In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  While all this was going on, the Soviet cosmonauts continued in their orbits around the eternally blue planet. On 17 September, 1991, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were admitted to the United Nations as independent states. The crew aboard Mir heard the report, looked down and joked among themselves that the three countries had clearly changed colour. On 7 December, the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine held an impromptu summit in a remote hunting lodge by the Polish border. According to one of the participants, the host, Yeltsin, was so drunk at the moment the other delegates arrived that he fell from his chair. The first thing they saw upon entering was a scene straight out of Gogol: Yeltsin's enormous bulk being slung onto a divan by his two fellow presidents. Several members of the Russian delegation then carried him to a side room, where he slept throughout most of the historic meeting. At 2.17, however, the three presidents signed a joint communiqué: ‘The Soviet Union has ceased to exist.’ In the days that followed, the remaining republics ratified that agreement. On 25 December, 1991, Gorbachev stepped down. He was given a dacha, an office in Moscow, and a pension of around 140 euros a month. The red flag above the Kremlin was lowered that day.

  Anatoli Artsybarski made it back to earth just before the Soviet Union fell apart, but his colleague, Sergei Krikalev, remained suspended in space for five months longer than planned. Later some people claimed that he had stayed in space so long because there was no money to bring him back, that his prolonged orbit was due to the fact that the country that had sent him into it no longer existed. ‘Nonsense. Journalistic claptrap,’ Artsybarski growls. ‘There were simply a few technical problems.’ The only thing he really wants to talk about, however, is his ‘people's collection’ to save the Mir space station, about the ‘revitalisation of the prestige of the Russian cosmonauts’, about the ‘stimulation of prizes, diplomas and medals’, about pride lost.

  In early 1998, The Economist published the results of an opinion poll held among a significant cross-section of the Russian population: under which leader, in their view, had life in Russia been at its best? The president at the time, Yeltsin, received fourteen per cent; Stalin and Czar Nicholas II both received six per cent; Gorbachev took three per cent; Lenin – the great leader and model for more than seventy years – received one per cent. A massive preference was expressed for one of the last, dyed in the wool communist leaders, Brezhnev, with forty-two per cent.

  I ask the beggars around St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square about their pasts. A young man in uniform tells me he lost his leg in Afghanistan, most of the women once worked in factories, one had been widowed at a young age – her pension had been melted away by inflation – and the last one I spoke to had worked all her life in a clothing store. No, they had never thought they would end up here, in this shivering line-up, clutching a plastic cup.

  Russia was living in the final weeks of the Yeltsin era, the post-communist period that had started so propitiously just seven years before. A liberal democracy! A market economy! A constitutional state! Local self-government! Individual freedom! Western prosperity! In late 1991, all of that was still to arrive.

  In practice, though, democratisation and the introduction of a market economy in the former Soviet Union was a spectacular failure. From the ranks of the former communist nomenklatura there arose a new elite that absconded with the key national industries and resources, including the banks, the energy sector and the media. These oligarchs elaborated on the time-worn mechanisms of the old Soviet hierarchy: a combination of brute force and extreme servility, patronage between senior and junior managers, a system of nepotism, blat and bribery.

  In 1992, Yeltsin began with the head-over-heels introduction of the market economy. Shares in the state-owned companies were distributed among the population in the form of coupons. Most of those coupons were then bought up for a pittance by a handful of businessmen. Car dealer Boris Berezovski, for example, secured a major interest in Siberian Oil (Sibneft), Aeroflot, the state broadcasting company and several newspapers. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin's prime minister between 1992–8, used his status as former managing director of the Soviet gas company to set up a firm of his own, Gazprom. It was the world's largest energy company, with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.

  During that same period, as part of the ‘shock therapy’ propagated by Western economists, Yeltsin's reformers lifted all government price control. The results were disastrous. In the howling inflation which followed, most of the pensions held by the elderly and the disabled became almost worthless within the month. Thanks to the influx of foreign investments, Moscow, St Petersburg and several other large cities witnessed a new prosperity, but in the rest of the country the shock therapy resulted in a national tragedy.

  This was clearly not the ‘transitional period’ spoken of so widely in the West, but a decline in almost everything essential to daily life: salaries, benefits, food supplies, health care, education, government services and public safety. Between January 1993 and January 1996, Russia's industrial production decreased by a third. More than half of all Russian families ended up below the poverty level. Symptomatic of the malaise was the collapse of the country's air traffic: the number of passengers tumbled from 135 million in 1989 to 20 million in 1999, and more than half the country's airports were closed during this same period.

  Statistics on Russia's population following this shock therapy showed trends similar to those in a country struck by war or famine: between 1989–99, the average life expectancy of Russian men decreased by five years, to fifty-nine: fourteen years less than the average Western European male. The total population dwindled at the rate of one million annually – a phenomenon unique in modern history. Russian mortality statistics were reminiscent of those in Zimbabwe, Afghanistan or Cambodia; tuberculosis, AIDS and alcoholism became major causes of death. The birth rate, that perpetual indicator for the ‘mood of the nation’, fell by fifty per cent.

