Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (17 page)

Now, as I struggled to find redeeming features in that mongrel town, Tatiana’s gentle radiance, her undamaged sanity struck me as some sort of miracle. It was almost as if the gift of healing had come down to her after all.

1997–1998

F
OLLOWING YELTSIN’S REELECTION, THE CHARISMATIC GENERAL
Lebed, an outspoken opponent of the war, had finally brokered a peace agreement with the Chechens. The appearance on the political scene of this military hero boosted people’s hopes. Here at last was a credible, democratically committed successor to the failing Yeltsin. But Lebed’s political career was cut off by the same arbitrary methods that rescued the election for Yeltsin. Acting on the Kremlin’s behalf, Gusinsky’s NTV television channel aired old footage purporting to show Lebed’s links with the extreme right. Lebed was fired and disappeared from the political scene.

After the election, there was no stopping the oligarchs. Boris Berezovsky boasted that seven tycoons were controlling 50 percent of the Russian economy. Even if not strictly accurate, this was a fair measure of their political influence. Their deal to bankroll government in return for shares in key state assets had given them a controlling interest in Russia’s oil and gas. One of them, Vladimir Potanin, was now deputy prime minister, while Berezovsky was handling relations with Chechnya.

The honeymoon between government and the oligarchs proved short-lived, however. Early in 1997 Anatoly Chubais (the one economist of Yeltsin’s original team still in power, and effectively running the country) decided to end the preferential deals which they enjoyed in the ongoing privatization program. When Russia’s phone system came up for auction, Chubais tried to ensure there would be no insider trading. This led to all-out war, among the oligarchs, and among them and the government.

Meanwhile, Western finance was flooding into Moscow. Now that hyperinflation was over, the stock market was booming. But the results were not reaching beyond Moscow or trickling down to ordinary people. Bureaucrats were still holding back salaries for months and using the money for their own purposes. Some three-quarters of businesses in Russia were still being conducted by barter.

The financial crash that followed in August 1998 was avoidable. But the government and oligarchs were so preoccupied by their ongoing row that they did not heed the warning signs. Russia was spending more money than it made: taxes were not being collected, and the old habit of subsidizing Russian industry had continued. The government was financing its deficit by borrowing short-term bonds on the capital markets. Indeed, it was so deeply in debt that it was paying back more than it was borrowing. The solution was devaluation, but the Central Bank was set against that.

The oligarchs’ political meddling further weakened the government at a critical moment. They engineered the sacking of Chubais. Then, with an eye to controlling the choice of Yeltsin’s successor, Berezovsky instigated the removal of Yeltsin’s heir apparent, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin. Yeltsin then asserted his independence and replaced him with Sergei Kiriyenko, an honest young banker. But Kiriyenko’s political weakness and inexperience made this a fatal choice.

Then came the crash. First, the West stopped lending Russia money. Next, oil prices fell. Finally, the Asian financial crisis caused foreign investors to draw back. With the Central Bank determined not to deflate, it was inevitable. The government had been in such a hurry to break up its command economy that it had not created the institutions needed to regulate the wild new market.

The financial crisis ruined those whose business was money—including the bankers among the oligarchs. It also destroyed those who had been borrowing. This included a large part of Russia’s struggling new middle class. Overall, 30 percent of small businesses folded. Living standards crashed by 40 percent.

But it made the fortunes of those, including oligarchs, who owned assets.

1997

IN SEARCH OF THE RUSSIAN IDEA

All afternoon the train had been traveling through a forest of birches. It was mid-May, but the branches were still bare. I was on my way east to Siberia, in search of Natasha and Igor. Whether they would want to see me was another matter. Two years had passed since they left Saratov and Natasha had long ago stopped answering her friends’ letters. Anna could not forgive Natasha for turning her back on their friendship.

