When I asked a friend from Moscow, now an expatriate in Georgia, to explain how Russia could have fallen so quickly into Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime after the fall of the USSR sometime in the early 2000s, his response was unequivocal: “It was the 1990s, it was a jungle!” The stories he told me afterwards helped me to understand at least a little why the demand for a “firm hand” was so great after 2000.

In the 1990s, household savings were almost completely wiped out and inflation had led to elderly people—“senior citizens” who had given so much to their society and country— begging on the streets and starving to death. I cannot forget the begging grandmothers I used to meet on every corner during my first visits to Moscow. All rules had, it seemed, disappeared from the country [Fig. 30]. The practice of borrowing a sum of money from an acquaintance, a fraction of which could be used to pay a hired assassin who then murdered the acquaintance of the person in question and relieved them of the obligation to repay the loan, was, at the least, said to be commonly practiced. The market for the profession of assassin for hire was reportedly so saturated after the breakup of the elite military units that an assassination for hire cost about $2,000. In the resulting chaos, society became radicalized, allowing nostalgia for the previous regime, neo-Nazis, Stalinists, and religious fanatics to coexist [Fig. 31]. The trauma of this period, duly fed by the resulting Putin propaganda, can be seen as one of the key reasons for Russia's current imperialism.

To better understand the roots of the current situation, in this chapter I would like to address the most recent period—that which corresponds to the last thirty years of Russian history, and not only the artistic aspects. I will, first of all, summarize the salient facts of politics with a special focus on economics in the 1990s. Secondly, I will present the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour from its much-discussed rebuilding in the nineties to the times when it was included in the celebrated performance of the punk feminist rock band Pussy Riot in 2012.