  A second selling-out of the former Soviet Union took place in 1995. Three years after Yeltsin took office, his government could barely pay the salaries of its officials. With elections on their way, the president and his men found themselves in dire straits. In deepest secrecy, therefore, a deal was struck with the country's principal oligarchs: in return for loans to the government, they would receive temporary receivership over the shares in the remaining state-owned companies, including several gigantic oil and mining complexes. Because the loans were never repaid, the oligarchs were ultimately able to take over those shares for next to nothing. By this and other manoeuvres, Yeltsin was able to raise half a billion dollars for his 1996 election campaign. He won, thanks to an overwhelming media offensive.

  In the McDonald's in Pushkin Square, I talk to two teenaged girls. Tautly made-up little faces, somewhere around seventeen. Could they remember anything about the communist era? ‘The queues. I remember my mother standing in line for a pair of boots.’ ‘Me too, I was five, I stood in line with my grandmother to buy soap, she had numbers written on her hand, I don't know why.’ ‘But I also remember the May Day parade, they used to give us sweets.’

  Do they ever buy Cosmo? The younger of the two does on occasion, she likes to leaf through it and daydream. She earns enough money to buy the magazine with a part-time job, but it costs her a day's pay. But the older one thinks the magazine is stupid. ‘It's about dumb men, but it's written for dumb women.’

  The striking success in Russia of the glossy women's magazine Cosmopolitan is a phenomenon in itself. Everyone I spoke to about it had an opinion on the subject. ‘The people have an enormous need for new symbols and icons, for new ways of interacting,’ one person tells me. ‘Most of the bosses here are either ex-communists or criminals or corrupt. What's more, they're usually dirty old men, they can't keep their hands off women. Cosmopolitan shows a completely different lifestyle, with modern and open relationships between men and women, bosses and employees.’ Someone else says: ‘Cosmopolitan provides new role models for Russian women: unattached
women, well educated, working women who are able to take advantage to the fullest of the joys of postmodern society. Women who are in control over men.’

  Dutch media magnate Derk Sauer, founder and owner of the company that publishes Cosmopolitan in Russia, can himself only partly explain the magazine's success. ‘The first issue of the Russian edition appeared in 1994. It was Russia's first women's glossy, and it was one of those cases of being in the right place at the right time. A magazine is the ultimate medium for expressing a lifestyle. In the Soviet days, everyone was expected to be equal. This magazine taught people to express their individuality again. It became their guide to the new life.’

  The 40,000 copies of that first issue were sold within an hour. Circulation peaked at around 500,000, now it stands at around 350,000, and Sauer is currently working on concepts for new magazines. ‘Soviet propaganda was quite effective: at first, the Russians had a very naïve view of capitalism and the West. Everyone expected huge profits right away, trips to Spain, a Volvo parked at the door. Now they're starting to discover themselves again. Nestlé sells more and more of its products under Russian names. So do we. That's why the title of our new financial daily newspaper is classically Russian: Vedomsti, Reports.’

  Derk Sauer arrived in Moscow ten years ago. At that time, the market was bare. Today he is the head of Russia's biggest independent media concern, with 550 employees, two daily newspapers – the Moscow Times and the Russian Financial Times – and sixteen magazines, including Cosmo and the Russian Playboy. He is cheerful, enthusiastic and optimistic. After all the misery, he says, the Russians have an incredible talent for dealing with setbacks and overcoming them. That's how they have been able to form an entire economy, uniquely their own.

  His own company's results are an eloquent example of that: officially speaking, the figures are impossible. The total circulation of his Independent Media Group is over a million, but according to government figures there is no way so many Russians could buy his publications. Supposedly, only a very small group can afford them.‘If the statistics were right, this publishing house would have gone down the tubes long ago. Our turnover definitely does not depend on those couple of thousand exceedingly wealthy families. I have only one explanation for it: there is a sizeable, relatively solid middle class on the rise in the cities, people who get up early, work hard and actually have money to spend. The only thing is, they don't exist in the official statistics. And that's only logical: after all, who wants to pay eighty per cent taxes?’

  He tells me about an acquaintance who imports washing machines. ‘He's a clever fellow, he bribes the border guards and sells his machines on the black market. Officially, he doesn't exist. But he has quite a few people working for him, it's a real company. His employees don't declare their earnings either. And they still live in their old Soviet apartments, which cost next to nothing. Almost everything they earn is disposable income. We estimate that approximately a fifth of the Russian population, about thirty million people, profit from this new economy in one way or another. Of course, that still leaves you with 120 million others.’

