I hail from another Russia, one that came to be in August 1991. Over the next 25 years, my Russia would mutate into something entirely different. In truth, its undoing began at the very moment it was born. The man who gave it the first dose of lethal poison was Alexander Nevzorov, now a mildly obscure liberal critic of Vladimir Putin. A star of combative perestroika-era television, Nevzorov initially exposed corruption, and indulged in showing gruesome footage from crime scenes. This was shocking for viewers, who had for decades been protected from such pictures. But in 1991, Nevzorov found a new cause, lionizing OMON riot police in Riga who had conducted a dirty war against independence movements in Baltic countries. For several months, the Riga OMON terrorized Latvia. On the night between Jan. 19 and 20, they shot five people dead. On July 31, they executed seven people who manned a customs post at the border between neighboring Lithuania and Belarus. For Russian and other Soviet democrats in 1991, the Riga OMON were despicable villains. Nevzorov looked the other way, producing instead a series of documentaries that pictured them as noble defenders of the collapsing empire, waging a desperate war against an overwhelming horde of pro-Western zombies. The films were collectively titled "Nashi." ‘Nashi’ is a pronoun best translated from Russian as "our guys," or literally — "ours". A piece of genius political branding, the term evokes scenes from Soviet war films, as well as fist and knife fights between teenagers from rival neighborhoods. It harks back to ancient mammalian pack instincts, and it reduces the complexity of the world to a simple black and white “us against them” picture. The term also had the phonetical brilliance of hinting at the Nazis, a forbidden fruit that felt sweet to nationalist-leaning Russians of the perestroika era. But just as well, it also appealed to Bolshevik-inspired internationalists, because it didn’t necessarily presume discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. It didn't matter, for example, that the commander of Riga OMON Czeslaw Mlynnik was an ethnic Pole. What mattered is that he remained loyal to Moscow and stood firm in the face of what Nevzorov pictured as the coming Apocalypse. Nashi films became the first manifestation of the emerging reactionary coalition, for which the democrats coined the term “red-browns,” thus reflecting its synthetic National-Bolshevik nature.

Journalist Alexander Nevzorov working at a rally in St. Petersburg, U.S.S.R., February 1991. Pavel Markin / TASS

This was, however, a very different Russia. Things that seem unconceivable now were the broadly accepted norm back then. For example, the day after OMON’s attack on the Riga barricades, and a week after the massacre of pro-independence protesters by Soviet troops in Vilnius, at least half a million people rallied in the center of Moscow in support of Baltic independence. It was one of the largest rallies in the history of Russia. It demonstrated how important the Baltic independence cause was for the Russian pro-democracy movement. That sentiment, which did not last long, was the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully 11 months later. The red-browns were the underdogs of the time, unable to compete with the prevailing democrats. When the putschists were defeated in the Moscow August coup, Nevzorov created a political movement called Nashi. He was joined by Riga OMON commander Mlynnik, the latter’s political patron, Latvian politician Viktors Alksnis, and a motley crew of ultra-nationalists and neo-Communist politicians. Liberal journalists branded the group as "nashists," hinting at the fascist character of their ideology. Regardless, the project proved premature. With little take off in the fall of 1991, Nevzorov gradually lost interest in politics and started breeding horses. But Nevzorov had pioneered a narrative which came to dominate the political discourse in Russia over the next two decades. In 1992, the red-browns made a major comeback, fueled by the disappointment with Yegor Gaidar’s “shock therapy” and real human tragedies caused by the poorly thought-out dissolution of the U.S.S.R. The red-brown rallies started drawing as many people as democratic ones just a few years ago. The Russian parliament, elected by the Soviet rules in 1990, drifted in that direction, too. The climax came in the fall of 1993, when a broad red-brown coalition, including Mlynnik and Alksnis, came to the defense of the rebellious Russian parliament. The uprising was brutally squashed by troops loyal to president Boris Yeltsin. Nonetheless, two months later Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR, a force fueled by the same newly-created red-brown Nashist ideology, came first in a free parliamentary election. The developments famously prompted writer Yury Karyakin to shout live on television: “Russia, you’ve gone nuts!”. The events of 1993 destroyed the democratic coalition that brought President Boris Yeltsin to power. Many democrats lamented the heavy-handed dissolution of the parliament, and sympathized with its defenders. Others became obsessed with the idea that Russia needed a dictator like the Chilean Augusto Pinochet to modernize efficiently. Their effort to identify and coach a suitable figure first resulted in the promotion of general Alexander Lebed, who was touted in the West as the "iron man” Russia really needed. That first idea of a Russian Pinochet was eventually replaced with a more flexible and sophisticated one in the form of Vladimir Putin. Under Putin, the unwinding of 1991 Russia, hitherto a process carried out by stealth, proceeded in an increasingly open manner.

Activists of youth group Nashi rally to mark the 55th birthday of Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Oct.7, 2007. Ivan Sekretarev / AP