An overly deferential managerlike man was there to meet Vova and his two “business associates.” All four of them then shuffled away to a back room; Vova smiled and gestured that I should wait where I was standing, and maybe take a look around.
I did so, then realized with a jolt that we were in a state-run jewelry store. There were gold bands and neck chains, rings with small diamonds, and other items made from precious metals and stones. Customers were huddled over the few display cases. Most seemed less concerned with the aesthetics of the goods than with their practical qualities, such as grams and karats. One squat, middle-aged man with thick, pharmacy-style glasses purchased some sapphire earrings and two gaudy women’s rings with completely different band sizes. I wondered whether he was making a foray into cross-dressing or just had a lot of paramours to please.
It wasn’t that everyone had struck it rich and had started buying up baubles in the midst of an economic collapse. Prices for gold and stones had been set artificially low by the state, much lower than on world markets. Buying and then reselling to middlemen could be lucrative—like swapping a ten-dollar bill for a twenty. The shoppers would then go on to sell to other middlemen or take the loot out to Western countries and hawk the items for hard currency.
Vova and his lot were middlemen too, after a fashion. They controlled access to the store, taking payoffs from the people in line, who anted up for prime positions and rights to buy from “special” collections of goods. The gang then shared the payoffs with the store managers; the managers then used the proceeds to secure more jewels and gold from state suppliers, and so on. And Vova’s guys also provided “insurance,” as he put it. The “insurance” bit was obligatory, obviously.
Yet the gig wasn’t a reket in the full sense of the word. Vova scolded me for misunderstanding the difference: A racket, he explained, was a simple, one-off extortion, with the extorters threatening to kill or maim the owners of a budding small-business cooperative (or actually killing or maiming them) unless they handed over cash on demand. Vova was adamant that this sort of crude shakedown had no resemblance whatsoever to his “respectable” line of business. His vocation had important sorts of “moral underpinnings,” as Vova reasoned, because he and his associates provided actual protection for their clients, who might otherwise be molested by “real racketeers” or, worse, by corrupt Soviet police or bureaucrats, who could either extort money themselves or simply shut down the operation—and no one wanted that, did they?
Vova acted as if he were the only thing standing between the workers of the jewelry shop and chaos.
“We keep an eye on them so they don’t get kicked around,” he said. “You see, the people we protect would rather deal with us than the cops. Why? With the cops they might have to pay bribes, or they might end up tossed into the clink for no real reason. The cops could end up running the store, or the cops and some bureaucrat might close it down. So the workers prefer to deal with us.”
It helped that everyone was part of the racket: the state suppliers who dealt the cut-rate goods for bribes, the store managers who took and gave payoffs, even the customers who bought purely for speculative profit. And, of course, Vova and his “business partners.” They were the most parasitic on the food chain, but the fact that everyone in the entire game was corrupt helped calm his conscience.
• • •
BARDAK!” VOVA EXCLAIMED once we were back in another taxi and heading away from the jewelry store. “Whorehouse!”
This was Vova’s one-word postulate about the nature of the crumbling Soviet system and usually signaled the beginning of one of his out-of-the-blue inexplicable rants.
The word bardak can literally mean “whorehouse” in Russian, but colloquially, it is something closer to “chaos” or “mess.” It lacks the vulgarity connoted in English, and in the language of Pushkin, it is employed with great frequency. Still, I could not get over the curiousness of hearing “Whorehouse!” several times a day from the lips of average Russians whenever the slightest injustice befell them. In Vova’s case, it sounded more like an explanation of the untenable social order that demanded his racketeering activities than a justification of the same.
“My father is a fucking Communist,” Vova began. “He still believes in that nonsense, or at least he thinks he believes in it. I tell him he is a fool. The simple truth is that this is anarchy. And anarchy doesn’t respect fools.…”
We drove on. Vova became silent. I said nothing. It started raining. The monochrome landscape blurred. We were now deep in the heart of Kupchino. Vova piped up, noting we were near the Button Factory he’d quit. And it was for those who continued to toil there that Vova reserved his most potent venom.
