A Country Without Icons

In the past, Russia always had a strong sense of identity, often centered around images. When Vladimir I of Kiev baptized Kievan Rus in 988, the pagan idols were whipped, burned and hurled into the river. The Bolsheviks were iconoclasts too, turning churches into warehouses and using icons for flooring in banyas.

But the end of Soviet Russia was different from the end of pagan or tsarist Russia. True, in the initial exuberance, statues of Lenin, Stalin and others were smashed or hurled to the ground. But unlike the Christians and the Bolsheviks, no one was waiting in the wings with a ready-made ideology or new icons.

The Russian national idea, a somewhat vague and clumsy formulation, indicates a vision of goals and a system of values embraced by the state and the people to create the country’s identity at a given historical moment. Typically, it stresses the uniquely Russian elements in its opposition to the West. That identity has failed to crystallize in the new Russia in the nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That vacuum has been described in both positive and negative terms. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia In Global Affairs, says in contrast to former U.S. President George W. Bush and “the missionaries on the other side of the Atlantic … Russian policy can be criticized for many things, but it has managed so far to avoid the inclination toward ideology.” Opposition leader Gary Kasparov sees it in darker tones: “The Cold War was based on ideas — like them or not. [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin’s only idea can be concentrated into the motto ‘Let’s steal together.’” Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky terms the new Russia as “capitalism with a Stalinist face.”

Describing the present is only the beginning. The next and more difficult steps are pointing out a new vision for Russia and indicating the practical path that leads to it. In “Putin: The Results,” opposition leader Boris Nemtsov wrote: “Russia needs at last to become what it has a right to be: a successful European country in which its people have decent lives. … We need a government that doesn’t rule the people but serves them.” But he has no idea of how to go about it: “First and foremost, the police state has to be dismantled and human dignity returned to the people.” But how are such states dismantled and who returns the dignity?

The intelligentsia has largely abdicated its traditional role as opposition and creator of values. President Dmitry Medvedev called their objections “very often emotional, scathing, but superficial and irresponsible.”

Indeed, it has been Medvedev who has done the most to forge a new vision of what the new Russia should and could look like. His September “Go, Russia!” manifesto was honest and realistic. He called for a diversified, innovative economy based on the “intellectual resources of post-industrial societies.” Moreover, he wrote, “The more intelligent, smarter and efficient our economy is, the higher the level of our citizen’s welfare, and our political system and society as a whole will also be freer, fairer and more humane.”

Medvedev will probably recede into the background when Putin is re-elected president in 2012. In the meantime, he should keep hammering away at his vision of what the new Russia can be — that is, Russia’s great task and challenge at this point in history. Medvedev’s presidency will be more than justified if he helps fashion the new icon of identity that will guide his nation into the future.

Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”