THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 23
there will be no vacuum of power, not
for a minute.”
Ernst got into a waiting car with re-
cordings of Yeltsin’s and Putin’s speeches
and, with a police escort, sped through
the capital to Ostankino, a sprawling
complex of television studios. At noon,
as night fell in Russia’s Far East, he gave
the order to broadcast Yeltsin’s address.
Yeltsin was hosting a luncheon with his
ministers and generals in the Presiden-
tial quarters at the time. “The chande-
liers, the crystal, the windows—every-
thing glittered with a New Year’s glow,”
Yeltsin recalled later, in his memoirs. A
television was brought in, and his guests
watched the announcement in silence.
Putin’s wife at the time, Lyudmila, was
at home, and didn’t see the broadcast,
so she was confused when a friend called
to congratulate her; she assumed that
the friend was offering a standard New
Year’s greeting. Later in the day, a news
segment showed Yeltsin and Putin
standing side by side in the Presiden-
tial office. “Take care of Russia,” Yeltsin
told Putin as they left the room.
The following morning on Chan-
nel One, after a kitschy variety show,
the network cut to breaking news from
Chechnya. Putin had gone on a surprise
trip to visit Russian troop positions,
where he wore a fur-trimmed parka and
handed out hunting knives. He told the
soldiers that the war they were fight-
ing was “not just about defending the
honor and dignity of the country” but
also “about putting an end to the dis-
integration of Russia.” Ernst worried
that the separatism in Chechnya could
spread, and believed that Russia’s insti-
tutions of power were atrophied and
vulnerable to collapse. “In moments
when everything has gone to hell, a per-
son shows up, who might not have
known of his mission ahead of time,
but who grabs the architecture of the
state and holds it together,” he told me
recently. He thought that this person
was Putin.
In the lead-up to the election, Chan-
nel One, under Ernst, portrayed Putin
as Yeltsin’s inevitable successor, and re-
lentlessly attacked his rivals, presenting
them as infirm, corrupt, even murder-
ous. Putin’s poll numbers began rising
by four or five points in a week, and he
quickly went from an unknown entity
to the most popular politician in the
country. Channel One had backed pol-
iticians before, but this was something
new: the invention of a candidate from
thin air, a television phenomenon from
the start. Putin won handily and, after-
ward, Ernst began to craft a visual lan-
guage for his Presidency. He suggested
that the inauguration be moved from
the State Kremlin Palace, a modernist
concrete box, to St. Andrew’s Hall, an
ornate tsarist throne room that would
provide an imperial spectacle. He felt
that the old era, for both Russia and
Channel One, was giving way to an-
other. As Ernst put it, “We would find
a new intonation together.”E
rnst was born in 1961, the son of a
well-known Soviet scientist. He
was bright and ambitious and, by the
time he was in his twenties, bristled at
the restrictions imposed on citizens by
the country’s decaying gerontocracy.
From a young age, Ernst was obsessed
with film. In 1986, when he was twenty-
five, he left a senior post at a state ge-
netics laboratory and, inspired by the
convulsions of perestroika, drifted among
Moscow’s quasi-underground directors
and filmmakers. He shot several music
videos, including a concert by Aquar-
ium, the godfathers of Russian rock,
who, in 1988, performed in Leningrad
with Dave Stewart from the British pop
band Eurythmics.
I met with Ernst in the summer of
2018, in a voluminous conference room
at Channel One. He described his early
days with vibrating enthusiasm. A cen-
tral part of his self-image is clearly still
grounded in that period, when he was
not an all-powerful television demigod
but a scrappy outsider. “I felt like a
person who was deceiving everyone,”
he told me. “The Soviet Union was still
in full force—and yet there I was, with
no formal education as a director, film-
ing some Western musicians, not to
mention my rocker friends, who them-
selves had been banned only two or
three years before.”
In 1988, he became a director at “View-
point,” a news-magazine program that
gained a devoted following for its ear-
nest discussion of topics that weren’t cov-
ered elsewhere: corruption in the Com-
munist Party, the failing Soviet war in
Afghanistan, the fledgling class of mil-
lionaires. Viewers in the late Soviet erahad become accustomed to a heavy lexi-
con of bureaucratese and boosterism that
verged on the absurd. In his book on the
paradoxes of the time, “Everything Was
Forever, Until It Was No More,” Alexei
Yurchak, a Russian-American anthro-
pologist, describes how, for decades,
during the televised funeral of a Soviet
dignitary, announcers would note that
the official was “buried on Red Square
by the Kremlin wall.” Eventually, space
on the square became scarce, and high-
ranking functionaries were instead cre-
mated and their ashes placed inside the
wall itself. Viewers could see that the ac-
tion on their television did not match
the voice-over, and state linguists peti-
tioned the Central Committee to up-
date the text. Amazingly, the appeal was
rejected. “Since nothing about the rep-
resentation of the world was verifiably
true or false, the whole of reality became
ungrounded,” Yurchak writes.
“Viewpoint,” by contrast, spoke hon-
estly and clearly, pushing the country
to “verbalize things that were impos-
sible to say before,” Ernst told me with
pride. In August, 1991, when a cabal of
Communist hard-liners in the security
services mounted a coup to put an end
to Gorbachev’s perestroika, the crew
of “Viewpoint” hid equipment in their
apartments and went on the air with
emergency programming. The coup
failed, and, soon after, the Soviet Union
fell apart. That December, cameras
filmed the Soviet flag being lowered at
the Kremlin for the last time.
Ernst once told an interviewer that,
compared with “Viewpoint,” perhaps
“only Boris Yeltsin himself played a
larger role in bringing down the So-
viet state.” But, when we spoke at Chan-
nel One, Ernst emphasized that the
“Viewpoint” team members didn’t see
themselves as revolutionaries, even if
history pushed them in that direction.
“When you’re taking part in a big his-
torical process, you don’t always under-
stand how it will develop down the
line,” he told me.
In 1991, he launched an arts-review
show called “Matador” (he simply liked
the sound of the word), which was un-
like anything previously seen on Rus-
sian television. Ernst appeared with long
hair and a motorcycle jacket, and nar-
rated segments on such topics as the
avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner