Adam Curtis - The Medium and the Message

At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.

These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks in an offworld pleasure bubble, surrounded by vast replicas of pictures and architecture from the glories of past civilizations.

Italian Navy

I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.

In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.

Many of the ships' workers can only get a living wage on the whim of the thousands of passengers above them - on the tips they choose to give them. And in the strange fun-world of the superliners the waiters, the cabin staff, the cooks and everyone else who serves, live in a state of continual vulnerability - unprotected by most of the employment laws that apply on land. Meanwhile many of the companies that own the vast ships pay practically no tax at all.

But it wasn't always supposed to be like that.

The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.

The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.

But it didn't turn out like that. And this is the story of what happened - and how the very opposite resulted.

It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible.

 

The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.

But with the growing democratisation of Britain after the second world war, more and more ordinary people wanted to experience this, and what was called "the Cruising Revolution" started. In the 1960s the "one class cruise" was invented - passengers were promised that the experience would still be "ultra deluxe", but anyone could go, there were no class divisions.

In reality the idea was born out of desperation. Jet airliners had stolen many of the transatlantic passengers, which meant the shipping companies had nothing to do with their liners.

In 1966 Alan Whicker made a wonderful documentary about one of these cruises. It was on a liner called The Andes, and it is a very funny picture of Britain's postwar class structure in miniature when they are all thrown together in a boat. Everyone claims to be getting along together - but they all bitch about each other and everyone hates the Nouveaux Riche.

Here they all are, enjoying their genre fiction.

 

And there's always one:

 

I love the fact that there is a mysterious child on the ship that everybody complains is going round telling the passengers to "shut your cakehole", but Whicker can never find him.

There is also a woman who in one sharp line points to the problem that would bedevil the democratisation of luxury. "I came because I expected millionaires" she says - "but all I found was a load of Huggets". The Huggets were a fictional working class family from a famous radio sitcom.

If exclusive places are open to everyone then they are no longer exclusive.

Here is some of the film.

But it was the Americans who took the cruising revolution and turned it into a global phenomenon.

In the mid sixties the American cruise industry suffered a terrible disaster. An old converted troop ship called the Yarmouth Castle was on a cruise to the Bahamas when it caught fire and 91 people died. It was a terrible scandal, the sprinklers didn't work and the public address system failed. And the captain, it was alleged, jumped into one of the first of the lifeboats with four other passengers and sped off into the night. He later claimed that he was going to get help.

Here is a postcard of the Yarmouth Castle along with a picture of it on fire.

 

An Israeli-American businessman called Ted Arison saw an opportunity to regenerate the cruising industry - by using modern boats.

In the mid 1960s Arison was working in the airfreight business in New York, but his family had run shipping lines in Palestine and Europe in the 1930s, and he wanted to start a cruise line.

Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.

Kloster and Arison are today seen as the founders of the modern cruise industry. Their first boat, the Sunward, started taking middle-class Americans on week-long cruises to Jamaica from Miami - and it was an immediate success. They also became close friends.

Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west - and the "third world" which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.

So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.

Kloster hated the idea that his liners were just going to take white middle class Americans on cheap holidays in other peoples' hell and misery. He supported the left-wing politicians in Jamaica who said "Tourism is Whorism".

Here is a picture of Kloster, his wife, and a very big boat

 

Kloster held brainstorming sessions in the company to come up with new ideas that would provoke the American tourists to engage with the lives of those they were pointing their cameras at. One brilliant suggestion was that women workers in a Jamaican coffee factory should be given instamatic cameras so they could take picture of the passengers as they toured past them. The aim was to make the tourists feel what it was like to be watched and snapped as if they were animals in a zoo.

In a wonderful and perceptive history of the cruise industry called Devils on the Deep Blue Sea, Kristoffer Garin has described another scheme that Kloster dreamt up. It was called "New Experiences", and involved having a "Jamaican Family in Residence" on each cruise.

The New York Times described what was supposed to happen:

"The passengers will be invited to meet the Jamaicans informally, to dine together, drink, dance and play together, to ask questions and pump them for all kinds of information in friendly conversations with no holds barred, including political and racial problems."

And then - when the ship arrived in Jamaica - there was going to be the "meet the people experiment" where passengers would go and spend a day with middle-class Jamaican families who were like the passengers - doctors would meet doctors, teachers would meet teachers - people Kloster believed would be "articulate enough to communicate".