I must have dozed off. When I woke the light was beginning to fail, but still the forest went on. Mile after mile of wild cherry trees in bloom edged the wood like a trimming of lace. I also intended to track down Vera, the tiny woman who befriended me when I stepped off Benya’s boat. She had left home to join the prophet Vissarion somewhere remote in southern Siberia. Before the Revolution, the outlying parts of Russia harbored many such homegrown sects, as well as the Old Believers. Now this seemed to be happening again. Thousands of people seemed to have joined Vissarion’s sect, but it was under heavy attack in the press.

The birch forest had ended and the steppe stretched away to the horizon, flat and featureless. Back home in Britain, the very contours of the island’s landscape instilled a sense of beginnings and endings. Here the space just went on and on. The émigré philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev maintained that the essential quality of his people, their aspiration toward the infinite, echoed the great expanses of the steppe. Like Dostoevsky, he believed that when this spirituality, “the Russian idea,” was tainted by Western rationalism, the result was demonic. Berdyaev believed his people had been crushed by the energy it took to claim so much land. The damage I saw everywhere around me, the punishment that industrialization had visited on the land, the neglected state of everything that man built seemed to bear out his judgment.

Russia’s history also suggested that its people traded space for freedom. The bigger the country grew, the less free her people became. Serfdom came quite late on. Western Europe was releasing its peasants by the mid-seventeenth century. But that was when Russia’s great expansion east and south was taking place. Her peasants moved often, for the soil was poor and quickly exhausted. These movements felt threatening to the tsarist state, so it tied them down with serfdom. And communism kept them there.

Today it was different. Now it was poverty that held people in place. You would not have thought it if you looked at Moscow. Over the last five years the skyline of the gray, balding, dew-lapped Soviet city was transformed. Postmodern turrets, smoky glass cathedrals to capitalism, thrust their way through the concrete. It looked as if a team of makeup girls had done over the old buildings. On what once appeared to be featureless blocks Art Nouveau detail and tendrils of exuberant ironwork were now picked out. Churches were spruce, their onion domes gleaming blue and brown with spangled stars. Neoclassical façades were burnished in raspberry pink, ochre, and rust. As for Stalin’s skyscrapers, clever lighting added what looked like a hint of irony to their domineering style, by night at least.

Zurab Tsereteli’s kitsch statue of Peter the Great, ninety-six meters high, bestriding the Moscow River, left no doubt as to who was the role model for the new Russia. Thanks to the city’s wily Mayor Luzhkov, the transition from state communism to state capitalism appeared seamless. The pompous edifice of the Church of Christ the Savior, blown up by the Soviets, was rebuilt. Construction took five years, as opposed to forty-four originally. Luzhkov had cleansed the city of Chechen traders and deported the homeless from the city.

The train passed a man on crutches, walking slowly, swinging his dead leg. There had been no buildings for a long time. I watched, expecting to see a house, a village perhaps. Where had he come from? Where was he going?

In Moscow I asked around about Benya. No one had seen him. Someone said he had been kidnapped by the Kirghiz yet again. His friends seemed strangely unworried: he probably spread the rumor himself, they said, because he could not deliver the money he had promised to various artists. He had left a film unfinanced, and a cruise down the Volga that had to be canceled.

An ample, motherly woman in charge of our carriage brought me tea. The hopes with which I set out on my travels seemed grotesquely wishful now. The transition from communism was conforming to the pattern of Russian history established by Peter the Great. Each attempt to impose Western forms of development clapped on a veneer of modernity. It did not change the nature of power. Indeed, through modernization, it only threatened to make it uglier.

Authoritarianism was acquiring a new intellectual respectability, thanks to the Eurasianists. Strangely enough, it was my Westernizing friend Anna who first made me aware of them. When I last stayed with her, she was talking enthusiastically about Lev Gumilev, who was one of the more liberal. Son of the poet Anna Akhmatova (the honor earned him two stints in prison camp), he had acquired cult status since his death in 1992. Inspired by émigrés like Nicholas Berdyaev, the Eurasianists were searching for a Russian identity that did not look to Europe. Their starting point was the country’s physical geography, which was more Asian than European. Their ideas were prompted, like fascism, by the humiliation of a nation deeply imbued by a sense of its historic destiny. In their view liberal democracy, with its enfeebling relativism, its incontinent consumerism, had failed as an idea around which different cultures could unite. Russia could offer the world a finer model, spiritually strong, not sapped by individualism.

