the country. Not only did the Constitution give him enormous power but, even more importantly, he personied the centuries-long Russian tradition of one-man rule under which the rulers character leaves an indelible imprint on state policy or, at least, on how it is perceived by foreign players. Russias three presidentsBoris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedevare so different in character and psychology that it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to analyze Russias foreign policy through the prism of personality. Yeltsin is viewed as either a pro-Western liberal or an impulsive whipcracker, depending on the ideological position of those passing judgment. Putin is described as an aggressive, anti-Western autocrat, and Medvedev as a reasonable politician lacking independence or a man who is continuing the policy of national betrayal. Such stereotypes determine how Russias international conduct is dened not only in the media, but also in many ostensibly scholarly publications. Meanwhile, it would make more sense to take the opposite view and analyze how objective conditions compelled any particular president to behave in a certain manner, rather than highlighting a particular presidents impact on circumstances. In this light, Russian foreign policy appears much more integrated, if not consistent, than it is usually portrayed. Russia developed as an international player during its rst three presidents terms in ofce. paper, Russias role as a key global player. The latter was by no means guaranteedRussia had to ght all the way, even for its permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Those goals set, Russia had to do three things. Firstly it had to stabilize the domestic political scene; hence the acute struggle for power and suppression of political opponents in October of 1993. The Chechen War was also designed to halt the powerful impetus to territorial disintegration imparted by the Soviet collapse. Secondly, Russia had to facilitate the cessation of hostilities and support fragile statehoods, which, if they collapsed, risked reinvigorating secessions powerful centrifugal force. Thirdly, Russia had to ape an active role in the world CRISIS MANAGEMENT by attempting to join the civilized commuThe Yeltsin administration was acting in condi- nity (under Andrei Kozyrev) and later (under tions of a permanent crisis, whether political or Yevgeny Primakov) by attending all internaeconomic. Few people now recall that the new tional forums, going (regardless of its ability to Russian government had to tackle fundamental inuence their decisions) and demonstrating its issues with great urgency, including Russia as stance on all issues. successor to the Soviet Union (i.e. its legal sta- Russia achieved the goal it set for itself of tus in the world), nuclear weaponsin Russia preserving its formal world status, but by the and beyondand relations with neighbors, late 1990s it was clear that it had to back this almost all of which were more names than ac- up economically and politically. Failing to do so tual states, but which all immediately started would mean its power would again be called talking about their national interests. The into doubt against a background of neverRussian Federations foreign policy could not ending domestic conicts. Considering that by continue along Soviet lines because although that time the leading world players had tired the Soviet Union was in the nal throws of dis- of Moscow, outside forces were unlikely to integration, it remained not only a great power, stand on ceremony in dealing with the faltering but also one of the two main pillars of the Russian bear. existing world order. Russia wanted to inherit this status of a world power, but could not and FROM IDEA TO PRODUCT did not want to perform this particular role of Putins presidency was largely devoted to this systemic support. task of converting Russias nominal status as In fact, Yeltsins foreign policy was aimed a great power into something real. Like Yeltsin, (leaving secondary albeit gripping details to he reached for both carrot and stick. First, one side) at preventing the total collapse of the aim was to integrate into Western instituRussias status and preserving, at least on tions, primarily in Europe. In the rst half of
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?
Russias rst President Boris Yeltsin had to preserve Russia as a key global player; Russias second President Vladimir Putin had to consolidate the countrys position on the global arena; Russias third President Dmtiry Medvedev had to come up with a new agenda; Russias fourth president will have to decide its destiny.
Photo: Alexander Makarov, Alexey Druzhinin, Vladimir Rodionov
the 2000s Putin persistently offered the West lucrative strategic and energy deals, hoping to build Russias status as an equitable part of the European and Euro-Atlantic communities. Circumstances intervened, preventing him from achieving this goal, and the second phase of Putins presidency, embodied in his Munich speech, aimed to show the West Russias irritation at this inability to come to terms. Putins presidential rule coincided with a stormy period in the world arena. Developments increasingly started to deviate from the chosen path, the forecasts of the late 20th century failed to come true, and the players were becoming less and less coordinated in their actions. Under the circumstances, Putins efforts to consolidate Russias domestic and foreign potentialities amounted to a rational choice. However, the emotions that Putin had accumulated toward his Western partners started to erupt, with or without cause, which only aggravated the general feeling that something was awry. Tensions exploded two months after his presidential term came to an end: the war in the Caucasus broke out as a belated item of his mandate. Domestic support for the military invasion of a neighboring country was considerably broader than usual. It reected a feeling of psychological resurgence after almost 20 years of geopolitical retreat. At the same time, the events of August 2008 completed the postSoviet perioda period dened by overcoming the shock of the Soviet Unions collapse.
WAIT AND SEE Medvedevs presidential term fell in this transitional period. The previous agenda had been exhausted and a new one had not yet emerged. Compared to his predecessor, the cheerful, calm third president looks positive. However, his tranquility reects a wait-and-see attitude rather than any readiness for new joint undertakings. He rules in an era of the accelerating erosion of international institutions and the rapid shift of global inuence from West to East. It is widely believed that Medvedev wholly belongs to the Western camp. In reality, things are much more complicated. He (much like Barack Obama in America) is the rst postEuropean president. In other words, he is a leader for whom Europe ceased to be the starting point. It is no accident that Russia-EU summits always attracted attention under Putin but have since, under Medvedev, become meaningless and routine affairs: in part because of the total mess in which the EU currently nds itself and partly because Russia has lost interest in this particular partnership. The geography of Medvedevs trips is also much more diverse than that of his predecessors. Indicatively, the public images of the three Russian presidents conform to their historic missions. The colorful Yeltsin, who, even with his weaknesses, embodied the Russian noholds-barred spirit, had to prevent Russias main partners from forgetting it existed. Always on guard and ready to retaliate, Putin sought to consolidate Russias positions in
order to compensate for previously incurred losses. Well-mannered and polite, Medvedev has led the country through this waiting period, trying to reduce the risks from unpredictable developments abroad. True, in this last case, Medvedevs image represented only part of Russias foreign policy, because of the unconventional dual power setuphis mentors inuence has continued to project itself onto his policy. The next presidential term will decide Russias destiny, all the more so since it will last six years. It will not see comprehensive self-determination or the choice of the path the country will follow in years to come. On the contrary, the next few years will witness the nal collapse of inherited structures, and a potential series of chaotic developments and regional crises. The president of 2012 to 2018 will have to act under the Hippocratic do-no-harm principle. His primary purpose will be to minimize risks and think thoroughly before taking any bold action. Yeltsin preferred competitive games, and Putinendurance sports. They say Medvedev likes the concentration of yoga. The next president needs to be a strong chess player. Any coincidence here with public political gures is purely accidental.
The views expressed in this article are the authors and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti. This comment was originally published in English at en.rian.ru on June 16, 2006.
Fyodor Lukyanov is the editor in chief of Russia in Global Affairs.