The only problem was that they couldn't find enough Jamaican middle class families, and many of those who were deemed suitable thought it was incredibly patronising. Plus Kloster found that behind his back in the Miami offices the experiment was called the "Take a Nigger to Lunch Program"

 

Kloster was helped in his vision by his vice-president of public relations, called Herb Hiller who was a bit of an early countercultural management theorist. In 1970 Hiller wrote the greatest company mission statement of all time:

 

But then it all went wrong, because Kloster discovered that his friend, and business partner Ted Arison wasn't a nice capitalist, but a ruthless one.

Kloster claimed that Arison had been taking the advance payments he was supposed to be holding from the bookings and doing all sorts of odd and dodgy things with the money. Plus a lot of it was missing. Kloster accused Arison of cheating him, Arison denied it and there was an enormous row - and Arison left the company taking with him all the future bookings. So Kloster broke into Arison's new offices late at night and stole them back.

Arison set up a new company to try to beat Kloster - it was called Carnival Cruises, and it was funded by a great character called Meshulam Riklis.

Riklis was one of the earliest of the takeover kings of the 1970s and 80s who used junk bonds to build  a giant financial empire. He is also famous for lavishly wining and dining the judges of the Golden Globes awards in 1981 - which some believe led to the unlikely triumph of his actress wife, Pia Zadora, for her film Butterfly.

Here is a picture of Ted Arison.

 

To make Carnival Cruises grow, Arison went downmarket - offering the cruise experience to people who would never have considered it before. Then he had a massive stroke of good luck in 1977 when ABC TV began the Love Boat series. The series was an instantaneous hit and it transformed the image of the cruise liner. It not only portrayed it as a sexual paradise, but crucially a paradise that was open to all. It was the opposite of the exclusive and unattainable world portrayed in Dallas and Dynasty.

 

But to make the cruise affordable Carnival had to cut costs - and Arison did this through tough management. Just how tough was shown on Easter Sunday 1981 when 300 crewmen on two of Carnival's "fun ships" in Miami decided to strike. They weren't unionised, it was a spontaneous outburst against the harsh world they were forced to live and work in, and the low wages.

Ted Arison's son Micky was now second in command. Garin's history describes what Micky then did. He waited four days, and then invited the strikers' leaders to come ashore to talk. But it was a trick.

At the same time Micky sent a fake news helicopter to fly down the side of the boats. The strikers rushed to the deck to wave banners at the helicopter - while at the same time a force of private security men wearing helmets and holding clubs rushed onto the ship. They cornered the terrified strikers, pulled them off the liner and gave them to the immigration authorities waiting on the deck - who promptly deported them back to Honduras.

It couldn't have been more different from Knut Kloster's utopian capitalism.

But Knut was about to have another vision that was going to make everyone in the cruise industry rich beyond their dreams.

Kloster was still running Norwegian Cruise Lines and, in 1986, he came up with "The Phoenix Project" which was going to build a giant ship like nothing else ever seen in the world.

The journalist Kristoffer Garin described Kloster's vision:

"Phoenix would carry a staggering 5200 passengers and an additional 1800 crew - a number that rivalled the entire fleet capacity of any of NCL's competitors. Brochures spoke breathlessly of a ship designed for the 21st Century - a 'floating metropolis" a ship with a skyline.

Phoenix's superstructure would consist of several towers each of them eight or nine stories high, built atop a giant hull spanning the length of four football fields. It would feature beaches, palm trees and a retractable harbor at which smaller ships could dock. Its amenities would include nearly a hundred thousand square feet of convention space"

 

And true to his beliefs, Kloster still saw it as a way of helping create a better world - the brochure described:

"On this particular day, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies land their helicopters on the middle tower to join a conference on capitalism and third world development."

But the board of NCL thought he was mad - and in 1987 Kloster left the company. In his final speech he compared himself to John deLorean and finished by saying "business in America is impersonal" - and disappeared off the scene. Or so it seemed.

Meanwhile in the following years all the other cruise corporations in Miami, led by Carnival, did exactly what Kloster had dreamed of. They built giant superships that were just like the "floating metropolises" he had wanted to build.

The modern world of the cruise mega-liner is remarkably like Project Phoenix - except for one difference - no one comes on a cruise to discuss the problems of the developing world and how to create world unity.

That bit of Kloster's vision didn't make it into the modern cruising world.

Instead the ships became floating palaces where everyone became like an aristocrat on a sea voyage.

In the 1990s the BBC made a docu-soap on one of the new giant ships - the Galaxy, which was owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises who are also based in Miami. Here are some bits from a couple of episodes - it gives you a very good picture of the world on board, and its extravagant weirdness.

I particularly love the "midnight buffet". At midnight the doors to a vast restaurant open and passengers stream in to gorge themselves on elaborate food sculptures, while one of the staff stands above them with a microphone telling them over the speakers the amazing statistics of how much they are consuming on a voyage.

