An epic sci-fi tale set in the 22nd century on fictional planet Pandora and its alien Navi civilisation wins the hearts of  millions of fans.  Then, 40 years later, James Cameron makes Avatar.

That’s right, this week Russian newspapers were rife with allegations that Cameron stole the idea for his blockbuster film from a series of popular Soviet science fiction books by the Strugatsky brothers in the mid 1960s.

According to the Guardian,

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora – the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

…There are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids – the Na’vi in Cameron’s epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys’ novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

So is Boris Strugatsky seeking to take Cameron to the cleaners for a well-earned piece of the second highest grossing movie since Titanic?

After all, that’s exactly what JK Rowling did when she launched huge copyright lawsuits against the Russian Tanya Grotter and Belarussian Porry Gatter books.

Yet unlike the billionaire Rowling jealously chasing down each insignificant Harry Potter upstart, humble pensioner Strugatsky simply “shrugged off suggestions of similarities between Avatar and his Noon Universe, and denied reports circulated last week that he was accusing Cameron of plagiarism”.

Could there be a wider cultural difference at work?

Russia is a frequent target of American copyright suits, but Russians themselves seem to be much less protective with their own intellectual property.

For example, two of the country’s leading and best selling literary  novelists - Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin - have made most of their books available free of charge on their websites.

In fact, Pelevin put his entire oeuvre on the internet for free in 2006, (including english translations and audio books) specifically in protest at the notion of  copyright in the arts.

Vladimir Putin himself had allegedly plagiarised his entire university thesis.

And let’s  not forget the most famous case: General Kalashnikov, whose iconic gun has become the world’s most prolific weapon but who received not a penny in royalties.

So what can explain this attitude?

Perhaps it comes from Russia’s experience with culture in the 20th century.  The official Soviet position denied artists ownership over their outputs, just as people had no ownership of land or other commercial properties.

But ironically, the opposition to Soviet officialdom was even less proprietorial.

Predating the way information is handled in the internet, dissidents shared underground-published works and liberally copied and re-typed books written by other dissidents or smuggled in from the west.

Similarly, when rock bands proliferated in the 70s and 80s, they spread and shared their music secretly using reel-to-reel recorders in what became called ‘magnitizdat’. Either way, culture-whether official or underground-had never carried a commercial character.

Somewhere, James Cameron must be thanking God for the USSR.

Radio Liberty, apparently.

Yesterday, the first of their three part series exploring the middle class across the former Soviet bloc was dedicated specifically to ‘what it means to be middle class’.

Yet without ever defining the slippery concept of middle class itself, Charles Recknagel concludes that, unlike their supposedly heroically liberal and democratic Western counterparts, Russia’s middle classes “don’t endorse the values of democracy and liberalism. They support the social, political, and economic order that has been formed over the past decade in Russia”.

Because the middle class in America and Europe surely don’t “support the social, political, and economic order” there?

(Actually, one subset of the US middle class certainly didnt - the tea party protesters. But somehow I doubt that is who Recknagel is holding up for emulation).

The article berates the fact that “in Russia the stage today is dominated by politically loyal entrepreneurs” and that “there is a widening gap between the wealthy ruling elite and the poor majority”.

Yet this is just as true of America, where I am yet to see a dissident entrepreneur and where “income inequality… is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez”.

What did Recknagel hope to find, anyway?

Expecting to stumble across the depositories of Russia’s revolutionary or emancipatory energies amidst the ranks of boring, risk averse, status-obsessed, insecure, conformist, careeristic straight-laced businessmen and upwardly mobile professionals would be like trying to catch a glimpse of Solzhenitsin at a Politbureau meeting.

If he was looking for rebels, Recknagel should have done the obvious and looked in the same places you’d expect to find them in America or Europe - the underground arts scene.

The sort of people who listened to punk legend Viktor Tsoi at unofficial concerts in the Soviet Union, attended Caryl Churchill plays in 80s London or saw Dario Fo perform in Italy.

Thankfully, another Radio Liberty report did just that.

Byron Asher chronicles the “small but significant coterie of gritty, alternative theaters that eschew the mainstream Russian classics — Anton Chekhov and the like — and are dedicated to producing only new, socially relevant plays by young playwrights… tackling social and sometimes political issues that nobody else will”.

