Russians

by Gregory Feifer

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  For Mama

  Outside the Kremlin, August 19, 1991. (Igor Tabakov)

  When I returned to Moscow the following year—here at the Kievskaya train station—during the first heady days of post-communism, the government was staving off economic collapse. (Adam Goodheart)

  1

  The Hidden Russia

  One of the characteristic operative features of [Muscovite political culture] is, whether one is dealing with the sixteenth century or with the twentieth, the rule “Iz izby soru ne vynesi” (literally, “Do not carry rubbish out of the hut”) remains in operation: i.e., one does not reveal to non-participants authentic information concerning politics, political groupings, or points of discord.

  —Edward Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways”1

  Nothing suggested the day would be different from other Mondays in Vilnius, the capital of what was then the Soviet republic of Lithuania. That meant no breakfast for more than two hours after our train arrived because no cafés we found while wandering the baroque city’s entrancing but empty streets would open until 9:00 a.m. If, however, what gave their staffs the right to show up for work when office employees did was supposedly egalitarian communism, Lithuanians had so little liking for it that they were busy fomenting opposition to Soviet rule, having declared independence from Moscow the previous year.

  Soviet troops had killed more than a dozen people in January when they suppressed a protest supporting Lithuania’s nationalist government. But there had been no violence since then, and on the tranquil morning of August 19, 1991, it would have been hard to imagine that the Soviet republic would soon be not only independent but also a member of the European Union. Three days later, however, that would be very imaginable.

  I was nineteen that summer of my first—and, it would turn out, last—visit to the dying USSR. After capping my freshman year in college with three months in Moscow, I was on a weeklong lark through the Baltic republics with a young, irrepressibly good-natured correspondent for the Soviet Union’s most daring new television station. Hunting for something to eat, Kolya and I encountered only a lone driver cursing his broken-down truck and several dog walkers amid architecture that would have looked more at home on the Mediterranean than anywhere near the usual sprawl of prefabricated Soviet housing. We trudged along cobblestoned streets lined by decaying buildings with pretty courtyards that appeared to have remained unchanged for a century until we found another café. Luckily Kolya, short for Nikolai, was a skilled charmer as well as an up-and-coming reporter and close friend. Banging on the glass door, he convinced the stern waitress within to supply us with coffee and rolls, testimony to another fact of Soviet life: sufficient inventiveness or persistence often got what you wanted. Kolya even induced the pretty young woman to smile and disclose her phone number before she asked whether we’d heard the news that day.

  “We’re just off the train,” Kolya replied. “We’re lucky enough to have seen you on this lovely morning.”

  “Well, you might want to know there’s been a coup in Moscow,” she said deadpan.

  Since Kolya’s own little coup of securing our breakfast had involved overcoming the typical Lithuanian reluctance to speak Russian, the language of the oppressors, we guessed she was trying to joke with us. Still, we returned to the train station to inquire about tickets back to Moscow just in case they might be needed.

  There were no tickets to Moscow. Or to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called. No tickets to anywhere in the vast Soviet Union, not even for a hefty bribe, which usually produced seats when none were supposedly available. Struggling to contain a touch of panic, we rushed to the platforms. Since my Soviet visa wasn’t valid for Vilnius, my presence there was illegal. But wanting to stay out of trouble and to rescue the suitcases I’d left in Moscow were secondary to not wanting to miss anything historic that might be taking place there. A real crisis still seemed unlikely, especially because we saw nothing out of the ordinary—at least no crowds storming trains. Taking no chances, however, we found a young conductor on a train heading to Leningrad—the closest we could get to Moscow—and bribed our way into a sleeping compartment.

  Far from being sold out, the train was virtually empty. When it jolted out of the station, the only others in our car were the conductor and a friend of his, who were sharing a bottle of vodka: more testimony to the lack of Soviet interest in supply and demand, we hoped, than an indication that a coup had truly taken place. As the train rattled northeastward, we still didn’t know whether the waitress had been joking or that we’d lucked onto one of the last trains out of Vilnius before rail traffic was halted.

  Several hours later, the loudspeaker in our compartment crackled to life. During a news conference taking place in Moscow, which was barely audible, a group of old-guard Politburo bosses announced that they’d formed an emergency committee to take temporary control of the Soviet Union because General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was ill.

  Kolya’s dark complexion turned pale. “Then it is true,” he whispered. “And it’s the end!”

  That wasn’t overdramatization on his part. Kolya had started at Channel 2 earlier that year while he was still a third-year college student, after the station’s launch by Boris Yeltsin, then the increasingly powerful president of the Soviet Union’s Russian Republic, by far the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics. The station, one of Yeltsin’s efforts to burnish his credentials as a reformer, attracted some of the brightest stars of television journalism, who were given the freedom to broadcast their own scripts from a cramped studio inside Moscow’s sprawling television complex. Kolya’s work for the country’s most aggressive news channel—not to mention a temporary job at CNN’s Moscow bureau, where we’d met earlier in the summer—would surely put him in serious trouble during the recriminations that would no doubt follow.