But in the series there are also glimpses of what life is really like below desks. I have cut together all the bits of Edward who has just been promoted to "butler". It gives you a very good sense of the intensity of the job. Edward works eight months straight, very long hours, 7 days a week, with just two hours off every other day.

The modern giant cruise ships that rose up in the 1990s are far more than just boats, they are really floating societies. But those societies are extremely strange.

Many of the liners work like a pure vision of capitalism. The floating worlds pay hardly any tax, most of the workers are protected by very few laws, and often many of them can only survive if they satisfy the needs and desires of the passengers well enough for them to give them a big tip. Free enterprise at its freest.

All this happens because of The Flag of Convenience. It was an idea that the Americans came up with in the early days of the second world war to allow them to send help to Britain. Roosevelt was worried that Hitler might declare war on the US - so a law was passed that allowed American ships to be registered either in Panama or in Liberia.

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism, but it is now used for purely selfish reasons. Many of the cruise companies register their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia, this mean they do not have to pay corporate taxes in the US and aren't bound by many labour regulations.

Journalists and historians who have written about the industry have described the result. On many ships thousands of workers below deck work often 7 days a week, sometimes for fourteen hours a day. They are paid two to three dollars a day - depending entirely on tips to earn a living wage. The work most of them are asked to do on their shifts is impossible for one person to complete, so they in turn have to pay others to help them.

And a weird underground economy often results.

In his history of the industry, Kristoffer Garin has described how many of the workers also have to pay bribes to others elsewhere in the complex hierarchy of the ship - waiters have to bribe the cooks to make sure the food is hot, the cabin cleaners have to bribe the laundry chief to get clean sheets on time. He describes a world in which the cruise lines:

"take full advantage of their Flag of Convenience liberties when it comes to labor. Squeezing the most out of workers in return for the least possible pay is one of the keys to the industry's profitability, and the cruise lines have become extremely adept at it."

In response to such criticisms the cruise companies argue that great improvements have been made in the living conditions for their crews. And they say that the minimal wage - big tip system is the only way to keep the cost of the cruises affordable. They also point out that if a worker gets a lot of tips he or she can make a reasonable wage. But they also admit that it is a tough system

In 2001, the then CEO of Carnival Corp, Bob Dickinson, agreed to be the guinea pig of a BBC Back To The Floor documentary. Dickinson went to work at the lowest crew levels on the Fun Ship MS Imagination on a Carnival cruise in the Caribbean.

You have to admire him for doing it because it gives an amzing insight into just how exhausting and terrifyingly uncertain this world is. The person who is the real star of the film is Alina. She is a Romanian who cleans cabins and is paid $45 a month, and she works with Dickinson in the film.

 

Alina knows Dickinson is the boss, and you can see her holding back. But despite that she knows what she is up to - and she gives you a very clear idea of what life on Carnival's giant "fun ships" is really like.

But at the very same time Knut Kloster returned  - with yet another vision.

He had spotted the central problem with the way the giant cruise liners had developed. They had been created as giant floating theatrical bubbles in which ordinary people could enter and feel for a few days that they were experiencing a luxurious indulgence that previously had been the privilege of just the rich and the upper classes.

But where should the really rich and powerful go - if all the Huggets were behaving as though they  now ruled the world?

Knut Kloster came up with a solution. He was going to design the most luxurious floating metropolis ever, where only the really rich could come aboard. They could buy luxury apartments for millions of pounds and float around the world free of the hoi polloi.

Here is a report from BBC Breakfast Time in 1998 when the dream-boat project was first announced.

Kloster unveiled the ship in 2002. He called it The World. Just like everyone else he appeared to have abandoned his previous visions of world unity and compassion for the poor and downtrodden - this was strictly a utopia for the rich.

Journalists were allowed on for a look - and Oliver Burkeman described what he saw:

 "This is not a private yacht, nor is it a cruise ship," Kloster announced. "It's a vacation lifestyle concept that goes beyond anything that has ever existed."
The World - 644ft long, 12 decks high, built at a reported cost of $ 532m - redefined the meaning of exclusivity. For prices from £1.5m to £5m and above, the ultra-wealthy could purchase homes on what was, in essence, a floating city-state, complete with shopping streets, six restaurants, the only full-sized tennis court at sea, a church, several pools, one of which doubles as a dancefloor, a running track, a 7,000 square foot spa, a helipad, a retractable marina, and one staff member per resident.

The apartments sold really well. Many billionaires were obviously attracted by the fact that the World's multi-denominational chapel was designed by a member of the Norwegian group Ah-Ha.

