Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  More invitations followed, usually to the upscale Aragvi restaurant, which was known to serve the KGB as a kind of listening post and reception place for foreign visitors. Its private rooms were perfect for bugging conversations. “My flesh crawled the minute I saw him,” George recalled. “But I assumed he had the power to have me kicked out of the country and prevented from returning, so I had to be very careful.” Short and stubby, with an ugly, glowering stare and a country accent of which he was ashamed, Bastard, as George silently called the man, oozed envy of Western freedom and privileges even when he was spouting Marxist-Leninist slogans and pressuring his “guest” to “join the struggle for world peace” by supplying information about his fellow Americans. George had to walk a very thin line between pretending he’d be willing to do that one day and saying nothing that could be used to blackmail him. Despite the liters of vodka the Bastard downed on the KGB’s expense account, he sobered up the instant his prey slipped enough to utter something that might have been construed as anti-Soviet.

  The KGB officer—who, my father later learned, indeed had the power of admitting and expelling him—“made life a thousand times easier” by not calling him during several reportorial trips to Moscow from his base in London. But his luck ran out when he went to research his biography of Solzhenitsyn, by far the most powerful Soviet dissent of the time. Returning from an interview with one of Solzhenitsyn’s closest Gulag friends to his room in the Rossiya Hotel, a brutalist box next to Red Square, George was shocked to find Bastard sitting on the edge of a chair, his fury “enough to burn a hole in the door.” After years of George’s game of being a friend of the Soviet Union, “now he’d obviously found out I was gathering material about Solzhenitsyn, meaning I’d double-crossed him. No doubt that was a blow to his personal standing. After all that work he’d done on me, what would his bosses think of him?”

  He shouted that the road was now “closed” to George. “Entry to the Soviet Union is forbidden to you!” In his nervousness, however, George mistook the word “entry” (vezd) for the very similar-sounding “exit” (vyezd).

  “ ‘Holy shit,’ I thought. ‘I’m stuck in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life!’ No doubt I turned white, which is just what he wanted. He marched out, very satisfied,” my father recalled.

  Nevertheless, George managed to return to Moscow ten years later. Arriving in early 1980, when the United States was boycotting the Moscow Winter Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the previous year, he noticed what appeared to be a remarkable new development about which he hadn’t read: many people, including the relatively straight and patriotic, had started complaining. Not about politics, which were rarely discussed openly, or about any high principle, but about the shortages of consumer goods, the low standard of living, the sense that society in general was no longer working. It was the start of a revolution of rising expectations and lowering hope that they’d ever be met—a revolution scarcely described in the West, where fear of the Soviet Union continued to dominate in the media. Although living standards had risen under Brezhnev, the Soviet people were increasingly aware of how poorly they lived compared to people in other countries, and they were sick of it. Returning to London, George published articles in the London Sunday Times and Harper’s Magazine describing Soviet society as “sick.”

  I noticed something very similar about Russia when I returned to Moscow for a reporting trip in 2011 after more than a year away: everyone was complaining. No longer around their proverbial kitchen tables, as they did under communism, but in the sushi chains and fancy department stores that made life appear very different from the way it was in what my father likes to call his “day.” Before every taxi trip, I girded myself against harangues from the driver about how the greedy bastards at the top were stealing everything.

  In another development that suggested similarities to Brezhnev’s USSR, a Levada Center poll conducted the same year revealed that 22 percent of adults wanted to leave the country for good—three times the number that had said so four years earlier and significantly more than the 18 percent who had said they wanted out as the waning USSR was spiraling toward dissolution in 1991. The poll surveyed people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine who lived in large cities and earned five to ten times the average income—i.e., the young middle-class people who would soon take to the streets to protest.

  Authoritarianism was among the least of their concerns. What bothered them most of all were high prices, crime and corruption. Of course no one had liked those features of their lives earlier. The difference was their growing impatience with the stagnation behind the high-flown rhetoric, a sense that Putin’s imminent return meant that nothing would change for the foreseeable future.

  The ever-stauncher nationalism Putin used to help weather the growing dissatisfaction fed the deep-rooted racism and xenophobia coursing just beneath the facade of a society that comprises more than 180 ethnic groups and is still grappling with the consequences of the Soviet collapse. Communism had once promised to wipe out national boundaries and ethnic distinctions. Actually, the imperialists in the Kremlin relied on a poorly defined Soviet “nationality” to veil the dominant Russian nationalism. A rhyme about Yuri Gagarin conveys the flavor of that racialist spirit.

  Kak khorosho shto nash Gagarin

  Ne Evrei i ne Tatarin

  Ne Kalmyk i ne Uzbek

  A nash Sovetskii chelovek!

  (How good that our Gagarin

  Isn’t a Jew or a Tatar

  Not a Kalmyk or an Uzbek,

  But a man of our own Soviet stock!)

