Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (15 page)

At the moment Stankevich is veering toward the right-wing Russian Patriotic movement, which is perhaps foolish; he has a non-Russian last name and an extremely intellectual delivery, which will not go down well there. “He’s always been the dark horse,” one Moscow political columnist says to me. “It’s impossible to know exactly how much power he’s wielding behind the scenes.” Stankevich says, “There is not at this moment a single democratic thing in Russia. Nor can there be until the third wave comes in, and constitutional reform is enacted.” What does it mean for a top presidential adviser to the “democratic” president to speak in this way? “It’s time for the renewal of the political class,” Stankevich continues. The radicals who helped bring down Communism are no longer needed, he explains. “We’re in the most dreadful catch-twenty-two”—it’s comical to hear that phrase in a Kremlin office—“in which the country can function only when we have a new constitution which changes the role and definition of the Parliament; and such a constitution can be passed only by this Parliament, which it will destroy.” So what now? “Perhaps it will be necessary
to proceed outside current laws. Could the leaders of the American Revolution have won by sticking to the laws of the colonies?”

If Golovin had in hand the heartening rhetoric of what is right, then Stankevich has the language of what is necessary. “How much,” I finally ask him, “can you change the course of events in Russia, and how much have they taken on a momentum of their own that no elected or appointed official can control?”

“Government in this country,” Stankevich says, “now and for the foreseeable future—it’s without power. All we have is influence. Our goal must be to recognize that, to stop pretending that we have absolute power and to use our influence soundly. And our goal must be to gain power again. We will accomplish that goal.”

In the middle of our conversation, the telephone rings. On a desk in the farthest corner of Stankevich’s office is a collection of a dozen telephones of different colors and designs, each connected to a different line. Stankevich walks across the room to answer one of the phones and speaks in his same voice of calm authority for about five minutes. Step by step, he instructs someone—I think it is a relative—on how to fix his car. Again, he has that lulling tone in his voice. Try this. If it doesn’t work, try that. It is the day before a national referendum on Yeltsin’s presidency, and Stankevich is not—as are some others in the Kremlin—hysterical. His manner says clearly that what will happen at the polling stations in sixteen hours cannot injure him.

The most important new skill these younger men and women have is adaptability: they figure out how to get for themselves what they want faster and better than anyone else. What they do not have is any framework in which to place themselves or their own successes; nor do they have a clear sense of the responsibilities their success may carry. The Soviet Union was dominated by the rhetoric of ideology, until finally ideology itself lost its meaning. When you discuss democracy with the empowered members of the younger generation, they seem to understand it as a euphemism for capitalism, and capitalism they take to be a system in which everyone grabs for himself
whatever will be most useful to him. Fifteen years ago, many of these people might have been battling against an establishment that they would have seen as evil. “Those heroic days are over,” Artyom Troitsky says to me rather bitterly. “I wouldn’t be living heroically if I were part of today’s younger generation.”

I spend my last afternoon in Moscow with Vasily N. Istratsov, director of parliamentary relations for the foreign ministry. A sage man in his midthirties, he has been pulled from his position as a professor at Moscow University into this high office. Ironical, witty, charming, he has the bearing more of the worldly diplomats in Tolstoy than of the self-promoting men and women I have met. He and I talk about the politicians I have interviewed, many of whom he knows. “You know,” he says, “the traditional structure of Russian politics is like a football game. Everyone is on one of two teams, and they are interested in winning by attacking each other. The only thing that changes is the subject of division: this week, pro-Yeltsin is facing anti-Yeltsin, but last week it was something else, and next week it will be something else again. I am a civil servant, a close-up spectator at the game. I watch as the sides align and realign themselves, as the teams re-form, the way they’ve been re-forming in this country for years. These members of the younger generation, the people you’ve been talking to—they’re not spectators. They’re out on the field, playing the game. But they don’t have on uniforms. You ask yourself, ‘Are they with black or with white?’ And very soon you understand that they are playing not on the side of black, not on the side of white, but on the side of the ball.”