  Fishing out a bottle from his backpack, he poured a large shot of vodka into a stained tea glass. Down the corridor, the conductor was hosting a loud, drunken card game. His acrid tobacco smoke billowed into the corridor as the train rattled past green fields and forests under looming gray clouds.

  “They won’t send you to Siberia,” I said, unable to think of anything more reassuring.

  “Oh yes they will. Our whole station will go. We’ll be first.”

  “You’ll think of a way out. Pour another shot.”

  He poured. The train trundled on. I thought I already knew enough about Russia to appreciate how resigned and brave Kolya was.

  Getting to the moon would have been easier than finding a hotel room in Leningrad. We spent the night in the very cramped apartment of a friend of a friend of mine on the outskirts of town, where flipping between television channels produced only Swan Lake on his small screen: a sure sign of trouble. The following morning, our host—an enterprising young waiter obsessed by his large collection of previously banned Western rock albums—got us overnight train tickets to Moscow by calling in a favor. A favorite oxford shirt of mine was added to the cost.

  Before leaving, we joined a mass of protesters who had taken over Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main thoroughfare. The sun shone brightly. Until very recently, the red, white and blue flags of imperial Russia that some were waving wo
uld have been a display of shocking insubordination to the communist regime. We now knew that Gorbachev, who had initiated the policies of perestroika (attempted economic restructuring) and glasnost (considerable loosening of controls on free speech), had been put under house arrest while he was vacationing in Crimea. It was up to the people to take a stand against the coup, and they were doing it. After seventy years of communist repression, the unbelievable appeared to be unfolding before our eyes.

  We went to sleep on the train that evening, uncertain whether we’d make it to Moscow because a curfew had been imposed. Dark clouds hanging over the capital in the morning made the weather cold as well as rainy, and the news that Soviet armored personnel carriers had killed three young protesters near the US embassy during the night further darkened the mood.

  Kolya went to the television studios to find out what was happening, and I made my way to the so-called White House, an architectural eyesore built in the 1980s on the Moscow River to house the Russian Republic’s parliament, now the center of protest against the coup plotters who were holed up in the Kremlin, not far away. Yeltsin was inside with a group of other self-styled “democrats.” As thousands milled around outside, the streets were littered with gutted buses, iron rods and a seemingly random collection of objects that had been hauled there to construct “barricades” of symbolic importance that wouldn’t have done more to stop an attack than the protesters’ umbrellas. However, a division of unarmed tanks that had been persuaded to back Yeltsin had maneuvered to stand with their turrets pointing away from the building, demonstrating solidarity. Many were adorned with flowers.

  That more people who were presumably hunkering down in their apartments didn’t join the relatively thin crowds in a city of some ten million heightened a general feeling of foreboding that the coup might succeed. The protesters formed a human chain around the White House, where dozens of so-called meetingi sprang up: circles of citizens who argued about the merits of the protest and its chance of success. Others huddled around the few people who had radios, grasping at any scrap of news about what was happening in the White House and the Kremlin. More crowds gathered in front of soldiers who had blocked off access to the Kremlin and Red Square. Agitated protesters tried to persuade the soldiers to join them. “Listen to the people!” one middle-aged woman screamed, but it was impossible to determine the effect.

  By late afternoon, I was back near the White House when a man announced that the standoff had ended. The radio he was carrying had broadcast a report that the coup plotters had dispersed, some to make a desperate effort to meet with Gorbachev in Crimea. A plane carrying Yeltsin allies was in hot pursuit.

  As if on cue, the summer clouds dispersed and a bright sun shone on what felt like a liberated city. Could it really be over? Certainly the atmosphere quickly changed. Happy clusters of Muscovites stood around laughing and exchanging war stories about the tense hours that had just ended as if they were long past. As the sun set, municipal workers set up a stage in front of the White House. Rock bands materialized, their music adding to the celebration of deliverance by the exhilarated crowds that walked about, discharging nervous energy. Despite the great flow of beer and vodka, however, it was supremely difficult to believe the plotters had been faced down, their last attempt to save communism foiled. Soviets had waited for this day for decades. An impossible dream had come true: Russia was free!

  Soon, it seemed, the USSR would be a part of the international community, enjoying the West’s previously unimaginable freedom and prosperity. That was the common expectation. The reality was a precipitous economic collapse that had actually begun well before Yeltsin signed an accord in December of 1991 formally disbanding the Soviet Union. In the decade that followed, hyperinflation wiped out Russians’ savings while crooked privatization deals enabled a handful of Kremlin-connected insiders to snatch many of the state’s richest assets. The helplessness of the former superpower the world had respected and feared made many people feel deeply humiliated. Large numbers began resenting the West for not doing more to help—and, many thought, for gloating.

