Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  The spectacular fizzle of the promise of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, continues to fascinate me—I think less because I witnessed it than because it revealed just how deeply the traditional culture runs. Maybe the Russian character reflects my own in that it’s buoyed by great plans and hopes so often diminished or destroyed by insecurity about the possibility of achieving them. The much-derided but inadvertently brilliant phrase of Yeltsin’s longtime prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, keeps sounding in my ear: “We hoped for the best, but it turned out as it always does.” Although he was speaking about economic reform, his words have become universal for Russians.

  Despite its extravagant squalor, waste, greed and indifference, Russia remains full of life, inventiveness and beauty, qualities that will continue to challenge our ideas about the country. Although many or most Americans hope or trust that it’s moving toward more openness and democracy because we tend to think such progress is ultimately inevitable—on top of it being far more exciting to hear about what we perceive as good news than that the bad old days are here to stay—Russians’ own experiences, of course, continue to shape them and set their priorities. However, as long as they keep mining their society’s deep ironies and paradoxes, they will sustain the possibility that its fundamental values may one day adapt to the postindustrial world despite the obstacles caused by all the deeply rooted factors that helped create their national character.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book grew out of a project first conceived by my father, George, many years ago. We had planned to write it together until it became apparent that our experiences in Russia were too personal to interweave coherently, partly because they took place at very different times. He has been central to the book, not only because it contains my version of his story but also because of his critical editing and support.

  My mother, Tatyana, who patiently described the details of her own life, has been no less central. And my wife, Elizabeth—who’s not only a careful reader but also spent most of my time in Russia with me—provided some of the best ideas.

  I’d like to thank my agent, John Silbersack of Trident Media, who helped develop the project’s concept and believed in its worth throughout.

  Thanks to Cary Goldstein, who acquired the book for Twelve, for feeling there’s still something important to say about Russia and for his editing. Thanks also to Sean Desmond for his incisive editing. Barbara Clark’s graceful copyediting and thorough fact checking have been essential.

  Although this book is largely journalistic reportage, I owe a great deal of my understanding of my experiences in Russia to my professors at Harvard, including Edward Keenan, Timothy Colton, Svetlana Boym, Richard Pipes and Vladimir Brovkin.

  In Moscow, I relied on the help of Sergei Sotnikov and Boris Ryzhak. Thanks also to Jay Tolson at Radio Free Europe in Prague, who gave me plum assignments on top of time off to do some of the writing.

  Ultimately this book is a product of the many relationships and conversations at the core of my experience of Russia, with people from Kolya Pavlov—whose friendship has colored everything I know about the country—to Yuri Vaschenko, whose incisive theories about its paradoxes entertained as well as elevated my understanding, to countless others whose stories are part of the fascinating, maddening place.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gregory Feifer is a former Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio who has reported from Russia for almost a decade. Educated at Harvard University, he is the author of The Great Gamble, a history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and has written for numerous outlets, including the New Republic, the Washington Post and World Policy Journal. He lives in Boston with his wife, Elizabeth, son, Sebastian, and daughter, Vanessa.

  Also by Gregory Feifer

  The Great Gamble

  Spy Handler (with Victor Cherkashin)

  NOTES

  1. THE HIDDEN RUSSIA

  1. In The Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986), 119.

  2. EXTRAVAGANCE

  1. Forbes magazine Russian edition, April 19, 2012.

  2. Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1984), 95.

  3. Voslensky, 206.

  4. Masha Charnay, “Marat Guelman: ‘Things Can Work Differently,’ ” in Russia beyond the Headlines, May 17, 2012, http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/05/17/marat_guelman_things_can_work_differently_15657.html.

  5. Interview in Vedomosti, February 20, 2013.

  6. Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 198–202.

  7. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, “Conveyor Belt of Russian Justice Legalizes Abuse,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 3, 2010.

  8. Moskovskiie Novosti, April 11, 2012.

  9. The Moscow Times, January 18, 2012.

  10. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, May 15, 2012.

  11. Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 159.

  12. Financial Times, November 1, 1997.

  13. Forbes magazine Russian edition, March 23, 2013.

  14. Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (January–February 2008), 69.

  15. The Independent, July 16, 2009.

  3. POVERTY

  1. Tony Wood, “Collapse as Crucible,” New Left Review 74 (March–April 2012), http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2952.

  2. The Guardian, April 11, 2011.

  3. From the US Department of State’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, cited at www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3183.htm.

  4. My translation from Anna Akhmatova, Works, vol. 1 (Munich: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1965), 360.

  5. Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York: The New Press, 1995), 139.

