Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  During the country’s mass privatization, each Russian was issued a voucher that could be sold or used to buy shares in a wave of auctions of the old enterprises. But contrary to conventional wisdom that the voucher system was aimed at a fair distribution of state assets, it was little more than an openly acknowledged bribe to get Russians to accept privatization. As for the later privatization schemes—in which the country’s oil industry went to Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and a few other Kremlin insiders for next to nothing in rigged auctions—Boycko said, “The top consideration was finding people with the ability to invest in oil and other enterprises whose production was in very serious decline, or to attract investment.”

  A partner of the New York law firm White and Case, John Erickson was newly arrived in Moscow in 1992 when the World Bank approached him with a request to advise Boycko’s agency, the State Committee for State Property Management, or GKI (for the Russian name Goskomimushchestvo). Erickson said opposition from competing state agencies controlled by old-guard managers created tremendous pressure to move quickly. He told me he’d get a call at four o’clock in the afternoon, “and they’d say, ‘We need a draft investment company regulation on Yeltsin’s desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’ In a sense it was a race. The overriding concern, over and above doing it perfectly properly, was speed. Get it done, get the genie out of the bottle before somebody could turn it back.” Although there was “a lot of chaos” in the 1990s, Erickson believes the enactment of new, Western-style laws meant the country was Westernizing.

  In the murky free-for-all that followed communism’s collapse, most successful businessmen exploited loopholes or resorted to outright crime to compile their huge fortunes. At one point, Berezovsky relied on a criminal gang of Chechens to do his dirty work. But although the economic chaos was real and disturbing enough, it was only part of the picture then. Yeltsin guaranteed individual rights and freedom of speech. He also installed the young technocrats in government who drafted the country’s Westernizing, democratizing reforms. Rampant as they were, crime and corruption took place on a smaller scale than now. According to the government’s own anticorruption committee, the average Russian company paid a whopping $135,000 in bribes each year after the first four years of Putin’s presidency—up from $23,000 when he took office.

  In short, Putin didn’t clean up crime. He only made it look that way by institutionalizing crime after making certain the Kremlin was the dominant player. “Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin,” observed Stanford professor and future U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul about the myth that Putin had rescued the country from the bankrupt, lawless 1990s, “the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.”14

  As for his promise to leave the oligarchs alone if they stayed out of politics, Putin failed to keep his end of the bargain. The oligarchs who do the Kremlin’s bidding continue reaping huge fortunes. Those who don’t have been prime targets in the president’s attack on anyone who stands in his way or even hints at the possibility.

  Putin threatens and destroys even some who give no indication of opposing him, only of getting too big for their breeches. Like the seventeenth-century French nobleman Nicolas Fouquet, who hosted a party so lavish it gave Louis XIV an excuse to arrest him, Azeri businessman Telman Ismailov found himself in trouble in 2009 after throwing an opening party for his new billion-dollar Turkish hotel, which has ten restaurants and a beach with nine thousand tons of artificial sand.15 Ismailov paid Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton and Tom Jones to attend. At one point, he was reported to have danced as hundred-dollar bills rained from the ceiling. Many believe the images angered Putin, who is especially sensitive about oligarchs’ conspicuous spending abroad. A close ally of former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov—who, after his failed challenge to the Kremlin, maintained an uneasy relationship with Putin despite showing all the outward attributes of loyalty—Ismailov also owned a sprawling outdoor market in the capital where Chinese and other traders sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contraband goods. It was soon shut down before Ismailov temporarily fled to Turkey.

  The conventional wisdom in the West is that hard work tends to be rewarded. In Russia, many who build wealth still often see it confiscated in one way or another. If the relationship between Russia’s wealthy and its leaders resembles its iterations in previous eras, however, Moscow’s new money is changing the city’s old face. Like another transplant from the West, a new development of corporate glass skyscrapers called Moscow City looms over everything built before it. One of the antiseptic new buildings, the billion-dollar Mercury City Tower, was Europe’s tallest upon its completion—until the showcase of angular, pink mirrored glass was overtaken by its neighbor the Federation Tower.

  The latest installments of Moscow’s grand architectural projects, together with many smaller complexes of office and residential buildings, are cropping up like the proverbial mushrooms. Although most of the new construction is unimaginative—one friend complained that “rich Russia is even less attractive than impoverished Russia”—that’s hardly unique to Moscow. The splurging by the superrich has helped make the city one of the world’s most expensive, but that, too—like its filthy and often slushy streets—apparently must be lived with. What often seems intolerable, even for the superrich—“often” being daily or twice daily—is the city’s horrendous traffic, which leaves millions stuck in cars for hours, breathing terribly polluted air. A 2013 survey by the satellite navigation company TomTom rated Moscow traffic as the world’s worst.

  Igor Shein, editor of the Russian edition of the Robb Report, a consumer magazine for the very wealthy, said it will be difficult to do something about that. “Russians are behaving better abroad,” he told me—a claim visitors from other countries to Europe’s luxurious resorts may challenge. “But back home, they still behave very immodestly. They drive like crazy and do what they want in all sorts of other ways.”