  Chapter SIXTY-TWO

  Chernobyl

  THE COLD HOLDS NO SECRETS FOR THE RUSSIAN RAILWAYS. UPSY-DAISY, scoop a little more coal into the furnace and the train compartments turn into cozy living rooms, the corridors into warm loggias, the passengers eat and drink, someone sings a tune, and meanwhile the Moscow-Kiev Express barrels on through the moonlit night. In the bar, as they say here, ‘we let our souls fly’.

  The next morning, Irina Trantina is waiting for me at the station in Kiev. Through her many contacts, she has arranged a special tour for me, and it's all she can talk about. As soon as we are in the car she says: ‘Do you know where I was that day, 26 April, 1986? Right here, at this station. I worked in the ticket office, I had night duty, and the first thing that struck me in those early morning hours was the total silence. There were no police, no one. We thought that was very strange, but no one could explain it. The next day a friend of mine picked up a report on Voice of America, they said something about an explosion near Kiev. That was all. When I got to work that day, the whole station was full of panicked people. Someone said: “They're from Chernobyl. The nuclear power plant there blew up.” More and more rumours like that started going around. On 30 April I saw a special train from Chernobyl come through here, full of top officials and their families. Then everyone in Kiev knew that something had gone very wrong. But the radio still didn't say a thing.’

  Kiev celebrated May Day in the normal fashion, with the usual shows and parades. ‘The whole charade had been going on for five days, and I'd had enough of it. A friend of the family was quite high in the military, and I called him. He was extremely candid: “Irina, we have an enormous problem. A nuclear power plant has blown up. No one knows what to do, that's the reality of it.” The next day all of Kiev was in total panic, everyone was trying to get away, it was like a war. We simply devoured iodine, we thought that could keep the problems at bay.’

  The official announcement came on 5 May: ‘There are a few problems, but absolutely no risk.’ Four days later the order came for all children to be evacuated. The newspapers in the West talked about nothing else. But most of the people of Kiev still knew nothing at all.

  The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further.

  In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: first in the direction of Sweden and Finland, then across Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, by way of Switzerland, northern Italy and France, all the way to Great Britain and Norway. Some residue also reached the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Rumania. Twenty countries were contaminated. Years afterwards, British sheep were still failing inspection on the grounds of being a threat to public health.

  Around 200 people died during and immediately after the explosions, but in the years that followed thousands more died from radioactive contamination and resulting illnesses. According to the most conservative estimates, the disaster claimed a few thousand lives; other reports speak of many times that number.

  These days Chernobyl is inhabited again. It is an inconspicuous town, only an hour from Kiev, full of people whose job it is to make sure that no one else comes to town: forest rangers, security people, soldiers, firemen, maintenance personnel, office workers, cafeteria help. Cars drive in and out of town, laundry flaps cheerfully on the line, three babies have been born here recently. At least 10,000 people work at Chernobyl these days – more or less at their own risk, only time will tell. But then, with two weeks on and two weeks off, an early-retirement plan and double overtime, what Ukrainian could resist?

  Thanks to Irina's efforts, I am today the guest of Nikolai Dmytruk, assistant director of the Chernobyl InterInform agency of the ministry of emergency affairs. He shows me his collection of maps, full of faded ink spots, red, yellow and green. The official ‘zone’, as the most hazardous area is called, is shown on the map by means of concentric circles tightening in around the exploded plant, several kilometres apart, each one indicating greater danger, each one accompanied by increasingly strict security controls, as though the good Lord himself had gone to the drafting table during the explosion with compass and ruler. The tr
uly radioactive areas look much more jagged on the map, big red smears, blown along by the wind. Some sections of the zone were upwind during the disaster itself, and are now quite safe. But on the other hand, in the densely populated town of Narodichi, in real terms outside the zone, the radioactivity is just as strong as in Chernobyl itself.

  Some 100,000 people have since moved from the most heavily contaminated areas, but around 200,000 remain. Ukraine simply lacks the funds to evacuate them. Meanwhile, strange things continue to happen. Osteoporosis, cancer of the larynx and immune diseases, the statistics tell it all. Almost all of the young people here have health problems. In the same way Belgian or Dutch physicians deliver the diagnosis ‘stress’ when they don't know what else to say, the doctors in Kiev say ‘radiation’ and go on about their business.

  Dmytruk has me put on a kind of prison suit, then we climb into an old Volkswagen van and drive to the reactor. ‘Everyone expects to see something unusual here,’ he says. ‘Ruined forests, rabbits with six legs, death and destruction. But that's exactly it: you don't feel anything, you don't see anything, you don't smell anything, not a single human sense sounds the alarm.’ The scene of the disaster itself, popularly referred to as ‘the sarcophagus’, looks like a huge concrete coffin built around the ruins of the reactor. The Geiger counter reads 1.05 microroentgens. ‘Not bad,’ Dmytruk says. ‘When the wind is blowing hard we sometimes get up to 1.5. Then you can hear the sarcophagus creaking and groaning in the distance.’