The cruellest missiles always strike from somewhere and the maddest wars are decades in the making. Adam Curtis is not clairvoyant — yet long before the invasion of Ukraine, the film-maker and journalist was already focused on the bloody eastern edge of Europe.
The result is his astonishing new BBC series Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. It is the kind of strange coincidence that might have come from one of his own archive-based documentaries: a vicious turn in geopolitics colliding with the project of a singular figure working at a laptop in central London.
“This all came out of a boring sense of duty to public service broadcasting,” Curtis says. Some years ago, he explains, a cameraman friend stumbled upon 10,000 hours of unedited “rushes”, stored in a cupboard in the BBC’s Moscow office. Shot across the Soviet Union as it morphed and shrank into post-communist Russia, the footage eventually reached Curtis. In the years ahead, he often looked through it, pondering how these scenes from an imploding superpower might sit in a future project, a grand synthesis such as The Power of Nightmares (2004) or HyperNormalisation (2016).
“Until I thought, ‘Actually, the [BBC] licence fee has paid for all this stuff. And no one has seen more than seconds of it.’” Why not simply treat it as what it already was, he asked himself — as a haunting chronicle of modern Russia? And why not now?
It was September 2021. Five months later, Vladimir Putin’s army began its assault on Kyiv.
I meet Curtis, who is impish good company, in a chilly Soho, central London. “I didn’t see the invasion coming,” he says, “but I did think, ‘Ah. Even now the empire is crashing.’ ” His work in progress was already filled with what suddenly looked like foreshadowing. There was Afghanistan, of course. Another omen was the failed 1991 military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. “Imagine that shame. The army that had won the Great Patriotic War [as the Russians call the second world war] now couldn’t even depose its own leader.”
Curtis cites the theory that the invasion of Ukraine arose from a long-scorned military finally winning over a Putin desperate for legacy. Then he pauses. “I do want to say this is not a series about Putin. It is about the weird stew that created him.”
That portrait duly begins amid the full sprawl of the former Soviet bloc, from Vladivostok to East Berlin to the Mir space station, still charged in 1985 with the advance of Marxism to outer space. Later we see Chernobyl and an addled Boris Yeltsin, but only as part of a fantasia of morbid symptoms: supermarket fist-fights and kitsch TV versions of Lord of the Rings, beauty contests and obscene poverty. The thesis comes in a subtitle: “What It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism.” Then a subtitle to the subtitle: “And Democracy.”
“Because I still think people don’t quite get that about Russia. Communism collapsed, yes. And then just as completely, all trust in democracy vanished too.”
The series is being released on BBC iPlayer, now the regular home of work by Curtis, who feels that he “swims between the cracks” of the corporation. Yet there have been tweaks to his house style. The pop music typically used as mordant Greek chorus is stripped back to a few faded Russian hits, included only if they are part of the original footage. And stark white text takes the place of Curtis’s signature voiceover.
“Russia is very over-talked about in the west,” Curtis says. “So I wanted to pull back and give the audience a sense of living through the Russian experience. We have a terrible habit of conflating ordinary Russians with their government, and we shouldn’t. But I also don’t want to do the simplistic thing of saying, ‘Oh, they’re just like us.’ I just wanted to reinstate a history that is often forgotten.”
At the time, in sections of the west, the same era was called the “end of history”. This was the phrase of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, known for asserting that with the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy had forever triumphed.
“The end of history,” Curtis grins. “Wasn’t that intoxicating?” Like Curtis himself, such voices are now kept off screen. But the blithe optimism of western leaders still hangs in the air as we witness the disastrous “shock therapy” of an abruptly entirely free market.
“And even when it became clear that it was going wrong, the west still saw it as that sexy ‘wild east’. All a bit jokey and Looney Tunes, wasn’t it? So I want people to see how cataclysmic it was.” Curtis duly charts the disappearance of trees from city parks, cut down for firewood, the battlefields where Nazi corpses were dug up and scavenged for relics. “But another cliché I wanted to avoid is that it was all down to American bankers. They were in the mix. But Russians themselves will tell you: no, the sci-fi idea of instant capitalist democracy came from inside Russia.”
In 1992, the year of Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, Curtis made his six-part documentary Pandora’s Box. A sceptical view of technocratic progress, it opened with the newly fallen USSR. The series was the first of the archive essays that would make Curtis’s name.
Thirty years on, many of the same themes still nag at him. If Curtis has long mapped the vacuum of belief in western societies since the end of the cold war, TraumaZone completes the picture from the other side of the looking glass. Collapsed living standards are of a piece with the death of organising principles alongside nihilism and nostalgia.
And all roads lead to one man. “I do think, when you look at Putin,” Curtis says, “you see someone who went mad trying to maintain the appearance of a functioning system.”
But if communism and democracy both failed in Russia, Putin found inspiration in the most brute ideology of all. TraumaZone reminds us of the forgotten Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the raving ultranationalist who, amid the chaos of the 1990s, reframed a new conflict from the bones of the old. To the west, he insisted, communism had only been a pretext. What the US had really wanted was simply to destroy Russia.
“Did you know Zhirinovsky died just weeks after Ukraine was invaded?” Curtis says. “But his worldview had been totally absorbed by Putin.”
Yet nationalist genies seeped out of bottles everywhere. With Ukraine now the subject of Russian atrocities, it might seem questionable even to reference the jingoism that gripped Kyiv too. Curtis doesn’t shy away. “I think I’ve handled it OK. In Ukraine, a lot of the old communist leadership just rebadged themselves as nationalists. But that got tangled up with something real. I’m not judging Ukrainian nationalism, but it feels reasonable to say it existed.”
Then there is the starring role that Curtis reserves for the oligarchs. TraumaZone reminds us that the looting, ambient violence and actual power structure that would become known as Putin’s “Mafia state” were all in place before he came to power, put there by men who would later use their money to buy superyachts and football clubs. “There is an argument that the only successful, orderly activity in post-Soviet Russia was the criminal theft of wealth from the country. Again, I wanted to stop the people involved looking like comic-strip characters.”
Call it a historical irony that we are sitting a short walk from the London office of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now an anti-Putin dissident, but spot-lit by TraumaZone as playing a key role in ransacking the state. “Khodorkovsky is a born-again democrat,” Curtis says. “And it’s not for me to be cynical about that. But I will honestly report the past.”
In another Curtisian coincidence, the same stroll would take you past the BBC’s New Broadcasting House, hub of another once gargantuan power. Sifting through the endless footage from old TV crews, Curtis was struck by a teasing idea. “I started to wonder if, as the real British empire disappeared, the BBC became a proxy for it. All these reporters sent off around the globe, coming back to explain a world that was still centred on Britain.”
Nor has he missed another quirk in the timing of TraumaZone. After all, the new British government is keen to launch its own take on laissez-faire shock therapy. “Russians have said to me: Britain is just Moscow in 1988. I do have a sense that this also feels like a place in the very final days of empire. The same strange nostalgia. The same dark pessimism about democracy. And that feeling the ground is now starting to move quite rapidly under our feet. Well, it is, isn’t it?”
On BBC iPlayer from October 13
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