However, closer examination of the schooling system gives a different impression of the difficulties Russia faces in building a competitive economy beyond the segment based on mining natural resources. To begin with, although technical training at top Soviet institutions achieved very high levels, the education that most Soviets received under communism failed to provide the basic curricula that are crucial for critical reasoning and initiative, the kind the best American schools and colleges provide. Heavy drilling in Marxism-Leninism discouraged creative thinking.
A handful of scholars, such as the literary theorist Yuri Lotman—of Estonia’s Tartu University, the Russian Empire’s first institution of higher learning, established under Swedish rule in 1632—were global pioneers in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. But the Iron Curtain cut off most others, especially social scientists, from key developments abroad. Among the fields that withered was psychology, which became a tool for justifying the incarceration of political prisoners in psychiatric wards, a practice that is showing signs of a resurgence under Putin.
Yevgeny Bunimovic, a poet and former teacher who is now a member of the Moscow legislature, disputes the claim that Soviet schools were the world’s best. One of Russia’s best-known experts on education, Bunimovic works in an office in the newly renovated city Duma building on centrally located Petrovka Street, where members of his staff are unusually cheerful for Russian government employees. “It’s a myth,” he said of the idea that Soviet education was among the world’s best. “In mathematics and chemistry, yes, the teaching was good. But not in history, which was subject to propaganda. And the negative influence of Soviet control remains very large.”
Another critic, Boris Davidovich, characterizes Soviet education as “totalitarian.” A mathematics teacher, Davidovich is also deputy director of Moscow’s School 57, located in an old neighborhood behind the Pushkin art museum, close to the Kremlin. “The method was based on power,” he told me, “specifically the state’s power over the teacher and the teacher’s power over the child, who was forced to learn.”
Then came the Soviet collapse. An almost overnight disappearance of nearly all education funding left schools to fend for themselves. Throughout the country, teachers were paid between five and ten dollars a month. Following the example of other state employees, many continued working despite receiving nothing at all. Most schools had no money for maintenance or new textbooks. Despite that, Bunimovic praises the Soviet legacy for helping schools remain open during those very difficult years. In the 1990s, the Moscow school system somehow managed to keep textbooks free of charge, but “there was no money for library books or chemicals for chemistry experiments, let alone any kind of renovations. God forbid something went wrong.”
School 57, which specializes in mathematics and is one of the country’s best, struggled to survive. Since Russian schools are funded by regional and municipal governments, those living in Moscow, by far the richest city, are luckiest. With fierce competition to get in, many of School 57’s students are gifted. But ten years ago, its green Soviet-era paint was peeling and the wooden floors were creaking and unvarnished. Deputy director Davidovich, a fast-spoken but philosophical man with graying hair and a short beard, exudes pride in the school, as do many others there, including the students. The end of Soviet-era controls “freed teachers,” Davidovich said. “Now they can speak the truth without fear. It’s a different mentality.” But when the government left schools to do largely whatever they wanted, it also effectively stopped enforcing standards. With the Soviet coercion gone, there’s been nothing to replace it. Davidovich believes the biggest problem now is students’ lack of motivation. “It’s very difficult to teach in those conditions.”
In some respects, the situation has changed dramatically since oil and gas money began flooding state coffers more than a decade ago. With the government finally paying attention to education, there’s been a sporting attempt to renovate School 57’s old classrooms with earth-tone colors and new lighting, which make it seem like a different place. Davidovich said the government’s decision to allocate a certain amount of money for each student has “transformed our situation.” Teachers are now paid a thousand dollars a month, small by Moscow standards but a far cry from the pitiful salaries of the 1990s. Still, the city government covers only around 75 percent of the school system’s budget, forcing directors to raise the rest themselves. Some comes from wealthy parents, many of whom demand special treatment for their children.
As competition for access to good public schools increases, parents complain about having to pay for their children to get into the best ones and then having to bribe teachers to give good grades. A middle-aged Muscovite named Tatyana Valentinovna told me she sometimes has to pay five hundred dollars. The prices increase for older students. In a 2011 poll conducted by an independent agency called the Public Opinion Foundation, respondents said higher education constituted the most corrupt sector of public life, even above the notorious traffic police.
Other systemic problems include government pressure to teach officially approved lessons, a consequence of increased spending on schools. Putin has called for a universal secondary school history textbook “free of internal contradictions and ambiguities.” Previously suggested new versions have muted criticism of Soviet crimes and praised dictator Joseph Stalin an “effective manager.” Bunimovic told me the education system is held hostage by a dichotomy between what the government says and what it does, as when Prime Minister Medvedev makes admirable speeches about the urgent need to improve education while heading a government that has very little tolerance for criticism.
