Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  However, as long as the economy was booming, all things seemed possible. By June, the price of oil had doubled in a twelvemonth period, reaching $147 a barrel in the following month. Russia’s economy looked set to grow by more than 7 percent. Now at last the country could afford to make the massive social investment that was required across the country’s crumbling infrastructure, from pensions, education, and health to the armed forces. The means were there for Russia to transform itself from a corrupt, autocratic energy state into a confident, knowledge-based economy.

  But in practice, there was little sign that the regime had the political will for much beyond self-enrichment. Despite the boom, cracks were already showing in the edifice. Quite apart from the corruption, inflation was slipping into double figures. In July, the stock market shuddered and fell by 5 percent after Prime Minister Putin made critical remarks about the steel company Mechel: no one had forgotten that the state’s dismemberment of Khodorkovsky’s mammoth company, Yukos, which produced 20 percent of Russia’s oil, started in this way.

  Then, on August 7, Georgia’s President Saakashvili made a determined bid to regain control of the autonomous region of South Ossetia. After six days of heavy fighting, Georgian troops were repulsed. Russian tanks fanned out over Georgia and proceeded to destroy the country’s newly modernized armory.

  Brief though it was, Russia’s war with Georgia transformed the political scene. It was Russia’s 9/11, proclaimed President Medvedev. The country had “risen from its knees,” the press exulted. The war buried any chance Medvedev might have had of pursuing a more liberal political agenda. It was announced that army funding would rise by 50 percent over the next three years.

  However, the regime’s unpopularity was reflected on the international front. Russia had arguably only followed a precedent set by NATO in 1999 when it bombed Yugoslavia in defense of Kosovo’s right to self-determination. But nevertheless, it found itself severely isolated by world opinion.

  The West’s ally had also played its propaganda well, and the sight of Russian tanks entering Georgia raised old Cold War ghosts. While Europe dithered, caught between distaste and self-interest, America’s press exploded in Russophobia. All this served only to add a strong sense of grievance to the triumphalist mood back in Russia.

  But world attention was soon diverted by the global financial crisis—one which had begun in the United States. Since the collapse of Soviet power, the banner of the free market had been fluttering over the world. Now suddenly it was in shreds. All over the world, markets were crashing. This was a crisis that was going to spare no one. For all the Cold War rhetoric, there was no ideological divide anymore.

  By the end of November, the price of oil had fallen from a high of $147 to below $50 a barrel. For Russia’s oil-dependent economy, this was catastrophic. The poor faced hardship, since simply to meet its budgetary commitments the state had to dip into its reserve funds once the oil price fell below $70 a barrel. The rich were not spared either: Russia’s once booming stock market dropped 70 percent between May and November, the steepest decline of any worldwide.

  HOW ABOUT A RIDDLE?

  Russia’s troops had not yet pulled back from Georgia when I boarded the sleeper from Moscow to Saratov. For the first time in all these years, I was apprehensive of the reception that awaited me in Saratov. How would my friends have responded to the war? Would they, too, have retreated behind a firewall of patriotic indignation? Although my three companions, young professionals from Saratov, looked pleasant enough, I retreated quickly behind the newspapers, wary of conversation.

  I had reckoned without the lithe, dark-haired woman sitting opposite. “Right, I’m Masha,” she said, shutting the door decisively and tucking her legs away under her. She was deputy director of a big Saratov factory which made soft cheese and margarine, she told us, and she was on her way home from a refresher course in Moscow. All three of them had been in the capital for similar reasons, it turned out. “What are we going to talk about?” Masha went on. “How about a riddle?” “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” groaned the large-boned young man next to me, who ran part of Saratov’s pension fund. His suit was one size too large and his fair hair kept flopping over his clever face. “Let’s talk about Muscovites.” They proceeded to savage Muscovites as lazy, spoiled parasites, who raked in the money while a wretched, invisible black labor force of central Asians somewhere on the outskirts did the real work.

