I first met Taufik’s son Ulugbek at a party in a cramped Moscow apartment in 1991, when he was in his thirties. Tall, handsome and smiling, he greeted me with the effusive generosity typical in Central Asia, asking about every one of my family members in an easy manner that made it seem as if he’d known me from childhood. Ulugbek’s warmth—more than the usual importance that people from his part of the world impart to relations that wouldn’t be considered particularly close in the West—reflected his extraordinary self-assuredness. An A student in Tashkent, he had moved in Moscow in 1979 to study engineering at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, considered Russia’s best.
He married an outgoing young woman named Natalia soon after graduating and by the time their first son, Sasha, was born in 1990, he was well on his way to a respectable academic career, teaching mechanical engineering while writing a doctoral dissertation on stress analysis in metals. Meanwhile, it was clear to them the Soviet economy was imploding. Natalia’s job with the Communist Party youth organization, the Komsomol, granted her weekly visits to a special store that sold products unavailable elsewhere: caviar, cheese, even olive oil. But children’s supplies were almost unobtainable anywhere. After lunch during the week, she would take time off work to scour the neighborhood shops for lines worth joining. Since diapers didn’t exist, Natalia used the largest women’s menstrual pads she could find. The most pressing problem, however, was baby formula, which was especially scarce because it was in great demand even by otherwise uninterested shoppers who snapped it up to barter for other products.
No Soviet-made baby formula was available, and imports were strictly rationed. But Ulugbek’s volunteering to help unload trucks of it when they arrived at a local store at night earned him a double ration of four cans, which would last a day and a half. Because of the constant struggle, Natasha began supplementing the baby’s diet with food and juice.
When Sasha’s first birthday arrived, Natalia and Ulugbek could spare only a single American dollar to spend on a present. They took it to an Irish hard-currency supermarket, one of Moscow’s first Western shops, where they bought an exotic fruit: bananas. Matters would only get worse. Prices were liberalized the following year—released from Soviet controls that had kept them very low—and inflation skyrocketed. “You could get by before because prices were low even if there was nothing to buy, and maybe you got lucky or you had friends or ties and could buy things on the black market,” Ulugbek later recalled. “Now salaries suddenly became worthless.” His amounted to six dollars a month. Unable to feed his family, he left academia, relying on his father’s connections to help find a job in business.
Ulugbek’s postcommunist transition was successful: he eventually went on to work for General Electric and other Western companies. Nevertheless, he sent Sasha to live and study in Germany (he and his younger brother Timur speak fluent English and German) because Russia is far from the kind of place he envisioned it would become when he could afford to buy only two apples a week. “Back then it was hard, but we didn’t feel ruined,” he says. “We weren’t starving because we were doing all sorts of things to get by. We were never completely broke, and in many ways it was a happy time.”
Thanks to his dark, non-Slavic complexion, xenophobic police often make a point of stopping Ulugbek on the street to demand his passport, sometimes even ordering him or his driver to head to a local police station for a formal check. Before Putin came to power in 2000, he says, “no one believed Russia would return to authoritarianism. Absolutely no one could have envisioned there would be a quiet counterrevolution, that tough limits on newspapers and television would return, that corruption would become far worse.” In these times, he adds, the old optimism is gone.
More than that, although many ordinary people no longer struggle just to survive, much of Russia’s outward prosperity is deceptive. “Half my friends eat porridge in order to be seen driving into town in their Volkswagens or BMWs,” Natalia says. “That’s the Russian mentality. People want to show off so much that several generations will live crammed into one or two rooms or refuse to see a doctor when they’re sick in order to flash the newest iPhones.” For the many more who still struggle to survive, the ongoing spread of poverty today is very much part and parcel of the new oil-rich Russia, kept in place despite the authorities’ populist promises by the exploitative nature of the country’s rule.
The most obvious cause of current Russian poverty is the breakdown of Soviet-era infrastructure. Starting in the 1920s, labor camp prisoners hacked out settlements across the inhospitable expanses of Siberia and the country’s far north to exploit the oil, metals and other natural resources found there. The expansion built on the tsarist campaign to conquer the vast territory, which had taken place with great speed because very few indigenous people lived there to stand in the way. Over the next half century, economic planners encouraged hundreds of thousands more to relocate there, and the government lavished huge sums on inefficient schemes to transplant people to regions where no “normal” economy would have beckoned them. Without Communist political control, the physical difficulties have made many Siberian communities unsustainable today. If the region of Tver would be thriving in other circumstances, that can’t be said of the vast, far-flung stretches of territory that constitute most of Russia: land barely fit, or totally unfit, for human habitation.
That was more than clear to me during my visit to the Arctic city of Novoi Urengoi, in the western Siberian region of Yamal Nenets, where I’d flown to see the area that holds some of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. The city’s concrete-slab buildings—painted in garishly bright colors in an attempt to offset the psychological burden of months of darkness, isolation and subzero temperatures—rise from endless stretches of drab tundra covering the gas fields. It’s a company town where the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, is king and gloves are a good idea even when I visited in relatively balmy August.