“Medvedev has said our future depends on raising a new generation of critical thinkers, but how can you do that in a society in which newspapers are censored? You simply can’t have both,” Bunimovic said. He also criticized the government’s historical revisionism. “We have a government that sees enemies surrounding Russia,” he said. “That kind of thinking produces a certain type of student—not the critical, open-thinking type. Again, you can’t have both.”
Other schools, especially in Russia’s much poorer regions, are in far worse condition. Many still struggle to survive, and the level of education is often miserable. Even in the relatively wealthy capital, most schools look run-down. The difference in levels of education is helping fuel the massive gap between the poor, who get most of their information from state television, and the elite, many of whose children read critical media in Russian and foreign languages on the Internet. Educators also say corruption and pressure to toe the official line, those hallmarks of Putin’s Russia, are threatening the school system.
A medical student named Sasha Vitrogansky told me many medical school applicants pay thousands of dollars in bribes to pass their entrance exams and continue giving gifts to secure good grades. “Something wrong can always be found on our tests and reports,” he said. “If you want to pass, you have to take along a box of chocolates and a bottle of liquor at the very least. You force yourself to smile when you hand them to your professor.” Boris Davidovich told me that kind of bribery is seriously damaging even grammar schools such as School 57. “Corruption is lowering the level of education; it’s one of our biggest problems,” he said. “The state of our schools reflects society in general. It’s our common woe.”
Although the average Russian student now ranks close to the average American in world comparisons of educational achievement, Bunimovic concluded, neither country should be proud of that.
Since 1991, Russia has defied countless predictions and heartfelt hopes that its dominant way of doing things would change. Although travel abroad, the influx of foreigners, the freedom to read, the advent of the Internet and a new consumer culture have combined with other very powerful agents to produce some change, so far their influence hasn’t been powerful enough. Under the Soviet Union, the Communist Party’s monopoly on power enabled its leaders to embark upon, and often later abandon, grandiosely wasteful projects such as a ra
ilway through the largely unpopulated far east. Now vast income from the energy sector has replaced Soviet control and enables a less authoritarian regime to undertake similarly wasteful projects, such as funding the auto industry, for the sake of shoring up its power and glorifying itself.
Among the new initiatives was Putin’s most audacious effort to present Russia as a modern place: his successful bid to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in the popular Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the president spends much of the summer. Tens of thousands of mostly migrant workers toiled for miserly pay to rebuild the town’s rickety Soviet-era infrastructure on a scale reminiscent of the old communist developments. The defiance of logic also approached Soviet levels, and not just because the city’s subtropical climate necessitated hoarding the previous year’s snow under thermal blankets on the surrounding Caucasus Mountains. Staging the world’s premier international sporting event within a half day’s drive of North Caucasus regions where Islamist militants carry out almost daily attacks did more to defy reason.
Sochi has become synonymous with Putin’s crony capitalism because it enabled his associates at the top of Russian industry to reap billions of mostly taxpayer funds by helping build what have turned out to be some of the world’s most expensive sporting facilities. Companies belonging to one man alone, Putin’s childhood friend and former judo sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg, earned more than seven billion dollars, more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.22 Much of the work was shoddy, polluting and wasteful. The ski jump had to be rebuilt numerous times, until Putin himself fired the Russian Olympic Committee’s vice president, whose brother happened to own the responsible construction company. The final cost estimate for the seventeen-day event surpassed fifty billion dollars, almost four times the proposed amount, making it the most expensive Olympic Games in history.
Nevertheless, the corruption and lethargy that come with Putin’s system and its suppression of genuine enterprise may well continue sustaining the old way of doing things until the oil wells run dry.
Some of the thousands of soldiers sent to help put down opposition protests in central Moscow ahead of parliamentary elections in 2007.
8
The Avant-Garde
He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.
—from “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” a manifesto of the Cubo-Futurist art movement, 19121
Amid the old wooden dachas and new tin-roofed redbrick buildings that constitute Russian suburbia thirty miles northeast of Moscow, billboards and rudimentary strip malls selling construction materials give way to a rambling pine and birch forest. A two-lane road stops at a large metal gate flanked by a wall of neat concrete blocks and barbed wire. Behind them lies what used to be one of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets: Star City. Built to train cosmonauts to fly into space, the area formerly called Closed Military Settlement No. 1 hosts astronauts from around the world as they prepare for stints on the International Space Station.
The aging compound, constructed around sprawling, typically Soviet paved central quadrangles, includes apartment blocks and a school together with massive brick buildings housing replicas of space station components. One section lies underwater at the bottom of a pool, where trainees in space suits float with the help of scuba divers. In another building, engineers fiddle with wires, pipes and panels of electronics in a very cramped residential module. Decorated with acres of wood and linoleum, the complex appears basic despite the highly advanced technology it houses. Although the engineers say their simulations are crucial to ensure the proper functioning of the space station, it’s hard to imagine anything in the facility actually working in space, a perception heightened by the staff’s defensiveness. Everything’s better than at NASA, I was told, including the bureaucracy, which doesn’t choke off progress as American officials do. The rivalry sometimes surfaces into public view. Although partly conceived as a showcase for what countries can achieve by working together, the International Space Station has prompted arguments between Russia’s space agency and NASA that mirror Moscow’s troubled relations with the West. Shortly before my visit, the station’s commander confessed in a newspaper interview that squabbles about equipment and supplies were harming work in space. Since Moscow was charging foreign astronauts for using its facilities on the space station, he said, only Russians used the Russian toilets now and there was no more sharing of food. Other astronauts later played down some of the claims, but confirmed the general friction.
