Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  I aim to identify and describe what foreigners rarely see about the Russian people’s motives and goals by explaining the informal system’s role in many aspects of life. Heeding the Russian admonition to smotri v koren’, “look at the roots,” I’ll explore its influence before, during and after communism partly by tapping another rich, perceptive source of wisdom about the fundamental Russian character: the descriptions and reflections of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol and other writers and intellectuals. Starting with descriptions of the visible aspects of social attitudes and behavior, I’ll go on to explore how they inform—and are shaped by—the concealed political culture. While my overarching purpose is to make Putin’s actions understandable—and help readers measure just how far Moscow may be willing to go in its geostrategic challenge to the West—Russians will also attempt a definitive explanation of what makes Russia Russian—not merely today or yesterday in the Soviet period and before—but for as long as national characters retain their identity.

  During my eight years in Russia as a journalist, I interviewed hundreds of people, from kindergarten children to babushki—the archetypal grandmothers—to powerful political and cultural figures, factory directors, workers and farmers. I’ve traveled from Russia’s western borders across the country’s nine time zones to its remote far east and from the subtropical Black Sea to the permanently frozen far north. However, much of my knowledge comes not from interviews, during which Russians are rarely at their most candid, but from participating in daily life and from long, leisurely conversations that offered insight into popular attitudes toward sex, vodka, religion and the West.

  My first interest in Russia was entirely personal. My glamorous, very self-confident Russian mother represented another world from London and Connecticut, where I grew up. I gathered from her that Russia was a different kind of place where conduct often seemed more shaped by instinct and emotion than convention of any kind. Her behavior seemed to say that Russians value love and camaraderie above professional success and social standing. How to square that perception of them with the national ethos mystified me because I pictured the USSR much as my friends did: a miserable place where people waited hours in line for toilet paper, many fearing imprisonment or shooting. My mother’s descriptions of her childhood helped form an image of a vast, gray wasteland where children were lucky to eat an orange on New Year’s, the most expansive Soviet holiday. How lucky she was to have escaped!

  Greatly prizing beauty and creativity, she often displayed her disdain of things Soviet in her criticism of their bad taste on top of their shoddiness, an aspect of communist control that seemed to go with its severity. Whatever one’s views about current Russian tastes, it’s not accidental that many see themselves as aesthetes, a reaction to decades of life under enforced mediocrity.

  My mother’s faith in innate Russian talent also represents the kind of paradox in which the country is rich. Few would argue Russians have made glorious contributions to art, literature and dance, but she goes further. Even if Russians didn’t invent cars or airplanes, she sometimes says only half in jest, their huge gifts would have enabled them to do a better job of it if they had.

  Like many who lived under Stalin, she was lucky to have survived, having been born to a single mother whose husband, an airplane designer, was arrested in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror. I knew virtually nothing about that or other aspects of my grandmother’s struggles when I was growing up in rural Connecticut, where she also lived. I viewed her as a very kind but somewhat clueless-seeming fish out of water. She was born in the Volga River city of Kazan, where her grandfather, the family patriarch, was a savvy grain merchant who survived the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution by giving the Bolsheviks desperately needed flour. Legend has it that my great-great-grandfather could discern what region grain came from by its smell.

  My mother met my American father in 1959, when he was a guide at the first American National Exhibition in Moscow, the venue for the celebrated Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate. A dashing, outgoing twenty-six-year-old, he’d studied French history at Harvard but learned Russian in the navy because the burgeoning Cold War made the Soviet Union fascinating to him. Lured to Moscow by the promise of adventure exploring America’s reviled enemy, he was captivated by the surprising warmth and informal nature of the relations between the people he met, whose friendships he often found deeper and less focused on superficialities than those among his friends in the West, partly because hardship made warmth necessary. A graduate student at Columbia University at the time, he soon returned for an exchange year at Moscow State University, when he spent months attending court trials for his first book, Justice in Moscow, which helped launch his sparkling career as a journalist. He later made many return trips.

  The ease of communication he found went for relations between men and women, too. While his romance with my mother was still unlikely, I think most of her story, from her first days in a freezing Siberian cabin to her coming of age with bohemian friends in Moscow, helps illustrate some fundamental values that underlie Russia’s various political and economic systems. As for me, having first traveled to Russia for the excitement it promised, I kept returning because I thought I recognized similarities between the people’s current attitudes and behavior and what I’d read of Russian history in college and graduate school: a window into the human condition.

  Of course I’m not suggesting that some things haven’t radically changed, including the ambitions of my old friend Kolya, with whom I traveled to Vilnius in 1991. The eager young reporter who was helping his country transform itself has lost much of his idealism. No longer able to do honest reporting of any depth, he switched to working for foreign television companies and joined the millions of his compatriots whose chief interests are cars, dachas and designer clothes. Although a strong supporter of his country’s opposition leaders, he now feels, like many others, that his main priority is to protect his private life from a corrupt state whose main concerns are its own.