  A century and a half ago, the Marquis de Custine feared an explosion in the country he saw as “a cauldron of boiling water, tightly closed and placed on a fire that is becoming hotter and hotter.” With the lack of concern on the part of today’s superrich for the people as a whole rivaling that of earlier eras, the anger is again never far from the surface. The wealthy also know in their bones that their power is fragile, as do the rulers about their own.

  My grandmother Serafima (left) in a Moscow park with an unidentified friend.

  The Khuzikhanov family in Kazan. My grandfather Mutakhar is on the top right next to his brother, Lukman. His parents are in the second row, along with Mutakhar’s unidentified girlfriend. Shamil, the third brother, is on the bottom right next to his sister.

  Serafima’s husband Zhora with his mother and daughter Natasha, who is ill with meningitis.

  3

  Poverty

  Poverty is no vice.

  —Old Russian saying

  Visiting Russia for the first time seemed like a homecoming long delayed by the Soviet refusal to grant any of my family a visa. What struck me most on arriving in Moscow on a hot June day in 1991 was how shoddily constructed the prefabricated housing was. Eager to learn about the land whose language I spoke but about which I otherwise knew very little, I found myself trying to disguise my revulsion at the way its people were forced to live.

  I would spend the summer in a residential area of the city’s northwest, where acres and acres of nearly identical apartment complexes looked like slums built with carelessness and disregard for architectural integrity, not to mention aesthetic sensibility, even when brand-new. The concrete blocks hulked along a stretch of overgrown weeds that passed for a park and included several abandoned building sites—locals had stolen the bricks for use at their dachas, I was informed, because none were available for sale—and a padlocked “palace of culture” with an empty theater and library. Networks of dirt paths through uncut grass connected the buildings to pockmarked asphalt sidewalks.


  Like many Moscow buildings, the one that would be my temporary residence had a facade of unattractively colored panels glued together with a white substance that had dripped down from the joints, an assault to the senses that seemed to signify contempt for its occupants. Inside, the bare concrete entryway was filthy and the shuddering little elevator smelled of body odor and the dried, tobacco-soaked spit that dotted the floor. Although I’d been prepared to see widespread deprivation, I was astonished to learn I’d arrived at a desired address in an elite neighborhood to which lucky residents had flocked from the polluted center.

  The shock didn’t last long. Regardless of the size of their bank accounts, almost everyone in the Soviet Union lived in conditions that people in developed countries would consider impoverished. The apartment I occupied was small but cozy. The minuscule bathroom had only one faucet for the sink and bathtub—the tap swung from one to the other—and there would be no hot water for the month of August, supposedly for annual maintenance. But the apartment’s interior, like many I saw that summer, had been decorated with care, albeit with garish velour furniture. The building’s residents, mostly middle-class and middle-aged, spent much of their time grumbling about queues: store shelves were often empty. On my first trip to a local supermarket, I saw people waiting in line for as long as four hours for slices of beef that appeared blackened from rot. Thanks to a severe shortage of tobacco in addition to almost everything else, vendors at outdoor food markets sold glass jars filled with nearly spent cigarette butts.

  It seemed logical to think that a little free trade would transform life for people whose days seemed to revolve around scrounging for food and goods that I’d always taken for granted. However, Western optimism that Russia would quickly rebound when restrictions were lifted after the collapse of communism sounded naive even then. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are no such lines at supermarket chains where everything is available—if you can afford it. Some of Moscow’s huge new stores are in shopping centers near suburban apartment complexes that knock up against old villages that had lain beyond the capital’s sprawl until very recently. The new buildings have something in common with the plans for share-everything communities drawn by idealists during the early Soviet years. The fancy stores, gyms, kindergartens and other amenities and services of the new, capitalist versions make them islands of security where residents enjoy at least partial insulation from the dangers and uncertainties of inner Moscow.

  Drive beyond the capital’s expansive limits, however, and you encounter a very different country, only slightly changed from the Soviet Union I saw in 1991. A smattering of officials, businesspeople and Mafia members ensure that rural Russia has some of Moscow’s trappings: garish brick mansions, Toyota Land Cruisers with dark tinted windows and new restaurants. But poverty is endemic, beginning abruptly where Moscow ends, although the boundary keeps changing as the city’s outskirts push ever outward, riding roughshod over old wooden settlements. Beyond them, decent roads give way to uneven asphalt riddled with gaping potholes that often degenerates to barely passable dirt roads in impoverished villages. Even some sections of the highway to St. Petersburg, the main road linking the country’s two largest cities, still have only two lanes, which sometimes pass rows of traditional rural cottages. Tourists admiring the ornate latticework of those little structures, ubiquitous from the Baltic Sea thousands of miles east into Siberia, may be visited by fairy-tale images of princes, peasants and firebirds. The reality is less magical. Many houses have no indoor plumbing and most toilets are in outhouses.