“The main goal is to revive a type of theater than can change people, that can transform them in the space of an hour and a half,” says one such new playwright, Maxim Kurochkin, author of Vodka, Fucking and Television. “We haven’t had a chance to see such theater lately. I’m interested in theater that is dangerous for society, that is destructive and brings transformation.”

Who cares about Recknagel’s beloved middle classes?

As Tsoi sang:

We hear: ‘They won’t take risks
Because they’ve got it all
They’ve got a home, with an electric light’
And I don’t know which of us is right.
Rain awaits me out in the street; dinner awaits them at home
Shut the door behind me; I’m leaving
But if you get sick of your cosseting light,
You’ll find a place here among us
Where there’s enough rain for everyone.

This week was the Russian Orthodox Christmas. Twenty years after Communism and somewhat at odds with the newfound Christian ardour of Russia’s elites, it’s not a big stand alone holiday, falling relatively quietly in the middle of the 10 day vacation starting with the big Soviet milestone of New Year’s.

Yet at the same time, Russians are also not celebrating the centeniary of Leo Tolstoy’s death partly because, according to Luke Harding in the Guardian, “the writer’s criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today”.

The question of what to celebrate and why exposes a crucial open sore: After a decade of Yeltsin and a decade of Putin, Russia is still struggling to find an identity.

This unresolved issue has seriously harmed the country’s international standing.

“Today, Russia’s brand is quite negative”, recently wrote an American and Russian academic in the Moscow Times. Their survey of Berkley students’ responses to what the word ‘Russia’ connotes was striking: “Their associations for Russia were overwhelmingly negative; communism (28 percent), cold (13 percent), vodka (7 percent) and corruption (7 percent) dominated the responses and placed Russia far behind the other four countries included in the survey (the United States, China, Italy and Britain)”.

The professors advice Russia to get a brand makeover, and suggest the following new (and rather implausible) buzzwords: Multicultural Russia, Eco Russia and Resilient Russia.

However, any such brand makeovers are meaningless without a fundamental settlement of the identity question.

In today’s New York Times, Alison Smalere counts what Russia means for some of its younger generation:

“This New Year, I spent a couple of evenings in the company of Natasha, mid-20s, just back from four years of study in London. Why return? “Because,” she said, “I wanted to be able to dance on tables.” Britain, she opined, was just too smooth and boring”.

But apart from this vague sense of difference, today’s Russia can boast only a rather directionless modernisation: “Walking down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in west-central Moscow, I see the Escada shop and the sushi restaurant of the present”.

Certainly, some academics, like SV Kortunov, think that Russia “can achieve more than merely modernization, a national state, and a materialistic civilization: it can be a country that combines the latest Western ideas (meritocracy, post- industrialism, etc.) with the traditions of Russian development, including Soviet traditions, and the achievements of Russian philosophical thought”.

But as of now, even 20 years after the end of the USSR, the talk remains “of victory, and starting over — what the popular journalist and author Yulia Latynina calls “news in the future tense.”

Like James Dean, Yegor Gaidar lived hard and died young.

But unlike Dean, the only victim of whose reckless driving was himself, the man who privatised Russia’s economy in the 1990s took his entire young country on a deadly joyride that wrecked millions of lives.

That’s no hyperbole: The Lancet has determined that the Gaidar-engineered mass-privatisation led to a 13% increase in the death rate, leading over 3 million people to die prematurely.

As if that wasnt enough, even Luke Harding points out that “in January 1992 [Gaidar] abolished state control of prices, wiping out the rouble savings of millions of ordinary Russians overnight. His reforms were described as shock therapy. They paved the way for the dubious state privatisations of the 1990s and the rise of the oligarchs”.

Predictably, the Voice of America’s headline for the obituary reads: Gaidar died believing in the inevitabiliy of Russian democracy”.

A man like Gaidar could only have emerged from the muck of Hobbesan early 90s Russia, a rancid petrie dish incubating malignant strains of bandits and opportunists.

But in fairness, he was not a bandit like Alfred Koch, or a bandit-opportunist like his stablemate Anatoly Chubais.  A minister in his early thirties, he was a romantic, Randian megalomaniac; carried away, like many smart young people, not by malice but by a conviction in his own infallibility and that of his free market shibboleths.  Chillngly, the young Gaidar was a lot like Larry Summers.