  Despite that trend, however, efforts are still under way to build a civil society—the groups outside government and business that help shape public life—that would enable the population to defend its interests these two decades after communism’s collapse. In the face of tremendous obstacles erected by an increasingly repressive regime, those attempts may someday help lay the groundwork for fundamental changes. So what’s on the minds of the millions who push into Moscow’s subway cars and squirm in its immense traffic jams? What are the thoughts and concerns of the far greater numbers of country dwellers whom foreigners rarely see, let alone talk to? What do they think about themselves and about life in general?

  Generalizations must be suspect. It’s no easier to sum up the huge country with people who are disparate in so many ways than to categorize America, where Tea Party supporters differ so greatly from New York liberals. Still, I believe certain qualities are recognizably Russian and that Americans and other Westerners would do well to ponder some of them. Like it or not, Russia, for all its manifest and concealed shortcomings, remains a great power with formidable material and cultural strengths and an inclination and capacity to challenge us—which is highly unlikely to change soon. For centuries, the country was a giant force, even when its economy was more stunted and its government even more malign than now. Surely it will continue to confound us with ideas and designs very different from our own for as long as anyone can reasonably foresee.

  Roustam Tariko, the billionaire owner of Russian Standard vodka, at a Moscow charity ball. ( Justin Jin / justinjin.com )

  2

  Extravagance

  Money is like down—one puff and it’s gone.

  —Old Russian saying

  You see them in front of downtown Moscow’s five-star hotels and fancy restaurants: rows of luxury cars jammed on sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the traffic-choked streets. Matrix points of a privileged city within a city, they come with bodyguards, tough men who help maintain the distinctio
n between their employers and the vast bulk of lesser Russians by directing wilting stares of suspicion at passersby. Maybe that’s why I was the only one who appeared to notice a line of especially costly automobiles inching down Bolshaya Dmitrovka, a narrow street of pre-Revolutionary brick buildings around the corner from the Kremlin, on a bitter April evening in 2009. Bone-chilling wind lashed the huddled pedestrians shuffling across ice-covered sidewalks past the Mercedes, Bentleys and Hummers, mostly black with impenetrably tinted windows.

  I’d almost broken my neck by slipping on the treacherous ice, surprised once again, as foreigners in Moscow often are, by the women in perilously high stilettos who click by with apparent ease. Surprised, too, that the administration of a city blanketed in snow and ice for half the year allows shops to pave the sidewalks in front of their doors with slippery tiles. However, those weren’t the concerns of the passengers in the luxurious cars, which stopped at velvet ropes cordoning off a red carpet. It led to a five-story building that was sparkling under banks of brilliant lights. Photographers snapped as glitterati emerged from the backseats: leggy women in alluring dresses, men in suits and shirts with collars opened wide. Bodyguards in dark jackets and two-way radio receivers buttoned in their ears kept nervous watch.

  The evening’s affair was devoted to the opening of yet another exclusive Moscow restaurant. While the Soviet Union excelled in broadcasting prescriptions for reforming the world, until the dying days of the USSR, not a single Japanese restaurant—or a French, Italian or American one—broke the numbing uniformity of dour state establishments that served the same cuts of overcooked meats and soggy vegetables to those lucky enough to get in. By the end of the 1990s, however, chain outlets offered sushi on virtually every third corner. Now the addition of Nobu, the latest outpost of the upscale international chain, would provide another little playground for the city’s rich and powerful.

  My invitation to its launch reflected Russia’s often paradoxical shifts in ideology and interests since 1991: it came from the former head of the CIA’s Soviet division, who knew Nobu’s co-owner Robert De Niro. The former intelligence officer had enlisted my help in inviting some of his ex-KGB adversaries. Now that the Cold War was over, they were potential collaborators in a future Hollywood film that carried a promise of big bucks. But my main interest in attending was to gauge what effect, if any, the global financial crisis that had just bashed Russia was having on the city’s legendary social life.

  Inside, the main room was dramatically dark. The white-haired former KGB officers dropped their steely guard to gawk as politicians mingled with businessmen amid an army of models sporting enough eye shadow to make up for decades of Soviet rule, when cosmetics were often unavailable. Their kind of loud chic can seem in bad taste in Paris: too outrageous for a predominantly bourgeois society. In fad-crazy New York, it often appears unnatural because it’s poorly copied. But something about Moscow enables its women to carry off risqué designer wear better than almost anywhere else. Maybe the secret lies in the essential lawlessness of the city’s gritty streets, which carry more than a whiff of danger. Or the jarring contrast between extravagance and the heart-wrenching shabbiness of the great unwashed. In Russia, anything goes.

  As dance music pounded, waiters with fixed smiles distributed flutes of Champagne and sushi canapés. More photographers circled celebrities and “minigarchs”: the second-tier millionaires and billionaires who aspire to join the oligarchs. Unlike the journalists, hangers-on and people providing party services, those who counted were very much at home amid the restaurant’s international panache of wood, brushed steel and mosaic-tile. The evening’s crowd could have been visitors from another land with no connection to the vast mass of “ordinary” Russians.