 

But as the deadline for the setting sail came nearer, something like 30 of the 110 apartments remained unsold. So the company running the ship did something without telling the residents. They let the apartments out to "very rich" people who wanted to go on a sea cruise.

In mid-2002 the World sailed off around the world. And it all started to go wrong - the "very rich" cruise passengers had obviously been attracted by the free drink and started to fall over and vomit. They were behaving like Huggets.  The residents were outraged - and there was literally a mutiny on the ship. In 2003 the residents got together and bought the boat from the banks who owned it.

All the passengers were kicked off - and The World sailed off into mysterious exclusivity.

 

When Knut Kloster and Ted Arison invented the idea of modern cruising over forty years ago - at least one of them had a vision that it could help create a new era of world harmony and peace.

As the cruise-world developed and mutated over the next forty odd years it mirrored the changes in modern capitalism - from a naive utopian belief in transforming the world - to a harsh, narrow utilitarian vision of the free market where everyone above and below decks is expected to behave as "rational utility maximizers"

And today the world of the modern cruise liners also mirrors the present structure of our global society. Millions of people live in a world where they expect the luxuries which were previously only offered to the few. At the same time millions of others around the world struggle daily to create the platform that holds that fake luxury world together.

Meanwhile the small elite who are genuinely rich and powerful float off into the distance on their own boat - and kick anyone off who dares to get drunk and call it a cruise.

Our leaders tell us that we are all in the same boat.

But what will happen if our boat sinks? Will those same leaders be among the first to jump in the lifeboat and speed off into the dark telling us they have gone to get help?

 

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Everybody is always remarking about how stuck our society feels these days. The music doesn't change, the political parties are all exactly the same, and films and TV dramas are almost always set in the past.

We are also stuck with an economic system that is not delivering the paradise that it once promised - but is instead creating chaos and hardship. Yet no-one can imagine a better alternative, so we remain static - paralysed by a terrible political and cultural claustrophobia.

I want to tell the story of another time and another place not so long ago that was also stifled by the absence of novelty and lacking a convincing vision of the future. It was in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s. At the time they called it "the years of stagnation".

 

There are of course vast differences between our present society and the Soviet Union of thirty years ago - for one thing they had practically no consumer goods whereas we are surrounded by them, and for another western capitalism was waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum. But there are also echoes of our present mood - a grand economic system that had once promised heaven on earth had become absurd and corrupted.

Everyone in Russia in the early 1980s knew that the managers and technocrats in charge of the economy were using that absurdity to loot the system and enrich themselves. The politicians were unable to do anything because they were in the thrall of the economic theory, and thus of the corrupt technocrats. And above all no-one in the political class could imagine any alternative future.

In the face of this most Soviet people turned away from politics and any form of engagement with society and lived day by day in a world that they knew was absurd, trapped by the lack of a vision of any other way.

But in the late 1970s a post-political generation rose up in Russia who retreated from all conventional political ideologies, both communist and western capitalist, and instead turned to radical avant-garde culture - in music and in literature - to try and protest against the absurdity of the system. I want to focus on their story - because it is fascinating and forgotten (and they produced some great music) - but also because of what happened to them when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Despite the differences between east and west, I think that the fate of that post-political generation does offer a glimpse of what happens in a stagnant political culture when a door finally opens on a different kind of future. Especially as some of the choices they made were very unexpected - and the outcomes sometimes very sad.

 

At the heart of the Soviet dream was The Plan.

The fundamental idea was that the whole of society could be planned and organised in a rational way. A giant headquarters had been set up in Moscow in the 1920s called Gosplan, it's job was to work out the needs of every single person and then make sure those needs were fulfilled.

And for a while it worked - the Soviet economy grew faster than America in the the 1950s. But then in the 1960s it faltered and those who ran the Plan began to discover that they could not control such a complex system. Their scientifically planned targets began to take on a strange and increasingly absurd life of their own - and the planners found that the system was controlling them.

In 1992 I made a film called The Engineers' Plot which told the story of the Plan and what happened to it. Here is a section from the end which shows the bizarre world the failure of the Plan created for the life of all Soviet citizens.

I've followed it with an extract from a Panorama programme made in 1981. The crew managed to get into the Soviet Union and secretly film bits of everyday life. It is a brilliant and vivid portrait of the emptiness and disillusion that was spreading through all levels of society - and how no-one believed in anything any longer. The woman who talks as she wallpapers a flat expresses this in a beautiful and touching way.

The disillusion had begun back in the 1960s as the economy faltered. As a result a new generation began to turn away from politics - and to begin with they looked to America and its pop culture as an alternative.

The problem was that it was very difficult for Russians to get hold of anything American. But then Dean Reed turned up.

