Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (69 page)

At this point, Vladimir Putin was forty-eight years old. A life-long practitioner of judo, he was not only fit but sober, for which the Russian electorate, used to ailing and unsteady leaders, was certainly grateful. But he had come to Moscow from his native St Petersburg relatively recently, and was still regarded as an outsider in most of the capital’s close-knit political circles. His sponsors faced an uphill task as they set out to market his political brand. The solution was an unexpected one. As a former lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet-era KGB, Putin had proved his mettle as an effective and reforming leader of its Russian successor, the FSB, and he continued to cultivate a positive image for that organization once he was president. In time his vulpine features seemed to personify all that was best – if such a notion were possible – in the ideal secret policeman.

As the euphoria of New Year’s Eve wore off that January, however, Kremlin-watchers were unimpressed. Putin, wrote political analyst Lilia Shevtsova, was ‘not a charismatic or a bright personality’. His qualities included ‘modesty, dullness … and the ability to use street slang’.
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She might have been gloomier still if she had recollected that Stalin’s early rivals, such as Leon Trotsky, had once made broadly similar comments about him. In private, even Yeltsin later came to rue his choice of protégé.
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But the president was there to stay. In March 2000, Putin took advantage of a storm of fear – the spectre of Chechen terrorism that his own security forces had worked to summon – and returned to the Kremlin with 52.94 per cent of the vote, against 29.21 per cent for his nearest rival, the Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov.
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Four years later, riding a wave of prosperity based on the international price of Russia’s oil and gas, he secured an even more convincing winning margin. There was an interval from 2008–12, the four-year break after two presidential terms prescribed in Yeltsin’s 1993 Russian constitution, but in 2012 Putin returned to the Kremlin again, and this time he looked very much at home.

The watchwords of the new regime had been prefigured at the moment of its birth; whatever his private goals, in public, Russia’s leader was to stand for anti-corruption, a sleek and steely masculinity, and an untiring fight against crime. Above all, Putin represented the stability that many tired post-Soviet Russians craved. They talked about normality as if it were a kind of right, but what they wanted was a government that looked convincing and refrained from making intrusive demands. Since the state in fact remained very weak, Putin’s regime worked hardest to deliver on the looks. Instead of fear and poverty and shame, this leader seemed to promise that his people could again feel proud, infusing their beloved patriotism with a twist of xenophobia, especially towards the west.

Voters were so distracted, and so relieved, that a majority chose to ignore the tedious, depressing facts behind the fairy-tale, but the price they paid for ineffective government was high. Crime continued to rise during the Putin years,
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and in the first decade of the twenty-first century Russia lost more citizens to terrorist attack than any other industrialized country. The only places with bleaker records were Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Corruption among government officials reached such an extreme that by the end of 2005, ministerial posts and governorships were said to be exchanging hands for multiples of $10 million.
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As for investment confidence, the official figures for Russian capital flight topped $40 billion in 2010, and the indications for the future offered no prospect of change.
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But Putin really did convince large numbers that their country had returned to its essential course. Even before he took office, on 29 December 1999, his name had appeared at the foot of an online Kremlin posting about the nation’s future called ‘Russia at the Turn of the New Millennium’. It emphasized what was unique about the place, dismissing imported western ideas such as individual freedom of expression. ‘For Russians,’ Putin had written, ‘a strong state is not an anomaly … but the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of any change.’
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It was that version of normality, not some imported democratic dream, that he had pledged himself to build.

