The Remains of the Red Day III - 1991-2021: The Dissolution and Future of an Illusion

Illustration credit: Georgia Ryan

2021 is a year of tragic anniversaries for the Russian-speaking world. The years 1921, 1941, and 1991 mark the bloody beginning, catastrophic climax, and surreal end of the Soviet story. Anatoly Grablevsky’s column ‘The Remains of the Red Day’ combines historical perspectives with contemporary cultural and political ones as he studies these three seismic events. He aims to explore how the past, by informing and determining the present, lives on in the Russian national consciousness to this day.

An elderly woman rises to a makeshift stage amidst a sea of people on Palace Square of St Petersburg on 20 August 1991. She begins by saying that her sister was murdered by the Soviet authorities in 1975 for dissidence. But those days of passive suffering are over. “The people are not a whore that you can keep on using however disgracefully you want”. Another speaker says: This turning point of our history will forever squeeze out the last drop of our slavery.

For the first time since perhaps 1917, the people of Leningrad were rising up to the corrupt power structure. On 19 August, instead of the usual broadcast, the people woke up to find Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake being played on loop on State television. Something was up. Slowly, information began leaking through that a junta of senior Communist Party hardliners had seized power, had arrested Gorbachev and was about to abolish the hard-earned freedoms won during perestroika. The reaction was instant; in Leningrad, and in Moscow, tens of thousands had come out in support for Gorbachev and his liberalising reforms, daring the tanks to fire at the crowd, while building barricades with slogans such as “fascism shall not pass”. Faced with immense popular opposition, the coup failed, and Gorbachev was restored, but the August events had effectively sounded the death knell of the USSR. In the following months, the last republics still loyal to the USSR seceded, and on December 25 1991, the flag of the USSR was lowered for the last time on the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian tricolor.

The initial euphoria did not last long, as both economic and mental depression quickly set in across the post-Soviet space, with the exception of the Baltic states. In countries like Russia and Ukraine, Western-style capitalist “shock therapy” had devastating consequences: the GDP of both countries dropped by half from 1991 to 1994, massive corruption and cronyism was the norm, and hyperinflation ran rampant, reducing people’s life savings to nothing in a matter of months. In Russia, the poverty rate, which was 1.5% in 1990, sky-rocketed to over 40% in 1993, while male life expectancy plummeted from 65 in 1990 to 58 in 3 years. Politically, while Ukraine fared better in establishing some sort of democratic civil society, many former Soviet Republics almost immediately fell under authoritarian control, notably Belarus and many of the Central Asian republics. In Russia, it didn’t take for President Yeltsin, widely seen as the hero of the democratic uprising in 1991, to show how much he actually cared for democracy and the rule of law. In October 1993, he ordered tanks to shell the Russian parliament building after the parliament refused to allow itself to be unconstitutionally dissolved by presidential decree. Over a hundred people were killed, and a new constitution promptly ushered in, vastly extending the president’s power. In addition, in the southern parts of the former empire, massive sectarian and religious violence engulfed the entire Caucus region, which rages on to this day. The great and lofty hopes of political liberalism, economic prosperity and human dignity of 1991 were brutally, almost universally, shattered.  

This brings us to the final, less tangible, more psychological legacy of the USSR – a sense of conformist and wary resignation among an entire generation of people, a resignation perfectly captured by politicians like Putin. To understand the enduring presence of this sentiment and how it came about, consider this: the majority of Russians who regret the fall of the Soviet Union are in their 40s, 50s and 60s.  These were people who were brought up thinking they lived in a great country that would soon become a literal utopia, only to realise during the late 1980s that in fact their whole system was a decaying sham, built on countless lies and fear. Naturally, this youthful generation revolts against communism and is at the forefront of the democratic movements of 1990-1991, placing their hopes in the triumphant Western liberal capitalist model, only to find that the new system is as corrupt and dehumanising as the old, all-be-it in different ways. As if to add insult to injury for a people as proud as the Russians, they find that their country has gone from being a feared superpower to a laughing-stock on the world stage, as epitomised by the alcoholic Yeltsin. Where do you turn when you don’t know what to believe anymore, when you dare not hope or strive for change for fear that things will only get worse? The now utterly disillusioned Russian people turned to vaguely imperial, vaguely religious, vaguely Soviet nationalism, embodied in the ultimate cynic, Putin, the KBG man-turned-Tsar, the man who believes in nothing, except power. Putin’s enduring appeal is simple: stability at home, great power politics abroad. Only now is this recipe for permanent nationalist stasis beginning to be questioned, with the rise of a new generation, born after 1991, that is demanding change to the corrupt status quo.

Thirty years onwards, though probably the most momentous event of the second half of the 20th century, the fall of the Soviet Union is not movie material. In some ways, this is not surprising, since there are no heroes or villains in this story, and there is certainly no happy or glorious ending. And yet because the Soviet world, that “dream within a dream”, ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, through a surreal and mundane inertia, the USSR with its idealised esprit de corps, continues to exert a kind of moribund and romantic attraction to a nation that no longer believes in anything: the number of Russians who pine for the Union reached a remarkable 66%, according to Levada. Only in countries like Ukraine, which in recent years has carved out its own path towards a more prosperous and democratic future, has the Soviet illusion lost its lustre.

Svetlana Alexievich writes at the start of her masterpiece Secondhand Time: “Communism had an insane plan, to remake the old breed of man, ancient Adam. And it really worked… Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement”. The communist country - and increasingly, Homo Sovieticus himself - may disappear, but the inter-generational Soviet ghost lives on notwithstanding, terrifying for many, inspiring for some, and dormant in all.