Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  The mechanism for achieving that change bred cruelty and paranoia. Less a real roadmap than a psychological tool for coercing loyalty, enslaving workers and justifying the elimination of anyone accused of obstructing the government, the Five-Year Plan also threw most Soviet resources at building heavy industry to the near exclusion of almost everything else. Coal, iron and steel production dominated, along with tractor and automobile manufacture. One of the signature projects was building a steelworks in the city of Magnitogorsk, roughly translated as “magnet city,” in the southern Ural Mountains, to exploit huge reserves of iron ore. Much of the work was carried out by prisoners, who also built gold and nickel mines, oil wells and lumber camps in the vast stretches of uninhabited Siberia and the country’s far north and east. Forced labor laid the foundations of many cities there, as well as the roads, railroads and other infrastructure they required.

  All the construction was “carried out amidst constant crisis bordering on chaos,” as Malia put it.16 By 1930, industrial production was actually falling. Nine years later, the standard of living in the countryside was lower than it had been in 1913. Alexei Stakhanov—the miner who gave his name to the Stakhanovite movement, which encouraged “model” workers to achieve high productivity—was a favorite Soviet example, touted ad nauseam by propagandists. Stakhanov was reported to have mined fourteen times his quota in a single shift (102 tons in less than six hours). Actually, other workers whose efforts went unmentioned contributed to his achievement, however many tons he actually mined.

  Far from becoming a model for socialist or any other kind of society, the inefficiency and shoddiness of Russian products had become legendary by the time my father began visiting the Soviet Union. On a Soviet collective farm in the southern Krasnodar region at which he spent some weeks in the 1970s, he reported that half the tractors, including the new ones, were under constant repair. Still, the director kept his farm in better shape than it would otherwise have been because he bought two tractors for every one he needed, a method of acquiring spare parts that spoke volumes about wastefulness and inferiority.

  In Moscow, many brand-new buildings were ringed with nets to catch bricks that fell from their facades. Jokes were among the few things in which Soviet production excelled. One of them captured the spirit of sloppy work and shortages particularly well. It’s 1978. A dentist who makes good money because he, like all competent dentists, is paid under the table finally saves enough to buy a car. Taking an immense stack of rubles—neither checks nor credit cards existed—he goes to an outlet (there were also no showrooms) where Volgas are sold. After laboriously counting the money, the manager pulls out a big ledger and flips through its pages. “Yes, you can have your car in 1986,” he says. “April fourteenth. Do you want it in the morning or the afternoon?” The dentist thinks for a moment. “Better make it the morning,” he says. “The plumber’s coming that afternoon.”

  Overcoming the late-communist era’s legacy of that kind of dysfunction remains one of Russia’s greatest challenges. My first summer job in Russia, in 1991, less than a month before the attempted coup d’état, was as a translator for CNN. My very unglamorous assignment was to help put together temporary studios for covering a summit meeting between Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush. Along with other television news channels, CNN set up some of its operations in the then astoundingly modern Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel on the Moscow River, which had been built in the late 1970s with help from the American industrialist and Soviet friend Armand Hammer. Having shown up in a blue blazer and harboring visions of not-too-distant stardom, I was happy to make the acquaintance of Kolya Pavlov but dismayed to find that my job would consist chiefly of lugging equipment from the basement to the conference rooms upstairs, where producers were setting up broadcast studios.

  Nevertheless, all my interpretation skills were required. Despite the extortionary rates CNN was charged for storage, each visit to the hotel’s dank depths necessitated negotiations with the men in overalls who kept the storeroom keys. They were rarely there. I’d find the door shut, a string sealed with wax attached across the door crack (as if that seventeenth-century method of preventing or at least recording theft would have discouraged thieves in any way). When they did happen to be available, the gruff doorkeepers would come up with one reason after another for not allowing CNN the use of its equipment. Needless to say, incremental bribes were the only way to get things in or out. That was the Soviet economy in a nutshell.

  Trying to get things done could become overwhelming. After I began reporting for the local English-language newspaper the Moscow Times, I broke a number of flimsy hotel telephones in provincial cities by slamming down their receivers. The frustration produced by hours of trying to reach one or another official is unpleasant to remember even now. Those were the Yeltsin years, when officials still spoke to reporters—if you could get through over the crackling lines, which produced mainly static. In the Volga River city of Samara, where I was trying to set up an interview with an up-and-coming young reformer type who was generating headlines after he’d modernized the local power utility, I spoke to any number of his secretaries before, during and after their boss’s lunch. Each time, I received a promise he’d provide a yes or no response to my request if I called back fifteen minutes later—when the phone would unfailingly ring unanswered. When someone finally picked up hours later, it was only to lay the receiver down again. Anyone who has tried calling Russian consulates abroad for information about how to apply for a visa will confirm that I’m not exaggerating here.

  Nevertheless, I was genuinely taken aback during a reporting trip for NPR years later when I arrived at a tiny provincial airport an hour ahead of the departure time for one of two weekly flights to find the doors chained shut. It was near a small town deep in the taiga forest of the far east, where an overnight snowfall had prompted me to call twice in the morning to confirm the time. Ten minutes of banging and yelling summoned the nonchalant airport director and his secretary, whose only explanation for why the plane had taken off earlier than scheduled was a shrug.

  I didn’t know whether to feel angry or desperate: the next plane wouldn’t be leaving for days. Perhaps it was my own fault for having scheduled important interviews the following day in Khabarovsk, the nearest big city. There was nothing to do but check into one of two hotels. Turned away from the first by a woman who demanded, “What do you want?!” when I rang the bell on the concierge’s desk, I managed to get a room in a crumbling hulk called the Youth Hotel.

  If the airport staff members’ refusal to admit any responsibility for having misinformed me was typically Russian, however, so was their transformed demeanor the following morning, perhaps because they hoped their unacknowledged guilt would be absolved when they offered good news. A private plane flying natural-gas pipeline technicians would be passing through and the airport chief had convinced the pilot to take me along. Now apologetic, the director gave me a half-hour lift to the airstrip in his ancient military jeep, in which he was barely able to negotiate the unplowed road. Inside, the young woman checking me in had never seen an American passport before. “Have you been to Hollywood?” she asked, beaming. “Bruce Willis lives there, right?” More than being able to keep my appointments, it was her friendliness that sustained my smile as I finally trudged out to the airstrip.

  Western visitors to Russia have regaled their friends back home with stories of shoddiness, disorganization and graft for centuries. When the Marquis de Custine visited in 1839, his overwhelming response was dismay. “Seen from the Neva,” he wrote of the river flowing though the grand imperial capital, “the parapets of the St. Petersburg wharves are impressive and magnificent; but from the first step on land, you discover that these same wharves are paved with inferior stones, inconvenient, uneven—as disagreeable to the eye as they are painful to pedestrians and treacherous to carriages.”17 Writing about the preliminary customs procedures—the full process would turn out to last days—de Custine described the
petty officials he encountered on his first stop, the island of Kronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland just outside St. Petersburg.

  The profusion of small, superfluous precautions creates here a population of clerks. Each one of these men discharges his duty with a pedantry, a rigor, an air of importance uniquely designed to give prominence to the most obscure employment. He does not permit himself to say so, but you can see him thinking approximately this: “Make way for me, I am one of the members of the great machine of the State.”18

  In his description, the clerks make an inevitable mockery of efficiency and effectiveness. They also dehumanize those at the bottom of the ladder.

