The Diary: John Thornhill

I have spent a fair chunk of my life striving to understand Russia. Of only one thing am I certain: the country will remain unfathomable long after I am dead. My latest week in Russia has only added to the confusion. To steal a line from the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus: "Everything is true, and also its opposite."

From one viewpoint, the picture in Moscow seems clear, and alarmingly bleak. Sober political observers I have known since my six-year reporting stint in Russia in the 1990s warn of a slide into fascism. The confrontation with the west over Ukraine, they suggest, is as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The makeshift shrine of fading flowers and spluttering candles that marks the spot where Boris Nemtsov was murdered within the shadow of the Kremlin seven weeks ago is an arresting reminder of what is at stake.

The opposition movement - such as it is - remains shell-shocked. Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former Duma deputy once seen as a rising star of Russian centrist politics in the late 1990s, has lost his seat in parliament and now occupies a dim basement office filled with unhung paintings. Grimly humorous, he is unremittingly downbeat about the outlook.

"The Communists fell in 1991 after five years of crisis. The shops ran out of flour and soap and toilet paper. But the shops work today and there is a lot of toilet paper," he says.

Yet glimpses of another Russia keep piercing the gloom, just like the sunshine that breaks through the clouds on a glorious Orthodox Easter weekend. In almost 30 years of visiting the country, I have rarely seen Moscow seemingly more at peace with itself. A new civility seems to have seeped into daily life over the past decade. Service staff in shops and restaurants are almost polite - some are even keen to please. Cars stop at pedestrian crossings. Everyone wants to speak English. In spite of a sharp economic contraction, Moscow is buzzing as crowds throng the inner Garden Ring, lined with giant Easter eggs and kitsch wooden stalls selling the traditional kulich cake. An Easter music festival, run by Valery Gergiev at Moscow's Conservatoire, at which Denis Matsuev hammers out Shchedrin's Piano Concerto no.2 is packed - and out of this world.

. . .

Things grow even more curious on a trip to Kazan, which has craftily branded itself as Russia's Third Capital (even if other cities would contest the title). Kazan, which celebrated its millennium in 2005, was once the bastion of a mighty Khanate, until crushed by Ivan the Terrible in 1552. Today, the city is the capital of the oil-rich republic of Tatarstan, home to 2m mainly Muslim ethnic Tatars and 1.5m Russians. A glittering mosque standing nearby an Orthodox cathedral in Kazan's historic Kremlin enshrines the region's diversity and tolerance.

Spurred on by a resurgent separatist movement, Tatarstan wrested a lot of autonomy from Moscow in the 1990s - even if President Vladimir Putin has since tugged most of it back. But the republic remains determined to chart its own economic destiny and is launching an ambitious 15-year strategy to turn itself into a hub of creative industries. "The central value of the Strategy is Man," the launch document states, outlining impressive plans to develop the region's human capital by promoting education, smart technologies, and foreign investment.

The launch, at Kazan's IT park, is directed by Rustam Minnikhanov, Tatarstan's dynamic, diminutive president. His name appears apt; he certainly has all the swagger of a mini-Khan. But his staff enthuse about him as a man of the people, who has worked his way up the government and knows everyone else's job better than they do. He also loves to drive locally produced Kamaz trucks in desert rallies across the Middle East.

Afterwards, I talk with Aleksei Kudrin, Russia's finance minister for 11 years, who now runs a non-governmental organisation promoting civil society. In the opening session, he had talked about the need to encourage more "freedom" in Russia to promote an honest debate about the problems confronting the country. "Modern economic growth is very much linked with creative industries," he says, requiring freethinking people to take the initiative and innovate. "That is a big deficit in Russia. That is why I want that this concept becomes understood in Russia step by step."

At a reception in Kazan's Kremlin that evening, the city's hipsters display a lot of free thinking, talking excitedly about their next projects. They are mostly well-travelled, digitally wired, politically disengaged twenty-somethings who appear to have much more in common with the global creative class than with many of their compatriots. Largely indifferent to the confrontation over Ukraine, they talk instead about the necessity of "human progress".

. . .

Whenever I am at a loss to understand Russia, I turn to a well-thumbed copy of Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet and Nobel laureate. In a series of essays, Brodsky argued that with its magnificently inflected language and its incredible ethical sensitivity, Russia had all the makings of a cultural and spiritual paradise. Instead, it had in Soviet times turned into a drab hell.

There, unfailingly, I stumble across a passage that seems to speak to our times and, perhaps, to the 15-year rule of Mr Putin - even if the words were written in 1980 about another country, the Soviet Union.

"The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most. When it's more than that, it invariably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging wars or internal terror, or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, resorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalise himself by doing something horrendous."

John Thornhill is deputy editor of the FT and a former FT bureau chief in Moscow

Illustration by Shonagh Rae

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