Reed is an extraordinary figure. In the 1950s he had been a not very successful teen idol, but then he reinvented himself in the mid 60s as a singing leftist revolutionary, travelling the world singing songs that attacked American imperialism, not just in Vietnam but in Latin America and the Middle East.

 

This led him inevitably to the Eastern bloc countries, and then to the Soviet Union where he became a superstar. It was a bit odd - a generation of Soviet teenagers loved Dean Reed because he brought American music and modern culture into their society, yet Reed himself loathed America and had come to Moscow as part of his quest to expose the corrupting influence that America was having on the world.

Back in the 1990s the Arena series made a great  film about the life - and very strange death - of Dean Reed. It was presented by the journalist Reggie Nadelson. Here is an extract about Dean Reed's arrival in the Soviet Union and the effect he had. The Russian rock critic, Atermy Troitsky, who appears will also turn up later in this story.

The disillusion with the communist dream grew throughout the 1970s. The millions of people who worked in the factories began to notice that the managers whose job was to run the plan were beginning to use the absurdities for their own purposes - to loot the system for the own profit.

Then in 1979 came the invasion of Afghanistan. It is now looked back on - rightly - as a disastrous decision that further undermined the Soviet Union. But what is forgotten is how for many of a young, disillusioned generation in Russia it was seen as a way to regenerate the ideals that were collapsing at home.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who used to be Britain's ambassador to Moscow, has written a wonderful book called Afgantsy. It tells the story of the Soviet invasion through the eyes of those who took part, and that includes the thousands of aid workers and civilian advisers that also went in. Their aim was to try and build 'socialism' in Afghanistan, just as thousands of westerners would later try and build 'democracy'.

 

Braithwaite quotes a Soviet youth adviser called Vladimir Snegirev who went to Afghanistan. In March 1982 he describes watching the Afghan New Year celebrations in the Kabul Stadium, and how they express the dream of creating a new world.

"There is a striking contrast which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador - a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don't have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute"

For Snegirev it was the ageing and corrupt Soviet leadership  under Brezhnev that was the problem. He later wrote of the optimistic vision that Afghanistan seemed to offer:

"Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That's what I thought, that's what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives.

In Afghanistan it was as if time had gone backwards, but now a power had arisen in this land which wanted to drag the people out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned?"

Here is part of a documentary made in Kabul in 1983 that filmed life under the Soviet occupation. It shows the Soviet advisers trying to transform this ancient world, including the celebrations for the new idea - Afghan Womens' Day

And here are some of the video rushes of the celebrations of Afghan independence day in 2002. They are happening exactly twenty years later in the Kabul Stadium - the very place that Snegirev watched the Afghan women celebrate their liberation. Now the women tell the camera they are celebrating the freedom brought by America and democracy.

But soon millions of Russians at home began to find out the futility and the horror of what was really happening in Afghanistan. Zinc coffins containing the dead soldiers were dumped in the middle of the night on the doorsteps of their families (sometimes it is alleged they contained the wrong body), soldiers returned with smuggled photographs and diaries that recorded brutal and horrific massacres of Afghans.

The mood of the generation who had turned away from politics and ideology now became much harder, cynical and sceptical. And one of the main casualties of this was the singer Dean Reed. Those who had once idolised Reed now turned against him.

Reed found himself trapped. He wanted to counter what he saw as American imperialist propaganda - and in 1986 he appeared on the US current affairs show Sixty Minutes to defend the Soviet Union, and that included defending their presence in Afghanistan.

To the Russian youth, who increasingly knew the truth about Afghanistan, this was absurd. He was now seen as Brezhnev's propagandist. And Reed found himself isolated. This isolation was powerfully expressed in a bitter song written as a message to him by one of his few friends left in America called Johnny Rosenburg.

A few weeks later Dean Reed was found drowned in a lake in a forest in East Germany. There are many conspiracy theories, some say he was killed by the CIA, others believe it was the KGB. But it was probably suicide.

Here is Soviet youth turning against Reed, and Johnny Rosenberg's song - from the Arena film.

Instead, in the 1980s, many Soviet youth turned to a new kind of music and culture that also borrowed from America, but it was one that attacked both the hypocrisy of western bourgeois capitalism and state communism. It came directly out of the punk movement in New York in the mid to late 1970s.

One of the key early figures was a Russian avant-garde write in exile in New York called Eduard Limonov. He had been expelled from Moscow by the KGB in 1974 and he arrived in New York just as the punk scene was taking off. Limonov became friends with people like Richard Hell of the band Television, Patti Smith, and the Ramones.