Like his grandfather, the Bolshevik and Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar, Yegor believed that he was ‘on the right side of history’; but whereas Arkady’s writing provided some counterbalance of empathy, Yegor quickly lost any connection he may have ever felt towards those on the receiving end of his theoretical postulates.

Yet today’s Russia remains built in his image, evidenced by the fawning official reaction to his death: Putin called Gaidar’s death a “heavy loss for Russia.”

But Gaidar, ‘who served as acting prime minister for just six months in 1992 before public anger forced Yeltsin to fire him’, continues to be despised by most Russians, so there was no populist gain to be had in singing his praises. And yet today the Kremlin finds itself on the same side as its favoured liberal punching bags Nemtsov et al. Why?

Because the Putin government is the direct descendant of the Gaidar-Yeltsin right-wing economic philosophy. Thus it came as no surprise to read that “after leaving politics, he remained influential behind the scenes, offering informal advice to Vladimir Putin on a range of economic issues”. Or that his daughter had become a cog in Putin’s power vertical.

Because, for all the political animus between Putin’s siloviki and the liberal democrats, they are bound together by their Gaidarist love for capitalism and contempt for the people.

So what to make of the man Mark Ames eulogised a decade ago as “the frog-faced architect of ‘reform’ and ’shock therapy’ and every other curse word associated with capitalism in Russia…the guy responsible for shaking down the entire russian population and handing over their belongings to a few well-placed comrades, [who] will go down in Russian folklore as one of the most terrifyoing villains ever to set foot on Mother Rus - [and whose] name will be invoked by parents to scare children into going to bed and brushing their teeth.”

It’s about time Russians started taking care of their teeth.

I love the BBC to bits, but I have had enough.

Yet another report, the second ‘profile’ in a week about the resurgence of Stalin’s legacy in the former USSR, has put my knickers in a twist. This time, we see a Stalin look-alike treated ‘like our own dear Queen’ in his hometown of Gori, Georgia.

Certainly, there are troubling signs of a ‘Stalin rehabilitation’ in Russia and elsewhere, which have rightly been treated seriously in the Western media and have been closely scrutinised on this blog.

There is no doubt: Stalin-love is being whipped up in Russia and Georgia by cynical politicians to foster nationalism and raise support for strong-arm right-wing politics.

But the sanctimonious ‘look-at-those-weirdo-non-European-value-orientated-Stalinists-over-there” anglophone media coverage is fast becoming an equally cynical exercise in feel good anti-Eastern prejudice. The implication is clear: We would never think of supporting such tyrants!

There are big problems with outsiders ‘exposing’ the crimes of other countries. Such accounts are all too often coloured and motivated by ulterior motives. And usually, a good litmus test of pure motives is whether the person highlighting the crimes in another country is as critical and incisive about those committed by his own.

For example, during the cold war, all the Western scholars who criticised the Soviet bloc with the same vigour with which they criticised their own countries could comfortably share a Mini. Most mainstream American and British historians of Russia (Gaddis, Service, Applebaum) have always been right-wing patriots and credulous believers in ‘Western democracy and capitalism’ with an axe to grind against those daring to enact alternative ways of socio-econonic organisation.

In a classic essay, Mark Ames once wrote why US columnist and historian Anne Applebaum is nothing like murdered Russian reporter Politkovskaya:

Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by…get this…not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good!

Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?!

Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you’d expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don’t take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract — ie, why don’t Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?).

Here’s why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist’s book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne’s book has in Russia. None.

That kind of thing is not dispassionate history but rather Orientalism in its most classic sense, defined by Said as ‘a cultural apparatus [which] is all aggression, activity, judgment”.

And it cuts to the crux of the BBC story about Stalinism in Georgia. From my experience of Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’s reporting, he is a middle of the road liberal Brit, with a healthy respect for the Monarchy, Winston Churchill and his neighbourhood pub. And that’s OK!

But if a Russia Today camera crew were to bring a Churchill lookalike to a London school (assuming any of the English pupils, with their notoriously abysmal history knowledge, would even recognise him) and film their incredulity whenever anyone called him a great WWII leader rather than pointing out his enthusiastic gassing of Arabs, repatriation of Russian POWs to certain deaths in the Gulags, complicity in the Bengal famine, brutal crackdowns on domestic anarchists and striking workers, casual sexism or unhealthy body mass index, they would not be taken very seriously, even though all those things about Churchill are very much true.