  6. Anton Chekhov, “Peasants,” in The Portable Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1947), 352.

  7. Boris Kagarlitsky, “Opposition Needs to Reach Beyond Moscow,” The Moscow Times, May 17, 2012.

  8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk, trans. Robert Dessaix (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982), 27–28.

  9. The Moscow Times, May 16, 2012.

  10. The Washington Post, March 29, 2013.

  11. Anton Chekhov, from Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 209.

  12. Sergei Zakharov, “Kak vymeraiet Rossiia: Karta otpustevshykh gorodov,” Slon.ru, March 19, 2013, http://slon.ru/economics/kak_vymiraet_rossiya_karta_opustevshikh_gorodov-920081.xhtml.

  4. DRINKING

  1. World Health Organization Global Alcohol Report for the Russian Federation, 2011, http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alcohol_report/profiles/rus.pdf.

  2. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Collier Books, 1992), 157.

  3. Edward L. Keenan, e-mail to the Johnson’s Russia List forum, May 16, 2003, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7184-1.cfm.

  4. Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski, Classic Vodka (London: Prion Books, 1997), 49.

  5. Faith and Wisniewski, 36.

  6. Faith and Wisniewski, 38.

  7. William Pokhlebkin, A History of Vodka, trans. Renfrey Clarke (London: Verso, 1992), 138.

  8. Pokhlebkin, 159.

  9. Sergei Romanov, Istoriia russkoi vodki (Moscow: Veche, 1998), 222.

  10. Pokhlebkin, 143.

  11. David Nowak, “The Stench of Death and Alcohol in Pskov,” The Moscow Times, November 7, 2006.

  12. The Moscow Times, November 7, 2006.

  13. John Sweeney, “Vodka’s My Poison,” on This World, BBC Two, March 14, 2007.

  14. Tony Halpin, “Millions of Men Disappear as Demon Drink Takes Its Toll,” The Times (London), March 29, 2011.

  15. Reuters, “Russians Wrongly Think Th
ey’re Healthy,” April 27, 2011.

  16. Vitaly Korotich, Zhili-byli-eli-pili (Kharkov, Ukraine: Folio, 2005), 53.

  17. Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow Stations, trans. Stephen Mulrine (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 1.

  18. Erofeev, 20.

  19. Korotich, 62.

  20. Korotich, 63.

  21. Martin McKee, “Alcohol in Russia,” Alcohol and Alcoholism 34, no. 6 (1999), 827.

  22. McKee, 828.

  23. Sergei Roy, “The Vodka Mess,” The Moscow News, May 12–18, 2004.

  24. Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Moscow’s Drinking Problem,” The New York Times, April 16, 2011.

  25. Korotich, 17.

  26. McKee, 825.

  27. Schrad.

  28. Korotich, 36.

  29. Schrad.

  30. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), 8.

  31. Dostoevsky, 18.

  32. Vladimir Nikolaev, Vodka v sudbe Rossii (Moscow: Parad, 2004), 61.

  33. McKee, 825.

  34. Roy.

  35. Roy.

  5. INTIMATES

  1. Edward L. Keenan, “An Approach to Russian History,” in Studying Russian and Soviet History, ed. Abraham Ascher (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Education Consortium, 1987), 4.

  2. Keenan, 5.

  3. Keenan, 5.

  4. Maura Reynolds, “A Soviet Legend Dies Hard,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2002.

  5. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 10.

  6. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 15.

  7. Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavski), On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 40–41.

  8. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7.

  9. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 34–35.

  10. Boym, 1.

  11. Including “Soviet Children’s Fear of Being Left Alone,” The Moscow Times, June 5, 2012.

  12. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 156.

  13. Shlapentokh, 159.

  14. Boym, 115.

  15. Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 119.

  16. Richard Lourie, “Zombie Russia,” The Moscow Times, May 23, 2011.

  17. Shlapentokh, 170.

  18. United Nations Demographic Yearbook, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dyb2008.htm.

  19. Rb.ru, October 25, 2011, http://www.rb.ru/article/sredniy-klass-v-rossii-eto-nad-chertoy-bednosti/6805177.html.

  20. Ellen Barry, “A Hunger for Tales of Life in the American Cul-de-Sac,” The New York Times, December 10, 2012.

  6. DOMESTIC ORDER

  1. The Times (London), March 29, 2011.

  2. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Collier Books, 1992), 17.

  3. Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 430.

  4. The Guardian, June 16, 2006.

  7. INDOLENCE AND INEFFICIENCY

  1. See Simon Shuster’s “Off with Their Heads,” Foreign Policy, December 5, 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/05/off_with_their_heads?page=0,2.