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The Kremlin was, of course, the only possible base for Putin’s state. Personally, Russia’s leader seemed more at ease in his luxurious suburban dacha, pulling pints of straw-coloured St Petersburg beer for Tony Blair or entertaining guests around a table of his own.
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Before long, he even had a string of better palaces at his disposal, the most controversial of which, in a protected forest near the Black Sea town of Praskoveyevka, was rumoured to have cost a billion dollars to build.
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But the Kremlin offered something beyond price. If a strong state were indeed Russia’s destiny, then here was its eternal sacred heart, the nation’s citadel. As Yeltsin had once put it, ‘There is a strange magic to the place, the magic of the air of history. Certain defence mechanisms subconsciously kick into gear, the mechanisms of genetic memory: people realise that in spite of everything, this is the Kremlin, this is Russia, this is my country.’
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Like so many previous Russian leaders, Putin set out to harness the aura of the red fortress. It helped that history had been his favourite subject at school.
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The past – or an invented version of it – became an instrument of yet another government. For glamour, the new regime invoked the romance of the tsars much as Yeltsin had done; official ceremonies and even smaller meetings were televised against the gold and crystal backdrop of the Kremlin halls. Unlike his predecessor, however, Putin also allowed his people to pretend to be good Soviets again. The Patriotic War played an ever-increasing role in public discourse, connecting present-day Russians with noble suffering, personal heroism, and world-class military glory. Its stirring music still made many hearts beat faster, as did the new national anthem, a reworked version of the war-time Soviet one, which Putin revived at the end of 2000.
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Critics complained that a return to Stalin’s tunes insulted his unnumbered victims, but their protests were to no avail. Yeltsin had sometimes looked like a foreigners’ lackey, a creature of the rotten capitalist world. Putin would never play that role. His message was exactly what most Russians seemed to yearn to hear.
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Between 2000 and 2003, repeated polls reflected ordinary Russians’ belief in their country’s special path, its ‘unique way of life and spiritual culture’, ‘predestination’ and, inevitably, its strong and centralized tradition of government.
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The exploitation of the past was systematic and sustained, but it seemed to peak around election times. In 2007, as the speculation about plans for a possible (and unconstitutional) consecutive third term for the president began to build, cinema audiences learned of a blockbuster film,
1612,
produced by Putin’s great admirer, Nikita Mikhalkov. Set towards the end of the Time of Troubles, it told the story of Moscow’s salvation from the invading Poles. For some reason, almost every scene in Mikhalkov’s interpretation of the epic demanded the bizarre appearance of a magical unicorn, a creature that had no connection to the real Romanovs’ well-documented purchases of narwhal tusk. ‘It’s important for me that the audience feel pride,’ the director, Vladimir Khotinenko, told journalists. He did not want young people to regard the struggle against enemies as ‘something that happened in ancient history but as a recent event’.
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The film was released in Moscow on National Unity Day, 4 November, the holiday that had replaced the Soviet revolutionary festival in 2005. Its message, that the latest time of troubles had given way to a new Muscovite golden age, led critics in the liberal press to dismiss the whole thing as ‘trash’.
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But image-makers did not take the hint. ‘Do we love Moscow?’ the conservative
Moskovskaya Pravda
asked in 2007. The pretext for the question was an online poll in which Russian voters had failed to place the Kremlin among the seven wonders of the modern world. The implication, couched in several pages of romantic prose, was that true patriots should speak up for the site that the poet Lermontov had called ‘the altar of Russia’. ‘We must learn to appreciate our connection with everything that took place and will take place in the land of our birth. The land of our fathers – in Latin,
patria
– our Motherland.’
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To help viewers to understand the unique greatness of that national home, they were soon to be offered another historical example: tenth-century Byzantium. In 2008, a pseudo-documentary film shown on the
Rossiya
television channel praised the ancient empire’s wealth, its bureaucratic structures, and its all-seeing networks of security.
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The only flaw identified by the presenter (Putin’s personal confessor, the archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov) was the weakness of early Byzantine constitutionalism, which allegedly insisted on electing emperors for four-year terms rather than anointing them for life.
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This proved to be too much even for Putin’s office, and the reform that his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, pushed through later that year merely extended future presidential terms from four years to six.