  The conversation centered on purchases and play. No mention was made of the financial crisis that was spinning the economy into a deep abyss. The price of oil, which accounts for almost a third of Russia’s GDP, had dropped from $130 per barrel in July 2008 to forty dollars, with devastating consequences. The economy, which had grown by 8 percent in 2008, shrank by the same amount the following year. By January, millions of Russians had lost their jobs, the stock market had shed more than three-quarters of its value compared to the previous year, and no prediction of improvement was taken seriously. But I overheard another of Nobu’s partners, an ethnic Azeri billionaire named Aras Agalarov, whose son was married to the daughter of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, curtly shrugging off the implications. Agalarov’s development empire includes a Moscow luxury shopping mall and the city’s most exclusive suburban housing complex. Most houses still under construction had already been sold, the cheapest for ten million dollars.

  Although many of Moscow’s wealthiest lost billions of dollars during the crisis, especially those who had built their business empires with the help of hugely leveraged spending sprees, they would soon benefit from generous government spending. Two hundred billion dollars would help bail out banks and some of the largest companies owned by the wealthiest oligarchs. When the economy picked up the following year, depleted fortunes would promptly resume their prodigious expansion.

  Elsewhere in the room, talk continued of favorite restaurants, holiday destinations and De Niro’s expected appearance. A would-be starlet in a little black dress grew impatient with the complaints of two foreign businessmen about Russian bureaucracy. “But Moscow has everything, isn’t that why you’re here?” she interrupted. “Why would you be anywhere else?” Like others who assert that everything Russian is bigger, better and grander, she spoke as if the poverty, potholes and streets deep in muddy slush were of no concern to anyone who mattered.

  When I first arrived in Moscow, armed with dislike for the communist elite, I was surprised by how diverting it was to visit the few hard-currency restaurants open to foreigners and select bribe-paying Soviets with connections. Although hardly opulent, places like the musty Spanish Bar in the old Moscow Hotel next to the Kremlin provided a cherished sense of exclusivity. Its dishes bore but slight resemblance to real tapas, but watching lucky patrons swagger into the little oasis as if they were royalty was instructive. Although the explosion of new restaurants and bars since then helped erase that particular inequity of the communist system, a growing demand for exclusivity created a profusion of ever-more-expensive restaurants that have turned the city into a diners’ paradise for those who can afford them. And while present-day Russia can’t be compared to the Soviet Union in terms of freedom and opportunity, its displays of extravagance can be as appalling as communist deprivation was grim. Or so it seems to me.

  Stories about various forms of excess are legion. An American businessman who examined the books of a Moscow telecommunications company to help prepare it for floating on the stock exchange told me he was surprised to find the firm owned a shooting range in central Moscow, where the managers unwound by firing rounds from Kalashnikov automatic rifles. “When I asked about it in his office, the chief operating officer proudly produced a machine gun fitted with a laser sight,” the American said. “He proceeded to point it at me in alarming jest.”

  The excessiveness comes from startling changes that have made Moscow home to the world’s largest collection of young millionaires, many in their twenties. The capital reportedly also boasts seventy-eight billionaires, more than any other city in the world.1 The first Bentley sold there several years ago is said to have been bought by a twenty-four-year-old. Now they’re a common sight, inching ahead in monumental traffic jams on streets that used to be scarcely lit and nearly empty. Their owners often also love luxury at sea. One of the leading oligarchs owns four of the world’s most expensive yachts, including a new one—to replace another he gave as a gift—that cost five hundred million dollars.

  Not that you need to visit Russia to know something about the country’s superrich. A strappingly tall forty-eight-year-old who is considered Moscow’s most eligible bachelor—who bought the New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets basketball team before runnin
g for president, then launching a political party—is among the most infamous. Shortly before Mikhail Prokhorov temporarily became Russia’s richest man, he was arrested in the fancy French ski resort of Courchevel on suspicion of participation in a prostitution ring. Since it’s well known that the country’s wealthy men export young women to entertain their entourages on holiday, most Russians were amused by the charge. Quickly released, Prokhorov soon launched Snob, a magazine that costs twenty dollars an issue. His arrest drew international attention not only because of his wealth and status but also because it provided a glimpse into the closed society of the Russian elite. In January, when the best skis in Courchevel sell for twenty thousand dollars and the “in” nightclub charges thousands of dollars for its top tables, local wags call it Courchevelski. That’s because Russia’s richest arrive for two weeks of very extravagant partying.

  The spending sprees are affecting the international market for art as well as prime European real estate. In Sotheby’s Moscow office, housed in a swank office building near the Kremlin, director Mikhail Kamensky told me wealthy Russians who have been buying expensive cars and houses for years are increasingly adding paintings and sculpture to their holdings. “It’s coming back as a new fad for buying luxury, but not in buildings or hardware,” he said. “It’s creating a trend to invest a lot, not just in art but also in a lifestyle of collecting.”