“Whorehouse!” Vova sputtered, shaking his head. This time the word served not only as an empty exclamation. “A bunch of fucking whores, that’s what they are. Mentally ill people! I just can’t understand why those workers keep degrading themselves. They are slaves. What’s more, they enslave themselves to rottenness. And what is the only thing worse than a slave? A slave unwilling to liberate himself. He willingly submits to a state of enchainment. He works blindly in the name of a monstrous force.”
Here Vova’s monologue turned from the gutter-level Russian I was used to from him into a literary bloom of rich verbs. But the point was pretty simple. In a world of scoundrels and baseness, it is better to be evil and free than decent but enchained.
Vova suggested we stop off to see Pavel, a mutual friend and fellow watch-hawker I had met during the good old days of making barbecue in the Leningrad forest. Pavel also lived in Kupchino. The pair had met at the Button Factory, where Pavel still worked the night shift, a fact that Vova ridiculed. We turned onto Budapest Street and got out of the taxi, paid the fare, and entered another cookie-cutter-looking building. We climbed several flights of stairs—the elevator was out. The hallway smelled of sweet and sour garbage and urine. I slipped on what felt like some vomit on the floor and barely avoided tumbling head over heels down the stairs. We reached an upper floor and knocked on a door. A woman clad in a bathrobe with a faded purple-flower print—Pavel’s wife, Sveta—opened the door cautiously and then began to smile.
“Vova!” Beaming, she eagerly invited us inside.
She led us into a tiny kitchen, where we found Pavel eating a bowl of noodle soup. Pavel embraced us warmly, and we took a seat. Sveta sat down and resumed the activity she had been pursuing when we interrupted her—twisting bits of cotton into small, compact pads. I asked her what she was making. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. Through an elliptical description, she explained that the rectangular cotton cutouts were, in fact, makeshift feminine sanitary pads—tampons were in short supply.
Pavel’s mother-in-law walked in, a stout matriarch with a military bearing. She smiled and put her arms around me. Then she glared at Vova and grunted a hello. It was obvious the two were not on good terms.
“How are things, Vova? What are you up to these days?” she asked. “Oh, you know, just business,” came the terse reply. The room became eerily quiet, save for the duet of Sveta’s ripping her fluffs of cotton into sanitary pads and Pavel’s soupspoon making regular contact with the bottom of a porcelain bowl.
Tenseness overtook the air. Vova quickly made up an excuse about having “affairs to attend to.” Since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time, Pavel convinced me to stay for a while. We saw Vova off, and he promised to call me soon.
Pavel was smallish, cautious, and quiet to the point of being meek. With no higher education, he nonetheless exuded a professor’s aura. Perhaps he would have become one had he not done a short prison stint. A few years back, a friend had smashed a store window and stolen a pack of audiocassette tapes. Pavel had known about the theft. He hadn’t taken part but was prosecuted under a Soviet statute making it a crime for not reporting the information to the police. That slipup, along with another friend’s confinement in a psychiatric hospital for trying to emigrate from the USSR, had deepened
his cynicism—and caution.
The Soviet breakdown was forcing Pavel and Vova to make major forced choices about their respective life paths. Vova obviously felt he had little to lose joining the expanding racketeering underworld. Pavel’s situation was different. He had an infant son, who made his father more concerned with staying out of trouble than grinding axes over the affairs of state. Vova had tried to convince Pavel to join in his racketeering operation, but Pavel had refused, and things hadn’t been quite the same between them since.
Pavel admitted the work at the Button Factory was grueling, monotonous, and poorly paid. The monthly three-hundred-ruble salary was once considered decent, but inflation had eaten into it. “It’s enough to buy bread and cottage cheese for my son, basic things,” he said. “Of course I’d like to do something else. I know Vova thinks that I’m degrading myself by working at the Button Factory. But what Vova is doing is really dangerous. I don’t need any more trouble.”
VOVA AND I met a few days later, this time on Vasilyevsky Island, connected to the rest of the city by bridges and the subway. Vova said he had a “surprise” for me, and we hopped into a taxi.