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RUSSIAPROFILE .

ISSUE 4 VOLUME VIII FALL / 11

SPECIAL REPORT: 20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

The Red Goes Tricolor

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

STARS VERSUS EAGLES

(ANTI) SOVIET GOURMET

COULD HAVE, WOULD HAVE, SHOULD HAVE

LIVING LIKE COMMUNISTS

14 THROUGH THICK AND THIN

FREEDOM FIGHTERS LEGACY

Photo: Igor Palmin

22 THREE CHAPTERS OF HISTORY

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

The Nationality Question Still Haunts Modern Russia

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

STARS VERSUS EAGLES

Russia Lacks a Unied Policy With Regard to Its Symbols

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

By Anna Arutiunova RUSSIA PROFILE

MEMORIES IN BRONZE AND GRANITE

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

COULD HAVE, WOULD HAVE, SHOULD HAVE

Russian Historians Have Discovered a New Appreciation for Soviet History

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

FREEDOM FIGHTERS LEGACY

Soviet Dissidents Were Pioneers of Civil Politics

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

Over the Past 20 Years, Moscow Has Become Nearly Unrecognizable

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

Russia Has a New Youth Group to Replace its Soviet Prototype

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION

RUSSIA PROFILE Issue 4 Volume VIII Fall/11

20 YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION