Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Another member of Serafima’s close circle, her cousin Olga (Sergeevna) Kiva, rarely displayed outward affection for Tatyana on the days she agreed to look after the mischievous girl. Beginning with stern lectures about what was allowed and what wasn’t, Olga Sergeevna spent much of their time together suspecting misbehavior. That didn’t stop Tatyana from violating rules by jumping on her relative’s bed when she was away in the kitchen.

  Olga Sergeevna behaved differently when it was her turn to visit Serafima’s room. There she would exclaim, “Tanichka, Tanichka!” upon entering and Tatyana would be forced to kiss the woman, for whom she had no particular liking. Failing to display kindness to children in Soviet Russia raised suspicion. It was a signal that a person couldn’t be trusted with the secrets of a family’s private life. In a dangerous society where trust among family members was crucial for survival, exclusion could make life even more perilous.

  No doubt Serafima’s highly cautious nature, especially after her husband’s arrest, made her especially protective of Tatyana. Her frequent warnings to be careful, to bundle up and to not get hurt often had the opposite effect on her rebellious daughter, whom she told nothing about the outside world and gave no direct hint about whether she believed Soviet rule was good or bad.

  When Tatyana began school, she was bombarded with typical propaganda. Taught to be grateful to the Motherland, children were also inducted into Stalin’s cult of personality. Like most, Tatyana believed Lenin was everyone’s grandfather and Stalin was their father. On the most important official day of the year, the anniversary of the great October Revolution, Serafima—a woman who had suffered her share of privation and anguish under the communist system—presented her daughter with books inscribed with congratulations. “Perhaps she thought I was one of those with ears behind the walls,” my mother said later in wistful reflection.

  Other families hid far more: stories are legion about people lying to their spouses for decades. It was a matter of survival; the Soviet regime forced them to deny their thoughts, identities and histories to the extent that they began to doubt themselves, a widespread psychological trauma that has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone dealt with. No wonder the culture of lying remains deep-seated today, when the daily denial of reality provides fertile ground for Russia’s staggering corruption.

  Some areas of normality existed under the Soviet Union, however. Although indoctrination was supposedly critical in Young Pioneer summer camps, many were surprisingly free of propaganda beyond the usual ideological songs, and even ardent anticommunists remember them fondly. Not all camps were the same. Tatyana initially pressed her mother to enroll her in one of those established for workers’ children because that’s where many of her school’s bullies and rule breakers went, and she didn’t want to stand out by being different. “They were bandit types,” she said. “Their families drank heavily, the men swore, they were very crude and uncultured, and I was horrified by the children.” Other summer camps were little different from their American counterparts: oases where boys and girls hiked in the woods, played volleyball and enjoyed their first crushes.

  Lives in communal apartments continued more or less unchanged until 1961, when Khrushchev began erecting cheap five-story apartment blocks to alleviate the housing shortage. The structures were later called Khrushcheby—a spin on trushcheby, “slums.” Serafima and Tatyana’s move into their own apartment in one of those buildings occasioned great joy.

  Although deep suspicion of strangers persists, attitudes toward personal relationships as well as the state began changing soon after Stalin’s death in 1953. One of the qualities my father liked most about the Soviet Union when he traveled there in the 1960s and ’70s was the nature of friendships, which led him to share an affection for Russia with other foreigners who also had some of their closest friends there. Ironically or not, George Kennan, the architect of the American policy of containment who served five months as a US diplomat in Moscow before his expulsion by Stalin, also loved Russia, a country he described in his memoirs as “in my blood… There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.” For my father, there was nothing mysterious about the people he liked, the Western-leaning ones who read the same books and had the same political and cultural instincts. He once characterized their naturalness as a kind of freedom from fear of making fools of themselves. If Americans in restaurants hesitate to complain because they’re afraid of appearing foolish and the English don’t even dream of arguing, Russians wouldn’t hesitate to plunge right in. On top of that, they were willing to do virtually anything, and at the drop of a hat, to help their friends. Like private life in general at the time, friendship was more important than work. And because most people were oppressed more or less equitably, meaning that ordinary striving rarely got you anywhere (unless it was done according to the Party’s rules), Soviets seemed to value love and companionship, even if by default, more than most Westerners did.

  There was also a very practical reason for the importance of friendship. As the authorities relaxed their grip on private lives, many people increasingly looked to turn the tables on the state by exploiting it for their own benefit. Growing nepotism, theft and other forms of corruption gave rise to networks and distribution systems for goods and services. Sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh described the exploitation of state resources for personal interests as essentially “privatizing” the state, and he believes everyone came to assume that everyone else was partaking.12

  Friends and family played the central role in what emerged as the Soviet “second economy,” Shlapentokh writes.13 You beat the system with the help of your friends. After the state confirmed people’s right to own private plots of land in 1977, the dacha—an oasis away from urban life and Soviet strictures—became a center of leisure life. Because building materials often couldn’t be obtained in stores, scrounging and stealing them from wherever they could be had became a key activity. Their disappearance from construction sites that were left unguarded caused work stoppages on many buildings, or so people said at the time. That channeling of state resources into private hands was illegal but accepted. And as more people bought cars—at the time, the only ones available were of Soviet manufacture—the constant need to service the rusting little disasters on wheels increased the importance of personal connections for acquiring spare parts.

