Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Some believe men’s attitudes toward women are among the most direct vestiges of serfdom. Oppressed by their owners or other overlords, their lives circumscribed by the dictates of reactionary church dogma, male serfs had few outlets besides beating their women, or so the argument goes. Repression under communism perpetuated such traditional attitudes. “Physical violence and love is connected in Russia,” Pisklakova added. She traced the association to a sixteenth-century domestic guide called Domostroi, “domestic order,” that instructed the master of the house not to hit women in the face in order to avoid public embarrassment. It recommended whips as more effective than fists.

  “No one spoke about domestic violence during the Soviet era,” Pisklakova said, because the model of the Soviet family was presented as perfect. “Therefore, there couldn’t be violence, period.” Although attitudes are very slowly changing and new laws are being passed, and although the topic of domestic violence sometimes even appears on television talk shows, “it’s still seen as up to women to make the home better,” Pisklakova added. “Domestic happiness remains their responsibility.”

  Other convictions reinforce those attitudes, including the belief that men deserve more sympathy than women, partly because so many died during the last century’s two world wars and also because their life expectancy is so much shorter. “Russian women are seen as very strong, which is true,” Pisklakova said. “But the attitude is that they can deal with their problems while men need protection.”

  Domestic violence also continues to be accepted because Russians see themselves as emotional and passionate. The impetuous “Russian soul” is often invoked to explain “crimes of passion,” however violent. A recent television drama billed as a tale about unhappy love featured a female metro employee who leaves her policeman husband after he beats her. After stalking her, he proceeds to kill her, then himself. “But the story wasn’t about love at all,” Pisklakova said. “It represented a classic case of domestic abuse, about power and control.”

  Change would almost certainly be faster under a political system that doesn’t repress human rights organizations or undermine the independence of the legal system. Still, change would be slow even under a more democratic government. Attitudes toward women and their roles derive from the generally small place all individuals hold in a society where the strong rule and traditional arrangements govern most aspects of life.

  Back on Moscow’s streets, proud new driver Lera Labzina said that although she believes some attitudes toward women will continue improving, others will never change. “Men have never accepted women drivers,” she said, “and I don’t think they ever will.” Even some women accept the stereotypes. Rear-window “warning” stickers that picture stiletto-heeled shoes are not uncommon on Russian cars. Others point to a larger lack of respect for the rule of law and human rights. “We never think about Russia as a country where women are oppressed,” I was told by Irina Mikhailovskaya, editor of the Russian edition of the magazine Forbes Style. “People are oppressed, not just women. That was true about the Soviet Union, and it remains true today.”

  Mikhaylovskaya believes change will be very slow if it comes at all. “We’re so far away from the West, it’s not a question of a few years or even a generation.”

  Children play outside a derelict factory in southern Siberia. ( Justin Jin / justinjin.com )

  7

  Indolence and Inefficiency

  There is nothing petty about the Russian mind when it comes to the gap between the scale of conception and the amount of achievement.

  —William Gerhardie, essayist (1895–1977)

  Since the dark days of communism, when many Moscow streets were unlit and the city as a whole was all but somnolent after dark, the capital has become known for having joined the ranks of cities that never sleep. Traffic jams persist, pedestrians clog its neon-lit sidewalks and shops and restaurants on every block bustle with customers. During the day, metro trains that arrive more frequently than every two minutes throughout the rush hours are packed to capacity. The frenetic, work-intensive appearance of things doesn’t mean that activities are conducted efficiently, however. Nor should Moscow’s resemblance to other major cities be taken as an indication that it functions as they do.

  Consider the crumbling ZiL truck factory, a collection of hangar-like assembly plants that sprawls across acres of prime Moscow real estate on the banks of a canal off the Moscow River. The location is a legacy of the old practice, tsarist as well as Soviet, of building factories in the center of cities with little regard for aesthetics or urban planning, let alone residents’ comfort. Founded in 1916, the complex cranked out more than two hundred thousand vehicles during its Soviet heyday, when ZiL was a pride and joy. The company also produced refrigerators and bullet-proofed limousines for Stalin. Today, ZiL trucks that look like they came straight out of the 1960s still roar from one end of the country to the other, their drivers bouncing and straining to steer the unwieldy vehicles without the aid of power steering or modern suspension systems. The Communist Party seemed to believe that only large trucks were necessary, even for hauling the smallest loads, and after the Soviet Union collapsed, ZiL continued building hundreds of thousands of obsolete hulks no one wanted.

  Now the plant stands mostly idle, producing a mere thousand sorely outdated vehicles a year. It is kept alive mostly by orders from the city government, which took control of the premises in the 1990s, and a joint venture there that assembles Renault truck engines from imported parts. While many ZiL buildings are rented out to other companies, massive World War II–era machinery still stamps steel parts in one remote corner of the factory. When I spoke to several workers operating the equipment there on a frigid winter day, they were unwilling to talk for more than a few minutes for fear of being overheard. I had better luck outside the administration building, where a handful of brave workers held a meek demonstration to protest their pitiful wages, a bold move for state employees in Putin’s Russia. One of the protesters was a stout, bleached-blond woman with short hair named Anna Fyodorova, who had worked at ZiL for thirty years and made the equivalent of three hundred dollars a month. That was her salary on paper. In fact, she said, she hadn’t been paid since the previous summer, a situation for which she blamed company management.