Like Ivan the Terrible and Tamerlane, not to mention Wingfield-Hayes’s beloved British Royal Family, Stalin killed a great many of his own people. But Wingfield-Hayes is very wrong when he attributes the adulation of Stalin by young people to the ignorance of his crimes. If anything, the older generation that lived under Stalin is even more likely to feel nostalgic for those days.

This is partly because most of those who disliked Stalin did not survive to tell the tale, but also for some other, more difficult reasons. For example, many Soviet families saw sons of someone murdered by Bolsheviks in the revolution later joins the Red Army and becomes a Stalinist. My grandfather was just one such person.

It is difficult for a 21st century middle class British person, a legatee of two centuries of peace, democracy and industrial development, to fully understand a context in which the deaths of thousands of people occur routinely; a yardstick, not a terrifying aberration. In his masterful history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes describes the horrific brutality of daily life under tsarism and how it was almost seamlessly followed by the horrific brutality of Stalinism.

In their brutality, the regimes were very comparable; the Bolsheviks were simply more productive owing to better mechanised and more rationally implemented terror than their Tsarist predecessors.

For most long-suffering Russians, the only real difference between them was tsarist Russia was brutal and autocratic, as well as backward, poor, constantly losing wars, disrespected and disintegrating. Whereas Stalin’s USSR was brutal and autocratic, but also modernising, strong, proud; cobbling together a new empire, defeating Germany and Japan, building a nuclear bomb, sending men to space, feeding and educating its people. Yes, the violence and brutality were a constant, but they was not the whole story.

Most importantly, Russians and Georgians believe that Stalin not only brought their backward countries greatness but also liberated their country from the Nazis genocide, a gratitude that is very difficult to understand for British and American people, who (barring Pearl Harbour and a relatively light Blitz) have never experienced an invasion in living history. This achievement should not be underestimated, especially considering everything the British have forgiven their Churchill for his more modest war-time successes.

Of course, Churchill’s imperial arrogance, racism and casual slaughter of non-Europeans should be viewed in the context of his statesmanship in WWII and great-power diplomacy. That does not excuse them. But sensitivity to this context is what prevents intelligent people from other countries from wondering why Churchill, or George Washington for that matter, are considered heroes rather than villains (although of course the scale of their villainry was smaller than Stalin’s), in the same way Wingfield-Hayes does.

None of this is to say, or course, that such ‘contextualisation’ is benign when done by the Russian government. Promoting Stalin’s achievements appears designed to make young Russians believe that brutal and autocratic policies could be ‘worth it’ to achieve ‘a strong country’ (whatever that means) at any price, with clear implications for Putin’s grips on power.

Yet according to Figes, who believes that the government is rehabilitating Stalin, the Kremlin’s aim ‘is not to deny Stalin’s crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country’s “glorious Soviet past”. It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period’.

But there is a difference between knowledge of one’s country’s crimes, and guilt-induced paralysis. While I cannot support the Kremlin’s historical revisionism because of its whitewashing, spurious scholarship, right-wing political subtexts and ulterior motives, neither do I believe that Russians should be made to renounce their entire 20th century history.

Churchill himself wrote in 1935 that “[History] is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.”

That many in the former USSR may say the same of Stalin should not inspire such self-righteous incredulity at the BBC.

In the 1990s, the Russian film landscape had come to resemble something straight out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with stray dogs wandering through Mosfilm studios in Eisenstein’s footprints and actors and directors stumbling around a menacing no man’s land in search of money and meaning.

What happened before, and after, is the subject of an engrossing (and plenty flawed) BBC documentary entitled Movie Nights in Moscow on Radio 3, in which Oxford professor Rana Mitter travels to Russia and speaks to directors, academics and viewers to determine the state of cinema in Russia today.

This state can best be summed up by the following exchange between rising auteur Alexey Popogrebsky and renowned Soviet director (and current head of Mosfilm) Karen Shakhnazarov.

For Popogrebsky, the 2004 fantasy blockbuster Nightwatch was the turning point for Russian cinema, when

Young people said: maybe its not so bad to go watch a Russian film, because in terms of the return on their money, they were getting as many special effects per square foot as any other Hollywood blockbuster. Because people want to be entertained, they want to be impressed.

