As the man who would not go away, Yeltsin was, for the Communist Party, an intolerable dissident. Such was his vital importance, his first important contribution to the collapse of the regime. Despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, the history of Soviet politics will show it was Yeltsin—vain, comic, clever, crude—who accelerated the essential step in political reform: the shattering of the Communist Party monolith. From the moment Yeltsin attacked Yegor Ligachev at the Party plenum on October 21, 1987, and rumors of this assault became the talk of Moscow, the facade of unanimity and invincibility, the hermetic code of Party discipline and loyalty, began to crumble. Although the proceedings of the plenum remained secret for months, Yeltsin quickly became an underground martyr. An actress performing in a hit play about the cleaning of the Augean stables, The Seventh Feat of Hercules, stepped center stage, abandoned her script, and accused the audience of sitting idly by as a new Hercules, come to purify the city, had been disgraced and persecuted. There were demonstrations at Moscow State University. Small independent political groups such as the Club for Social Initiatives petitioned the government for more facts on the Yeltsin case. Club members reported they were followed around town by men in small cars.
After failing to win back his position or good name within the Party at the Nineteenth Party Conference, Yeltsin took his campaign for revenge and rehabilitation to the public. His barrel-chested fury, his awkward candor, had an almost narcotic appeal for a people who saw the Party that ruled them for seven decades—the Party of Aliyev and Kunayev—as an ominous secret. To any reporter or crowd who would listen, Yeltsin insulted Gorbachev’s “timidity and half-measures” and Ligachev’s “dark motives.”
The Communist Party, for its part, well understood not only the meaning of Yeltsin’s attacks but also the much wider issue of what his political success would mean to its future. Yeltsin’s ascendance embodied the threat to the Party’s control of the economy and the Party mafia’s system of tribute.
From the first appearance of cooperative businesses in 1987, the Party did everything it could to destroy the new movement it had ostensibly endorsed. One leading conservative in the Central Committee, Ivan Polozkov, made his name fighting the rise of semiprivate cooperative businesses in the Krasnodar region. He closed down more than three hundred co-ops in the region, calling them “a social evil, a malignant tumor.” The KGB, under Vladimir Kryuchkov, waged a campaign against private business, all under the pretense of rooting out corruption. But Kryuchkov never got around to investigating the barons of the state military plants, men who would soon become his closest allies in the struggle against radical reform. The conservatives also knew they could play games with the psychology of a people grown accustomed to “equality in poverty.” They knew they could arouse bitter jealousy in millions of collective farmers and workers by advertising cases of abuse under the new “mixed” economy. They portrayed the new wave of businessmen as hustlers (invariably Jewish, Armenian or Georgian hustlers) who made millions by buying products at low state-subsidized prices and then reselling the same products for three or four times more.
Undeniably, the first wave of private businessmen in Russia were no angels—no more than the first Rockefellers or Carnegies were. Racketeering, theft and bribery soared. But to the Party and the KGB, what these entrepreneurs and hustlers represented was not so much evil or capitalism as competition. This was intolerable. Lev Timofeyev, the journalist and political activist who spent 1985 to 1987 in a labor camp for writing a book describing rural corruption, wryly demanded that the Party men “transform themselves into men of property, landowners or shareholders.
“Let them make profits and reinvest them, let them outrun competition and become rich. Let them be useful at last. They have a right to do that. The only requirement is that they do not prevent others from doing the same,” he wrote. “Unfortunately the party officials will hardly become successful owners of land or industries. They lack the qualities needed for becoming honest entrepreneurs and this is why they are so terrified of those who have them. They will stop at nothing trying to prolong the days of their rotten power and they are still strong enough to do it.”
CHAPTER 13
POOR FOLK
There in some smoky corner which, through poverty, passes for a dwelling place, a workman wakes from his sleep. All night he has been dreaming of a pair of boots.…
—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Poor Folk, 1845
When I first came to Russia in 1985, I rode through Moscow on a tour bus packed with a gaggle of British socialists. They were spindly fellow travelers who wore orthopedic shoes and plastic raincoats that folded away into envelopes “no bigger than the palm of your hand.” They felt like complaining about the rotten breakfast—cold kasha, bad coffee, surly waiters—but they knew they should not.
