by Stefano Caprio

In his new book, writer Mikhail Zygar retraces the last thirty years of the Soviet Union through a gallery of characters, helping us to understand Moscow's present based on the idea that no dictatorship is eternal and that the future always offers a chance for change.

The Russian publishing house Meduza, one of the main points of reference for the Russian opposition abroad, has announced the upcoming release of Mikhail Zygar's new book, The Dark Side of the Earth. The story of how the Soviet people defeated the Soviet Union, dedicated to the last thirty years of the USSR's existence, from the peak of the Soviet empire to its ruinous collapse in the early 1990s.

These days mark the anniversaries of the Declarations of Sovereignty approved by almost all the Soviet republics in 1990, from Yeltsin's Russia to the Ural regions of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which aspired to become independent states themselves.

Even before the end of the Union, the empire had crumbled after five years of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, which was as promising in terms of freedoms and rights as it was ineffective in economic and political reforms.

These memories allow us to compare today's developments in Putin's Russia with the various phases of Soviet history, as the two periods are inextricably linked, beyond the many evocations of the ancient history of Kievan Rus', Muscovy's aspiration to become the “Third Rome” or the Western-oriented empire of St Petersburg, from Peter the Great to Nicholas II.

Zygar is one of the most brilliant political journalists, writers and documentary filmmakers of the latest generation, having been born in 1981 and witnessed the decline of the Soviet system through the eyes of a child.

Former editor-in-chief of the television channel Dožd, he is the author of several books that have commented in great depth on these historical passages, such as The Kremlin's Entire Array, The Empire Must Die, All Free and, above all, the most effective title, War and Punishment, combining Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a reflection on Napoleon's war with the illusion of Raskolnikov's superman.

The subtitle of this book, published in 2023, is How Russia Destroyed Ukraine, not only in the current war, but over the past centuries.

What we have been witnessing for a quarter of a century now is in fact a rather grotesque re-run of the thirty years of Stalinism that effectively built the Soviet empire between 1924 and 1953, after the turbulent period of revolutions, civil wars, repression and liberalisation during the years of Vladimir Lenin.

This was followed by the decade of Khrushchev's “thaw” between 1954 and 1964, which in many ways can be compared to the decade of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin between 1986, with glasnost following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, until Yeltsin's re-election in 1996, after which the restorationist and sovereignist forces of Gennady Zyuganov's communists began to unleash themselves, paving the way for the advent of Vladimir Putin.

The reign of the new tsar, which is set to exceed that of the Georgian “Father of the Peoples”, can also be compared to Leonid Brezhnev's twenty years of “stagnation” between 1965 and 1985, which combined the repression of dissidents with the escalation of the confrontation with America in the endless “Cold War”, the mental framework, even more than the military one, in which the current leaders of Russia, President Putin and Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev), grew up, in a Russia that is heading towards a new economic stagnation.

According to its presentation, Zygar's new book does not seek to reconstruct the economic models and political characteristics of the various regimes, but retraces those periods through the figures who marked them, “criminals and victims, heroes and bureaucrats, poets and soldiers”.

It tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, the female symbol of Russia's new openness to the West; the “supreme poet” of the late Soviet era, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was also the first to interpret the aspirations of dissent in the Brezhnev era, inspiring perestroika itself; the first astronaut Yuri Gagarin, who “did not see God” in the sky, only to die young, consumed by alcohol, and the rebellious and popular singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky.

There are actors and writers such as Marina Vlady, Alla Pugacheva, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalia, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the leading opposition politicians now in exile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov with his wife Elena Bonner, film director Sergei Parajanov, singers Boris Grebenshikov and Viktor Tsoi, Yeltsin himself and many others.

The events that unfolded in the final thirty years across the Soviet empire are recounted, in Moscow and Kiev, Chernobyl and Tbilisi, Yerevan and Shpitak, Baku, Vilnius, Riga, Chişinău (then Kişinev), Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Tashkent, Warsaw, Prague, and even Berlin with the fall of the Wall, Washington and the rest of the world.