“How many times have you read Master and Margarita?” Vova asked.
I replied that I’d read the Bulgakov classic tale of good and evil once.
“Only once? Do you know how many times I’ve read that book? Seventeen fucking times,” said Vova.
He started to ramble on about the Master, a writer who together with his mistress Margarita makes a pact with Satan. In an antithetical slap to Stalinist orthodoxy, the devil then visits Moscow, wreaking havoc in an effort to prove the existence of hell. Vova digressed into a half-coherent speech about the essence of good and evil, and how, in Vova’s estimation, the two concepts can be flipped upside down.
Given his choice of conversation, I thought perhaps that Vova was taking me to some new alternative production of Master and Margarita. But when the taxi pulled up to our destination, I knew it could not be so: Although the building resembled a cinema or theater, the folks gathered outside did not look like the average literati crowd waiting for a weekday matinee. Rather, the sidewalk was crowded with men in black leather jackets, waiting impatiently to get inside while circling one another like famished wolves. Most fit the same general description as Vova’s thug partners at the jewelry shop.
Vova thrust two tickets into a window, and we entered a dank hallway. A concession stand sold slices of white bread with lumps of fatty sausage, chocolate bars, and bottles of champagne and vodka. Vova ordered us two cups of black tea and some biscuits—I rarely saw him drink alcohol. Surly ushers then opened the door to the main hall, and a fetid odor of stale sweat flowed out while the crowd of several hundred men began pushing to get in.
“Kik-boks,” smiled Vova, ushering me to a squeaky red vinyl chair in the front of a boxing mat and ring.
Kickboxing.
I’d heard of the sport in the United States. But in Vova’s world, the combination of martial arts and gratuitous violence was on a meteoric rise.
There were several warm-up bouts that served as a sort of school-for-savagery for me, with Vova helpfully noting the finer points of the art form. Wild applause erupted when it was announced the main fight would soon get under way. A loud gong sounded, and two fighters got onto the mat and began warming up with a series of hand thrusts and foot jabs into the air. One was an ethnic Kyrgyz, from Central Asia, whose name elicited some applause but mainly a chorus of whistles and derisive shouts. Then his opponent was introduced, and to thundering applause. An ethnic Russian, he was clearly the hometown favorite.
I still didn’t understand much about the rules, but as far as I could tell, one wasn’t supposed to kick one’s opponent in the genitals. It happened repeatedly, eliciting a collective groan of agony mixed with approval from the throng.
The Kyrgyz was at a disadvantage with the crowd. Whenever he landed a good shot, you could hear “Kyrgyz, Kyrgyz” echo through the hall in hushed tones, as if it were surprising and scandalous. But when the Russian landed his blows, cheers rang out. Two truths occurred to me as I watched the gladiators in action. The first was that ethnic and geographic designations—whether Russian, Tartar, or Chechen—played an important role in Leningrad’s pecking order of organized crime groups. The second was that this was manifest in sports, too. Tough, physically fit former athletes were some of the first to start protection rackets when capitalism crept into the crumbling USSR. Martial arts enthusiasts made good enforcers. Satisfied with this new knowledge, I grew bored with the contest and spent much of the time checking out some of the mugs in attendance for this cutting-edge Leningrad spectator sport. Then, with a fast fist-kick combo delivered by the Russian to his opponent’s head and ribs, the Kyrgyz collapsed in a heap and it was over.
“The Kyrgyz got in some good shots, though,” muttered Vova, giving credit where it was due as we left the fetid arena.
WE HEADED BACK away from Vasilyevsky Island toward Nevsky Prospekt, where Vova said we were to meet someone at the “Saigon” Café, an “alternative” haunt at the other end of Nevsky Prospekt and several kilometers away. For some reason, Vova set us off walking while he seamlessly returned to the life lessons to be gleaned from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. In his estimation, the author had succeeded in portraying the Soviet Union as Satan personified, a world where evil had become good, and good evil.