  Taking account of the pervasiveness of poverty is important for understanding Russia because its specter hangs over even those not directly affected. Today’s dilapidation is evidence of the latest stage in Russia’s long history of widespread, often overwhelming destitution in the countryside, where many peasants—who made up 80 percent of the population as recently as the early twentieth century—have barely been able to eke out a living from the fields for as long as anyone can remember. Under the tsars, much of the land was owned by rich absentees who cared little about their peasants, most of whom remained serfs until 1861. Soviet industrialization, launched in the 1930s with the aim of making the USSR into a great military power, further hindered the development of agriculture. All investment for new factories was squeezed from miserably oppressed farmers already suffering the crippling effects of forced collectivization. It may therefore seem surprising that contemporary rural Russia is sometimes even more depressed than it was under the last decades of Soviet rule, and that many people are poorer than they’d been as collective farmers.

  The village of Priamukhino, a scattering of houses half lost in forests and fields some ninety minutes northwest of Moscow, is no exception. The settlement would easily go unnoticed except for its church. Standing at the top of a rise reached by a narrow road, the stately yellow neoclassical structure, like many of the country’s rural churches, completes a picture that is as sad as it is beautiful, as if it has survived from a nineteenth-century novel. The melancholy—partly prompted by the church’s peeling paint, grounds full of weeds and the short-lived foliage of willowy, white birches—seems to have something to do with the resignation that summer’s respite is short, nature is powerful and life is hard.

  Not all is well in Priamukhino, if it ever has been. The church was saved from collapse in the 1990s by an energetic young priest named Andrei Nikolaev, a relative newcomer who became a local fixture. One freezing night in 2006, local firefighters called to Father Andrei’s house arrived to find it enveloped in flames. Inside they found the remains of five people. The priest had burned to death together with his wife and three young daughters in an apparent act of arson that shocked nearby residents. “Notwithstanding Christian forgiveness,” said the regional governor upon taking personal charge of the investigation, “such crimes are never forgiven.”

  In contemporary Russia, however, such crimes are also rarely solved. And because Father Andrei’s killing, if that’s what it was, followed several suspected murders of other rural clergy members, it appeared to reflect a growing malaise in the Russian countryside. I wanted to find out the extent to which that was true.

  Father Andrei’s suspected murder echoed history. In the mid-nineteenth century, a wave of arson swept through Russia at a time when radical anarchist and revolutionary movements sought to undermine the tsars’ rule. Priamukhino happened to play a role in those movements as the ancestral family seat of Mikhail Bakunin, a nineteenth-century aristocrat who became a founder of anarchism, which critics blamed for spreading terrorism. Nevertheless, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky were among the literary celebrities who visited Bakunin’s sprawling estate, which surrendered to serious decay under Soviet rule. After 1991, would-be scholars and hippie types joined the self-described anarchists who camped on the estate grounds to sing, debate, or simply hang out.

  When I visited Father Andrei’s house several weeks after the catastrophe, children’s toys and bits of furniture were visible among the charred remains. The house had stood on the side of a muddy lane along with some twenty similarly weather-beaten wooden structures. It was an eerie sight: most of the houses were abandoned. At the moment, the only sign of life, apart from barking dogs, cawing crows and the occasional distant rumbling of lone cars, was the sound of a rake. It belonged to Nikolai Gavrilov, who was clearing slush from the tiny front yard of a house several plots down from Father Andrei’s, one of only three still inhabited on the street.

  Although it was unclear where the scrappy grass of Gavrilov’s property ended and the communal road of muck began, he was doing a meticulous job. Wearing surplus military trousers tucked into high felt boots, the sixty-four-year-old appeared prematurely aged. His skin was battered, his eyes squinty and his large nose crooked. European visitors to nineteenth-century Russia sometimes observed that peasants often expressed an innate hospitality, even sweetness, to visitors, despite bein
g very hard-pressed. That’s rarely true now. Looking up from his work as if his dearest wish were to avoid the trouble outsiders often brought, Gavrilov initially refused to answer questions about his age or anything else, including his neighbor Father Andrei.

  “Everything’s fine here!” he barked in apparent defiance of his surroundings. “Just like everywhere else.”

  Had life changed during the past decade?

  “No!”

  Had a lot of people left? Most of the houses seemed empty.

  “People come and go as they please; is there anything wrong with that?”

  Some time later, Gavrilov admitted feeling sorry for Father Andrei’s dead children but said he’d never spoken to the priest himself. The other neighbors I saw among the few who remained also refused to speculate about the cause of the fire. But some complained that the national media had seized on a theory that village drunks killed Father Andrei in anger at his refusal to give them money for drink. A domestic dispute was far more likely, they said.

  Nazira Babaeva discounted that theory. She lived a short drive from the village church in a Soviet brick apartment house made more forlorn than usual because it stands alone amid open fields. Mounting a filthy concrete stairway to Babaeva’s floor, I entered her clean but shabby apartment with its worn, brown-colored furniture. A handsome woman who worked in the local post office, she told me that Father Andrei’s death broke her heart. Tears formed in her eyes when she said, “Batyushka”—an archaic word for “father,” commonly used for priests—“did great things here.” Chief among them, she said, was providing villagers with counsel and help and advising them about the power of prayer. Before he came in the 1990s, she continued, “I didn’t know who I was, even whether I was christened.”