  2. Edward L. Keenan, “Medieval and Early Modern Russia” (lecture, Harvard University [history 1353], Cambridge, Mass., fall 1997).

  3. Keenan.

  4. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 78.

  5. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962).

  6. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 59.

  7. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986), 165.

  8. Malia, 66.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Keenan, 166.

  11. Keenan, 167.

  12. Keenan, 171.

  13. Malia, 189.

  14. Tony Wood, “Collapse as Crucible,” New Left Review 74 (March–April 2012), http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2952.

  15. Malia, 201.

  16. Malia, 203.

  17. Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, Journey for Our Time: The Russian Journals of the Marquis de Custine, ed. and trans. Phyllis Penn Kohler (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1987), 66.

  18. Custine, 58.

  19. Custine, 63–64.

  20. Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1960), 4.

  21. Goncharov, 6.

  22. Bloomberg, March 17, 2013.

  8. THE AVANT-GARDE

  1. David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Victor Khlebnikov.

  2. Olga Khvostunova, “Science for Others,” Institute of Modern Russia, June 4, 2013, http://imrussia.org/en/society/484.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 3.

  5. Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), 258–59.

  6. Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,” in Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 119.

  7. Berlin, “Birth,” 129.

  8. Isaiah Berlin, “1848,” in Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 4.

  9. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avante-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4–5.

  10. Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,” in Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. John Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 122.

  11. Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, trans. L. Nazorov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 362–63.

  12. Benjamin Bidder, “Powerful Enemies: Kremlin Targets Russian Facebook Clone,” Spiegel Online, May 2, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/kremlin-targets-russian-facebook-clone-vkontakte-a-897487.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=.

  13. Grani.ru, February 4, 2013, http://grani.ru/Internet/m.211237.html.

  9. COLD AND PUNISHMENT

  1. Vissarion Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 537.

  2. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 113.

  3. Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, Journey for Our Time: The Russian Journals of the Marquis de Custine, ed. and trans. Phyllis Penn Kohler (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1987), 73.

  4. George Feifer, “Russian Winter,” Harper’s Magazine (February 1982), 39.

  5. Galina Stolyarova, “Not a Pretty Picture,” Transitions Online, January 31, 2013, http://www.tol.org/client/article/23576-russia-prison-women.html.

  6. Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152.

  7. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986), 147.

  8. I’ve been unable to find out whether the verse is Zhora’s own or whether he was quoting someone else. Scholars I’ve consulted told me it may be the work of a minor poet of the time.

  9. Anton Chekhov, from Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 218.

  10. Chekhov, 134.

  11. Quoted in Henri Troyat, Chekhov, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1986), 129.

  12. Vassily Aksyonov, The Burn,
trans. Michael Glenny (London: Abacus, 1985), 221.

  13. Edward L. Keenan, “An Approach to Russian History,” in Studying Russian and Soviet History, ed. Abraham Ascher (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Education Consortium, 1987), 7.

  14. Anton Makarenko, A Book for Parents (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 268.

  15. Aksyonov, 221.

  16. Ivan Kireevsky, Polnoe sobrannie sochinenii Ivana Vasiliecicha Kirieevskago, vol. 2 (Moscow: Tipografia P. Bakhmetova, 1861), 233–34.

  17. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 221–22.

  18. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 49.

  19. Billington, 55.

  10. CLAN RULES

  1. The Moscow Times, June 25, 2009.

  2. Harold Berman, Justice in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 154.

  3. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986), 144.

  4. Edward L. Keenan, “Medieval and Early Modern Russia” (lecture, Harvard University [history 1353], Cambridge, Mass., fall 1997).

  5. Edward L. Keenan, “An Approach to Russian History,” in Studying Russian and Soviet History, ed. Abraham Ascher (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Education Consortium, 1987), 7.

  6. Vladimir Pribylovsky of Moscow’s Panorama Center provides some of the most incisive analyses of the clan rivalries that dominate Russian politics, including in “Clans Are Marching,” openDemocracy, May 30, 2013, http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/vladimir-pribylovsky/clans-are-marching.

  7. Catherine Belton, “A Realm Fit for a Tsar,” Financial Times, November 30, 2011.

  8. The Guardian, July 30, 2009.

  9. Financial Times, October 1, 2012.

  10. Catherine Belton, “Suleiman Kerimov, the Secret Oligarch,” Financial Times Magazine, February 10, 2012.

  11. Gregory White, “Share Deals Open Window on Kremlin,” The Wall Street Journal Europe, March 27, 2012.

  12. Keenan, “Folkways,” 142.