The real source of the chaos of the new Russia is not the weakness of the police, the dominance of the mafia, the difficulty of constitutional reform, the undependability of Yeltsin, the spiraling inflation, the naïve policies of Western governments in their distribution of aid, the shortage of food, or the inefficiency of state-run factories. The problem is the ascendancy, in a society in which everyone was once asked to work for the common good, of a system of values within which everyone has an eye only on his own progress. It inheres in the impossibility of coherence in a country now run on the chance alignments and misalignments of hundreds of thousands of different, singular, individual agendas.

Timur Novikov died of AIDS at forty-three in 2002; Georgi Guryanov died at fifty-two in July 2013 of AIDS-related liver failure. That same year, Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe drowned at forty-three in a shallow pool in Bali—perhaps because he was too drunk to roll over after he fell, or perhaps, as some have suggested, in a staged murder, since he had been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin.

Petlyura’s attempt to build a “free academy” came crashing down due to poor organization, but he gained an international reputation, appearing under the auspices of the avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson in the United States. In 2000, Petlyura staged a retrospective exhibition about the disappearance of the socialist dream into the new Russia. Pani Bronya, meanwhile, won the Alternative Miss World title in 1998, while Garik Vinogradov became a target of Moscow’s powerful mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, in 2009 after making an anagram of the mayor’s name to spell
skillful thief
. Valera Katsuba has developed a following in the West, recently doing a portrait series of fathers and sons. Olga Sviblova has become an international celebrity; one artist recently described her to me as having “a personality like a propeller—always going.”

Boris Grebenshchikov was featured in
Newsweek
as the “Soviet Bob Dylan.” After a failed attempt to become a US pop sensation, he has gone home to Russia, where he is now called the “grandfather of Russian rock.” MC Pavlov is actively mourning the loss of his popularity to a new generation of Western-style rappers. Artyom Troitsky has protested against Putin, citing Article 20 of the Russian constitution, which prohibits censorship. Putin scornfully likened the protest symbol, a white ribbon, to a condom; in 2011, Troitsky dressed as a condom for a protest march, mocking Putin.

Yuri Begalov became a partner in a major minerals and oil industry firm and married, and then divorced, a famous television presenter.

In 2009, Aleksandr Kiselev was appointed head of the Russian postal service. In 2013, he resigned from that position and received a payout of more than 3 million rubles. Sergei Stankevich was charged with graft in 1996 and fled to Poland; he has returned to Russia and is a senior expert with the Anatoly Sobchak Foundation.

Russia has no shortage of defiant decadence.
Pravda
, always a government organ, spews nightclub propaganda: “According to
Forbes
, Moscow has more billionaires than any other city in the world, so you can imagine the level of opulence you’ll be able to experience firsthand in some of the nightclubs. This makes the destination a great place for a guys’ getaway or the perfect location for the most epic stag parties.” Disdain for social norms is only strengthened as those norms become more rigid. At twenty-four, Avdotja Alexandrova created a modeling agency called Lumpen, which features women with scratched faces, unkempt hair, and puffy eyes, on grounds that an “emotionally inexpressive face, no matter how regular or symmetrical the features, cannot be beautiful.” Sergey Kostromin, who founded a zine called
Utopia
, said, “Everyone is in search of their own private utopia: satisfactory emotions that might be faked with the help of consumerist society.” Another zine,
Russia Without Us
, was founded by Andrey Urodov as “a magazine for teens who miss the times they never had the chance to live in.” It’s a nostalgia rag for the Yeltsin days. Asked to characterize the scene, one Moscow food critic said, “Every Moscow restaurant is a theme restaurant. The theme is that you’re not in Moscow.”

Pop music continues to be censored. Andrei Makarevich, called “the Paul McCartney of Russia,” found his concerts closed down after he performed for children in eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s best-known rapper, Noize MC, accepted a flag from a fan at a concert in Ukraine. “I sang in Ukrainian, and someone gave me a Ukrainian flag,” Noize said. “And in Ukraine, it was totally fine.” Weeks later, his shows started to be canceled; sometimes, bomb squads showed up claiming fictive dangers. Almost all of his performances during a tour of Siberia were blocked; authorities visited his hotels and physically stopped him from playing at alternative venues.