  At last we finished with the customs ceremonies, the courtesies of the police, were rid of the military salutes and a spectacle of the most profound misery which can mar the human race, for the oarsmen of the gentlemen of the Russian Customs are creatures of a kind apart. As I could do nothing for them, their presence was odious to me, and each time these miserable wretches brought to the ship officials of all grades employed by the Customs Service and by the Maritime Police—the most severe police of the Empire—I turned my eyes. These ragged seamen are a disgrace to their country; they are a species of greasy galley slaves who spend their lives transporting the clerks and officials of Kronstadt aboard foreign vessels. In seeing their faces and in thinking about what is called existence for these poor devils, I asked myself what man has done to God that sixty million of the human race should be condemned to live in Russia.19

  Quoting de Custine may smack of cliché because so many have done it during the century and three-quarters since he visited. But there’s good reason: much of the spirit that depressed that eloquent observer persists, despite great changes in the urban landscapes. Although arriving in Moscow’s recently modernized main international airport, Sheremetyevo, is less dismaying today than it was several years ago, it still gives a taste of the country that awaits your entry. Renovations that vastly improved the late-Soviet era’s dark gloom have had little effect on the lethargic movements of the stern customs officials who take their time poring over the passports of visitors. Having just disembarked from their planes, passengers are forced to wait in jostling lines, sometimes for more than forty minutes. Emerging into the scrum of the arrivals hall, pivoting away from one dubious-looking taxi driver after another, one wonders why a country whose officials cite attracting foreign investment as one of their top priorities provides such a disheartening first glimpse to foreigners, many of whom are prepared to think the best of Russia. Of course that’s an academic question.

  Piotr Chadaev, considered the first of Russia’s nineteenth-century Westernizers, famously pronounced that if his country had a universal lesson for the world, it was that its example should be avoided at all costs. “That is but a natural consequence of a culture that is wholly imported and imitative,” he wrote. “There is no internal development, no natural progress, in our society; new ideas sweep out the old because they are not derived from the old but come from God knows where.” Chadaev believed his country was isolated from the West; that it was a backward place with no past or future. By arguing that Russia must follow its own path of development to fulfill its historical mission, he also influenced a seminal group of nineteenth-century intellectuals called the Slavophiles, who had come to believe Russian isolation was a virtue.

  Although the fictional character Ilya Oblomov represents a specific type from a certain era, he is among Russian literature’s enduring archetypes. Young Oblomov, the product of a noble family who comes of age in the idealistic 1860s, is the embodiment of a generation of Russian intellectuals called the superfluous men. Generally young and aristocratic, they supported freethinking, often radical ideas, unlike most of their contemporaries. (Their later designation as superfluous arose because they appeared to have nowhere to channel their energies besides dueling, gambling and other self-destructive acts.) Oblomov plans to do great things that never materialize. Instead he spends his idle days living off a waning inheritance, a symbol of the demise of his class. Like the hopeless alcoholic Venichka Erofeev, whose tale of his train trip from Moscow to the suburban town of Petushki would lambaste the Brezhnev-era USSR a hundred years later, Oblomov is as comic as he is tragic. Published in 1859 by Ivan Goncharov, a St. Petersburg civil servant from a family of grain merchants, the novel Oblomov tells the story of the hugely lethargic Oblomov and his equally indolent valet, Zakhar, who live in self-imposed isolation in Oblomov’s once grand St. Petersburg apartment, where the wealthy hero has settled after giving up hopes of a respectable career.

  Lying down was not for Ilya Illich either a necessity as it is for a sick or a sleepy man, or an occasional need as it is for a person who is tired, or a pleasure as it is for a sluggard: it was his normal state. When he was at home—and he was almost always at home—he was lying down, and invariably in the same room, the one in which we have found him and which served him as bedroom, study and reception-room. He had three more rooms, but he seldom looked into them, only, perhaps, in the morning when his servant swept his study—which did not happen every day. In those other rooms the furniture was covered and the curtains were drawn.20

  Unable to bring himself even to read a book, Oblomov spends his days in his dressing gown, daydreaming. Among other plans, he envisions schemes to reform his ancestral countryside estate into a model of prosperous activity. Unable to achieve his arcadian ideal, however, he ends up justifying his inactivity. In the first pages, he receives an annual letter from the bailiff of his estate that contains the bad news of an ever-smaller income, which spurs Oblomov to decide yet again to overhaul its management.