Limonov took the punk vision (best expressed, he said, in Richard Hell's song Blank Generation) and fused it with with Soviet disillusion. Limonov argued that that the West was in many ways just a more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, with more sophisticated propaganda - plus a similar intolerance of real dissent.

Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

In 1979 Limonov expressed this in a novel called It's Me, Eddie. In it he portrays a fictional version of himself on a dark, violent and pornographic journey through the hidden underworld of America. It was funny but also a cold and merciless depiction of the real effect Power has on modern American society and those in it. It shocked many people - but it became a best-seller in France and Germany, and Limonov was hailed as the voice of a new punk avant-garde.

These ideas had a big effect on the blank generation in the Soviet Union - and a new avant-garde underground grew up in Leningrad and Moscow who turned to culture, above all music, as a way of expressing the absurdity of their society, something that they believed politics was incapable of doing.

In 1986 the BBC captured the tamer end of this underground in a documentary they made about a Leningrad musician called Sergey Kuryokhin and his friends.

Kuryokhin was a classically trained pianist who had embraced the new musical radicalism - and formed a band called Popular Mechanics. Here are some extracts from the film - with Popular Mechanics rehearsing, conducted in a wonderful way by Kuryokhin. It is also a very good picture of the mood of that group, many of them children of high-up party members, who have completely detached from believing in any political future.

But the punk movement was not just composed of the children of the party bosses. In the 1980s a very big and influential cultural underground flourished throughout Russia, and it was much more than just a copy of western punk. One of its leading bands came from Omsk in Siberia, it was called Grazhdanskaya Oborona which translates as Civil Defence (the name was shortened to GrOb - which also means grave or tomb).

GrOb was led by a legendary singer called Yegor Letov. He was once incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Omsk for three months because of his rebelliousness. The music that Letov created was far more interesting than the western punk that had inspired it. His songs mixed modern noise with Russian folk in a full on attack on the emptiness of the world he saw around him.

 

The very perceptive journalist Mark Ames who edited the eXile magazine in Russia throughout the 1990s, and knew many of the avant-garde, says that Letov was one of the great geniuses of Russian literature.

Ames wrote of Letov:

"Punk may have started in New York and London, but the bravest spawn of all was Letov and his followers. When he began in the 1980s, Letov shunned the artsy irony of other anti-establishment bands in favour of raw violence and reckless confrontation against the blandness of the Soviet Union and the vapid optimism of Gorbachev's Perestroika. He left every band and every dissident in the dust, and they never forgave him for it.

Letov himself was the incarnation of what Edward Limonov calls "Russian Maximalism", the tendency to take things to their extreme."

Here is part of one of GrOb's greatest songs - Everything Is Going According to Plan - followed b a beautiful song by another member of the Siberian punk scene, Yanka Dyagileva, who was also Letov's lover in the 1980s.

 

I have cut the music to pictures of what was just around the corner, the sudden collapse of the Soviet union that began in 1989, and its strange aftermath. I have also added the lyrics to GrOb's song. The key lyric to Yanka Dyagileva's song that follows is "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."

With the collapse of the Soviet Union this generation faced a terrible question. In the 1980s they had retreated from any engagement with political ideology of both left and right, and they distrusted the west as much as the hated communist oppression.

They had turned to culture instead and built an ad-hoc avant-garde movement to try and mimic and expose the absurdity of the system.

But now the system had gone - what did they believe in?

One of the group decided to try and express this dilemma in a dramatic way. In 1991 Sergey Kuryokhin, of the band Popular Mechanics, went on  a popular TV talk show. He set out to prove that Lenin was really a mushroom. Kuryokhin wanted to show that in a society where no-one believed in anything the media could be used to make anything real.

To western eyes it is a bit silly, but at the time it caused a sensation. Here is a short extract

And you can watch a longer version here

The leading members of this post-political generation were now going to split and go off in very different ways.

Some made very sad, personal choices. In 1991 Yanka Dyagileva was found drowned in a river. It is believed that she committed suicide. Two other leading members of the underground punk scene also committed suicide.

But others decided to use the ideas that had driven the underground movement to try and create a new kinds of politic and new ways of running society in the wake of the catastrophic collapse.

These visions would manifest themselves in very different - and opposing - ways. But what linked them was a belief that in the avant-garde culture lay the seeds of a way of escaping the old, failed forms of politics.

The leader of one of these movements was the novelist Eduard Limonov.

When the Soviet Union collapsed Limonov had been allowed to return from exile. In 1992 he watched aghast as Yeltsin and a small group of technocrats decided to impose western-style free market capitalism overnight through "shock therapy". To Limonov this was a disaster, because from his experience of America he was convinced that American capitalism was no different from Soviet totalitarianism. It was just more subtle in its forms of oppression.

