Wither Russia?

Trying to figure out Russia in the Age of Putin is a bit like attempting to assemble a 1000-piece puzzle after someone has ripped the picture off the front of the box. The best approach is to start with some edge pieces: pick a few points of reference and work one’s way to the center. Here are four.

British journalist Marc Bennetts (I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives, OneWorld, $14.99) traces the unlikely transformation of Vladimir Putin from a technocratic prime minister in 1999 to the Kremlin Tsar he is today by charting the evolution of interactions between the Kremlin and its opponents.

We must begin, Bennetts says, with the reality that Russians assented to a Faustian bargain in the early 2000s, when they accepted sausages in exchange for freedom.

The oil and gas boom pulled Russia out of its economic crisis of the late 1990s and brought new prosperity to most layers of society. Yet this was accompanied by a steady and relentless crackdown on freedom of the press, demonstrations and independent political parties, along with widespread corruption, election rigging and propagandistic Newspeak.

This fairly normative interpretation is not the reason to pick up Bennetts’ book. Instead, it is invaluable for his many interviews and interactions with Russians who continue to demonstrate and defy authority even as things get increasingly difficult. And he covers the full spectrum, from radical right-wingers to pro-Western liberals, from voting monitors to provincial activists trying to stop a nickel mining operation from being set up in their backyard. We learn what keeps them fighting, despite impossible odds, what the Kremlin and Putin seem to fear most (Maidan), and why any form of dissent is increasingly seen as some shade of treason.

To many it is this latter twisting of reality, employing patriotism as a crass political tool, harnessing the whirlwind of nationalism, that is most worrying about what is going on in Russia today. Charles Clover (Black Wind, White Snow, Yale, $35) traces this phenomenon from its unlikely roots a century ago in the science of linguistics, through a myriad of non-scientific perversions that have coagulated into the Russian nationalist idea known as Eurasianism.

Clover’s story is mainly about the peculiar rise and influence of Alexander Dugin, a mystic, right-winged radical turned political theorist. But there are also KGB-funded nationalists, the exhibitionist-sensationalist author Eduard Limonov, the Gulag-informed theories of Lev Gumilev, and a whole range of wild and strange characters that seem ripped from the pages of Gogol or Dostoyevsky.

They have relevance only because Eurasianism has bubbled up to the Kremlin, appearing in dog-whistle statements like one by President Putin that “The Great Russian mission is to unite, bind civilization. In this type of state-civilization there are no national minorities, and the principle of recognition of ‘friend or foe’ is defined as a common culture and shared values...”

The Eurasianist idea is that the twenty-first century will be one in which major continents of political, economic and military power will compete for the future of civilization. And therefore Russia should preside over a “historically Eurasian” landmass united by a traditionalist worldview – one defined less by what it stands for, than what it stands against, which as Clover succinctly puts it, is “the cyborg-like rationalism of a West that has lost touch with its inner human nature, its spirituality, its fraternal family bonds.”

It seems an almost metaphysical conception, where the un-embraceable Russian soul (Putin in 2012: “Of course, we are less pragmatic, less calculating than representatives of other peoples, and we have bigger hearts. Maybe this is a reflection of the grandeur of our country and its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.”) is counter-posed against outside forces that want to change it, contain it. Yet it is not mystical; it is very real. Like the communist ideology that mad the USSR responsible for leading the worldwide revolution, this perspective asserts a Russian responsibility for stewarding a Eurasian landmass of like-minded nations. And you cannot steward something over which you have not control.

Thus, the Eurasianist worldview, Clover asserts, “directly provoked” the war in Ukraine, helped instigate the war in Georgia, and is turning “Western liberalism” into Russia’s chief foe – and that foe is not merely foreign: witness Kremlin assertions about “fifth columns” and “national traitors” seeking to subvert the country from within.

“It is hard to escape the idea,” Clover writes, “that Putin’s ‘Eurasia’ has become, in some sense, a geographical border around a separate truth.”

David Satter (The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, Yale, $30) has been reporting on Russia’s “separate truth” for four decades, and writes that “understanding Russia is actually very easy, but one must teach oneself to do something that is very hard – to believe the unbelievable. Westerners become confused when they approach Russia with a Western frame of reference, not realizing that Russia is a universe based on a completely different set of values.”

Yet Satter is not talking about spirituality versus rationalism. “It is necessary to accept,” he continues, “that Russian leaders really are capable of blowing up hundreds of their people to preserve their hold on power.”

Indeed, The Less You Know is a searing, difficult to digest chronicle of tragedies (the 1999 apartment building bombings, Nord-Ost and Beslan, the wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine) full of unanswered questions and circumstantial evidence that points to nefarious involvement by “competent organs” or other instruments of the Powers That Be. One might be tempted to write the book off as the work of a conspiracy crank, were it not written by a respected journalist for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, and published by a highly reputable publishing house.

At the root of everything, Satter writes, is the Russian state’s tendency “to treat the individual as raw material for the realization of the state’s ambitions...” which in the 90s and 2000s meant “the determination to introduce capitalism without the rule of law and Russia’s total criminalization.” And today, he asserts, “it is the Putin regime itself that is the enemy of the population... the regime itself will use any means at its disposal to stay in power.”

An important means ever at the Russian state’s disposal has been the media. And it is this fourth estate, and its role in “inventing” the Russia we see today, that concerns Arkady Ostrovsky (The Invention of Russia, Viking, $30), whose book was awarded the Orwell Prize soon after it was published.

Chronicling the role of Russian media in politics from the 1980s to the present day, Ostrovsky shows how it has been repeatedly used to shape and guide events by those who have held its reigns. From the “meticulously planned suicide” of the USSR to the Yeltsin elections, from the wars in Georgia and Ukraine to the rise of Putin, Russian media has been a reality unto itself. Quoting Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov, Ostrovsky notes that in Russia “we are mostly interested in words and have little concern for reality.”

This sentiment reached its culmination, Ostrovsky says, in Crimea and Ukraine: “never before had wars been conducted and territory gained primarily by means of television and propaganda. The role of the military was to support the picture.” There, the media did not merely mis-report or distort reality, “they invented it,” making up stories of atrocities, hiring actors to portray victims and combatants, spreading ridiculous falsehoods to muddy the waters.

Interestingly, tying together the ideas raised by both Clover and Satter, Ostrovsky writes:

“Those who produce Russian propaganda are not driven by the idea of reestablishing a notional ‘Russian World’ or rebuilding the empire – they are too pragmatic for that. They act not out of conviction or a sense of reality but out of cynicism and disrespect for that reality.”

A sobering conclusion indeed. Yet the final edge piece in beginning to frame this puzzle ought come from Boris Nemtsov, the gifted politician who was both inside and outside the Kremlin over the two decades before his murder last spring. One year prior, in May 2014, Nemtsov wrote this about modern Russian politics:

“I can’t remember such a level of general hatred as the one in Moscow today... ‘national traitors,’ ‘fifth column,’ ‘fascist junta’ – all these terms are coming from the same Kremlin office... The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell cannot end peacefully.”