While other Siberian settlements are shrinking toward expiration as their residents move south, the local Gazprom subsidiary was busy constructing new buildings and roads to its far-flung gas deposits and production units. Relatively high wages, good benefits and long vacations draw workers willing to brave nine-month winters, when temperatures often hover around minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. But those not employed by the gas company are less lucky. After years of subsidies carried over from the Soviet era, when company and state were virtually indistinguishable, Gazprom’s Urengoigazprom subsidiary recently carried out a “restructuring,” its euphemism for transferring the city’s power utility and housing services to municipal authorities. City officials claimed the transfer was barely noticeable to residents, but those I talked to said that hundreds of workers were laid off and a large percentage of the city’s population is barely able to afford the price increases.
A grizzled-looking welder named Pavel Gavrilyuk interrupted a stroll with his grandson in the city’s barren main square to speak to me. Barely surviving by doing piecework after being laid off, he was an illustration of the true human cost of Russia’s gas bonanza. “Pensions are less than two hundred dollars a month—what can you buy with that?” he said. “Anyway, what’s the point of living in the north? But who needs you back home where you came from so long ago?”
One would be forgiven for being a little surprised to hear such pessimism in a city founded a mere thirty years ago to tap newly discovered energy reserves. Many arrived on temporary assignments that paid more than they earned back home, then stayed and raised families. Now a large number have been left to fend for themselves in precarious living conditions after the state lost interest in supporting them. Their presence constitutes one of the Soviet Union’s largest economic legacies. Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, an expert in Russian economic inefficiencies, believes twelve to fifteen million people live in Siberia and Russia’s far-eastern regions who probably wouldn’t be there if not for government inducements. “You can restructure a factory,” he t
old me from Washington. “You can bring in new management, retrain people and produce new products that are hopefully better designed for the market. But historically and everywhere, it’s extremely difficult to downsize large cities.”
Gaddy reckons that as much as 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product goes to supporting residents of extreme, isolated areas, to which food and other consumer products must be delivered by plane because roads and railways don’t exist or are too dangerous to use in winter. But Novoi Urengoi’s officials, wary of saying anything that might be interpreted as critical of the government, assured me there’s nothing wrong with the way things are now handled. In the new glass-fronted building that houses Gazprom’s local subsidiary, deputy director Valery Marinin praised his company for taking the first steps toward revamping the old Soviet economic model. “Gazprom used to be involved in everything from gas production to farming. But companies must narrow their focus to what they’re supposed to be doing in order to be profitable. We produce gas, and the city should see to its own municipal services.”
However, there’s been no indication so far that the kind of restructuring Gazprom has undertaken is making municipal operations more efficient. If the city is in charge of building the roads and maintaining housing with tax revenues, Gaddy said, there will be “pots of money at the disposal of local politicians” who “of course” will want to use it to line their own pockets.
Locals complained that state-controlled Gazprom does what it wants by claiming to be a private company. Svetlana Kozlova, a retired worker who was selling gloves and woven goods in a small stall in the center of town, was embittered by the company’s practice of barring most residents from using the new roads it built from Novoi Urengoi to its gas fields’ production facilities because they’re supposedly private property. Some of the new asphalt was laid on old roads that are the only means of reaching faraway towns and settlements. “You’re nobody if you don’t work for Gazprom,” she said. While the company is making officials rich as it helps make Russia an energy superpower, average citizens must bear the burden of the Soviet past. “Housing is scarce, rents are high and many of us are barely scraping by,” Kozlova added. “People lived their whole lives in the north, built this place up, endured hardship, developed illnesses and are left with nothing.”
Russian poverty is hardly unique to far-flung locations or even outside the capital. Although Moscow is by far the country’s wealthiest area, with plenty of funds to maintain gas pipelines, electricity plants and roads, a visit to most parts of the city will reveal poor living conditions everywhere. Amid newly renovated apartments with their gleaming double-glazed windows are many that haven’t seen a lick of paint since Soviet days. They are likely to be inhabited by the elderly, some of whom can be seen on streets and in underpasses—hunched over, sometimes kneeling, holding out their hands and keeping eyes peeled for police. Most cross themselves profusely when a passerby deposits some coins.
Among them is Evgenia Pavlova, a seventy-six-year-old pensioner I found sitting in a corner on a row of crowded steps one chilly October morning. The former schoolteacher, who earned a pension roughly equivalent to thirty dollars a month, said scraping together enough money for food and medicine was tough. She pinned whatever hopes she had on Putin. “It’s difficult for him alone to cope,” she said. “We need ten Putins. He’s trying to do something, but I don’t know if he’ll succeed.”
