Eight Pieces of Empire (6 page)

“Da,”
whispered Vladimir Kovannikov, aka Vova.
“Vsyo-taki ne legko vesti zhizn prestupnosti.…”

“Living a life of crime really isn’t easy … but it beats being a slave.…”

This was, in a way, the mantra of the Vor v Zakone, or at least the modified modern version of the “Thief in Law” credo that dominated the late Soviet criminal underground. Vova was my guide in trying to discover what it really meant.

• • •

WE MET IN
1987 during my first visit to the USSR as a student at Leningrad State University. Vova was then “officially” working as a factory laborer in a clothing button factory. But with the Soviet economy already teetering, he’d taken to supplementing his wages by becoming a private entrepreneur—a capitalist—which was an economic crime against the state. At first it was harmless if still illegal stuff, such as buying name-brand wristwatches from tourists along Nevsky Prospekt and then hawking them to fellow Soviets for a markup.

That was the story of our first encounter: My roommate Jared was walking along Nevsky Prospekt when a lanky, loud, gregarious kid with a big head of frizzy hair going off in all directions, as if he used lye for a hair conditioner, approached and tried, in broken German, to buy Jared’s Timex.

“Spasibo,”
Jared had curtly replied when offered a week’s worth of prorated ruble wages for the timepiece. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

The offer was then doubled, but Jared still turned it down. Jared explained he wasn’t interested in selling his wristwatch. Over the semester, we would often run into Vova on Nevsky Prospekt, and we gradually became acquaintances.

When he wasn’t using his gutter German to score watches from surprised Swiss tourists, Vova gave us impromptu tours of what passed for Leningrad’s underground hippie scene, and in between shifts at the clothing button factory (aptly named the “Button Factory”) where he worked, he took us on expeditions to little-known former czarist castles and even organized shish kebab cookouts in the Russian woods for his two new American friends. Petty street black marketers like Vova were reviled as slime by many Russians of the time. Yet while some of my Russian “intelligentsia” friends ended up having ulterior motives in pursuing my “friendship,” Vova never asked me for a dime or even a small favor.

A couple of years later, Soviet society began its critical meltdown. Words like
reket
(racket, as in criminal),
keelir
(killer), and
mafia
singed themselves into the vernacular. In fact, many Leningraders seemed to take a dark, Dostoyevskian pride in playing up their city’s apocalyptic
atmosphere, even if its outward reputation as being one big mafia operation was exaggerated. Most ordinary people were not personally affected by the growing mob. At least Vova wasn’t, because he had become part of it.

ON THIS PARTICULAR
day, we had agreed to meet at the Petrogradsky Metro stop. As usual, Vova was a few minutes late.

I didn’t mind. Petrogradsky had always been one of my favorite Metro stations. The entrance had extremely heavy metal doors that were impossible to push or pull fully open. I couldn’t understand if this was a deliberate design defect to save on hinge repairs, or some sort of sadistic ploy. One had to sort of prop the door open and squeeze through before releasing it, and the door would often swing violently backwards and lash the next poor soul in line in the face. Across the street from the station, there was a store selling posters emblazoned with Soviet-style propaganda exhortations. I remembered it as two years earlier having been full of classic Communist, anti-American bombast, such as a lithograph of a US missile with a picture of Ronald Reagan’s head in the form of an atomic warhead. But Glasnost and Perestroika had taken their artistic toll during the ensuing years, and most of the more hilarious, rabidly anti-Western pictorial rants had been replaced by posters promoting sobriety, advocating ecological consciousness or, even more surprising, preaching touchy-feely peacenik stuff.

As I gazed into the shop window, I saw a shadow growing larger in the glass. I turned around without recognizing the man in the glass. It wasn’t until he flashed his fossilized smile that I knew it was Vova. He’d shaved his head, revealing nicks, cuts, and divots around the perimeter of his tightly wrapped skull. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of an oversize, crème-colored trench coat. He looked menacing.

We exchanged a hug. I asked some requisite questions about his family and work, including the Button Factory. Vova screwed up his face.

“I don’t work at the Button Factory,” he snarled, waving his hand as if to swat away a mosquito. “I’ve got a new job now.” Then he flashed a
grin so wide that the brown rot between his gums shone like shiny bits of rust.