The anti-gay-propaganda law has resulted in innumerable vigilante attacks on gay people. Groups lure gay men and teenagers by professing to want a date, then beat their victims and force them to perform humiliating acts such as drinking the urine of their assailants. These episodes are recorded and posted; hundreds appeared online in 2015. Many victims sustain bone fractures and facial injuries;
some develop anxiety and depression; others are so frightened that they become homebound. Gay people are assaulted on the streets, in the subway, at nightclubs, or during job interviews. The Russian government has refused to prosecute these acts as hate crimes.

Yelena Klimova has been forced to pay enormous fines for trying to build an online resource for gay teenagers. In the spring of 2015, she published an album called
Beautiful People and What They Say to Me
, in which she shows the profile photos of people who have threatened her on social media. A smiling woman holding a bouquet wrote, “Go and fucking kill yourself before they come for you”; a man whose winsome profile pic shows him with a baby goat wrote, “Gunning you down, you little bitch, is just the beginning of what you deserve.” The gay activist and poet Dmitry Kuzmin wrote, “Russia lacks the concept of respect for another person simply because he or she is another person, a unique, independent individual. It is therefore useless to say here: ‘I’m gay and I have rights.’ ” Kuzmin said that escalating homophobia makes gay people into unwilling radicals. “As long as the image of the enemy is being concocted out of gays, I must make all my public statements exclusively as a gay man on the battlefield in this war that has been imposed upon me against my will.”

The countercultural status the Orthodox Church enjoyed in Soviet times (though the church even then was complicit with the KGB) has vanished entirely; it now openly enforces Putin’s agenda. In 1991, only a third of Russians described themselves as church members; in 2015, more than three-quarters do. At the same time, nearly a quarter believe that religion does more harm than good, and a third of church members say they do not believe in God. Few attend services. The leader of the church, Patriarch Kirill, described Putin’s leadership as “a miracle” and said of the opposition that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then the Apocalypse.” Patriarch Kirill is rumored to have a personal fortune of some $4 billion and flaunts a $30,000 watch and a penthouse in Moscow. He rents out the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for commercial functions.

Putin has been photographed repeatedly with the Night Wolves, an Orthodox biker gang. Ivan Ostrakovsky, the group’s leader, said, “The enemies of Holy Russia are everywhere. We must protect holy
places from liberals and their satanic ideology. The police can’t cope with the attacks. When I came back from serving in the Chechen War, I found my country full of dirt. Prostitution, drugs, satanists. But now, religion is on the rise.” Another skinhead Orthodox gang severely injured a protester who was marching in opposition to the stiff sentence meted out to Pussy Riot, the radical band arrested for performing an anti-Putin prayer in Moscow’s cathedral. “He insulted our sacred, holy things,” they said.

Georgi Mitrofanov, the sole Russian cleric who has demanded that the church acknowledge its historic relationship with the Soviet authorities, has said, “We lost so many honest people in the twentieth century that we have created a society where imitation and role play are the norm. Before we had people shouting they were building Communism, but they were just using slogans that gave them opportunities. Now a new lot, and indeed some of the old one, shout about ‘Holy Russia.’ The words mean nothing.”

Russia’s criminal gangs are involved around the world in extortion, human trafficking, drug smuggling, prostitution, arms trading, kidnapping, and cybercrime. Both the English prosecutor leading the inquiry into the murder of whistleblowing FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London and Spanish money-laundering investigators have concluded that much Russian organized crime is coordinated from within the Kremlin. The Spanish inquiry alleged that Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which oversees major criminal inquiries, and Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service, associate with criminals. WikiLeaks cables identify Russia as a “virtual mafia state” that sustains an assortment of criminal organizations: larger ones such as Solntsevskaya Bratva (estimated annual income: $8.5 billion), Bratskii Krug, Tambovskaya Prestupnaya Grupirovka, and the Chechen mafia, as well as innumerable smaller ones. Many are run by college graduates who game the system at the most sophisticated level.