In 1935, near the height of the Great Terror, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union decided to hold a party “that would compete with anything Moscow had yet experienced, before or after the Revolution.” The theme was “collective farm.” White tulips were delivered from Finland. A dozen birch trees were uprooted and placed under a sun lamp, so the buds opened on the day of the party. Embassy staff went to the Moscow Zoo and brought mountain goats—a half dozen of them were put on a platform at the head of the buffet table. Fishing nets were soaked in gold powder and glue, stretched along the marble walls of the huge ballroom, and filled with hundreds of zebra finches, which fluttered and sang merrily behind the gold mesh.
The 500 guests arrived at midnight, watching in awe as projected images surrounded them. Flowers appeared on the walls, a constellation of stars complete with a bright moon turned up on the high-domed ceiling, and multicolored spotlights shone down on the guests from the balcony. In the dining room there were pens with sheep and bear cubs. Cages with roosters hung on the walls.
“Despite the purges and terror, there was everyone at this American ball who was anyone in Moscow, except Stalin,” writes Alexander Etkind, in his excellent new biography of Ambassador William Bullitt. “The future victims drank, danced, and flirted together with their executioners, many of whom would later also perish. The intellectual Bolsheviks . . . would lose their power and lives in a few months. The high-ranking military commanders . . . would be executed over the next few years. The towering figures of the Soviet theater . . . all expected to be arrested and tortured at any moment. For some, the wait would be short; for others, painfully long. As if they had a foresight, the finches escaped from the nets and flew around the embassy in a “terrifying panic.”
One of the writers in attendance, Mikhail Bulgakov, would draw on the party in his descriptions of Satan’s Ball in The Master and Margarita, his surreal satire of Stalin’s Moscow, where the devil, in the guise of a dandy foreigner named Woland, visits the city to throw wild parties which are actually sociological experiments: “The Muscovites have changed considerably—outwardly, I mean, as too has the city itself. . . . But naturally I am . . . interested in the much more important question: have the Muscovites changed inwardly?”
Bullitt had arrived as ambassador in 1936. Left-leaning, he still believed that his liberal President, FDR, could build a warm relationship with Moscow. He felt previous Presidents had made a mess of U.S. foreign policy to Russia. In 1919 he had personally visited Lenin and struck a deal whereby the Soviet leadership promised an armistice which would cede most of the former Russian Empire to non-Boshevik forces, leaving Lenin with a rump state of Moscow and St. Petersburg. No one was under any illusions that Lenin would keep the deal when his army was stronger, but it would have set the pattern for a more engaged relationship and potentially constructive compromises. Bullitt wrote to President Wilson: “Today you may still guide the Revolution into peaceful and constructive channels.” Wilson ignored him, too focused on signing a peace treaty at Versailles which was so debilitating for Germany, a treaty that Bullitt and many others believed helped condemn Europe to another war. Overly paranoid of Bolshevism spreading across Europe, Wilson had missed the chance of an early détente with the Soviet leadership.
But after three years as ambassador, Bullitt grew disenchanted with the Soviet Union, convinced it was becoming another Nazi Germany. He loathed the secret police and the surveillance. He fought bitterly for FDR’s attention against pro-Soviet journalists like Walter Duranty who tried to convince the President that Stalin was a man he could do business with. The Soviet leadership, Bullitt argued, was more obsessed with world revolution and sowing chaos in capitalist countries than raising living standards at home. Stalin was intent on dominating his neighbors to establish the Communist Faith as far as possible. Bullitt’s analysis set the tone for his protégé George Kennan, who would go on to formulate the policy of containment, pushing back the Soviet Union at every point possible.
In his final dispatch Bullitt concluded the country hadn’t fundamentally changed from the Russian Empire. He was surprised with how familiar the writings of a mid-19th-century ambassador, Nicholas Brown, seemed in 1937. Speaking about the reign of Nicholas I, Brown wrote about harsh police tactics, censorship, and spies. Brown’s letters also sounded, Bullitt noted, like reports written by British ambassadors to Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
Sixty-nine years after Bullitt, Michael McFaul became U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Left-leaning, he still believed that his liberal President, Obama, could build a warm relationship with Moscow. He felt previous Presidents had made a mess of U.S. foreign policy to Russia. Could democracy and curbing corruption have been supported more vigorously in the 1990s? Could NATO expansion have been dealt with more tactfully? Intervention in Yugoslavia done more cooperatively? In 2008 McFaul had helped initiate the Reset, a new policy of cooperation with then President Medevdev, which had shown, he argues in his new must-read memoir From Cold War to Hot Peace, that it was perfectly possible to overcome previous tensions.
This all changed in 2012 with Putin’s return to the Presidency and large protests against his rule. McFaul found himself cast as a comedy foreign devil by Kremlin propaganda trolls, accused of inciting the protests by order of State Department Head Hilary Clinton; smeared as a pedophile; hassled and spied upon. He concludes that Putin’s aggressive foreign policy since 2012 is ultimately not chiefly due to U.S. foreign policy failures, but rather has its roots in internal Russian dynamics.
“Domestically, Russia had had something like a therapy breakthrough: it admitted to itself that it didn’t know how to be a country” writes Michael Idov in his new memoir of of the same period, Dressed up for a Riot. “Shepherding the surrounding nations was the only thing that gave its vastness a point and its citizens an identity. And internationally, it was the bad guy again, which made a certain kind of sense.”
Idov, a Riga-born American journalist turned film director, was editor of Russian GQ during the time McFaul was ambassador, and his book covers current affairs and U.S.-Russian relations through the revealing lens of high-society glamour and fashion: like Bulgakov he knows that politics only really reveals itself at parties, like Wilde that only the superficial has depth.
Some of the most telling parts of Dressed up for a Riot come when Idov tries to put Russian celebrities on the cover of Russian GQ instead of the usual Hollywood stars: isn’t Russia successful enough to look up to its own? Readers and colleagues are appalled: not just obviously pro-Western liberals, but the patriotic Putinoids of show-business too. Sales plummet. Russia’s glossy magazine culture Idov is surrounded by is full of a strange self-loathing, where the only idols that can be venerated are Western. The West is on the one hand the devil through which to motivate domestic cohesion; on the other it is the ideal which you crave. Russian political and popular culture, Idov seems to be arguing, can only gain self-worth and status in an act of performance vis-a-vis a Western gaze; a gaze whose attention, Idov wryly notes, Putin has won in his trolling of the West with the cheap and easy tools of information warfare.
Where does it come from, this need to portray the West as either ideal or demon to be performed in front of? Is it down to a simple sense of inferiority? “No nation,” Ambassador Brown had written back in 1850, “has so much need of foreigners, and so much jealousy of them.” Perhaps. But the Westerner who Russian political and popular culture evokes to gaze at itself is very much a Russian invention. Real Westerners don’t fit the bill. Idov’s problem as editor is that he doesn’t fit the preconceived idea of what a Western glamour editor should look like. He dresses wrong. He wears tweed jackets and jeans. He’s not camp enough. A Western glamour editor should wear Dolce and Gabbana suits and sleek black shoes. He should dress, in short, like a Woland.
It’s almost as if the West that Russian culture conjures is actually not the West at all—but just another way of talking, or rather not talking, about its own demons.