We settled into our seats, and with a noxious wheeze, the bus headed north for the monastery at Zagorsk. The tour guide, who spoke English with the clutzy formality of a movie spy working undercover, chirped on about the “utterly ideal” marriage of atheism and freedom of religion in the Soviet Union. “It is epitome of social and spiritual,” she said obscurely, but with a smile. The passengers had neither the strength nor the inclination to press her. They all wiped little circles in their misted windows and watched Moscow go to work on a dun-colored morning. Somewhere along the Avenue of Peace, we stopped at a red light. Through the gloom, I noticed a woman in a brown tattered coat begging in a doorway. She was hunched over and kept her gaze on the sidewalk so no one would see her face. She thrust her hand into the foot traffic. There were, I could see, a few 5-kopeck coins in her palm, though judging by the way everyone streamed by her, she probably had put them there herself, as a hint. A woman in the row behind me on the bus raised her hand and asked the guide what was going on. “Unlike in London,” the woman said, “doesn’t the state care for the poor?”
“This is quite unusual,” said the guide without looking out the window longer than she had to. “It is quite likely, in fact, that precisely the woman you see is a foreigner. Or gypsy.” Enough said. The guide was rattled and we were all a bit embarrassed for her. We rode the rest of the way to the center of Russian holiness in silence.
Those were the last days of illusion in the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, the regime floated on an immense sea of oil profits. At the height of the world energy crisis and its aftermath, the state plundered its vast oil reserves in Siberia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, giving Moscow the cash it needed to fund the vast military-industrial complex. The rest of the economy was a wreck and ran on principles of magic and graft, but so long as world crude prices remained high, it hardly mattered to the Kremlin. There was still enough wealth to fill the stores with four kinds of cheese, cheap boots in wintertime, and 3-ruble vodka.
But by the time Gorbachev took power in March 1985, the oil boom had vanished. The economy of illusion was dead. The Soviet Union entered the era of high tech with none of its own and could not hope to compete. It could barely hope to survive. The state of affairs was best summarized in the chestnut “The Soviet Union makes the finest microcomputers! They are the biggest in the whole world!” Although the West was slow to notice, its great enemy of the cold war was dangerous and broke. “Upper Volta with missiles,” as the Daily Telegraph’s Xan Smiley put it.
At first it was hard to make any sense of the poverty, to quantify it. In 1988, there were still far more articles in the press about Stalin’s mental health than about homelessness, infant mortality, or malnutrition. It was as though the press were in vague agreement with Edmund Wilson’s observations of Moscow a half-century ago: “One gradually comes to realize that, though the people’s clothes are dreary, there is little, if any destitution; though there are no swell parts of the city, there are no degraded parts either. There are no shocking sights on the streets; no down-and-outers, no horrible diseases, no old people picking in garbage pails. I was never able to find anything like a slum or any quarter that even se
emed dirty.” But decrepitude was everywhere now. Every sign of poverty that Wilson could not, or would not, see was now general and could not be overlooked. You wandered into poverty at every corner, in every city and village.
On a winter afternoon, I drifted away from a small street demonstration outside the offices of Moscow News and into a run-down cafeteria on Gorky Street. I was cold and hungry, and so I bought a bowl of watery borshch and sat down at one of the communal tables.
“You want a spoon with that?”
The woman next to me was smiling, her mouth filled with steel teeth. She gave me her spoon, a flimsy thing, and filthy, too, but a spoon. She said her name was Yelena and that for the past eight years she’d been living in train stations and airports. In summer she slept in some of the more obscure parks on the perimeter of Moscow. “Sometimes I get five rubles a day scrubbing the floors on the train after they pull in to Moscow,” she said. “Right now I’m broke, and everything I have is what you see—the coat and the clothes I’m wearing.” Yelena said that some of her friends had been thrown out of their apartments by husbands and boyfriends and they had nowhere to go. She wrote letters appealing for help to the Communist Party at every level and never got a response.