  “They take the money that’s supposed to go to our wages,” she said, “while they profit from renting out the factory premises. Capitalism is for our bosses, not for us honest workers because only those who steal get ahead.” Fyodorova fondly recalled life in the Soviet Union, in particular ZiL’s cradle-to-grave social support network, which included a hospital, stadiums, concert halls and children’s summer camps. “ZiL used to be its own state,” she said. “It owned everything, and everything used to be simple and easy.”

  Russia’s recovery from the 1998 economic downturn promised to help reverse the industrial decline. The government’s decision to devalue the ruble made Russian products cheaper, enabling new companies such as Wimm-Bill-Dann, which sold juice in Western-style packaging, to more easily compete with the flood of imports Russians craved. Then a surge in oil prices fed a consumer binge by buoying incomes. The GDP finally exceeded its 1991 level in 2004.

  But the future remains bleak for many workers like Fyodorova in Russia’s manufacturing sector. Despite being awash with oil and gas money, the government has failed—more accurately, it has declined—to use its riches for rebooting the country’s mostly stagnant industry in any serious way. Life for factory workers in the old so-called worker’s paradise has barely improved during the past two decades. Many employed in sectors kept alive by inertia, corruption and high import duties—such as the auto industry—put in their hours with a carelessness and disorder best conveyed by the word bezalabernost’, which means “lack of a working system.” The work ethic remains so weak that apart from weapons and a few small civilian aircraft, Russia now produces virtually no manufactured goods that can compete in the world market.

  Howe
ver much that is a legacy of the Soviet Union, which famously pretended to pay workers who pretended to work, it is also an old trope in Russia, whose fairy tales teach that the lazy and bumbling will be rewarded as long as their hearts are pure.

  The current lack of drive also derives from Russia’s natural-resources economy, in which what really matters is how to take—including by theft—rather than how to produce. Despite endless official promises of change, there is little indication it will happen soon. The present system works well enough to sustain the ruling classes and, for the time being, enough of the great unwashed to keep them from thinking of revolt.

  Not that some efforts to change haven’t been serious. Some facets of education have improved since the 1990s, when there was no money to pay teachers, and a few entrepreneurs have been working hard to start new businesses, despite the government’s choking regulations and demand for bribes. So is it Russia’s fate to remain perennially underdeveloped? Or is it simply enduring bad luck, as it has been for centuries?

  During the supposed rule of the proletariat, the main Soviet labor unions were weak organizations that actually represented the interests of management. Although that remains largely true today, a smattering of scrappy new workers’ groups has emerged to speak for real workers. I dropped in on a meeting of one of them in a central Moscow basement one cold January evening. At the bottom of a set of narrow stairs, ten members of the Moscow Workers’ Union sat around mismatched tables surrounded by busts of Karl Marx and shelves groaning with Lenin’s collected works. The dusty relics seemed more comic than usual because the dogged earnestness of those present seemed intended to defy the consistency with which Russia’s leaders have exploited its toiling masses. Solemnly agreeing that conditions for workers are increasingly miserable, the men nevertheless made no resolutions for action.

  Vassily Shishkarev represented employees of ZiL. Tall, bearded and weary-looking, he argued that workers were far better organized in the past, even during the dangerous days before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, than they are today. “People don’t discuss wages and factory work on the shop floor,” he lamented. “Instead they talk about mushroom picking and potato harvesting like a bunch of farmers. That’s because they’re forced to survive on what they grow in their spare time and on food from relatives in villages back home.”

  Echoing Anna Fyodorova, the veteran ZiL worker who had protested at the cautious demonstration, he said those who live well in Russia are almost exclusively “those who steal state property, company shares and money.” He questioned why the Moscow city government, which owns more than 60 percent of ZiL, hadn’t fired its management for its “miserable” failure to modernize. Of course the question was rhetorical. “Ordinary people understand you can’t survive by being honest,” he said by way of an answer. “Putin and his gang are building no new factories,” he said. “They’re just taking for themselves and their cronies.”

  ZiL would surely have been shut down many years ago in any country with a competitive manufacturing economy. Its survival speaks volumes about the nature of business in Russia, which has much less to do with producing than expropriating—in this case subsidies from the city government. Shutting down the factory was also far from the union members’ minds. On the contrary, Shishkarev criticized ZiL’s cutting of Soviet-era social welfare, insisting wages be raised to compensate for reductions. How should ZiL boost salaries despite making no money? His answer was a shrug.

  Back in the ZiL complex, mild-mannered spokesman Victor Novochenko admitted that his company is an anachronism. Despite workers’ nostalgia for the good old days, he said, unloading Soviet-era social burdens and property is crucial to ZiL’s hopes for reviving its fortunes. “We take up far too much expensive real estate in the center of Moscow,” he added. He also pinned hopes on replacing the company’s predominantly poorly trained pension-age workers by appealing to the government for help in training qualified personnel.