  I had just been reading about the Russian stock market, which had lost 50 percent of its value in a matter of days. The day I flew into Moscow, Wall Street plunged to its lowest since 9/11. I asked my companions how much all this was going to affect them. All three laughed: “Do you really imagine people like us have got stocks and shares?” Masha asked. “Well, with the petrodollar boom …” I began. “What boom?” floppy-haired Petr cut in. “It’s an illusion. Things are awful. Have been for ages. Inflation’s far worse than they’re letting on. It’s those Muscovites. They’re the problem. They’re the only ones with money, and they’ve got so much they don’t know where to put it.

  “Property’s gone crazy in Saratov. They’re buying it up sight unseen—land, houses, you name it. They’ll ring up: ‘It’s on the Volga, is it? I’ll take it.’ For the rest, middle class included, it’s grim. Friends of mine have been selling off their DVDs and home computers just to pay the rent!” Masha and the young engineer agreed; the so-called boom had lifted the oil elite and those who serviced it onto another planet, leaving the rest of Russia behind.

  The ample woman in charge of our compartment brought around glasses of tea. I thought back to all the train journeys over the last sixteen years which had carried me across Russia’s two continents and eleven time zones in search of friends and in pursuit of ideas. Sometimes in the nineties there was no tea, only hot water. Sometimes the collective anxiety was such that even the tribe of trusty railway stewards seemed suspect. Were they in cahoots with the gangs who were said to be robbing people in their sleep, bundling bodies off trains at dead of night?

  Now at least we ate confidently from the food boxes provided. Back then no one trusted that food of unknown provenance was not part of some money-making scam that would leave them poisoned.

  Masha, as if responding to these unspoken thoughts, nudged us back into conversation: “If you could choose a favorite moment, between the end of Soviet power and now, when would it be? I’d choose ‘92–’93. I don’t care what anybody says—I loved it. It was a unique time. Just for a moment a person could think for themselves, be free.” I flashed her a grateful smile. These days it was fashionable to maintain that the idea of freedom was meaningless, a mere window dressing for Western imperialism.

  “Well, I was only seven,” began the quiet, doe-eyed engineer. Petr interrupted: “I don’t agree. All I saw was fear and insecurity. Don’t get me wrong—I hate the way things are now. But you have to admit—it suits the Russian people. What do you expect? It’s only a hundred and fifty years since we had serfdom. People would still rather be owned. Before anything changes they’re going to have to want more freedom. As it is, the old days are back—I’m sure you realize that there’s a KGB person in every company again?”

  “Well, there’s certainly not one in our factory—”

  “Take a closer look. The Party’s back—it’s just the name that’s changed.” Petr was talking about Putin’s party, Edinaya Rossiya. “For two years they nagged me to join up. I refused. In the end they wore me down. OK, I said, I’ll make a deal. I’ll join, but on one condition—you’ve got to agree not to pressure any of my staff—they’re not management, why the hell should they join? So far they’ve stuck to it. Turned out I was the only person in the entire ranks of management who’d been holding out! As for those vast, corrupt monopolies at the top, it’ll take a couple of generations to break them up.”

  This time there was a long silence. The train lumbered through a country station. An image from a news report of the recent war flashed through my
mind. A truck full of raw conscripts with terrified faces was heading into Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian town which Georgian troops had attacked. Conscripts who came from backwoods places like this.

  “How about a riddle, then?” asked Masha brightly. What was it with this woman and riddles? “No! Let’s talk about the war!” Petr whipped back. “No. Absolutely not,” Masha cut in, too quickly.

  Then I understood. That was what the riddles were about. Like me, she was worried that the war was going to divide us, rupture the harmony of our carriage. “Fine! Let’s talk about the war!” I surprised them by saying. “You want to know what I think? They’re all wantonly irresponsible—Georgians, Russians, Americans. I’d rather be governed by nine-year-olds.”

  They looked at me in astonishment, all three of them, then started gabbling at once. Yes, the only people who benefited by the war were the leaders, and yes, this was only the beginning, it was going to get worse … The relief was palpable, and it touched us all. They hadn’t expected my reaction, and I hadn’t expected theirs.