A friend of Yelena’s, a homeless man named Leonid, joined us. “I’ve written Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Gromyko, everyone,” he said. “I want my right to work and live guaranteed by the Constitution of the Soviet Union.”
Yelena nodded. “You know,” she said, “there are thousands like us in this country. Thousands.”
“To tell you the truth, I probably make more money out here collecting empty bottles for twenty kopecks apiece than I would on a construction job in town,” said Vitya Karsokos, who made his living searching garbage dumps. “My biggest problem is I have to sleep in the train station or out in a dump in a box somewhere. I’d get a job in town if I could, but good luck.”
For years, while state television was still broadcasting documentaries about the street people of New York as an advertisement against capitalism, the Moscow police tried in vain to keep their own homeless out of sight. But as the number of homeless grew, their efforts collapsed. Moscow bomzhi—the acronym for “without definite place of residence”—slept in cemeteries, railway stations, construction sites, and basements. A favorite spot was the empty top floor of Moscow high rises with their ventilation pipes and heating ducts. There were drunks, abandoned children, the mentally ill—people who had fallen into the bureaucratic abyss and no longer had any right to a place on the apartment waiting list. Bomzhi sometimes worked, sometimes for money, sometimes for a bottle of vodka. You’d see them afternoons helping the local liquor store unload the vodka delivery truck. They’d collect empty bottles in the park and on garbage heaps and cash them in for change. At airports and train stations, bomzhi helped the drivers hustle fares and then took a small cut. In Moscow they might hold a place for you in line at a store; in Central Asia they’d take on migrant work at harvest time in the cotton fields.
At the Kazan Station in Moscow a wanderer named Alik said he’d talk my ear off if I’d only buy him a bottle. I suggested we go to a store and join the vodka line. When he stopped laughing, he said, “Just give me thirty rubles.” He snatched the bills from my hand and set off down the sidewalk. We walked ten feet before Alik found what he was looking for. A ghostly woman in a ratty coat reached into her pocket and the silent exchange was done. Alik quickened his pace and we headed toward a place marked CAFÉ. Three feet inside the door, he screwed off the bottle cap and downed the entire liter bottle in a few magnificent swigs. “Usually, in the morning, I like some potatoes,” he said and then stormed out the door, singing.
Alik was a sawed-off man with a two-week beard. He kept a change of clothes stuffed in a ventilation duct at the station. He said he refused to work collecting empties. “Too humiliating. What am I, a dog?” he said. “I’ll tell you what I do. When I need money, I take it. Like, one minute you’ve got your rubles, then you don’t!” For his adventures in pickpocketing, Alik had spent the better part of twenty years in prison camps and exile. Whenever he was released, he returned to “the station life.” He had no residence permit—“In Moscow, I’m no one”—and hospitals and drunk tanks couldn’t bear him for long. He didn’t make it easy. He was a nasty drunk. Sometimes he went three or four days without eating—“just ’cause I can’t stomach it.” He was irritable, manic. In a moment, he would turn sentimental, an autodidact who recited the poems of Pushkin and sang the songs of the great bard Vladimir Vysotsky, screaming them all in your face as if they were a curse.
“My father and mother worked morning till night just to support us kids,” Alik said, sitting in a deserted courtyard. “My brother was killed in Hungary in ’56. He was nineteen. Sometimes I think if he had survived I might not have started the way I did. I ran away when I was sixteen or seventeen, went off to Kazakhstan. I was going hungry, and so I lifted my first purse. That’s how my prison career started. I got five years in the Tashkent camp for teenagers. I’ve been all over the prison zone ever since. You sit in a rank cell and get twenty minutes’ exercise a day and you’re hungry, lying there on the cold concrete. I started getting sick that way. We bomzhi stay in these places twenty-four hours a day and we’re always worried we’re gonna get clubbed by the cops, day and night. We have nowhere to go. I’m telling you this on behalf of the Soviet homeless, who are punished for their destinies. No rights, no residence permit, no nothing. It’s tough when you get out of jail. It’s like you’re a third-class citizen and nobody needs your life.”