  Eight years and many visits after the 1991 attempted coup, I returned to Moscow to live. My arrival coincided with another watershed: an explosion of protest against NATO’s bombing of Serbia. Powerless to stop it, Russians released a decade of bottled-up anger, most visibly in the form of eggs, paint and other projectiles hurled by rowdy crowds at the American embassy’s thick yellow walls. Passing by during the height of the demonstrations, a gleeful taxi driver pointed at the ooze-covered building. “The Americans think they can do anything they want,” he said. “But we won’t let them!” Widespread public opinion was even more hostile.

  A well-dressed young man who overheard me talking to a visiting British friend on a crowded street warned us to stop speaking in English “or I’ll kill you.” Politicians took their cue from the people, fashioning foreign conflict into a test of loyalty to the Motherland for the first time since the Soviet collapse, helping plunge debate about the issue to the level of chest beating. Strident cries in support of “our Slav brother” Serbs widened the sense of antagonism between Russia and the West. For us mistreated Russians, the operative word was nashi, “ours.”

  The outcry was prompted partly by Yeltsin’s political paralysis during an economic meltdown in 1998, when the government defaulted on its debts and inflation soared. A collective war whoop sounded throughout the country with its collapsed economy and scandal-ridden political system. Marat Guelman, a gallery owner and stalwart of the Moscow art world, leaped on the irony. “When globalization’s the thing and the whole world’s trying to become integrated,” he said at the time, “the Russian idea is to exist alone, apart from the rest.”

  Although anti-Americanism hasn’t since returned to that high point despite regular denunciations under a new leader who has compared the United States to Nazi Germany, it remains strong among many Russians. Vladimir Putin shot out of obscurity in 1999 by exploiting growing nostalgia for the USSR, fueled by the disappointment, uncertainty and crisis that brought Yeltsin’s reform era to a shuddering halt.

  Once in power the following year, Putin set about building an authoritarian regime whose control would expand for more than a decade, until soaring corruption on top of another economic downturn—a much smaller one, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008—prompted another backlash. A new middle-class urban population nurtured during a decade-long oil boom launched the first serious protest against Putin’s rule in December of 2011, when tens of thousands of newly disillusioned Russians demonstrated against rigged parliamentary elections. Although Putin was easily reelected to a new six-year term the following year, whereupon he renewed his assault on democratic practices, the unhappiness over his return to office for a tenure that could last another dozen years, until 2024, raised new questions about the country’s future.

  Will Russia forever be separated from the West? Why do so many of its people continue admiring their authoritarian leaders? Have they learned nothing from their painful past? Western observers tend to look for signs of inevitable progress toward liberal democracy in Russians’ growing Internet use, together with their huge appetite for imported consumer goods and in the opinions of a small group of opposition leaders who, not surprisingly, predict Putin’s imminent demise. I think they tend to ignore the country’s historical record, its culture and the opinions of the vast majority of a people whose behavior and values have been patterned differently from ours. My explanation of the gap between those analyses and the country I’ve spent so much time in lies largely in a hidden Russia, a way of thinking and acting that is elusive to foreigners because it’s intentionally kept obscure.

  I believe official institutions, the kind the West depends on for governing, have functioned so inefficiently in Russia because their real role is largely to hide the workings of a collection of crony arrangements informed by a traditional political culture that has shaped the country’s history for centuries. Put
in resurrected it after a decade of Westernizing reform under Yeltsin. The current president’s “clients” in Russian officialdom—the bureaucrats and businessmen loyal to him—make up the actual governing structure, even though their official titles don’t necessarily indicate that. The difficulty in seeing things as they are lies in the beneficiaries’ suppression of the transparency and legality they perceive as threatening them, misleading observers about the true nature of the country’s governance.

  Is Russia fated to develop along its own path? Do its people possess a special Russian soul or intrinsic qualities that keep them from embracing Western values? I think the going political scheme has survived not for those reasons but for very practical ones: it has enabled society to remain more or less stable despite the sweeping upheavals that have transformed life since the Soviet collapse. Whether that will remain true as the public confronts new change can’t be predicted, especially because the coercive nature of Putin’s administration makes it inherently unstable. But the discomfiting fact is that a vast number of Russians are active participants in a system whose main work is to protect itself, partly through a state bureaucracy that has doubled in size in recent years.

  “To get anything done—register a new company for example—you have to pay bribes, so people don’t draw up official documents,” Roman Shleinov, an editor of the crusading newspaper Novaya Gazeta and an astute observer of Russian corruption, told me. “Instead, they’ve become used to making agreements face-to-face.” The result is a country of informal ties, “from the gypsy cabs on every street to the biggest companies, which need the Kremlin’s secret approval for their deals.”

  The pages that follow cite examples of such dealings in schools, shops, offices, factories and the corridors of power. My chief purpose in offering them is to describe the behavior and attitudes that sustain the system as well as its sources, including the country’s difficult climate and geography and a correspondingly difficult history, often dressed up in comforting historical myths. I’ll also explore some of the paradoxes central to the Russian psyche, including the generally weak work ethic in a country that has produced some of the world’s greatest artistic and scientific advances and the importance of family ties and friendship in a place where hardship, often worsened by cruelty, is legendary.