One of the loudest arguments was over the Russian practice of taking civilian travelers to the space station in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in fees. Vladimir Gubarev, a space industry expert who served as Moscow’s spokesman for the joint US-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission in the 1970s, was pained by such disagreements. Speaking in the comfortable study of his central Moscow apartment, decorated with photos of Apollo-Soyuz and other Soviet milestones, he told me the American and Russian space programs do things differently. “They have different cultures, so it’s a mistake to believe you can create a successful joint station in space,” he said.
Gubarev placed most of the blame on Moscow. Instead of developing new technology, he said, the Russians were mainly interested in squeezing profit from seriously outdated technology, leaving their space program at mounting risk. In 2011, one mishap after another caused Russia to lose five satellites and a spacecraft, an ambitious unmanned probe that would have collected soil samples from a Martian moon. After it became stuck in orbit around the earth, the space agency’s chief, Vladimir Popovkin, insinuated foreign sabotage. “I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone,” he told the newspaper Izvestiya, “but there are powerful [technological] means to affect spacecraft, and their use can’t be ruled out.” Although a deputy prime minister later admitted Russia’s failures could have been caused by equipment “produced about twelve to thirteen years ago,” other officials wondered whether American radar had disabled the probe.
To me, the space program vividly illustrated some of the paradoxes of Russian life. Star City’s jerry-rigged appearance reflected the legacy of a superpower with Third-World standards of living. Russia’s backwardness has ensured that many of its achievements, in art as well as science, are inspired by and measured against advances in the West (when they’re not largely stolen). The space program was also representative for another reason. In a society where many developments have been initiated by orders from above, the Soviet space program’s early successes came essentially from below—specifically from the ingenuity and dedication of a handful of individuals.
In other areas, too, Russians have excelled at getting primitive machinery to work under extreme conditions, not only in the extraordinary circumstances that figure prominently in the national consciousness, such as victory in World War II—which is celebrated with what seems to be ever-greater pomp each year—but also in everyday life. Despite or because of huge obstacles and limited resources, they’ve displayed great originality and inventiveness in literature, painting, music, theater and cinema, and their feats during the last century would have been even more brilliant if Stalin hadn’t killed so many splendid scientists and artists and driven so many others underground or abroad.
One theory holds that some of the very qualities that make largely undisciplined Russians relatively poor workers—lack of self-control, ambition and willingness to follow rules—also help liberate creativity. My relative Gera Kiva, a specialist in industrial automation technology who taught at Moscow State University, told me his field was seriously constrained because “we had no resources; we did everything by hand and the seat of our pants.” Still, that wasn’t the main problem. “Russians can think up anything—we swim in ideas,” he said. “But we can’t carry them out because we just don’t have the patience to take things to the end.”
With their dogged work, opposition leaders and human rights activists are spearheading some of the efforts to instill Western values in Ru
ssian society. One day, they may help change the relationship between the people and their state. Meanwhile, I believe the closed political system that inspires some individual creativity still stifles most achievement.
The Soviet Union trumpeted its launching of the Space Age half a century ago by sending the first man-made satellite into orbit around the earth. Far from the result of any government initiative, however, Sputnik was made possible largely by one man whose identity remained secret for decades.
Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, began building rockets for military use after World War II, relying on German plans that came to light after the United States had captured the top German engineers. (Nazi technology was advanced partly because the Treaty of Versailles following World War I restricted Germany’s production of weapons but said nothing about rockets.) The two-time winner of the Hero of Socialist Labor award—one of the Soviet Union’s highest honors along with the Lenin Prize, which Korolev also won—had barely survived Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937–38. He spent six years in the Gulag, partly in a Siberian labor camp, where he lost his teeth.
His longtime first deputy, a fellow rocket designer named Boris Chertok, first met Korolev in 1945 at a Soviet laboratory inside Germany. A frail ninety-five-year-old when he met a handful of reporters on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, Chertok was still wonderfully lucid. We gathered inside a museum dedicated to Korolev, surrounded by photographs and memorabilia of the space program, where Chertok said his former boss was not only a genius engineer but also a gifted organizer. “He had a great ability to persuade people,” he recalled. “He was also exceptionally single-minded and ruthless with subordinates. Deep inside himself, he felt a great responsibility not only to his people but also to history.”
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