The “dark side of the Earth”, represented for seventy years by the Soviet Union, concerns the choice that millions of inhabitants of the evil empire had to make in dramatic conditions of epochal change, and seeks to affirm that no dictatorship is eternal, that the future always offers a chance for change, and that we must look ahead with hope, and not just with fear.

Zygar's conclusions are in line with the messages of Russian politicians abroad such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who calls for “readiness for the next sudden change in Russia”, and Julia Navalnaya, the widow of the martyr Alexei, who praised the new book, saying, “I love stories of an entire country told through the simple family stories of many people, famous or not”.

She expresses her admiration for Zygar, ‘one of the most profound contemporary Russian writers, and on every page you can see a very meticulous and intense work... you think you know how it ends, but you can't help reading it to the end’. Books like this allow us to reflect on the reasons behind the most unpredictable and dramatic crises and developments, such as Putin's current war against Ukraine, which no one expected and which seems never-ending.

The conflict between Moscow and Kiev is one of the themes Zygar has focused on in several publications, most notably in War and Punishment, written in response to the 2022 invasion.

He describes the many “myths of Ukraine” that Russia has developed over the centuries, which today serve as justification for the “defensive” aggression that extends from Ukraine to the whole world.

The writer calls this book “a confession”, similar to what Solzhenitsyn wrote about the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians, which concerns the depths of the soul of the people of the “Russian world”. This idea, which today defines the imperial ideology of Putin and Kirill, was born in the mid-17th century with the Cossack uprisings of Bogdan Khmelnytsky against the Kingdom of Poland, which led the inhabitants of the Don lands to ask to be integrated into the vast territories of Tsar Alexei Romanov's empire.

The term “Ukrainians” therefore defines the “border men” who want to remain free in the vastness of the “Russian world”, understood as a territorial dimension not constrained by the borders of feudal lords and military powers.

Russia and Ukraine are “one people” according to Putin's interpretation, which should not be attributed to Vladimir Putin's personal follies, but was formed in the consciousness of Russians thanks to the liberal intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, starting with the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who raised the young Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol, persuading him that Malorossija on the banks of the Don could only prosper under the leadership of Great Russia, which is why today's Ukrainians reject the greatest Ukrainian writer in history.

Or when Slavophile writers and philosophers in Moscow and St Petersburg despised the dream of the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who was also part of the circle of intellectuals in the Russian capital and was forced to write his first great works in Ukrainian while in exile in Siberia, after his only visit to Kiev, where he met with representatives of the “Cyril and Methodius” movement for the birth of the Ukrainian nation.

One of Putin's most frequent accusations against the leader of the revolution, Vladimir Lenin, is that he “invented the Ukrainian republic” instead of fighting and destroying it, in order to put it back in its place in the belly of Soviet Russia. in 1918, the independent socialist Ukraine and the autonomous republic of Crimea were indeed born, later reintegrated into the Soviet Union with particular levels of autonomy.

In his books, Zygar also recounts the rise of many powerful men in post-Soviet Russia who, in the final phase of the USSR, were only grey, second-rate bureaucrats, such as Putin himself and his protégé Dmitry Medvedev, or the former driver and orange juice seller Igor Sechin, a writer and translator from Portuguese and Spanish, who later became one of the most influential autocrats and oligarchs of Putinism.

One recalls Sechin's visit to Havana together with Nikolai Patrushev, Putin's “guardian”, and other ministers and officials in 2008, on the eve of the war with Georgia that inaugurated the war phase of Putinism.

At that time, Russia chose to respond to the aggressiveness of George W. Bush's presidency and his plans to strengthen NATO's missile defence shield in Europe, seen as a sign of a new world war, which led to Putin's threat to use the new Burevestnik missile, “the unstoppable tornado” that can destroy any enemy, or the Pozeidon nuclear submarine, which “no one else in the world has”.

The history of the present and the prospects for the future can be understood by re-reading the past that still influences people's thinking, freeing ourselves from myths and rediscovering reasons to hope for a different world.

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