Limonov set up a political party. He called it The National Bolshevik Party. It's aim he said was to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik revolution and integrate it with a modern nationalism.

The National Bolshevik Party almost immediately became the bete noire of both Soviet and Western liberals who saw it simply as the rise of a right-wing nationalism that was trying to hold back  the inevitable modernisation of Russia.

This seemed to be confirmed dramatically when, in 1992, the BBC filmed Limonov on the mountains overlooking the besieged city of Sarajevo. He had come there as a supporter of Radovan Karadzic - and the film shows Limonov firing a large Serbian sniper rifle into the heart of Sarajevo.

It was part of one of the most imaginative and perceptive pieces of documentary journalism the BBC has ever made. It is called Serbian Epics - made by Pavel Pawlikowski. The central figure of the film is Radovan Karadzic and the poetry he writes, and in one hour the film tells you more about the Bosnian conflict and its roots than any other film I have seen.

Here is the section containing Limonov - and it is also beautifully shot.

The shots of Limonov with the sniper rifle caused a scandal in Russia. Limonov has always claimed that the sequence was edited in a way that distorted what was happening.

But what is true is that Limonov, his party and the ideas behind it are far more complicated and interesting that they at first seem.

Limonov has explicitly said that his aim is to take ideas and attitudes from avant-garde art and music and use them to try and create a new kind of confrontational politics - one that could break through the fake ideas of western democracy to show how the new bourgeois elites were greedily destroying the Russian state.

Much of this Limonov says comes directly from his experience in New York in the 1970s:

"Loud denial of so-called values of civilisation, grotesque, trash, screaming, some borrowings of Rightist aesthetics, were all common for the New York City punk movement of the 1970s as well as for the first National Bolsheviks in the 1990s.

The newspaper of the party 'Linomka' (the name of a hand grenade) was in the 1990s the most radical and most punish of the whole world. With its slogans like "Eat the Rich!" or "A Good Bourgeois is a Dead Bourgeois!" or "Capitalism is Shit!" We were in the punk tradition, what else?…."

And the party symbol was deliberately designed, Limonov says, to play just such punkish games

 

One of the first members of the National Bolshevik Party was the punk legend Yegor Letov - leader of GrOb (he was member number 4). Then Sergey Kuryokhin - the leader of the Popular Mechanics band joined and the party soon became a home to many members of the 1980s avant garde music scene.

You can watch some footage of Letov playing at an NBP rally here.

Together they reached back into the past - and borrowed, as punk had done, from fascist and revolutionary aesthetics (and even further - both Limonov and Latov idolised Mayakovsky), in order to invent dramatic ways of confronting contemporary smug westernised culture. They also associated with some very nasty people who took nationalism to racist and xenophobic extremes.

To western liberals who want to spread democracy round the world someone like Limonov is a frightening alien because he is reawakening the dangerous force of nationalism. But he in turn sees western liberals as fools who have been duped, and are really the unwitting agents of a corrupt economic global elite. Limonov believes that the only way to confront that corruption is to harness a force that appeals to the mass of the people.

Here are some glimpses of Limonov and his party on a march called by the communist party in 1997 as President Yeltsin was letting the oligarchs loot Russia - Limonov's young supporters mingling with the old communists. One of the National Bolshevik Party banners has a fantastic slogan.

RUSSIA IS EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOTHING

But there was another route that this generation took.

The key figure is a man called Vladislav Surkov. He is half-Russian, half-Chechen. He was born in the provinces, but like all the others he came to Moscow in the 1980s.

 

Surkov is shadowy and secretive, but he has given a very unusual window into his life and ideas. In 2009 Surkov allegedly published what seems to be an autobiographical novel under an assumed name. It is a cynical satire called Almost Zero and it tells the story of Egor, a disillusioned youth who comes to Moscow in the 1980s.

Egor can see through the fake ideology of the Soviet Union and he becomes a hanger-on of the Moscow underground movement - dabbling in avant-garde theatre. In the post-communist 1990s he then becomes a cynical PR man who will promote anything for anyone.

Egor is compared in the novel to Hamlet - someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything. In real life Surkov worked in the late 1990s doing PR for the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but then, in 1999 he switched and started working for Putin - and became a ruthless manipulator of modern politics.

Reuters/Corbis/Sergei Karpukhin

Surkov created a modern and innovative way of managing the new democratic system - but in a way that his critics say has sidelined the mass of the people and completely diminished real democracy.

To do this Surkov created a constantly shifting political tableau. As well as being one of the architects of Putin's own party, United Russia, Surkov also allegedly helped to set up opposition parties the Kremlin could then use for their own purposes. And he copied Eduard Limonov - he set up a quasi-military nationalist youth group called Nashi.

