‘If you had a wish, what would it be?” asks the interviewer. The lugubrious woman is struggling to stick damp wallpaper back on a damp wall in a Moscow flat some time in the 1980s. “Huh?” she asks. “I don’t have any dreams and even if I did they wouldn’t come true. I don’t believe in anything or anyone.”
“And,” she adds with a cheeky grin that almost redeems the miserable scene, “I don’t believe in you, either.”
The story of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1999 that Adam Curtis tells in TraumaZone (BBC iPlayer) is how such depressive nihilism rose up to do battle with any lingering faith Russians had in the Kremlin to deliver a communist paradise as predicted by Marx.
Through an hour-long montage of ingeniously selected contemporary footage of everyday Russians from reindeer herders to striking miners, from beauty contestants to Afghan firefighters, from scientists wrapping themselves in sticky tape to investigate Chernobyl’s nuclear core to grotesque Muscovite fashion shows, Curtis builds up a picture of the era when the mask of Soviet competence slipped. The 1986 Chernobyl meltdown and cover-up did not help, nor did the authorities’ murderous ineptitude in not clearing the nearby villages for two days after the explosions. The calamitous retreat from Kabul between 1988 and 89 after 15,000 Soviet soldiers died and the red army was defeated by mujahideen was arguably more psychically deranging to Russians than Vietnam was to Americans.
Two clips in particular bring me up short. A camera enters a bathroom in Moscow’s Kosmos hotel, known then for gimcrack luxury and sex workers. Something has gone terribly wrong. The taps, like something from a David Lynch nightmare, pump out water so brown it can’t just be rusting pipes. And yet, even as disasters unfold and the Soviet dream disappears like sludge down the plughole, we see the Soviets’ last space probe, Phobos 2, off on its mission to explore the moons of Mars. We watch footage from that craft just before radio contact cuts out. It complicates any simplistic image of the Soviet Union as a basket case; it also had the right stuff to try to explore Mars’s moons before Nasa. The Soviet Union was not just tragi-comically behind capitalism’s expansionist curve.
Curtis’s film, the first of a seven-part anatomisation of modern Russia, is essential viewing. It will help you grasp how what Putin now presides over is not so much a country as a toxic zone whose inhabitants live with chronic PTSD and compensate for that (and the psychosexual failings of its tyrant leader) by indulging his imperialist folly. It suggests that nihilism was an unintended consequence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. If the Soviet Union was killed off, the Kremlin’s prints are on the murder weapon.
Perestroika, signifying initially a restructuring of the Soviet economy to give managers of big industrial plants freedom from Moscow control, was meant to save communism. It backfired horribly. Soon after Gorbachev announced perestroika in a speech at the Lada Togliatti factory in Samara Oblast, some scary-looking gangsters are filmed waiting to loot the Ladas as they come off the assembly line. The managers, Curtis’s captions tell us, decided to flog off the new cars to crooks. Perestroika created a lucrative, countrywide black market.
A latterday Russian revolution started here whereby the kleptocracy replaced the communist gerontocracy. Boris Berezovsky profited by buying cars from the plant on consignment, then paying the producer at a later date when the money had lost much of its value. Curtis doesn’t clinch the point that it was this oligarch who, by creating the Unity party and courting the former KGB officer, became Putin’s kingmaker.
Nor was Berezovsky the first to profit from perestroika. Curtis shows us the first oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose fortune began when he had an idea bananas enough to be a subplot in a Bulgakov novel. Under Soviet socialism, factories and businesses settled accounts with each other in so-called beznalichnye, a virtual money or non-cash. Under perestroika, though, non-cash became real cash and Khodorkovsky became rich speculating in it. Curtis cuts to the rise of capitalist excess in a Moscow nightclub. “I’m a mischievous Moscow playboy,” sings the lead singer of Alpha, as the gaudily rich bust their grisly moves. “Got everything a woman wants / Stupidity, power, fear and violence in my heart.” Curtis cuts from that to a Russian TV version of The Lord of the Rings, where the ring of power, wrested from Gollum, serves as a symbol for how free-market kleptocracy is seizing power.
Then we switch to Kim Philby’s funeral, in which the open casket of the British traitor and Soviet hero is borne to its grave; its progress is paused for a long while that so his widow, Rufina Pukhova, can embrace him one last time. When friends finally pull her away from the frozen corpse, it seems it is not so much Philby heading to the grave as the Soviet Union itself.
• This article was amended on 14 October 2022. An earlier version said that the Soviet Union had got “into Martian orbit” before Nasa. The latter’s Mariner 9 spacecraft was the first to make it to Mars; the reference should instead have been to a later Soviet probe, Phobos 2, being the first to attempt to explore one of Mars’s moons. This has been corrected.