But for Shakhnazarov, who directed the iconic Glasnost youth movie The Courier and whose new film The Vanished Empire evokes 197os USSR, that is precisely the problem with modern Russian cinema. Speaking with an accent that lends heightened poetry to his words, he lays the blame even more on the viewer than film-maker:

In Soviet period, we had Idea. You can say it was bad idea, ok. You can say it was good idea, somebody says that. But it was an Idea. Around this idea was the fire; some life was around this idea. Somebody support this idea, and others not support it, those called dissidents. But, I mean, this was the really big idea. Now, it’s vanished. And so we have, in my opinion, our society have no anything to live for. Because its impossible to live just for have a lot of sausages in the shops. There’s no real idea for the people, you see?

I don’t think [viewers today] are searching for something like the Idea, I suppose. Or, very few of them want to find in cinema something that is called Idea. Just they want to go to see entertainment.

Of course, Mitter delves into the recent high quality Russian art-house fare such as the internationally acclaimed Paper Soldier, Volchok (Wolfy) and The Return.

But at a time when even commercial movies are seen only by elite upper middle class audiences who can afford to spend $10 on a ticket, the viewership of such ‘idea-films’ is so negligible that they can not hope to speak to the population at large.

And while Mitter proclaims the new cinema to be a renaissance equal to the colossal flowering of creativity and boundary-pushing under Glasnost in the 1980s (which he doesnt spend nearly enough time talking about!), he is wrong.

This is because the cinematic awakening under Glasnost was truly inclusive, rather than elitist; challenging films that today would be the preserve of art house audiences involved the general public in dialogues about their own pasts and debates about their futures.

Millions of ordinary people flocked to cinemas to see movies banned since the 60s, such as Kommissar and Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist Repentance, or new social realist films depicting the dark undersides of ‘Socialist utopia’ such as Little Vera (first Soviet film featuring nudity!); or films that re-examined the place of young people in society, such as Bykov’s The Scarecrow, Shakhnazarov’s The Courier, Igla (a film about drug abuse featuring Soviet rock legend Victor Tsoi) and the groundbreaking Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young.

While many of those films were heavy and depressing, (their darkness serving as a political rebellion against the culture of official cheerfulness that marked Socialist Realism), so many quality films were not: for example, the above-mentioned Courier or the satirical comedy Kin Dza Dza.

And there was not the same kind of apartheid between highbrow ‘chernukha’ like Wolfy and commercial trash like Night Watch that we see today.

They were for the most part politically engaged and philosophically committed.

In the final scene of The Courier (2:55 in), the main character, Ivan, a high school senior, is watching some dudes breakdance in the park and asks his pal Basin: What do you dream about in life?

-Buying a winter coat

-What kind of dream is that?

-Winter is almost here and I’ve got nothing to wear; I went last winter without one and was sick all the time

-Cant your parents get you one?

-My dad’s paying alimony but my mum won’t give me a penny. Says I don’t need money. She is a sick person, there is no doubt. But what can you do?

At which point Ivan gives Basin the new jacket that his dad had just given him, and says:

-I won’t be needing it: I’ll get drafted into the army soon anyway. Wear it, and start dreaming of something greater.

He could have been addressing the new Russian cinema and its audiences.

My last post chronicled the large numbers of people (45% of Russians and up to 62% of Ukrainians) made worse off by the fall of the USSR. But what about the rest?

One man who certainly did not figure among them was Misha, the hero of a vivid, at times zany, groteque and poignant fictionalised account by Georgian writer and journalist Irakli Iosebashvili, the first part of which was published in the current issue of Guernica Magazine.  By following this post-Soviet ‘Gentleman of Fortune’,  the story paints a hustler-eye view of the absurdist, tragic and exhilitaring transition from state socialism.

Misha, the narrator’s streetsmart and charismatic Tbilisi father-in-law, was known even in Soviet times for his entrepreneurial spirit; in a nearly car-less society, he was called “Misha-you know, the one with the car”. As a result of his black-market prowess during the Brezhnev years, Misha “wore fedoras from Turkey and sheepskin coats bought in the Baltics, bell bottoms and shiny boots with big heels”.

Later, as Georgia spiralled into nationalist chaos, the “Soviet Union began to shiver and howl like some great poisoned beast, then went off to its noisy, drawn-out death”, and hyperinflation left Misha “suddenly bereft of one hundred thousand roubles”‘, he headed to Moscow to make dollars instead.