Gumilev had his own biogeographical theory: every ethnic group had its historical rise and fall, after which decline set in. But those charged with a sense of national mission could reverse this decline. The great changes of history in the northern hemisphere depended on charges of cosmic energy inspiring ethnic groups with
passionarnost
. The strength of this innate drive was what divided people untouched by greatness from a “superethnos,” like the Russians. It enabled the divided Slav tribes to come together to overthrow Mongol rule, and it could make Russia rise again today.

In Gumilev’s theory a decisive role was accorded to these
passionari
, the exceptional individuals who elected to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. When I read this I understood why Misha and Tatiana so deeply disapproved of Anna’s crusade against Saratov’s corrupt officialdom. Despairing of political reform, unable to see a way forward for her country, my friend had cast herself as one of Gumilev’s
passionari
.

For all the romanticism of his engagement with business, Misha was a pragmatist. Given time, he believed that the activities of businessmen like him would bring about changes in Russia which would irrevocably alter the nature of power. He was confident that on the level of the individual, where the patterns of history are made and broken, people were already beginning to slough off their totalitarian conditioning. They were liberating themselves by learning how to work for themselves. I so wanted this to be true. I worried about Anna, though.

The train stopped at a small station. Walking down the train, I passed a woman selling hot pies: “Hot manty, bi-ri-shi!” Her five-beat call with its rat-a-tat ending was as distinctive as that of any thrush. On the platform a flurry of trading was under way. A deaf and dumb boy was doing brisk business in fluorescent red and orange drinks. A fat woman in a flowered dress and white kerchief was filling a passenger’s newspaper with potatoes. Where the platform ended the grass strip by the railway tracks was planted with rows of potatoes. For much of the rural population, potatoes were still the staple diet.

The train was due in at Novosibirsk at four o’clock in the morning. I twisted and turned on my bunk. Natasha and Igor did not have a telephone. By the time I heaved my bag off the train at Novosibirsk station, I was jumpy. What was I doing, on a wild goose chase across Russia in search of people who might have forgotten all about me? The station was bleak. The massive cube of a female guard with a megaphone stood on the platform in a cone of light. I settled among the shabby crowd in the waiting room to wait for morning. The hard seats had fixed arms. A man in a worn suit sat slumped over his bag. A boy was scrunched up in a fetal position. A girl with a mop of peroxide hair hung over the metal arm like a cloth doll.

I must have nodded off. I dreamed about Natasha: the new beginning she had longed for had happened. She was living in an improbable Palladian stone house. She welcomed me absently and walked out into the garden, where a three-legged tomcat was dipping its paw in an ornamental pond. Beyond, in a beech grove, she was embracing an impeccably dressed English gentleman. In the dream, there was no sign of Igor. It was possible that I would not find her there at all. She might have taken up her admirer’s invitation to join him in Canada.

I went out to the hall in search of coffee. The real poor, who could not afford the price of the waiting room, were out here. As I waited in line, a man who looked like a dried chili walked up to me: “Where is it?” His shiny blue eyes were rimmed with red. “We had order, Soviet order.” The man’s words were slightly slurred. “We were great. Where’s it gone?” He looked at me reproachfully, as though I had taken it.

He was off to the Tyumen oil wells for another month’s work. “It’s a bag of shit, everything smells of oil … But there’s this old place I go past every day—they say it’s full of babas praying—wazzit called?”

“A nunnery?”

“Nunnery, that’s it. Weird idea—these babas, all locked in together, praying … But it makes me feel better …”

His journey would take a day. It was the only available work since Novosibirsk’s factories, which were largely military, closed.