  But the authorities’ record in such matters has been miserable. Under Putin, the government’s main strategy for assisting ailing industries has been to arrange takeovers by state-controlled companies or business groups close to the Kremlin. Investigative journalist Yulia Latynina, one of Russia’s most incisive columnists, told me she’s convinced state control is the worst way to encourage industrial restructuring. “In the best-case scenario, it results in the inefficient use of government funds to create unfair competition and stifle the market,” she said. “In most cases, it means straight-out theft by the new managers.”

  Visiting another auto factory, the mile-and-a-half-long plant of Russia’s largest carmaker, Avtovaz, is like stepping back in time. Until it was phased out in 2012, the most popular model of Avtovaz’s signature vehicle—the Lada—had been based squarely on the Fiat that was 1966 European car of the year. The factory is located in the city of Togliatti, on the banks of the Volga River in the Samara region south of Moscow. Named after the Italian communist politician, the industrial eyesore is wholly dependent on Lada and the myriad auto-parts and tuning companies it helped spawn. It’s also a center for organized crime where journalists who dare investigate the notoriously corrupt auto retail market are often killed. Until a third of its workforce was cut in 2009, the factory employed more than a hundred thousand workers—many of them women—who welded, screwed and hammered its products together, a massively labor-intensive process that required no less than thirty times the man-hours it took to build a car in the West. I spent less time than I wanted to on the factory floor because the midlevel directors accompanying my every step were far less interested in allowing the company’s countless woes to be exposed than in hustling me to attend a vodka-soaked lunch—the usual blind for journalists. I barely managed to escape by claiming I had a plane to catch back to Moscow.

  My friend Kolya once bought a Lada Niva, a small four-wheel-drive jeep. It needed service within a week because assembly workers had left metal shavings in the transmission. When I asked why he hadn’t bought a much more reliable and comfortable used foreign car for the same amount of money, he shot me an exasperated look. “How long have you lived here? Don’t you know you can’t expect a new car to work right away?” No wonder slightly used Russian cars—driven long enough for their owners to have hammered out some faults—often cost more than new ones.

  Instead of shutting down such companies or forcing them to change, the government has kept them and the hundreds of thousands of jobs they generate on life support partly by keeping prices very low—a new Lada costs around five thousand dollars—and continuing to raise duties on imports of foreign cars. That alone would not be enough to keep the domestic car industry afloat, however. Pride has driven politicians, such as Moscow’s former Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, to funnel huge amounts of government money into keeping it alive. When the global financial crisis of 2008 forced car factories to a standstill, threatening to deal Lada a long overdue death blow, it was Putin who rode to the rescue. Advertising efforts were redoubled, and, more effectively, import taxes were again raised, now to an average of 25 percent.

  When Putin visited Togliatti in April of 2009 for a highly publicized meeting with Avtovaz workers, he vowed to do what was needed to keep the company going. The government soon announced it would spend billions of dollars on a bailout on top of the raised import duties. Now the company survives as a symbol of Putin’s determination to exhibit himself as the defender of the Russian proletariat. Arguments about the steps needed for any real reform of the Russian auto industry aside, the Lada is such a bad car—and Avtovaz’s executives are so bumbling—that it exposes Putin to ridicule every time he steps near one. In August 2010, the then–prime minister exchanged his chauffeured Mercedes for a tiny Lada Kalina he was said to be driving across Siberia. His publicity stunt, intended to display the car’s reliability, achieved exactly the opposite.

  Amateur video footage posted on YouTube showed Putin traveling with a massive convoy of cars, buses and trucks—which included three K
alinas, one apparently broken down on the back of a tow truck. Putin tried again in 2011, when he showed up at a Lada showroom to promote an ostensibly new model the government was billing as Russia’s new “people’s car.” The then–prime minister failed to get the car to start, which he later very uncharacteristically blamed on himself, then failed to open the trunk until two company officials rushed to his aid. Nevertheless, Putin pronounced the new Lada a “good car.”

  While the authorities’ penchant for propping up grossly inefficient state enterprises partly explains Russia’s manufacturing failure, a more deeply rooted problem plagues new business owners. An entrepreneur named Vladimir Maltsev told me that the common scourge of corruption threatens the viability of his small wholesale trading company every day.

  I met Maltsev when I was hailing a taxi and he stopped. (Russians often use their cars as gypsy cabs when times are tough. In the 1990s, several cars would sometimes screech to a halt the minute you stuck out a hand out and the drivers would argue about who would get the equivalent of the two-or three-dollar fare. Now it’s usually quicker and cheaper to call a real taxi.) Although I’d spent years driving in Moscow and knew very well how the traffic police operate, I was researching the topic and asked Maltsev how often he was stopped. “Every day,” he said with a sigh. When I went on to ask about other forms of corruption, he told me the tax police had recently frozen his company’s bank account after claiming he had failed to file an apparently crucial document with his corporate return. When Maltsev—a stout, mustachioed man with dark curly hair—showed up at the tax police building with the proper paper, which bore a stamp showing it had indeed been filed, he was nevertheless made to wait in line at an office that never appeared to open.