One of the many glitteringly clever quotes circulated in the wake of Hilary Mantel’s death last week was something she said about history. The longer version is wonderful (what did she ever say that wasn’t?), but we’ll clip this bit: “Facts are not truth, though they are part of it … And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.” Yet using these fragments – “a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth” – Mantel could transport you so completely that you felt you were breathing the air of another century, feeling the emotions of other people, moving through other times.
This has an intense value. And yet, there is a certain type of historian who concerns themself – or himself, let’s face it – very little with emotion, even though that is all anyone ordinary who was forced to live through events was feeling at the time. Anger, shock, hope, bewilderment, laughter, exhaustion, betrayal – these are the trifling human offcuts of some loftier story, largely unmentionable byproducts of the grand machinations of greater men than them.
I’m glad this isn’t an affliction suffered by the documentary maker Adam Curtis, perhaps the BBC’s last great maverick, whose landmark series on Russia between 1985 and 1999 arrives on iPlayer in two weeks. Last year, Curtis was handed a treasure trove: every piece of raw footage shot by the BBC in Russia since the 1960s. Tens of thousands of hours, only the tiniest fraction of which had ever made it to air. Out of this hoard and other material lying in the BBC archive, he has created seven brilliant and deeply empathetic films that cover what happened to Russia between 1985 and 1999 (the year Vladimir Putin took power). It’s called TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy.
The films bring that world right up against your eyeballs, and prove themselves essential to our understanding of the Russia we have now, of the Russia from which Putin emerged, and of the staggering human cost of it all. And, perhaps, of what it feels like on the ground when ideologues with a plan decide to jolt the people towards a new utopia. Anyway, more on the UK’s week in economic shock therapy in a minute.
We already know the historical facts of the Russia story: the hideous iniquities of communism, its tumultuous collapse, the grotesque corruption and betrayal that followed, the vast scale – both ideological and geographical – of the various cataclysms. These films take us from the Kremlin to the Siberian mining villages, from the Chechen frontline to people’s apartments, immersing us in every layer of Russian society. I showed Curtis the Mantel quote this week and he loved it. “I found this extraordinary material – tens of thousands of fragments of experience,” he explained. “What I’m doing is taking these fragments and I’m trying to create a world for you to get lost in, a sense of what it was like to live through that world. At the end of it, I hope you think and feel differently about what Russians went through – and understand how Putin could emerge from that strange cataclysm.”
This I can definitely confirm. I watched the films in early summer, yet seeing last weekend’s mostly female protest against Putin’s Ukraine mobilisation in Moscow, I was immediately transported back to Curtis’s agonising footage of the mothers whose sons are conscripted into the Chechen war. The women in TraumaZone are what will stay longest with me – the struggling babushkas, the sex workers in Moscow’s Cosmos hotel, the state toothbrush factory employees, the reformatory teens, the idealistic first Avon ladies, the extraordinarily charismatic young girl who begs at car windows in the Moscow traffic … the women break your heart.
TraumaZone is a definite departure from Curtis’s previous style. There is no “Adam Curtis voiceover”, no music unless it’s part of the original footage itself, no provocative central thesis. He feels the hot-take industry has swallowed up everything since 2016 – “and I’m one of the worst offenders!” – and what the series offers instead is much more compelling and unusual. You can hear the flies buzzing on the steppes. You are in the middle of riots brutally suppressed by state police. You are watching as gangsters loot cars straight off the production lines. You are in the queue to be told there are still no potatoes in all of Moscow. It’s difficult not to conclude that the hardline free marketeers had about as much empathy for the ordinary people as the Marxist intellectuals.
Which I accept might be starting to sound familiar closer to home. Don’t worry, this isn’t some glib bollocks about how we’re all the same underneath. Russians are not similar to us, because they have been through a totally different experience. In the 90s, they had the accelerated and frequently catastrophic collapse of not one but two of the dominant ideologies of the 20th century. We had Britpop.
Not that that stops some pointed jokes. A Russian journalist who recently fled Putin’s regime reflected sardonically to Curtis: “You in Britain are Moscow in about 1988. Everyone knows the system isn’t working. Everyone knows that the managers are completely looting it. They know that you know that they know, but no one has any concept of a possible alternative. The only difference is you’ve already tried democracy. You’ve got nothing else left.”
Ouch. It has certainly felt like a rather idiosyncratic form of democracy this week, watching a government without a mandate pursue radical economic shock policies on the basis of pure dogma, no matter the forecast human fallout. Over the course of TraumaZone we get to know Yegor Gaidar, the ultra-free marketeer architect of the shock therapy designed to radically remake Russia’s economy, who became despised by the Russians who bore the brunt of his malfunctioning ideals even as the oligarchs used them as cover to steal an entire country. There is an arresting closeup of Gaidar’s face at the funeral of Galina Starovoitova, the democratic reformer assassinated in her apartment building in 1998. What is his expression? Is it a flicker of an epic personal reckoning?
I kept wondering if I saw a flash of it on Kwasi Kwarteng’s face this week, when the cameras followed the chancellor on some no-comment walk out of the Treasury as the financial crisis he caused was playing out in real time. Or whether we’ll see it when Kwarteng or Liz Truss is forced to encounter an ordinary victim who experiences their ideology as a repossessed house or hungry child, rather than something that sounds good in a pamphlet.
But perhaps these are the fleeting emotions we wish ideologues to feel, and not the ones they do. The one thing we can say with a general election possibly more than two years away is that no one but a tiny selectorate of 81,000 voted for this radical experiment. Is that democracy? Is that what keeps people believing in politics? Or are we entering a trauma zone of our own?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Marina Hyde will join Guardian Live for events in Manchester (4 October) and London (11 October) to discuss her new book, What Just Happened?! For details visit theguardian.com/guardianlive, and order the book from Guardian Bookshop
