Do Russians prefer the pre-Putin past? Not necessarily.

We colour history with nostalgia when we are dissatisfied with the present. But for those who know only what’s now? They might not want to go back.

A debate is raging among the opposition to Russian president Vladmir Putin about how we should view the 1990s. That was the decade when former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who would choose Putin to succeed him, introduced painful market reforms to a country that for 70 years had known nothing but Communism.  

In journalism, the most important thing is to be accurate. It’s great if you can be fast and entertaining. But accuracy is the number one requirement, because today’s journalism is tomorrow’s history. 

But where does our history come from? From sources, of course. Ancient historians like Herodotus, known as the “father of history”, relied on sources that were decades if not centuries old. Inevitably, ancient history was largely myth. 

Later historians had libraries full of books. Now we have a complete range of written, audio and visual material at the click of a link. So the facts about what happened recently shouldn’t be up for debate. 

Still, to some extent history remains subjective, depending on the point of view of the witness. Our experience colours our account of events. Nostalgia creeps in when we remember the times we were young.

Finding comfort in the past

I was a young reporter in the Soviet Union and Russia, so that subject still fascinates me. Many of the older generation, now in their sixties or seventies, who knew the deprivations and cruelties of communism, remember the 1990s as a time when they were free.

“We may have been poor but we were no longer living in fear and we felt there were new possibilities,” said a pensioner I’ll call Victor. I changed his name to protect his identity.

A younger man called Dmitry, whose name I also changed, is now in his late thirties and didn’t experience Communism. He doubts the “stories” about queues and empty shop shelves at that time. But he remembers the misery of his childhood in the 1990s. 

“Mum and Dad lost their jobs and although we had food, there was never enough,” he said. So, two very different interpretations of the same time.

I was lucky to witness the historic changes that turned Russia into a consumer society — for those who could afford to go shopping. Indeed, I wrote a book about how the economic reforms affected ordinary Russians called “The Ice Walk.”

Seeing the good and ignoring the bad

The West was anxious to prevent the return of communism, so it supported Russia’s transition to democracy. Western journalists turned a blind eye to Yeltsin’s sins. In particular, we decided not to condemn him too severely for shelling parliament in 1993 because he did it in response to an armed uprising led by conservatives trying to reverse his reforms.   

Now a young Russian campaigner from the team of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison earlier this year, has brought out a three-part documentary that further exposes the sins of the Yeltsin era. 

Maria Pevchikh, 37, who lives in London and chairs Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, is of the generation who experienced first hand the hardships of the 1990s.

Pevchikh’s three films recount how Yeltsin acquired real estate for himself and his cronies, how a gang of oligarchs facilitated his re-election in 1996 in exchange for monopolising Russia’s natural resources and how — the ultimate sin — Yeltsin undemocratically made Vladimir Putin his heir.

In effect, Pevchikh accuses Yeltsin of imposing Putin on Russia, giving the world the dictatorship we see today.

When we dredge the past, people protest.

When she released the films in April, with a Russian title that translates to “Traitors”, Pevchikh could hardly have expected the outrage that followed. She really set the cat among the pigeons. Older democrats were shocked that Pevchikh had dared to criticise the “saints” of the 1990s. 

Popular interviewer Yuri Dud asked the former oil tycoon-turned-political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsy what he thought of Pevchich’s series. Khodorkovsky, who now calls himself the “leader or the Russian opposition”, spoke at length. But in a nutshell his position was that although entrepreneurs like himself made mistakes, the 1990s carried Russia forward.    

Now another documentary series about the 1990s has been released by the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Yekaterinburg. The interviews in the series, whose title translates to “Not the past tense”, were conducted between 2012 and 2021, so they do not directly answer Pevchikh. But the speakers cast Yeltsin in a more forgiving light.

The first episodes show Yeltsin arguing with Mikhail Gorbachev — the last leader of the old Soviet Union, credited with ending the Cold War with the United States — about the need for more radical economic reform. And it shows Yeltsin resisting a hardline coup attempt in 1991 that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Experts argue that the “shock therapy” that Yeltsin brought in after that was inevitably flawed because never before had Communists tried to convert to capitalism.     

“This series gives some balance when we are looking at Yeltsin’s legacy,” said Boris Shestakov, a retired former correspondent of the old Soviet news agency, Tass. 

There is no one version of history.

Comments from the public were mainly positive. “The film is like a time machine for me,” one viewer wrote. 

Said another: “This is the first documentary film that clearly recounts the whole process of the collapse of the [Communist] party and state, impartially and without confusion.”

Debate about history is healthy. Russian historian Vladimir Kara-Murza, recently released from jail in an East-West prisoner swap, argues that Russia must not repeat past mistakes if and when it gets another chance at reform.

But this bitter argument about the 1990s is tearing apart an already fractured opposition, who have proved incapable of uniting against Putin to stop his war in Ukraine.  

As we have seen, the divide is partly generational. But what about Generation Z? The period from 1991 to 2000, with all its turbulence and freedom, may have a special message for those who have only ever known Putin, in power now for 24 years.

How will these Russians, now in their twenties or younger, look back on present times in years to come? How will history judge the Putin era? Only time will tell.     

Three questions to consider:

1. What do we mean by nostalgia when it comes to how we remember the past?
2. Why do older and younger people tend to view current circumstances differently?
3. How have your ideas of your childhood changed as you have gotten older?