There were a few other U-turns, not least because the internet and liberal press were giving voice to sceptics who might once have gone unheard. In 2007, a scandal erupted when a much-anticipated school textbook,
The Unknown History of Russia 1945–2006,
went so far as to excuse Stalin, describing him as ‘an effective manager’. The book was withdrawn and amended.
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But the president and his supporters continued with their vivid history lectures. Putin seemed to identify with the statist reformers of Russia’s past, notably Nicholas II’s prime minister, Petr Stolypin, and he enjoyed promoting their images. Yeltsin had adorned his Kremlin office with life-sized statues of Peter and Catherine the Great, but by 2005, the scale of themed redecoration had turned the Senate into a veritable pantheon. Official visitors – and television-viewers who saw the statues and portraits on screen – would never doubt which prophets of Russia’s destiny were meant to be inspiring them.
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No historical revival was more incongruous, however, than the new cult of the secret police. The 1990s had been Russia’s decade of repentance. Historians had worked like archaeologists then, joining survivors and human-rights workers in a sustained effort to uncover the extent of Stalinist violence, the evidence of repression and death. The FSB had not been implicated in these atrocities, but no-one would lightly have praised its Soviet predecessors, the Cheka and NKVD.

When a new television series,
Kremlin-9,
began in 2004, it seemed innocuous enough at first. Its purpose was to tell more of the stories that had once been buried in archives. The researchers focused on the elite rather than the people, and included tales of Stalin’s inner circle, war-time government, and even the decline of Brezhnev’s health. The series title referred to the secret police department that had long protected the top brass. But nothing that related to the Cheka was ever quite what it seemed. The cameras took viewers on many interesting tours, but the atmosphere resembled that of a Cold War spy novel. Crime and rivalry in politics were presented as the preserve of a fictional-seeming Kremlin where life was always lived by separate rules; the people’s real nightmare of mass-death and wanton cruelty was simply swept aside. And all was well, or normal, in the Kremlin of today. It was a place that Russians should again regard with pride. As the presenter, Pavel Konyshev, joked with his viewers, ‘They even built the towers in the seventeenth century as if they already knew that a future Russia would be the first to send men to space.’
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The FSB and its forebears were about to bask in official acclaim. There was no further need to dwell on slaughter, sadism, or corruption. On the eve of the ninetieth anniversary of the Cheka’s foundation, in 2008, a group of patriots proposed that the thirteenth-century prince Alexander Nevsky should become the security services’ patron saint, giving their gruesome work the blessing of a paragon.
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The Kremlin, too, was drawn into the rehabilitation of the Cheka’s image. A lavish commemorative book was produced, in a scarlet-bound limited edition, to celebrate the secret policemen’s ninetieth jubilee. The heads of every major state archive were listed among the contributors, and the cited documents included many that were usually inaccessible to scholars. The subject of this work was the security services’ historic role as guardians of the Kremlin.
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Everything was open now, the book implied: the Cheka and its heirs had nothing to hide. Indeed, the country’s sacred heart, Moscow’s Kremlin, had them to thank for its survival.

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In June 2001, the Kremlin was voted Moscow’s foremost tourist attraction, well ahead of the White House, Kolomenskoe, and even the Tretyakov art gallery. Although they were not very large by international standards (the Louvre has packed more than eight million people through its doors each year since 2000), its visitor numbers have remained the highest for any comparable attraction in Moscow. In 2010, they hovered at just under five thousand a day. But Sergei Khlebnikov, the Kremlin commandant, conceded that the welcome for tourists needed improvement. Plans to sell food inside the walls were duly approved. The rules about photography were also informally relaxed. The Kremlin’s museum service even prepared to raise its profile (and its income) by selling branded products such as pens and T-shirts, and in December 2010 names like ‘Kremlyovka’ and ‘Kremlin’ were trademarked in advance of future vodka sales.
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‘I am proud to think that my country has such an architectural heritage’, a visitor wrote on a guest site. ‘To be in Moscow and not see the Kremlin’, wrote another, ‘is impossible.’
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