Her words reflect popular opinion in the regions, evidence that despite the wave of protest against him from the urban middle class, Putin has been largely successful in painting himself as a protector of common people whose main platform in the 2012 election was a promise to boost social spending. Although most increases went to the military, Putin pledged to spend tens of billions of dollars on hiking wages for healthcare professionals, schoolteachers and university professors in addition to increasing child support, student stipends and buying more housing for war veterans during the course of his six-year term. Economists warned that the spending would seriously strain the government’s budget, while other promises, such as curbing alcoholism, were too general to even approximate their cost.
When demonstrators in Moscow briefly set up a tent camp following Putin’s May 2012 inauguration to call for fair elections and an end to authoritarian repression, some observers compared their effort to America’s Occupy Wall Street movement. As a perceptive sociologist named Boris Kagarlitsky observed, however, Occupy was nationwide in scope, operating under clear slogans everyone understood and many Americans supported. By contrast, “the Moscow protests have taken place against a backdrop of largely silent regions,” he said.
That wasn’t because most Russians like official policy or are afraid of speaking out. “Their silence has more to do with the fact that the protesters in Moscow do not reflect their particular interests and needs.”7 Putin understood that decades of Soviet cradle-to-grave care have conditioned Russians to expect the state to provide pensions, education and subsidized utilities, while Russia’s constitution still guarantees free medical care for everyone. No matter that the state’s support is often little more than theoretical. According to the World Health Organization, the quality of Russian health care ranks 130th in the world—down from twenty-second in the 1970s.
Russians aren’t oblivious to the situation. Almost 60 percent of respondents to a recent survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency were dissatisfied with their medical care. People I’ve asked about it say the country is divided into two groups: a lucky few who can afford good care in private clinics and the vast majority, who have been left with almost no safety net and sometimes have no choice but to bribe doctors. But the Levada Center’s Marina Krassilnikova told me that despite overwhelming unhappiness with the situation, most remain wedded to the idea of socialized medicine. That includes wealthy Russians who prefer to have the option of paying more for services if they want to. “People just aren’t ready to give up the right to free medical care under any circumstances,” Krassilnikova explained, “even though they know they can’t exercise it.”
The situation is even worse in St. Petersburg than Moscow. Although the glorious architecture of Russia’s “second city” is one of the wonders of the world, much of it is in terrible condition, even steps from the central thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. Few foreign tourists ogling the restored facades suspect that many people live in crumbling apartments behind them, where dank interiors are also dark because burned-out lightbulbs are often not replaced.
The devastation of World War II, when up to a million residents trapped by the Nazi blockade during the siege of Leningrad died of cold and hunger, is partly responsible for the housing shortage. Sixty-five years later, great baroque buildings remain cut up into warrens of communal apartments—shared quarters with dingy, dirty corridors and other “public spaces” where families’ use of the same bathrooms and kitchens can make life miserable. Such living conditions echo those depicted by Fyodor Dostoevsky almost a century and a half ago, when his gambling helped keep him in or near poverty. In his novel Poor Folk, a lowly clerk describes squeezing into alcoves behind curtains where the smell of rotting garbage soon appears to pass “because you take on the same bad smell yourself, and so do your clothes and hands and everything else…” Birds die in the air filled with smoke from cooking, and “there’s always old washing hanging on strings in the kitchen.”8
Families that shared all that—and sometimes their bedrooms—with several other families also involuntarily shared intimate details of their lives, unless they whispered and moved on tiptoe. That’s next to impossible when people are rushing to get to work in the morning and irritation at having to stand in line to use common bathrooms easily explodes into anger. Such scenes made much of domestic life tense during the Soviet years, and while there are far fewer communal apartments today, they still number more than a hundred thousand in St. Petersburg. The mayor recently complained that a project to phase them out might take another ce
ntury to complete at its current rate.9
Aside from the specific character of Soviet-style communal living, the widespread nature of Russian poverty may not appear much different than in other countries where large swaths of the population are poor. But another difference—and another explanation for the great nostalgia for the communist past—is that until the Soviet collapse, many Russians were relatively well educated and presumably able, if not necessarily willing, to openly object to the massive inequities.
Why put up with unfair inequality in society? Because in spite of being downtrodden, many Russians believe, if largely unconsciously, that they have a stake in the current system. The corruption that ensnares almost everyone gives a critical mass of people reason to believe that they also benefit.
If the disintegration of Soviet-era infrastructure partly accounts for the rapid economic collapse of many regions, corruption helps explain why it continues getting worse. Perhaps nowhere is its role in deepening poverty starker than on Kamchatka, which is fascinating not only for its unique natural beauty but also for the corruption that has ensnared the poverty-stricken local population in a more visible way than in most other regions. One of the last great spawning grounds of Pacific wild salmon, the far-eastern peninsula is a place where hunger and fraud are feeding a culture of poaching that’s endangering the region’s entire ecosystem as well as some salmon species.
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