Nashi claims to be an "anti-oligarchic, anti-fascist movement" but members have reportedly compared themselves to the Hitler Youth. And the Kremlin allegedly uses them to beat up opposition journalists.

At the same time Surkov writes lyrics for a rock group called Agata Kristi and essays on conceptual art.

A TV journalist who worked in Soviet television called Peter Pomerantsev has written a fascinating article about Surkov. You can find it here. In it he argues that Surkov has turned Russian politics into postmodern absurdist theatre. In a way, just like Limonov, Surkov is adapting avant-garde ideas to this new political world.

"The novelist Eduard Limonov describes Surkov himself as having 'turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models'.

There's something in this. In contemporary Russia the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.

Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable."

Here is part of a report the journalist Tim Whewell did for Newnight about the forces behind Nashi. He shows them using the very same slogan - "Bury the Dollar" - that Limonov's party uses.

And at one moment Whewell manages to doorstep Surkov and grab an interview. Whewell is a brilliant reporter with a range and cleverness that few others beat.

Eduard Limonov and Vladislav Surkov hate each other.

But in many ways they are very similar because both are convinced that western democracy is a complete sham - and both are trying to create political alternatives to what they see as the second wave of stagnation that took over Russia in the 1990s. This was the result of the corruption caused by the attempt to impose western capitalist and democratic ideas on the country.

Surkov believes that the truth is that the idea of democracy will always be an illusion, that all democracies will always be "managed democracies" whether east or west. So the solution is for a strong state to manipulate people - so that they feel they are free, while they are really being managed.

Limonov's solution is the opposite. He wants to bring The People back onto the stage of history - and make them active participants in building a new future. He believes that the way to do this is to use revolutionary propaganda, and to borrow from avant-garde ideas of the spectacle, in order to galvanise the masses and break through their torpor.

Opinion in the west is divided about Limonov. Many see him as leading the resurgence of the neo-fascist right. But others believe that he is misunderstood - that Limonov is genuinely trying to create a new kind of politics.

A French novelist called Emmanuel Carrere has just won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for a widely-acclaimed novel about Limonov's life. In it he portrays Limonov as an ambiguous hero of our time who is struggling with the great question of our age - how to create a vision of a new and different future in a post-political age where all ideologies are despised and distrusted.

Here are the rushes of one of Limonov's "revolutionary provocations" where members of the National Bolshevik Party invaded the Finance Ministry in the heart of Moscow in 2006. It is very like some of the activities of the Occupy movement that would happen later in London and New York - and it may be that both Surkov and Limonov are ahead of us. We're just at the start of trying to work out how to escape from our years of stagnation.

The protestors are shouting "Return the Money to The People" and "Putin Must Go".

I've also included some rushes of members of the NBP held in a cage in a court after another provocation - including one moment that shows just why liberals are frightened of Limonov's party.

This is followed by Limonov outside the court talking about the trial. The woman you glimpse behind him in the swirly coloured blouse is Anna Politkovskaya - who would be shot by an assassin in 2006.

Then, last December, thousands of people in Moscow came out and demonstrated against Putin and his "managed democracy". They too were shouting "Putin Must Go". It was exactly what Limonov and his supporters had been doing for ten years - but on a vast scale.

Limonov held his own rally alongside - obviously hoping that he would be the vanguard for this new insurgency. But he and his supporters were completely ignored. The protests swept on past them.

A week later, in response to the protests, Putin demoted Surkov - sidelining him from power. Surkov gave a great quote:

"I am too odious for this brave new world"

Maybe history is finally moving Limonov's way, but in its ruthless way it is leaving him behind - his job done.

Or maybe not. Maybe the new Surkovs will find a way of managing the protests. No one knows

Meanwhile rock music in Russia is a pale shadow of its former glory. Last year one of Russia's most famous rock critics, Artemy Troitsky, went on television and attacked rock musicians for becoming the poodles of those in power. In particular he savaged the lead singer of Agata Kristi, Vadin Samoylov, for being "the trained poodle of Surkov". This is because Surkov had written lyrics for Agata Kristi.

Here is a picture of Putin with his poodle - Tosya. The Kremlin image managers have always tried to keep Tosya hidden - because they consider poodles not to be very butch.

 

Troitsky's remarks caused a massive row, and he is now being sued for criminal slander.

Troitsky has reportedly defended himself by saying he loves dogs - and that he didn't think that calling someone a "poodle" was an insult. Poodles he said in court are actually "kind, intelligent, endearing dogs" and that he would not be offended if he was called "Che Guevara's trained poodle"

Brave man - standing up against the system.

 

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