Iosebashvili evokes a Russia which freedom had hit “like a great slap, and people were still reeling from the shock”, where “almost every day, somebody took to the streets—Communists, ultra-nationalists, unhappy miners, cavorting paratroopers” and “pyramid schemes, faith healers, and nationalist movements, each stranger than the next, sprang up on a daily basis”.

This is required reading.

After twenty years of post-Communism, it’s time to ask: cui bono?

According to a sweeping Pew Research Center poll of Eastern Europeans released yesterday, “the prevailing view in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary is that people were better off economically under communism. Only in the Czech Republic and Poland do pluralities believe that most people are now better off”.

And within those societies, the primary beneficiaries of the transition were the elites.

“It was the young, the better educated and the urban populations who were cheering [the post-Communist order]. How older, less well educated and rural people would adapt was then identified as one of the principal challenges to acceptance of democracy and capitalism”.

Moreover, whereas communism may have offered, in Churchill’s famous dictum, an equal distribution of poverty, the fruits of democracy have been distributed very unequally indeed.

“There are now wide age gaps in reports of life satisfaction. In Poland, for example, half of those younger than age 30 rate their lives highly, compared with just 29% of those ages 65 and older. These gaps were not evident in 1991, when all age groups expressed comparably negative views of their lives”.

Moreover, an “urban-rural gap also is evident in life satisfaction…In Ukraine, for example, 30% of urban dwellers express high satisfaction with their lives, compared with just 17% of those residing in rural areas. These disparities in reports of well-being were not apparent two decades ago”.

Given the views about their material situation today vs under the former regimes, it is not surprising to find fewer people satisfied with the transition to democracy and capitalism:

(With regards to democracy itself, there is definitely a large split between Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, with the former being much happier with the political transition than the latter. One factor that might explain the popularity of the democratic transition in Eastern Europe is that it was essentially a process of liberation from an outside occupier, the USSR).

Ironically for a process that ushered in a new era of religious freedom in Eastern Europe, the transition to democratic capitalism assumed the very opposite trajectory to the one Jesus preached when he said that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last” (Matthew, 19:30).

Instead, the transition quickly rectified the ‘unnatural’ order of the old regime- in which the first (the rich and talented) had temporarily been made last.

Henceforth, the masses-the old, the poor, the average and the rural-were returned to being last again, where they belong; so that the elite- the young, educated, talented and urban-could finally resume the rightful first place they occupied before the whole Communist/Christian debacle.

Terrified German officers called them Night-Witches. ‘Night’ because of the way they idled their engines to glide silently over German cities in daring night-time bombing raids. And ‘witches’, because they were women.

Today, the BBC aired an unmissable documentary about the legendary Soviet 46th Night Bombers Guards Regiment, the first female combat fighter pilots in the world.

It is a poignant story of thousands of women, many of them teenage girls, overcoming traditional gender roles to demonstrate extraordinary heroism in defence of their motherland.

But in focusing on two ace pilots in particular, it is equally a warning against the politicisation of WWII, which has lately been appropriated to show off nuclear missiles on Red Square, stir national chauvinism and even rehabilitate Stalin. So much so, in fact, that President Medvedev was recently moved to deliver an unprecedented attack on the revival of Stalin’s legacy.

The author-narrator, Lucy Ash, speaks with some of these last remaining heros, including Galina Beltsova, a highly decorated fighter pilot feted by the Kremlin. Beltsova recalls the fear of being captured by the Germans; tears spring to her eyes when describing the break-up of the USSR.

But then there is her comrade Anna Yegorova. Hit by anti-aircraft fire, badly burnt and with a damaged parachute, she fell to the ground, suffering serious injuries. “The most dreadful thing’, she recalls, ‘was opening my eyes and seeing Germans in front of me’.

She then spent 5 months in a Nazi concentration camp. Yet shockingly, what was more harrowing still was her treatment afterwards by her own people.

As soon as she was liberated from the camps, barely alive, she was dragged off to be interrogated by SMERSH counterintelligence. “They swore at me, said I was the scum of the earth, that i switched sides and joined the Germans; they treated me like an animal and called me a fascist bitch’, she recalls. When, after more than 20 years, she was formally rehabilitated and named a Hero of the Soviet Union,  she remembers, “I felt burnt out, I felt no joy or satisfaction. It felt numb. After the SMERSH tortured me, something within me died. God save anyone from such treatment”.

“Even after all these years’, concludes Ash, ‘Anna still struggles to reconcile the conflicting emotions inside her. The same could be said in larger relief about her country, and its tortured recollection of the war years”.