“Don’t you see, the part played by the devil …”
Vova seemed to be living inside the book, tormented by the value inversions that had become his existence. Indeed, his life had in effect become a form of rebellion against the dying Soviet system, which he so railed against—and yet was so much a part of. For Vova, morality no longer existed. Perhaps from a distant perspective, this sort of relativistic thinking is easy to condemn. But in a collapsing society whose rules are quickly being rewritten, it becomes more comprehensible. Was it admirable to toil in a button factory where the workers were being ripped off by hyperinflation, corrupt asset-stripping managers, and predatory bureaucrats? Was it “moral” to be one of those managers or state officials? Was it less moral to run a “protection service” or to be a corrupt cop hitting businesses for shakedowns? The twilight of the Soviet Empire reflected into a crooked mirror, where dark shaded into light, heaven was a sham—and hell was visible all around.
Vova didn’t stop his literary exegesis until we reached the Saigon Café. I’d been there once before but had forgotten how ill-matched the name was to the place. One naturally assumed to find a Vietnamese theme, however marginal, in food or decor. Instead, the Saigon was a run-of-the-mill Soviet-style cafeteria where the patrons stood up because there weren’t many chairs. Vova again ordered tea.
No sooner were we sipping from banged-up plastic cups than an old woman hobbled in and accosted us. She was wearing a dirty overcoat and eyeglasses held together at the nose with transparent adhesive tape. She snickered loudly, mumbling something incomprehensible. The woman pointed with one hand at Vova, leaning on a cane with the other. He did his best to ignore her. I tried to make out what she was saying.
“I think she wants twenty kopecks,” I told Vova, about a nickel at the time. Vova by this time was rattled by the bag lady’s taunts, which she for no discernible reason aimed solely at him and not a single other patron.
“Granny, do you want twenty kopecks?” Vova asked her, gritting together what remained of his teeth. The street lady, deranged but with lucid eyes, seethed, launching into a tirade against Vova. “No, I don’t want your twenty kopecks,” she hissed. She rambled and waved her finger at him, mocking his facial expression.
The old woman maintained this enraged state for several minutes. Eventually she ambled back out onto Nevsky Prospekt. The episode spooked Vova. He’d just been talking nonstop about Master and Margarita, which for Vova served to soothe the contradictions of his guilt-ridden criminal life. To him, the unhinged bag lady was an apparition dispatched to expose his sins.
VOVA SOON RELAXED, however. A beautiful specimen of the emerging genetic strain of soon-to-be-post-Soviet womanhood, with light auburn hair that came down to her waist and warm, knowledgeable eyes, emerged, covering his eyes from behind. She was stuffed into an above-market skirt and expensive shoes. I didn’t have to ask who was paying the tailor.
“Guess who?” she cooed.
Vova smiled and pretended not to know who it was.
Her name was Ellie, and she was a nineteen-year-old student from the local economics institute. She had come to Leningrad from Kingisepp, a town on the Estonian border about a hundred miles to the west. I learned all this as she took each of us by one arm, Russian style, and marched us out of the café, turning toward the landmark Kazan Cathedral before arriving in front of a much smarter-looking establishment that met the full “restaurant” classification (rather than the “café” class that the Saigon fit into or the low-rung beer stand across from my communal at St. Vladimir’s).
It was obvious Vova was not there for the first time. The waiters, slouched around in dark cotton vests, scattered as we entered the dining room, obviously in no hurry to come into contact with him. Vova and Ellie sat down across from me. She summoned one of the food servers and ordered a bottle of the still-cheap Soviet champagne, along with some baked mushroom julienne with cheese—a Russian specialty—and some tough meat of an indiscernible variety.
Ellie spoke as if defending a philosophy dissertation. She began ruminating about the sorry state of the empire. Each sentence was prefaced by the somewhat pretentious words predpolozhim (“let us assume”) or (“let us allow”). They sounded appropriate on her lips, along with the metaphysical terms she used while trying to divine the future in a country dopustim where the past was constantly being redefined.
“Let us allow for the fact that Russia may completely cease to exist,” she began.
Eight Pieces of Empire Page 5