  Like American congressmen endlessly gerrymandering state districts, the Soviets drew and redrew national and regional boundaries to finesse their rule over territories, including the khanates and emirates of Central Asia, which formerly had no such borders. The practice fanned long-suppressed ethnic disputes that, when unleashed by the crumbling of communism, resulted in bloodshed and so-called frozen conflicts in former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

  Although Russia remained remarkably cohesive following the Soviet collapse, bitter enmity broke out between its various neighbors, too, including the Ossetians and the Ingush in the Caucasus. Their brief war in North Ossetia in 1992 resulted in hundreds of deaths and the expulsion of sixty thousand Ingush, and simmering tensions still show no signs of abating. Ossetians venturing into Ingushetia, and the other way around, still say they risk beatings and murder. In late 2011, when I wanted to take a taxi from Nazran in Ingushetia to the nearest airport, half an hour away in North Ossetia, my driver agreed only under the condition that a police sergeant accompany us to insure against trouble. Although none occurred, I sensed mass violence could easily break out again if and when the Kremlin relaxes its draconian security measures.

  The most prominent antagonists by far, however, are the white Slavic Russians who have joined the ranks of various nationalist groups since the 1980s. Among the politicians seeking their support who have long become fixtures on the political scene is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the clownish “ultranationalist” leader of the fiercely illiberal and utterly undemocratic Liberal Democratic Party, who once presented me with a bottle of Zhirinovsky brand aftershave, boasting that even the US president didn’t have his own line of toiletries.

  Zhirinovsky and others have played on the dislike of millions of migrant workers who, during the past two decades, have streamed to various parts of Russia, especially Moscow, where they work on municipal sanitation crews and construction sites, providing very cheap labor for the building boom. Although an astounding 60 percent of Tajikistan’s working population is believed to live in Russia, migrants are rarely seen on the streets except when they’re sweeping them. Central Asians form part of a virtually segregated second class of residents who do the various kinds of dangerous, backbreaking work that most Russians reject.

  During a visit I paid to the construction site of a typical updated Soviet-style residential blo
ck, Tajik workers, who slept on a rough concrete floor without access to running water or a working toilet, told me they earned the equivalent of eight hundred dollars a month—and that the police demanded bribes even though they had legal permits. “Tajiks in Moscow are slaves in the twenty-first century,” one soft-spoken worker named Said Chekhanov remarked. “We’re treated like animals. The police insult us, and our employers forbid us even to talk at work.”

  Everyone at the construction site had stories of attacks by masked men in the middle of the night. Another Tajik I met, a timid twenty-eight-year-old named Sukhaili Saidov, described an assault outside the metro by five young men wielding knives. He escaped after being stabbed in his stomach. However, he said another attack, on a young Central Asian woman, haunted him more. “She was killed right in front of me,” he said. “Three men grabbed her outside the metro, where there were lots of people around. She was screaming, but the police did nothing. Then the men smashed her head with a brick.”

  After suffering three attacks, Saidov was afraid to venture outside after dark, which cost him his job as a security guard. But he didn’t want to return to Tajikistan, where the average wage was around fifteen dollars a month. With work in Moscow enabling him to support ten family members back home, he decided to stay and look for another job.

  Karomat Sharipov, the head of a support group for Tajiks, blamed greed for fueling racist attacks. “Construction companies are making huge sums of money,” he said. “And so are the authorities, who are secretly paid to help ‘organize’ the migrant labor system. Spreading fear is profitable for them.”

  Although Putin has denounced racist attacks, he has also fanned the attitudes that animate them by exploiting nationalism for his political gain. During his first term as president, the Kremlin launched a nationalist party called Rodina (“Motherland”), partly to bleed communists of votes, before pulling the plug because Rodina’s leader, Dmitri Rogozin, was becoming genuinely popular. At its height, the party was banned from competing in Moscow’s municipal elections after broadcasting anti-immigrant advertisements urging “Let’s clean the city of garbage!” The aborted venture illustrated Putin’s attempt to walk a fine line between attracting nationalist voters and encouraging the virulent nationalism that has threatened to undermine his support.

  The balancing act seemed to start unraveling in 2006, when locals in Karelia, a forested region next to Finland, attacked houses and businesses owned by Chechens and other Caucasus natives before running them out of town. I flew there a few days after the incident had raised alarm bells in Moscow. The backwater industrial town of Kondopoga, whose name is now a byword for racism, was hardly unusual in that Caucasus natives owned stores and restaurants there and ran the local market, many having fled economic collapse and instability back home. On its dusty main street, residents told me usually nothing happened there.

  The violence began when several ethnic Russians celebrating their release from jail beat an Azerbaijani bartender after refusing to pay for their drinks. Witnesses told me the restaurant’s owner called in a group of Chechens wielding knives and clubs who attacked the Russians, killing two of them. The deaths prompted residents to call for the expulsion of Caucasus natives from Kondopoga. “They do whatever they want, act like they own everything,” a local named Victor Pavlov told me, echoing many others. “They’ve bribed our corrupt officials, bought out our stores and are dispossessing the Russian people.”