At times, Alik stopped talking and began humming and singing a Vysotsky song about a man going off to jail and never seeing his beloved again. Then he’d break it off and stare out into space and take another swig on a new bottle.
“So how do I break this cycle? I just don’t know. One of my buddies comes up to me the other day, yesterday maybe, and says he’ll smash my face if I don’t stop drinking, and I said, ‘You son of a bitch, I can’t stop. I can’t.’ I worked some in Uzbekistan, but it didn’t last. Never got along with the bosses. Worked on an oil rig once, too. I’ve never worked a single day in Moscow. For me, three hundred rubles a month and a flat, and I’d make it all right. But I don’t have it. So where should I go? You tell me.”
To describe the Soviet Union in terms of overwhelming national poverty was, by 1989, no longer the work of fire-breathing ideologues from abroad. Even the news organs of the Communist Party took up the survey of the wreckage of everyday life. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Party’s youth newspaper, blamed the Soviet system, pointing out that before the 1917 revolution, Russia ranked seventh in the world in per capita consumption and was now seventy-seventh—“just after South Africa but ahead of Romania.”
“If we compare the quality of life in the developed countries with our own,” the paper said, “we have to admit that from the viewpoint of civilized, developed society the overwhelming majority of the population of our country lives below the poverty line.”
The people themselves began to make the connection between the grimness of their circumstances and the failure of the Communist Party leadership. In the streets, “the mafia” became the muttered explanation for every shortage and inequity, and only foreigners made the mistake of thinking the term referred exclusively to the hustlers at the bottom of the criminal structure.
For a while the Kremlin ministries set the poverty line at 78 rubles a month—a level fit for dogs. But no one, not even the government itself, took the official poverty line seriously. Most officials and scholars in Moscow and in the West argued that the figure should be doubled. Even then, about 131 million out of 285 million Soviet citizens would have been registered as poor. “For decades we were striving to translate into life the idea of universal equality,” economist Anatoly Deryabin wrote in the official journal Molodoi Kommunist. “So what have we achieved after all these years? Only 2.3 percent of all Soviet families can be called wealthy, and about 0.
7 of these have earned that income lawfully.… About 11.2 percent can be called middle-class or well-to-do. The rest, 86.5 percent, are simply poor. What we have is equality in poverty.”
Poverty in the Soviet Union did not look like poverty in Somalia or Sudan; it did not necessarily mean bloated bellies and famine, but rather a common condition of need. The self-deception and isolation of the Soviet Union had been so complete for so long that poverty felt normal. Even so, almost no one, save the government elite, could ignore the widespread misery. “Even the ‘millionaire’ farm chairmen don’t have hot water out here,” a cotton farmer told me in the Turkmenian countryside. Or as Joseph Brodsky writes, “Money has nothing to do with it, since in a totalitarian state income brackets are of no great variety—in other words, every person is as poor as the next.”
Miners in the northern region of Vorkuta did not have enough soap to wash the coal dust from their faces; mothers on the far eastern island of Sakhalin gave birth in rented rooms for lack of a maternity hospital there; Byelorussian villagers scavenged scrap metal and pig fat to pay for shoes. A few early published figures began to give some sense of the scope of the problem: the average Soviet had to work ten times longer than the average American to buy a pound of meat; the riggers in Tyumen, a Siberian oil region with greater resources than Kuwait, lived in shacks and shabby trailers despite winter temperatures of forty degrees below zero; even Party officials estimated that there were between 1.5 and 3 million homeless, more than a million unemployed in Uzbekistan alone, and a national infant mortality rate 250 percent higher than in most Western countries, about the same level as Panama.
There was also the sheer crumminess of the things that you could find: the plastic shoes, the sulfurous mineral water, the collapsible apartment buildings. The decrepitude of ordinary life irritated the soul and skin. Towels scratched after one washing, milk soured in a day, cars collapsed upon purchase. The leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously. All of it kept people in a constant state of frustration and misery.
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