  As soon as he woke, he made up his mind to get up and wash, and after drinking tea, to think matters over, taking various things into consideration and writing them down, and altogether to go into the subject thoroughly. He lay half an hour tormented by his decision; but afterward he reflected that he would have time to think after breakfast, which he could have in bed as usual, especially since one can think just as well lying down.

  This is what he did. After his morning tea he sat up and very nearly got out of bed; looking at his slippers, he began lowering one foot down toward them, but at once drew it back again.21

  Oblomov’s childhood friend Andrei Stolz, whose German name symbolizes his industriousness, represents his opposite. Productive and practical as he is, his efforts to prod Oblomov into action come to nothing. Nevertheless, the reader sympathizes not with the wooden Stolz but with Oblomov, who, despite his shortcomings, is warm, kind and imaginative.

  Captivated by dreams of his once happy childhood, Oblomov personifies a state of mind: Oblomovshina, or Oblomovism, has come to mean a kind of inertia. He’s not the first literary archetype to have done so. All children are familiar with one of Oblomov’s best-known precedents, a fairy-tale hero named Ivanushka Durachok—Little Ivan the Sweet Fool—whose greatest desire is to while away his days lazing about on the warm tiled stove of his village hut. Like Oblomov, he is blessed with goodness and an easygoing nature. Unlike Oblomov, however, he manages to accomplish quite a lot.

  Ivanushka often has two elder brothers who try to outwit him but whose greed and selfishness inevitably lead them to failure. In one tale, Ivanushka is fetching water at a river when he catches a magic pike. In return for its release, the fish grants him the power to make his wishes come true. Ivanushka’s first act is to order his pails to walk home themselves. Commanded to chop wood in the forest, Ivanushka has an axe do it for him and a horseless sleigh pull the load home. Angered by the bizarre sight, villagers petition the tsar to arrest Ivanushka. Lured to the castle, he ventures there still lying on his stove, which walks there by itself. But he is saved from execution by the tsar’s daughter, who falls in love with him. The tsar allows them to marry but has them sealed in a wooden barrel and set adrift at sea. After days of floating, the desperate princess begs Ivanushka to do something. When he wishes them to reach shore, the barrel instantly breaks open
on land, where he conjures up a marble palace and they live happily ever after.

  If fairy-tale characters that endure in the West—such as Aesop’s dogged tortoise and the Grimms’ seven dwarfs—tend to glorify persistence and hard work, Russian fairy tales often champion resignation to one’s fate. The unlikely hero Ivanushka defeats his enemies, marries the princess and ends up living in a palace because he is compassionate and selfless.

  Literary and fairy-tale archetypes that instill the notion that people without coarse ambition are the spiritually purest reinforce Russia’s widespread fatalism, the idea that things will happen as they happen and nothing important can be done about it. However, today’s workforce is more directly affected by systemic problems in a sphere that has long been seen as one of the country’s great strengths: education. Like so much of Russian life, it is at the mercy of the self-interested bureaucrats and corruption that sap the strength of even those most committed to changing the Russian presumption that sloth conquers enterprise.

  Russians and foreigners alike who are surprised the economy isn’t more diversified and robust often point to the country’s traditionally high educational standards. The Soviet Union used to boast that its system was the world’s best, and while communism may have been disastrous in many spheres, it helped educate a land of formerly illiterate peasants. In addition to making literacy nearly universal by building on the impressive gains made before 1917, the Soviet Union produced some of the world’s top physicists, mathematicians and engineers. Russian computer programmers and hackers remain some of the best anywhere, and with so many highly qualified people, the logic goes, surely Russian industry should have more to show for it.