  Activists from Moscow arrived to organize protests. Among them was Alexander Belov, a young member of parliament and extreme nationalist who heads a notorious and vocal group called the Movement Against Illegal Immigration. When two thousand protesters met to draw up a petition addressed to the local mayor, Belov called for all Caucasus natives to be expelled within twenty-four hours, although he later denied having incited the crowd. “I just said, ‘The land belongs to you Russians,’ ” he told me. “ ‘You’ve been robbed and that will soon be remedied.’ ” After the protest broke up, a mob of some two hundred mostly drunk young men rampaged through Kondopoga’s streets, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at stores, restaurants and houses belonging to Chechens and other Caucasus natives. Roughly sixty people fled.

  When I spoke to some of them in the gym of a nearby summer school, where they were under police protection, a middle-aged Chechen woman named Taisa Gazikhanova told me the rioters had threatened to kill them. “I was born here,” she declared. “Nevertheless the people I’ve lived around my whole life suddenly turned on us.” Her plight failed to impress Karelia’s governor, Sergei Katanandov, who told me he sympathized with unhappiness over what he called ostentatious displays of wealth. “Everything would be fine if new arrivals in our region respected our principles, our views about life,” he said. “And if they didn’t insult people with their behavior.”

  Back in Moscow, Putin revealed his sympathies in language whose code wasn’t difficult to crack. The government, he said, had a duty to protect the “native population” from criminal groups “with an ethnic flavor” that control street markets. Then he proceeded to restore Soviet-era quotas on foreigners working in shops and markets. Alexander Verkhovsky, an expert on racism who runs Moscow’s Sova think tank, told me such behavior encouraged extremist violence. “What’s more, officials often use hard-line rhetoric to win public favor,” he said. “They say the country is surrounded by foreign enemies. But since the average Russian can’t fight foreign countries, he targets people around him.”

  Although few explosions on the scale of Kondopoga have followed, the nationalist movement continued growing. The killing of a young Slavic soccer fan during a 2010 fight with a native of the Caucasus region Kabardino-Balkaria prompted five thousand fellow fans and nationalists to riot in central Moscow. Placing roses at the grave, Putin said the young man’s death was “a great tragedy” and promised more restrictions against immigrants. Another killing of an ethnic Russian—this time allegedly by an Azerbaijani man in an industrial Moscow district—prompted outraged locals to join hate groups in storming a shopping center, beating migrants, and attacking police. The authorities responded by targeting the victims. Seeking to stem the tide of anti-migrant anger, police raided a vegetable warehouse, where the arrested more than a thousand people under the pretext of investigating crime by migrants. Mayor Sobyanin pledged the crackdown would continue—the response that promises to fan the flames. The Levada Center recently found that 60 percent of Muscovites supported the rallying cry “Russia for Russians!” That does not bode well for a country whose Muslim population is expected to expand as more immigrants arrive from the Caucasus and Central Asia and internal migrants move from the North Caucasus to other parts of the country.10

  The relationship between Russia’s Slavs and Jews is no less complicated but perhaps more paradoxical. Americans often have a hard time understanding why Jews, Everei, aren’t considered Russian and still tend not to identify themselves as such even if their ancestors have lived there for centuries. While others may not find that unusual in a generally xenophobic former empire that co-opted hundreds of ethnicities, Russian anti-Semitism does have some unique characteristics. Historian James Billington traces their development to the advance of Muscovite self-identity in the fifteenth century, when an “anti-Jewish fervor” was “built into Muscovite ideology.”11

  Muscovite pretensions to being “chosen,” he explains, bred hostility toward older Jewish claims to the same distinction, made more acute by envy of the more cosmopolitan culture of Jewish groups that interacted with the Slavs, mainly at the edges of their territory. They included Jews from Western Europe as well as the Turkic Khazars in the Caucasus, whose leaders converted to Judaism.

  Nevertheless, Russia’s small population of Jews escaped serious persecution until the late eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great acquired large swaths of Lithuanian and Polish land heavily populated by Jews after Russia conspired with Prussia and Austria to partition the once powerful Polish-Lithuanian Empir
e.

  Catherine marked off a territory that included parts of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine exclusively for Jews. Heavily taxed, they were forbidden to leave without permission. Poverty in the shtetls of the so-called Pale of Settlement was dreadful, and its inhabitants were never free from fear of repression and violence, especially under the conservative Nicholas I in the mid-1800s. However, their oppression began in earnest at the end of the century, when they faced waves of anti-Jewish pogroms (derived from the Russian word meaning “to storm” or “destroy”) that swept the empire after a period of relative calm under the reforming Alexander II, liberator of the serfs.

  The reactionary new tsar, Alexander III, was a staunch anti-Semite whose conservative adviser Konstantin Pobedonostsev believed Russia’s “Jewish problem” would be solved by the conversion to Orthodoxy of a third of Jews, the emigration of another third and the death of the rest.12 Alexander progressively tightened laws against Jews, banning them from the countryside and from participating in local elections even within the Pale. Jews were also ejected from Kiev and Moscow. More pogroms followed after a nationalist newspaper in 1903 published what it said was the text of a Jewish plan for world domination. Possibly written with the help of the secret police, the so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” purportedly documented the minutes of a meeting between Jewish leaders to plan their global hegemony, which would be achieved by controlling the world’s press and economies.