  “Can you believe it?” piped up the doe-eyed young engineer. “A friend of my father’s bought this suit the other day. When he got home he looked at the label. ‘Made in the US. 50 percent linen 50 percent cotton’ it read. Then ‘Sorry our President’s such an idiot.’ ” We fell about laughing, with the solidarity of the powerless.

  “Now will you let me pose my riddle?” Masha asked. This time we relented. “Two women are standing at a market stall which sells pigeons. One says to the other, ‘I’ve got two children under school age.’ ” Masha was off and running. I hated riddles. “Their combined ages are the number of pigeons on that stall. How old are they? And by the way, my oldest’s called Borya.”

  For my own part, I had never intended to spend so many years puzzling over a different, insoluble riddle, the one Churchill famously posed. “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” he told the British after declaring war on Germany, when it was not clear which side Russia would join. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” It still was the key. But the answer to the riddle came out very different, depending how you defined that national interest.

  The three of them argued over the riddle with an engaging degree of enthusiasm while the train rumbled on over the darkening steppe. Out came the paper and pen. At one point Masha, suddenly unsure whether it really was solvable, rang her boss. “Haven’t you got anything better to do with your Friday evening?” her boss grumbled. We took to our berths without having found the answer.

  Meanwhile, I had been reading the papers. There was an article about the Tunguska meteor, whose mysterious site I had passed on the trip into the taiga to visit the Old Believers. All this time, no one had been able to work out how such an enormous object—some fifty to one hundred meters across—could have hit the earth without leaving a crater. Was it a UFO, dark matter, a nuclear explosion? Now, a hundred years after the event, two Russian scientists had come up with a mathematical model which proved how the asteroid, or comet perhaps, had disintegrated into tiny fragments on its way into the earth’s atmosphere, exploding and bouncing away from the earth’s surface while barely having touched it. One mystery solved.

  Others were going to remain unsolved. I had no reason to doubt the chilling warnings of my enchanting Professor Kaznacheev about the dangers of mind-control weapons, designed to manipulate people’s mental functions at a distance. Indeed, they were substantiated when the Duma banned the use of such weapons on Russian territory in June 2001. Since then, discussion about them had dried up in Russia. In the United States, there was no proof that the government had ever developed such weapons. They stuck to their line that no such technology existed, or that all such information was subject to the law on national security. Congressman Dennis Kucinich had introduced a bill in the House of Representatives in 2001 that would have obliged the president to start negotiations on the international ban for which Russia and the EU had been pressing. But it got nowhere.

  In the middle of night, when the men were asleep, Masha leaned down to me from the berth above with a bit of paper covered in equations. She had finally worked out the answer to her riddle. Lucky her. I was still a long way off finding an answer to mine: how long were the Russian people going to endorse the idea that Putin’s “sovereign democracy” was in their national interest?

  THE WORM TURNS

  It was a sunny Sunday, and Tatiana was driving us out to Marx in her smart jeep to visit Misha’s mother. Her daughter Nadya, who was now twelve, was whispering to her friend in the back of the car. We were sitting in a traffic jam. These days there were traffic jams all day long in Saratov’s city center; 4×4s and gleaming jeeps like ours sat nose to nose as far as the eye could see. There was plenty of time to register the new dress shops, the Irish pub, the shopping malls, restaurants, and the rash of stylish little cafés. Time enough to register that with a few dazzling exceptions, these frontages had been attached to buildings that looked more derelict than ever.

  Saratov was being run by an honest man now, they said. Poor fellow, it was no qualification for running this city. The previous incumbent was sitting in prison, facing fourteen criminal charges, including bribe taking, nondistribution of taxpayers’ money, and exceeding his authority. As for his predecessor, the master crook who had held the job for years before that, people referred to him almost nostalgically now, as of someone who “knew how to get things done.” He had survived all attempts to finger him.

