There is no single answer to the question of where Russia is going, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to play the same old song and approved a national anthem to the tune of the Soviet one with changed words. The intractability of the new Russian leadership in foreign policy shows that its clear striving is to be master in its own house, and simultaneously it is no less clear that its striving to develop its national market is meant to lead many astray or even lie to them. Nina Khrushcheva, who is equally familiar with both Soviet realities and the Western model, has her own view: if the first shoots of normal economic development appear, society will inevitably move forward despite any ideology that might today exist, which means that this article should be read closely by readers in Ukraine.
“Forward to Communism!” This slogan defined, and cynically mocked, the do-nothing Brezhnev era of stagnation. Today, Russia is racked by a sense of dОjИ-vu for those times. Under Yeltsin, despite the chaos of flawed markets and an even more flawed democracy, there was a sense that things were moving forward. Now many Russians have no idea where they are moving forward or backward or, indeed, if they are moving at all.
President Putin’s restoration of the old Soviet national anthem was the first recent hint that Russians are marching back to the future. Although Putin did have the decency to change the words, he retained the Soviet spirit of “Great Russia united forever.” Then the Federal Security Bureau, formerly the KGB, celebrated the anniversary of the founding of its foreign service branch, that is, spies, a reverie attended by a certain former employee named Putin.
This was followed by a shareholders meeting of the RAO UES (United Energy Systems), Russia’s electricity giant, now headed by reformer turned oligarch Anatoly Chubais. The meeting was meant as a sign of Russia’s new business friendly climate, but the banner hanging over the hall, “Long Live the Eightieth Anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s GOELRO Plan,” mocked any such intent.
GOELRO’s (State Organization for the Reconstruction and Development of the Soviet People’s Economy) slogan was Socialism means Soviet rule plus electrification of the whole country.” Chubais’s plan is similar to GOELRO, but instead of national socialization, it calls for obligatory national marketization. If a region can’t pay for its electricity, its people will be cut off and left without heat.
For most of this enormous country, with its 135 million people and eleven time zones, such signs of the past and the promised business future are regarded as skeptically as proclamations about record harvests under Brezhnev. All such things are seen as Kremlin games, hypothetical and hypocritical, bearing little if any relationship to reality. Everyone to some degree has nostalgia for the past, some bleary idea of how the past can (rather than cannot) work in the future. But Russia’s people, after ten years of Yeltsin’s anarchic freedoms, are too jaundiced to take any slogan seriously, be it from the Soviet past or from the management consultant’s hymn book.
Russians no longer care about slogans and symbols because paying bills and feeding their families leaves no time for indoctrination and ideology. Perhaps this is something the West should have realized about the Soviet economy all along. Propaganda and indoctrination are time consuming and inefficient. You can’t produce if you are chanting slogans or spying on friends.
At the end of the day digging coal, teaching children, or waiting tables, Russians now want reasonable services, a logical tax system, and regular paychecks. Whatever anthem — old, new, or none at all — under which these things appear will be deemed suitable, and may even be sung. Of course, many hope that someone will explain to Chubais that national marketization works best when supported by functioning social institutions and a social safety net. Few have any real hopes of this.
Recently I traveled in distant regions of Russia, where I grasped the enormous disconnect between the center (Moscow) and Russia’s periphery, between rulers and ruled. That disconnect is nothing new; there have always been Tsars and serfs, commissars and proletariat. That postcommunist Boris Yeltsin, however, although he sometimes declared allegiance to a hazy collective sense of Rossiyane (citizens of Russia), deprived — or freed, this is a matter of opinion — Russians of all collective life; both their real life of shared hardship and the imaginary half-life of communist solidarity. Today everyone deals with life and hardship individually (a new word in our everyday vocabulary) regardless of any Kremlin desire to make life uniform.
Indeed, even Russian uniformity is different nowadays. In Novgorod I saw LukOil (one of Russia’s big private oil companies) gasoline stations. I saw them in Moscow as well; then in Novosibirsk. They are uniform: red and white, brightly lit, clean and businesslike. What makes a market economy a market economy, I thought, is the fact that you can always find a Texaco or a BP, Elf or Statoil petrol station, or a Seven Eleven store in Alaska, South Carolina, or Tokyo. When LukOil stations look the same in central Moscow and remote Siberia, it means something new and, yes, revolutionary. For in this uniformity Russia has the hope of becoming a “normal” country, a place where the uniformity of slogans is replaced by uniform commercial services.
Of course, highbrows everywhere object to this so-called McDonaldization of life, arguing that commercial sameness is the death of culture and individuality. In Western Europe, Japan, and the United States, places where individuality lost its novelty long ago and where the managerial spirit and mass commerce flourish, this sameness might be something to debate. In Russia, however, a couple of thousand shining LukOil stations are not threats but harbingers instead. They are a new type of individuality here, the individuality of the survivor-entrepreneur against the tyranny of the socialist crowd.
To critics of this, I offer one more sign. On my way to Novosibirsk airport at 5 a.m. on a morning when the temperature read minus 48 Celsius (minus 118 Fahrenheit) I saw a brightly-lit wooden hut. Pizzeria Venezia proclaimed a sign with a carving of a gondola. Globalization and someone’s vague idea — no, dream — of la dolce vita had reached the depths of Russia. If Putinism means that, perhaps Russia is moving forward after all.