  Art and literature reflected the change. A new, more casual tone that arose during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign in the late 1950s and early ’60s idealized individual pursuits instead of the state. Poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Vosnesensky and guitar-strumming bards Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky provided personal voices that undermined totalitarian generalizations and ideals.14 In films, the nomadic geologist traveling vast expanses of empty land for the sake of furthering Soviet knowledge became an archetype. And for many citizens, travel within the Soviet Union and camping in the countryside became expressions of officially approved romantic individualism.

  Although the Soviet Union had undergone a sea change by the time I first visited thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika, friends and family were still very much how one usually got things done even then, or perhaps especially then, since as I’ve described many store shelves were literally empty.

  My cousin Ulugbek, who abandoned his promising academic career in 1993, and his wife, Natalia, relied on connections to survive. For example, a friend of Natalia’s who worked in a grocery store would set aside a box of about twenty frozen chickens when deliveries arrived. “We’d thaw them, cut them up into pieces and try to figure out how long they’d last,” Natalia explained. Such typical “under-the-floor” schemes of course made store shelves even emptier.

  Many Russians had long made jam from fruit gathered or bought in summer so it would last until winter. However, a critical lack of sugar—much of it was used for making moonshine—meant that was no longer possible. Obtaining large quantities of food when it was available therefore necessit
ated freezers, which were in especially short supply. Unable to buy one in Moscow, Ulugbek used his connections to obtain something else, a new television set. After driving four hundred and fifty miles east to Kazan, he exchanged it at a freezer factory. “If you had a head for commerce,” Natalia said, “you could get by.” Another friend of hers who worked for a shoe company was paid in shoes—a common practice in the mid-1990s, when the economy was starved of capital, many wages were unpaid and barter transactions accounted for up to half of industrial output.15 Natalia took some of her boxes of shoes to sell at factories and schools.

  I’d already seen some evidence of the importance of connections when I met several Russians during a year I spent at Dartmouth College. They were among the first wave of ordinary Soviets who traveled abroad more or less freely, meaning no reason had been found to deny them permission to leave after they’d gone through the very onerous application process. At Dartmouth, they slept on the couches and floors of classmates they’d met during the Americans’ semesters abroad in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called.

  They stayed and stayed. Those who were thrown out moved to rooms of new friends and acquaintances. The guests appeared to have not one iota of concern about their imposition and distracting effect on college students who couldn’t easily afford either the time or the expense of caring for essentially helpless visitors. (With little English and no money, the Russians survived largely on food snuck from cafeterias.)

  They succeeded because there was something infectious about their warmth, their eagerness to please and embrace of hedonism. I befriended one of them, a ne’er-do-well with long blond hair and a brilliant wit in his late thirties named Yuri, who after a few weeks had adopted the look and studiously unhurried manner of a California surfer. Thriving on company, he was game for anything, including swimming in the Connecticut River and especially guzzling beer at the parties held in one or another reeking fraternity basement most evenings. After I invited him to visit for a couple of weeks that summer, already knowing better, he stayed for months and became a devoted friend. I felt certain that if our roles were reversed and I were penniless in the Soviet Union, he’d do the same for me. In any case, no American I ever met had a tenth of Yuri’s nonchalance or fatalism.

  It was a friend of Yuri’s, a waiter who had never previously heard of me before I showed up on his doorstep, who put me up when I arrived in Leningrad during the coup d’état attempt in the summer of 1991. He also used his connections to get pain relievers from a hospital because I was sick, then procured train tickets to Moscow that would have been impossible for me to obtain. However, those kinds of ties to friends of friends who were otherwise strangers began dissolving almost immediately with the Soviet collapse. Once the state’s intrusion into private life more or less ended, so did the bonds engendered by the common plight. With everyone having to go out and hustle, there was far less time, energy and concern for others.

  Although some found the new freedom to legally wheel and deal liberating, many couldn’t make it in the new Russia. After spending almost a decade in the United States drifting from one job and/or friend’s house to another, Yuri returned to his hometown, once again called St. Petersburg. Growing up under a system that provided most people with little incentive to work—unless you wanted to climb the Party ladder—he, like almost every other Soviet citizen, had developed a kind of passive resistance that consisted of doing as little as possible. Given a job to do—splitting wood in New Hampshire, for example—he would go at it until the job was done. But although he was brilliant with his hands and conscientious about even the most demeaning work, he seemed incapable of planning his future or otherwise acting to improve his lot. Russians have a special word to describe such behavior: avos, a desire to avoid hassles while maintaining blind hope for the best.

