Putin

In 1931 Stalin ordered the demolition of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, built in the mid-1800s to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. It was to have been replaced by a Palace of Soviets, much larger than the Empire State Building and topped with a 260-foot statue of Lenin. However, after the demolition of the cathedral, the ground proved too marshy to support such a grandiose edifice, and for years the gaping hole was left empty. Later, Khrushchev hit on the idea of turning it into the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool, which fit nicely into the totalitarian cult of mass sport, if not rising to the iconic heights of the original concept. It was only after the fall of the USSR that the Christ the Savior Cathedral was rebuilt from scratch at enormous expense by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. And so it was into that long-suffering, much-manipulated, and symbol-drenched cathedral that one day in 2012 three young women, their faces concealed with balaclavas, began singing a discordant song of protest against Putin, a punk prayer. They were immediately arrested and almost as immediately became famous as members of Pussy Riot. Though they were quite sincere in protesting the suspect coziness of church and state, they had also inadvertently entered a labyrinth of symbols that led, as do so many things in Russia, to prison.

A desacralization and desecration of images had also occurred when the Soviet regime began falling in the late 1980s. Statues of Lenin—though not all of them—were torn down, and of course he himself, so to speak, remains in his mausoleum on Red Square. Immediately to the left of Lenin’s tomb is Stalin’s grave and the bust with its oddly crafty eyes. Stalin too had been embalmed and entombed alongside Lenin in the mausoleum until 1961, when Khrushchev, as part of his anti-Stalin campaign, ordered the body removed under cover of night, then buried. Stalin’s body was then placed under a concrete slab, just to be on the safe side. Who knows, maybe the corpse had even been dragged by a horse and beaten with sticks.

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The collapses of Tsarist Russia in 1917 and of Soviet Russia in 1991 were greatly different. Though Lenin was caught by surprise by events, having despaired of seeing any revolution in his lifetime, he and the other far-left revolutionaries had one enormous advantage: they knew what they wanted to be rid of and what they wanted to replace it with. The Bolsheviks had a worldview, a theory of politics, government, economics, foreign policy; they had a flag and a color—red, the color of flame, blood, and revolution; they had songs that could move the masses, they had artists itching to use the instruments of modernism to create a new art for all of society and not just one for an elite of connoisseurs. They had a philosophy of life and a theory of history as a progressive dynamic evolving through contradiction toward social justice for all. The state would gradually wither away as people achieved ever higher levels of consciousness, a vision described by Leon Trotsky in the concluding words of his book Literature and Revolution:

Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

In 1991 there was no Lenin waiting in the wings. Instead of the drama of violent armed clashes, there was only a void that only grew the more it was fed.

The questions about this period are myriad: Did the United States do too little to help in the critical early nineties? Or, on the contrary, did the United States interfere too much and propose solutions that were ill-suited for the reality of Russia? Or was there in fact very little that any outside nation could do, since Russia’s resurgence, like its demise, would largely be a matter of its own making?

One thing is, however, certain. No one had a vision for post-Soviet life apart from generalizations about constitutions, human rights, and free markets. But what actual policies to pursue, what flag should be saluted, what anthem sung, what holidays and heroes celebrated, what icons should be smashed and which new ones created, no one had the slightest idea.

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