The same, indeed, could be said for the whole history of the USSR - a series of contradictions and paradoxes, leaps and retrenchments, spectacular heroism, as well as savagery, betrayal, love and achievement, done, often by the same people, to each other - which can no less be separated into discrete fragments than the elements of a human life.

To wit, “the Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women to fly combat missions. Women pilots in other countries flew military aircraft in support roles and some were fired on by enemies. But only Soviet women pilots could fire back; only Soviet women dropped bombs and fought in air battles”. And yet the same Soviet Union then tried to shut down these female squadrons once the war was over.

The Soviet Union which both Anna and Galina defended in the face of almost certain death, but which repaid one with gratitude and the other with torture; the Soviet Union of both SMERSH interrogators and of Night-Witches.

Conservative Russians and those of an anti-Western disposition argue, correctly, that all too often the West cares to know and focus only on the Soviet Union’s crimes, and not on its achievements - human, technological and military, including its central role in WWII victory.

But accepting the essential truth of this grievance bestows no corresponding right of amnesia; to do so would be to repeat the very ignorance and bias that they rightly denounce. For only those who lack faith in Russia, who doubt that there are enough Nightwitches and Sakharovs and Akhmadulinas to counter-balance the Stalins and Berias, can be afraid to confront the Soviet past head-on.

“The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself…the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices”.

This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, once a qualified supporter of Putin, summed up the results of the recent regional elections in Russia, in which the incumbent party just happened to have “won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country”.

Yet despite the state controlled media, it’s not like the population is ignorant of the blatant fraud: a recent survey found that only 3% of Russians believe the elections to have been free and fair.

And they certainly harbour no illusions, either: a respected Levada Centre poll found just 4% who believe that Russia is a democracy.

Yet while some opposition leaders, such as the Communists and the centre-right Yabloko party (which amazingly received 0 votes in a district in which their own candidate Mitrokhin had definitely cast one) were furious, most ordinary Russians might have actually cheered.

That’s right: although 95% of Russians polled by Levada believe that they have no control over their political destinies, a whopping ‘26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia’.

In fact, when asked whether they a) either completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is needed or b) completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is wrong for Russia, the proportion narrows to just 50:31.

Moreover, “the majority (60%) also said it would be better for Russia if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%)”.

The following Levada Centre graph illustrates the Russian approval of three political systems: the Soviet one, the current one, or Western style democracy (the fourth line, in green, is marked ‘other’).

Contrary to almost all Western political science thinking, the most popular system from 1996 to 2007 was the Soviet one (blue), consistently winning the approval of 40-45% of the very people who were supposed to have rejected it in 1991, and twice as popular as the Western style democracy (red) they were meant to have favoured.

But the most interesting journey is marked by the yellow line indicating “the current system”. Under Yeltsin’s supposed golden age of democracy and freedom, this yellow line never rose beyond 10%. But as soon as Putin came in, in 1999, it has shown a steady rise. In 2007, it finally beat the front runner, the Soviet system, and continues to grow.

Most importantly, for the first time since the fall of the USSR, an overwhelming plurality of Russian citizens prefer their current system to either an idealised Soviet past or an increasingly demonised ‘Western alternative’.

In fact, this picture of contentment seems to demolish the liberal idea of Russians cowering under an increasingly authoritarian regime, just waiting to be rescued back to democracy.

Other polls show that Russians aren’t particularly impressed with the government’s handling of the financial crisis; nor do they support Putin’s increasingly overblown vendetta against Khodorkovsky (59% think the trial is designed to line the pockets of those benefitting from Yukos’s collapse, and 75% oppose keeping him in prison for life).

So, is there just some sort of weird masochism at play in the Russian soul?

But if so, then why should Putin falsify elections that he could have expected to win anyway?

That is the central question. Why on earth did the Kremlin bother to delete Mitrokhin’s vote for a party, Yabloko, whose popularity had never risen above the low single digits even in free elections? What’s the point?

Similarly, much has been said about the ‘rehabilitation’ of Stalin. And yet, authorities have been cracking down on organisations and academics that have been researching the gulag and the deportation of Germans - measures that I can bet actually increase Stalin’s popularity in the eyes of his current fans, so why hush them up (especially in the internet age)?.

What is the Kremlin’s game? Seriously, I’m Russian, but I have no idea what is going on.