  I was in a jaundiced mood. I had come here to see my friends. But with the exception of Tatiana, they seemed to be avoiding me. I had calculated my visit so that Anna and I could spend time together over the weekend. But she had not invited me to stay, and had come up with a flimsy excuse for not joining us in Marx.

  The day I arrived, Misha had also left for Germany, prompted by an “unexpected invitation.” Tatiana, of course, had done her best to make up for this by being more loving and attentive than ever. She had lost weight and looked like a tragic queen, stabbed through by an icicle. I dared not ask her about herself.

  The roads had improved. Clearly, this had been necessary to expedite the escape of the jeep owners from the sight of the limbless war vets, lurching drunks, piles of rubbish, bedraggled high-rise blocks, overloaded trams, and hollow-eyed grannies begging beneath hoardings advertising holidays in Australia costing only $4,000. Where the jeeps were heading became clear once we reached open country.

  Rows of pale, svelte high-rise towers reared up against the Sokolov hills, tall and striking as bulimic models. Around their foot stretched gated estates of gabled houses with vivid russet and blue roofs. These were the homes of the 15 percent who belonged to Russia’s new economy. As in a traditional steppe town the cows peeled off from the herd of an evening and made their way to their own front gate, so those 4×4s peeled off the road to adorn the forecourt of each imposing mansion. Sixteen years ago, when I first came down to Saratov, I little dreamed that Russia’s new beginning would look like this.

  Of all my friends, Misha was the one whose dreams had most spectacularly come to fruition during the years I had known him. Before he left on the train we had spent the afternoon together, but it was not long enough. I had come down here intending to celebrate his success. Misha had become a manufacturer entirely by his own efforts, rather than by appropriating a factory, or the wages of people from some factory, as was common in the 1990s. He had started farming at the right time, too, when across Russia people had turned their backs on the collective farms, when millions of acres were lying abandoned.

  This time Misha was more affectionate with me, more genuinely present, than I had ever known him. He was looking good, too, younger, having lost a lot of weight. But things on the farm had not been going well, he admitted. “The problem is that the new technology I’ve plowed my profits into hasn’t yielded the results I expected. In fact, it’s been performing badly even
by comparison with traditional methods! I’ve lost a lot of money.”

  Misha, ever the gambler, had been relying on modern European farming techniques, drilling rather than plowing, as well as using the latest in fertilizers and pesticides, to make the Volga steppe competitive with farms in Russia’s fertile black-earth country. Last year, those black-earth fields yielded 3.3 tons of wheat a hectare, and would yield more when properly managed. He was so far only managing 3 tons a hectare. “I may not be doing it right yet,” he brooded. “I’m a novice at farming—when I started I made every mistake in the book! Or it may be that the local farmers have got a point—they’ve always said my techniques won’t work here. It’s tricky farming country. Time will tell. But this year I’m hedging my bets, farming half my land in the traditional way.”

  Misha was being hard on himself, as usual. Three tons a hectare was not at all bad. Overall, the average yield per hectare in this vast, northern land was only 1.85 tons. He had disappointed only his own ambitious expectations.

  Last time I had been here, he was fighting a court case. Someone had accused him of selling them on bad seed. He was very worried then. How had that gone, I asked? “Well, I’ve more or less won—the man just didn’t have a case. But the case is dragging on. I’m innocent, but that’s no protection—he’s got powerful contacts. It’s all very tiresome. I’ve got to keep sucking up to these judges, giving them presents, to make sure the case doesn’t come undone again.”

  Misha’s real legal headaches lay elsewhere now. Since the price of land had risen, everyone was after it. Of the 1,011 hectares he farmed, some 300 were not his. It was land that belonged to Russian Germans who died or had left for Germany in the early 1990s. It was lying fallow, so Misha started farming it. But people were now coming up with pieces of paper that proved their right to bits of it, or so they claimed. The judges were inclined to give in to these little claims, on the grounds that Misha already had quite enough land. “What’s so frustrating is that I know perfectly well that most of these claims are just a try-on—they’ve got no basis in fact.” This legacy of the chaotic nineties was wearing him down, he complained.