“War’s the only way out,” the pickled man confided, tears in his eyes. “ ’S the one thing we know how to make.”

“Against whom?” I inquired.

“My pal’s a lathe operator—he’ll make us all guns—”

“But who are you going to fight?” I insisted. He focused on the question slowly.

“We’ll start with the government, I’ll cut Yeltsin’s throat myself. Lining their pockets, squeezing the money out of us like blood—it’s a bear pit. They’ll fight it out, fight for power till there’s only one left. Just let me get my mitts on ’em—I’ll kill the lot. They’ve sold great Russia for a bag of gold! It’ll never recover! Smashed. There’s no putting it together again.” He paused. “Bloody woman! Got to keep a tight rein!” He made a fist. “A woman’s got to obey a man! She should obey me. They’re all the same, good for nothing but fucking and flogging.”

I kept quiet, with an effort. “Don’t look at me like that. Your eyes—they go right through me. Have I said something wrong? Our women, I’m talking about our women … well, maybe not all our women. Come on, I didn’t mean it.” Pathetic now: “I’m going to die soon. I’m only in my forties. It’s been foretold.”

“Cheer up, it’s up to you.”

“No, it’s been foretold—I’ve got five more years.”

I headed back to the waiting room, anxieties blown away by this exchange. I chose to be here, after all. The chili man was probably right about his death, too. Life expectancy for men had fallen sharply. More men had died prematurely in the last few years than were lost on all sides in the Chechen war. Drink, drugs, and suicide were the immediate causes. But it was despair that was really killing them.

THE PRODIGAL RETURNS

I reached Natasha’s sister on the phone in Novosibirsk before she left for work. Yes, she assured me, Natasha and Igor were there, and still living together, somewhere on the outskirts of the city. When I asked how they were she sounded guarded. As for finding it on my own, that would be impossible, she said flatly: she would take me out there after work.

Memory had softened the brutish scale of the Siberian capital. The massy Soviet blocks and bullying scale of its streets and squares reflected an ideology which had little place in it for the individual. These undulating reaches of asphalt were intended for parades of military strength. In Lenin Square a huge statue of workers wielding weapons and tools was still striding into its radiant future. But gusts of wind were blinding them with wild cherry blossom.

The grim cityscape was softened by the sight of young girls wearing the latest fashion, polka-dot platform heels. The girls trod the wavy asphalt tentatively, like escaped giraffes. People were buying bananas and eating them there and then on the street, as if to make up for years of lost fruit.

Natasha’s sister was right. I would never have found the couple’s flat without her. They were living a long way away, in an old industrial district built by German prisoners of war and deported Russian Germans. Walking from the tram, we passed rows of arms factories. When the Wehrmacht invaded, the Soviets had been utterly unprepared for war. They were dismantling arms factories only just ahead of the advancing armies, hastily reerecting them here. Now those buildings stood derelict, windows broken. Two men were dragging equipment out of one of them.

My friends were living in two rooms on one of the elegantly proportioned, intimate courtyards in the workers’ suburb adjoining these factories. Designed in the Stalinist neoclassical style, all ochre and white, were palaces of culture, playgrounds, and bakeries. Crumbling now, lost in thickets of lilac and straggling birch, it was an elegy to that failed attempt to build a workers’ paradise on earth.

Natasha and Igor greeted me as if it was perfectly normal for me to turn up unannounced after two years. The contrast between them was shocking. Natasha looked wretched, thin and pale. But Igor was transformed. The discontent which had marred his handsome mustachioed face was gone. His dark eyes had lost that bloodhound droop. He looked plump and prosperous, though this was clearly not true. But he was working. Now that he had started, he did not seem to want to do anything else. Later, when Natasha and I went to bed in the couple’s double bed, we left Igor writing a business plan for some company. When we got up in the morning, he was still at his desk. After years of treading water in Marx, he was now in love with work.