In Putin's Moscow, a summer of death and distraction

Hindustan Times

01-07-2025

WATCH RUSSIAN television or listen to Vladimir Putin's chilling speeches, and Russia is a besieged fortress, struggling to preserve humanity against the decadent West, defending the traditional values of family life, and defying death by its readiness to sacrifice life. Walk on Moscow streets, however, and it looks nothing like a city in the grip of a death cult. But neither did Berlin in the early 1940s, with its entertainments, consumption and comforts. PREMIUM Russia's President Vladimir Putin.(Reuters)
The Russian capital is enjoying a three-month festival called 'Summer in Moscow'. It has been masterminded by Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor, and implemented by a team of young designers. Most of it is free. Pink, white and blue petunias in pots, amphitheatres of wildflower boxes and exotic plants fill every space. 'The city looks like one giant flower bed,' says Tatyana Malkina, a journalist. The centre is a display of paradisical life, with gardens, verandas, open-air classes in cooking and painting, artisanal ice-cream stations and pétanque and tennis. The festival is the culmination of years of renovation and infrastructure improvements. Around the Kremlin a horse-shoe ring of boulevards has become a chain of open-air stages: operetta on Tverskoy, art shows on Strastnoy, circus on Tsvetnoy.
All this co-exists alongside an intensifying ideological campaign. On June 12th, Russia Day, Mr Putin surveyed military men and women in the Kremlin's columned Hall of the Order of St Catherine. 'The meaning of today', he told them, 'lies in the immortality of the Russian people, our state, our motherland, Russia. And the road to this immortality lies through the victories you and your comrades-in-arms are blazing.' A female officer replied by extolling 'the moral purity of the army and…of the life of our people in the country'. Repression is tightening, too. On June 29th the Kremlin published a new order which classifies any preparations for the mobilisation of society or institutions as a state secret. It also prohibits sharing data from vast areas of civilian-state interaction, from trade to science. Contact with the West is perilous. Prison sentences of up to eight years chill debate.
The prominence of ideology in Russia has increased in proportion to the number of Russian casualties from the war in Ukraine. But unlike communism or fascism, the besetting ideologies of the 20th century, Mr Putin's surrogate offers no vision of the future. It consists of ultra-conservative, anti-Western, militaristic and millenarian tenets. The function of this ideology is to legitimise the war and the growing size of Russia's cemeteries. Mr Putin argues there is a civilisational struggle against the depraved West. The futile deaths are heroic feats. 'Allegiance to ideology is a marker of loyalty to the regime, not a matter of conviction,' one Moscow entrepreneur explains.
The paradox is that while the war requires ideology it also depends on distraction. Russia's vast contract army has allowed it to avoid wide-scale compulsory mobilisation so far. For many the war is fought 'somewhere over there' by people who freely signed contracts and have been paid to die, says Alexei Venediktov, the editor of the now-banned Ekho Moskvy radio station. Massive payouts to soldiers and their families drive consumption. With limited options to spend abroad, Moscow is a mecca for internal tourism. 'Inside the Boulevard Ring, you must not remember there is a war going on and you must see that paradise on earth has already arrived,' a 37-year-old Muscovite says. She tells a new joke: 'Please God, I don't ask for much—just to be a contractor for Summer in Moscow.'
With the outsourcing of the fighting to a contract army manned by recruits from the poorer provinces, Mr Putin is able to keep his capital free of signs of war. This allows him to accommodate the bureaucratic elite, which is overwhelmingly concentrated in the city and has no taste for traditionalism or the cult of death. Isolated again as it was during the cold war, and with the economy teetering on the brink of recession, the city demonstrates Russia's resilience and its superiority over Europe's capitals, with their dirty streets and crumbling infrastructure. Mr Putin remembers that the elites abandoned the Soviet regime when it failed to provide the lifestyle and goods available in the West.
More than ever consumption, repression and war are simultaneous. Memories of past conflicts have been redacted. Bolotnaya Square, the site of anti-Putin rallies in 2011-12, hosts free creative and sporting events for the young. A statue of Pushkin, a focal point for protests since Soviet times, is fenced off by newly planted cypresses. The shrine to Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician who was killed in 2015 by the Kremlin, is overwhelmed by a flower arrangement. Muscovites are well aware of the schizophrenia. Alexandra Astakhova, a photographer, says the experience is psychedelic. 'You can walk along beautifully decorated streets, then turn the corner and see a line of people outside a prison queuing up to hand parcels to those who have been jailed for protesting against the war.'
While some 300,000 have fled the city, most have stayed. Their voices are rarely heard. Dmitry Muratov, a 2021 Nobel peace prize laureate, says, 'People with whom I live and work in Moscow are stripped of their right to protest, other than their last word in court before they are sentenced. They have no possibility to express their repulsion at the bloodshed.' One journalist says that neither she nor her friends participate in the masquerade. But they take some comfort from the fact that the city is full of flowers and verandas rather than the swastika-like 'Z' symbol of the war and checkpoints. 'The mayor could be running around the city with an assault rifle hunting draft-dodgers. He isn't. He emphatically chooses life over death—as he understands it, which is pitifully narrow.'
Summers in Russia are short. Come autumn, the stages will be dismantled and the flowers removed. No one knows what next year's performance will look like. For now, people are living the only life they have and doing their best to ignore Mr Putin's obsessions.