  Back in Russia, Yuri took computer classes but couldn’t be bothered to look for a job as a programmer, then tried trading money on the foreign exchange until he had none left. Unable or unwilling to hold down a real job for more than a few months, he continues struggling to make ends meet.

  Like Yuri, the country itself is adrift in many spheres besides politics, its authoritarian regime sustained thanks mainly to the high oil prices that enable it to lavish money on whatever it wants. The American writer Richard Lourie calls it Zombie Russia.

  Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was no question about the nature and identity of Soviet Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russia has failed to forge a new identity for itself. It has no vision, no symbols and no values but to make hay while the sun shines. No single defining adjective has yet to adhere to its name—like Muscovite, Tsarist or Soviet Russia. No name has even been found for the 20-year period itself, like Thaw or Perestroika, which had caught on quickly in the past. No one believes in the country’s future past the end of oil. There is a void at the core of today’s Russia.16

  In this Russia of little to offer apart from opportunities for the ambitious to grab whatever they can get, many rely on what’s left of Soviet-era institutions, one of which is the grandmother: the babushka. Under communism, writes sociologist Shlapentokh, the housing shortages that forced young couples to live with their parents, combined with strict rules that pushed people into retirement at sixty-five and the need for financial and physical support from older relatives, enabled many young people to “exploit” their parents by imposing the care of their children on them. More than 40 percent of urban babies were cared for by their grandmothers, whose levels of activity increased after they retired, according to one study.17 Although no statistics about current levels of grandparents’ involvement exist, I have noticed that the parents of the majority of my friends spend much of their retirement helping bring up their grandchildren.

  Among those friends is Kolya, the fellow journalist with whom I was traveling in Lithuania in 1991. Born in 1967, he was raised in an outlying Moscow neighborhood called Kuntsevo, in a typical apartment made of prefabricated concrete slabs. Six people, including Kolya’s parents, sister, grandmother and great-aunt, lived in eighteen square meters—190 square feet. Like so many other boys, he grew up playing and fighting in the courtyard of his building, where residents gathered and talked. After his mandatory two-year army service, which he spent driving trucks at an air base near Moscow, Gorbachev’s reforms enabled him to unexpectedly enter one of the Soviet Union’s top universities, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. MGIMO had been known for grooming future KGB officers and children of the Communist Party elite. After Kolya married in the 1990s, he sold his late grandmother’s small apartment to help pay for a new one in Moscow’s unfashionable outskirts, where his new wife’s parents would live. Kolya’s in-laws had given up their central Moscow home to his wife, a lawyer. Soon, in their new apartment, they took in Kolya and Olga’s large dog. Several years later, they added Kolya’s daughter. Despite having her own bedroom at home, that daughter—a precocious, energetic twelve-year-old—has grown up living with her grandparents. They take her to her nearby school and, in summer, to their dacha outside the city. Kolya and his wife usually see her only on some weekends. They are now divorced, far from unusual in the country with the world’s highest divorce rate. According to the UN, five of every one thousand Russians are divorced.18

  Although his salary is lower than those of his Western colleagues, Kolya unquestionably belongs to the Russian middle class. A well-educated urban professional with disposable income, he owns real estate and vacations on the Mediterranean—exactly the kind of person the Kremlin’s critics hope will someday help support democratic reform. Despite the widespread signs of growth, however—including the mushrooming number of relatively affordable hypermarkets and sushi restaurants that cater to the demographic—definitions of the middle class and its size vary widely.

  Signs of a post-Soviet middle class in the Western sense—very generally defined as including those with enough discretionary income
to be able to afford consumer goods, health care and provide for their children’s education—first surfaced in the mid-1990s. However, expectations for its rise were suddenly cut short by the economic crisis of 1998, when the precipitous drop of the ruble’s value decimated people’s savings. The numbers seemed to recover by 2002, when a benchmark study put the middle class at a quarter of the population.

  But after a decade of steadily rising wages, stalled for two years during the global financial crisis of 2008, official figures still put the middle class—defined as consisting of individuals who earn at least the equivalent of twelve thousand dollars a year (or families earning that amount per individual) and also own a car and an apartment 19—at 25 percent of the population, compared to around 60 percent in the United States. However, independent surveys put the figure at anywhere between 10 percent of the population when people are categorized by education and income to more than 80 percent when Russians are asked to identify the class to which they belong. Pollster Ludmilla Khakhurina told me that statistics issued by the state committee that compiles them may not accurately reflect real income, thanks to widespread tax evasion and the black and gray markets that continue to make up a large part of the economy. “Our social structure isn’t clear because the criteria are changeable,” she said. Russia’s peculiar economy also differs from those of Western countries because housing was essentially distributed free after the end of communism and utility payments remain subsidized. Khakhurina prefers to look at consumer preferences and people’s own evaluations of their status.