The Soviet past isn’t dead. It’s not even past

“The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past” — William Faulkner

In Ukraine, one question looms above all: how will it end? In major Russian cities, protesters have bravely taken to the streets in defiance of armed police. People power has a special tradition in Russia, not only in the Bolshevik revolution but the Soviet collapse and, in its wake, the foiled coup to reestablish the Soviet Union — all were swayed by those on Russian city streets.

Putin’s approval rating was a solid 71% in independent Levada-Center polls, as troops were building up on the border. Whether they can be trusted or not, historically Putin’s support comes mostly from the provinces. Away from the cosmopolitan centres, his cult of personality finds purchase in a wider historical context — a fact insufficiently acknowledged in the West.

We saw this in the surge of domestic support after the annexation of Crimea, an otherwise bellicose military action only justified in terms of history. This peninsula with an overwhelmingly Russian population was gifted to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev and could be framed by Putin as rightfully Russian.

Over the past two decades, official Russian history has been sculpted to position Putin as a strongman with the grit to right the wrongs of the past. If this were only empty propaganda it would have not gained traction, but it plays on the genuine anxieties and desires of a large segment of Russians.

Playing into this is the West’s failure to accurately understand these very anxieties with enough nuance, instead resorting to clapped-out Cold War stereotypes. In them, the Soviet Union was an undifferentiated Orwellian huddle of material deprivation, state terror and soul-crushing greyness. Its end came at the fall of the Berlin Wall, a moment of “liberation” when overjoyed people sledgehammered the symbol of their oppression and streamed through to join the world. This gave birth to concepts like “the end of history” and, while it would be a struggle to find advocates of it today, its hubris and its assumptions endure.

In contrast, in the final decades of the Soviet Union, life for the vast majority of the population was stable to the point of boring. Although queuing and the black market remained a feature, food was cheap and the material shortages of the early USSR like lack of housing had been solved.

The piercing gaze of the KGB was locked on spies and career dissidents rather than ordinary people. This saw the rise of the Soviet joke, a feature that would have ended you in a gulag or shot during Stalin’s reign. One joke that reveals the laxity and lassitude of the period: a man in a line to buy liquor says to another man in the queue “I’m going to shoot Gorbachev”. He leaves but quickly returns. “Did you get him?” he is asked, to which he replies “No, the line there was longer”.

While Soviet life may have paled materially in comparison to the cocktails and Cadillacs of the American dream, it was stable. Of the former Soviet citizens I spoke with, many missed the sense of community, economic stability and personal security of Soviet life.

Crucially underestimated by the West, its collapse still weighs heavy on the Russian soul. The welfare state, full employment and communal bonds of the late Soviet Union ended abruptly. In their stead came a sudden spike in the cost of living, with hitherto unknown violence in the streets as the oligarchs carved up the state’s assets. Ownership was only what could be defended. In famous perekhods or highway underpasses, destitute former Soviet citizens would arrange their meagre possessions for sale so they could afford to eat.

The data to back up the human cost is telling. Life expectancy for the Soviet male peaked at 64.84 in 1987. Post-Soviet male was a sick species indeed. After the end of 1991, expectancy dropped precipitously to 57.55 by 1994, lower than it had been since 1955. It did not rise again above 65 until 2013.

Consider Gorbachev and the startling dissonance between the Russian and the Western versions. Still celebrated in the West as ushering in a period of world stability and peace, he is to this day reviled throughout Russia as overseeing the country’s fall from grace. This is not state-funded propaganda but the opinion of regular people who see him at best as a dupe and at worst as a betrayer who sold them down the river.

Also important is the narrative underpinned by an opportunistic West: assurances were given to Gorbachev by Western leaders that no country in the former Warsaw Pact would become part of NATO. Gorbachev never got anything in writing. What remains today is suspicion: the West talks friendship but cannot be trusted.

Crucial to Putin’s popularity is the context of his rise: by 1994, Russia had lost the First Chechen War against a relatively tiny population of Chechens in their autonomous Southern oblast. Defeat of the once mighty Red Army was humiliating. Afterwards there was a period of terrorist attacks in Russia by Chechen rebels. Not only was Russia no longer a superpower — it could not even hold itself together.

From this emerged Putin, who was installed as the country’s prime minister on the eve of the Second Chechen War. As the former chief of the FSB (successor to the KGB), he responded to the terrorist attacks — which some say the FSB themselves contributed to — with a ruthlessness that would become his trademark. In a matter of months he crushed the insurgency at immense cost to Chechen civilian life.

In its wake, he installed a puppet state that remains in place today. From these events grew the persona of a strongman that would bring iron-fisted stability no matter the cost. The proposition on offer was clear from the outset: fearsome strength, ruthlessness and stability with Putin or chaos, disintegration, and humiliation without. The dictator’s bargain: at least I’m not as bad as the alternative.

Putin is eager to cite precedent for his brand of rule in the form of rehabilitating Stalin. I was in Moscow for the 70th anniversary of the victory in World War II. Amongst the military parades of tanks and ICBMs that roared through the streets and the flyovers of Sukhois trailing tri-coloured smoke came a more subtle feature, barely registered in the West: the appearance of Stalin on bus stops and billboards throughout the city. This was his coming-out party after a lengthy rehabilitation in school syllabuses and official histories. For years he had began to morph from mass murderer into a strongman that had defeated fascism and brought modernity and stability to the Russian people.

The battle over Stalin’s legacy reaches across the border into Ukraine. Soviet history there has begun to shift from successful Soviet republic to one akin with the Baltic states — that of an occupied country. This narrative emphasises the famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin’s ruthless pursuit of collectivisation left the country without food and approximately 4 million people starved.

So too the Ukrainian impulses for independence during the Civil War in the 1920s and the beginning of World War II have served both as a thorn in the official Russian version and an inspirational chapter for Ukrainians facing Russian aggression. Far better for Putin should Ukraine become another Belarus, a passive client state that worships their Soviet history and expunges the human cost.

In 2015, I also visited the Moscow offices of Memorial, an organisation founded on the reconciliation of Soviet victims with their past. At that time the organisation had recently been listed by the security services as a foreign agency, meaning it had to leap through a series of increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucratic hurdles to continue operating. Memorial was the target of harassment and intimidation too — its offices were stormed by security agents who confiscated documents and hard drives.

Monuments cite history, but resound politically. Perm-36, one of the last gulag camps left standing, was spared the bulldozer to become a memorial to the millions of victims killed by the sprawling gulag archipelago. I had travelled to Siberia and found the entire camp intact in 2012, its main building made into a museum in the vein of Dachau: a sombre reminder of the totalitarian machine.

In true Soviet style, the camp fell out of favour. Its volunteer staff faced increasing harassment and threats from local government, who described it as a fifth column. Then, during the invasion of Crimea, it was forced to shut down after a withdrawal of state funding. After years in limbo, the museum reopened with references to Stalin and Brezhnev scrubbed and a new emphasis on foreign nationalist prisoners. Such is the continued power of history in Russia, even in the hinterlands of Siberia.

Such fear of real history by Putin is telling. Like any abusive relationship his power relies on a gaslit fallacy — nobody understands you but me, and without me you’re nothing. When the West resorts to clumsy Cold War stereotypes, they play right into it. Vital, though, are those Russians continuing the work of the Soviet dissident historians. They successfully once wrestled history from its role as propaganda and returned to it its primary mandate — recounting what truly happened and acknowledging the full human cost.

In the end the truth was such a threat that the archives were closed again. This period of openness contributed greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union as today it remains a threat to the foundation of the Putinist state.