Putin’s Football Philosophy: Peter the Great, or Perestroika?
I’m not the nationalistic sort. I count in my head in English, I think Ukrainians are alright, at heart. Even the Georgians, when they behave. I quietly enjoy the good news from back home and decry the bad, with the equal dose of ironic detachment and self-referential mockery demanded of my generation.
Yet I’d just lost my voice after two hours spent in a delirious jingoistic orgy as Russia devastated the Dutch. Watching Russia’s mesmerising play unlocked something primal in me, something dark, smouldering, bloodlustily beautiful.
60 minutes in: caught myself trying to superglue a small Russia flag to my neighbour’s front door.
10 minutes into overtime: searching Aeroflot’s website, rearing to go liberate my brother Slavs in Kosovo and Estonia.
But enough about me: what does this success say about Russia? Two important parallels stand out:
1: The last time Russia triumphed under the closest thing to a Dutch coach was when Peter the Great applied what he learned in Holland to drag his country into modernity. He studied ship building in Amsterdam, kept a Dutch mistress and in addition to technological advances tried to introduce to Russia a protestant spirit of hard work and self reliance. Yet in many ways, Peter’s reign was a culturally repressive one. Peter’s contempt for indigenous Russian traditions and institutions meant that it was only during Pushkin that the Russian language and culture had begun to shed their aura of inferiority.
2: The last time Russia faced the Dutch in a European championship was 1988, at the heyday of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which remade the country’s social and intellectual fabric. Incidentally, the inspirations for Gorbachev’s reforms were also Western European. Perestroika and ‘new thinking’ were heavily influenced by Italian Eurocommunism and Gramscism. Unlike Peter’s reforms, however, Perestroika ended up being a dismal failure in economic, military and technological terms. Yet it produced an immense cultural and creative awakening.
So was the match a metaphor for a national renaissance, and if so, which kind?
From a purely sporting standpoint, the renaissance of Russia’s team transcends these historical parallels. Hiddink did not remake the squad in the Western European image; in fact, he achieved what had eluded both Gorbachev and Peter the Great – using Western know how to activate and enhance inherent Russian strengths. In his brilliant piece in the Guardian, football historian Jonathan Wilson writes that “Russia’s thrilling commitment to fluidity represents a return to the fundamentals of their own footballing heritage”: after years in the wilderness, Arshavin and co have revived the authentic ‘total football’of the young Soviet side of the 1940s.
Russia is clearly experiencing a re-birth. Its massive sporting successes (whether in women’s tennis, the Olympics or hockey) after over a decade smarting from the horrors of transition only complement its economic and geopolitical re-assertion. Russia is in the news.
Putin’s rule, like Peter’s, aggressively sought Western engagement and know-how, and embraced with zeal its business (if not political) institutions. These instruments, however, were not used to ‘undo’ or ‘over-ride’ Russian culture as in Peter’s day. In fact, the Putin era was marked by a strained synthesis of economic and commercial Westernisation coupled with a peculiar, artificially inseminated nativism.
The state sanctioned fetishisation of the Soviet Union in popular culture, the Putin-inspired brand of laddism and machismo, the return of the traditional family, the constriction of press freedom, the growing ethnic prejudice and nationalism have been the repressive corollaries of this technical modernisation. Yet in one sense, the net effect is the same as in Peter’s day: a growing austerity and social intolerance. The current renaissance is neither deniable nor progressive.
In Euro 1988, the USSR lost to Holland. Like its squad, the Soviet Union itself had run out of steam. Yet the defeat coincided with the flowering of Moscow News, Ogonyok magazine and other independent media, and the general culmination of glasnost, or openness.
The booming, assertive and proud country that won against the Dutch yesterday could not be more different from its beleaguered, teetering predecessor of 20 years ago. Not least because that win came on the heels of the closure of yet another newspaper.