“Let’s go,” said Vova, grabbing me by the arm and leading me toward the street. We stopped a Lada-1—a Soviet knockoff of an early-1970s Fiat—and climbed in. “Kupchino,” Vova told the driver, the name of a grimy expanse of factories and faceless apartment blocks in the south of the city.

“Why aren’t we taking the Metro?” I asked. “It’s faster—and cheaper.”

“The Metro? What for?” countered Vova, as if the notion of a subway were suddenly beneath his dignity. “Kupchino!” he told the driver again. Then he turned and spoke to me in a conspiratorial whisper, just loud enough for the taxi driver to hear.

“You see, I’ve got a new system,” hissed Vova. “I just wait until the driver approaches a red light where there’s a lot of traffic. I tell him to get in the left lane.”

“So?” I ask.

“Then, when the traffic starts to move, I jump out, slam the door, and run away!” snickered Vova. “The taxi driver is stuck. He can’t get out and chase me with cars behind him. If he does, his car might get ripped off. He can’t get over into the right lane either, because it’s blocked with moving traffic. By then, I’m long gone.”

I saw the driver jerk his neck slightly as Vova explained his fare policy for cabbies. Maybe the driver thought it was just a joke from a shaven-headed thug in a trench coat.

We sped south, over the elegant iron drawbridges across the Neva River. We had a perfect view of both banks, clad in granite block. The baroque and neoclassical buildings, without a space between them and none higher than the Winter Palace, seemed bathed in a kaleidoscope of fading pastels. Against the setting sun I could see St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Half the city seemed to be in scaffolding, a Soviet hallmark.

As we passed south across Nevsky Prospekt, we began moving away from the city’s heart and into areas dominated by the stolid structures associated with Stalin-era buildings, and then finally into the outskirts of the city, where the “functional” buildings of the Khrushchev era reigned
supreme. While most were only twenty or thirty years old, the “suburbs of the future” were already crumbling, battered, cookie-cutter-identical high-rises. This was Kupchino, a formerly pristine (if swampy) forested area that was now a socialist-style ghetto of battered buildings, state-run factory behemoths, and gangland turf battles. It was a world away from my communal and Nina Nikolaevna’s Petrograd district of cathedrals, czarist haunts, and long avenues of worn-down but warm coffee shops.

Kupchino’s miles of apartment blocks were of such a uniform design as to be virtually indistinguishable from one another. The streets were laid out in a rectangular monotone. Humidity discolored the sides of the prefab buildings, leaving black sootlike lines that adorned the exteriors in abstract maps. This proved to be a godsend, for the soot murals made it possible to tell one identical building from another. Otherwise, it was easy to get lost in the Orwellian maze, possibly the work of a dissident urban planner bent on architectural sabotage. It reminded me of the crumbling housing projects in the south side of Chicago.

Kupchino may have had its aesthetic shortcomings. But from a sociological perspective, it was a hotbed of life as the Soviet Empire was collapsing. Among the endless stretches of crumbling residential blocks buzzed a beehive of fledgling extortionists and shady businessmen. They hung out in acrid-smoke-filled “billiard clubs” and slimy disco bars. All around were smoke-belching, state-owned factories waiting to be taken over in sham privatization schemes.

OUR OLD LADA
rattled to a halt in front of a nondescript storefront. When Vova asked how much we owed for the ride, the driver shrugged. This was unusual, since Soviet gypsy cabdrivers—like cabbies everywhere—had a habit of overcharging anyone stupid enough not to negotiate the price beforehand. “Oh, it’s up to you guys,” said the driver, faking a smile. Vova handed him a wad of rubles as we got out of the car. The driver didn’t bother to count them and looked relieved as we disembarked, as if he’d dumped off a pair of lepers.

There was a long queue in front of the store. People were grumbling.
Some were arguing. At first I thought the line was for vodka or milk. But there were no drunks hanging around, and no one coming out with bags of groceries.

Two tough-looking men greeted Vova. One was short and skinny. He had on acid-washed jeans and a shiny, synthetic-looking leather jacket. The other was taller and balding. He wore a tracksuit. Under the top half he wore a sweater. Vova and the men discussed something and we moved on toward the shop. The two men led us to the front of the line. I thought we’d evoke hostility for cutting in front, but no one uttered a word—or even gave us a dirty look.

A man in a slightly too-tight sport jacket and tie propped open the door and let us in. The number of customers was tightly controlled—there weren’t more than a dozen inside. Several times more waited in line on the street.

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.