Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 23

With sudden intensity, he speaks of the harm Communism wrought in artificially cutting off the Soviet Union from the free-market relations linking the rest of the developed world. The credos of Marx and Lenin ‘brought colossal losses to our country’, he says. ‘There was a period of my life when I studied the theories of Marxism and Leninism, and I found them interesting and, like many of us, logical. But as I grew up the truth became ever more clear to me – these theories are no more than harmful fairy tales.’ Indeed, the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 were responsible for the ‘tragedy we are experiencing today – the tragedy of the collapse of our state’, he boldly tells the interviewer. ‘They cut the country up into republics that did not exist before, and then destroyed what unites the people of civilised countries: they destroyed market relations.’

It is just a few months since his appointment as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, but already it is a powerful, carefully crafted performance. He sits casually straddling a chair backwards, but everything else points to precision and preparation. The fifty-minute film shows him on the judo mat flipping opponents over his shoulder, speaking fluent German with a visiting businessman, and taking calls from Sobchak about the latest foreign aid deals. His meticulous preparation extends to the man he specifically requested to conduct the interview and direct the film: a documentary film-maker known and loved across the Soviet Union for a series he made intimately charting the lives of a group of children, a Soviet version of the popular UK television series Seven Up. Igor Shadkhan is a Jew, who recently returned to St Petersburg from making a series of films on the horrors of the Soviet Gulag in the far north; a man who still flinches at the memory of anti-Semitic slurs from Soviet times, and who, by his own admittance, still ducks his head in fear whenever he passes the former headquarters of the KGB on the city’s Liteyny Prospekt.