Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (13 page)

“I don’t want to be part of a subculture,” says Valera Katsuba, a St. Petersburg artist and photographer. “I know that’s the fashion in the West, but though I may choose to sleep mostly with gay men, that doesn’t mean I want to socialize primarily with them.”

This year, James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
was published in Russia. The film
Longtime Companion
was shown on television, paid for by a private sponsor. “I was visiting my family in the small town in Belarus where I grew up,” says Katsuba. “And we were watching television, and suddenly this film came on. ‘Look,’ my mother said, ‘it’s about homosexuals.’ I was surprised she even knew the word. I asked her what she thought, and she said, ‘If they’re happy, it’s all right with me.’ Ten years ago, no one would have said that.”

Most people here, some straight and gay friends agree, have bigger questions on their minds. “They wonder if the Russian Federation is about to fall apart,” one offered. “Or whether the mafia is running the whole country,” said another. “They fear they will not be able to pay for food next month,” added a straight man. “Whether other men are sleeping with men—really, no one could care less.”

I spend an afternoon with Kevin Gardner, an American AIDS activist in Moscow. “There are many gay groups,” he says, “a special body of gay hearing-impaired, several gay dating services, lots of gay newspapers. You see gay personal ads even in mainstream newspapers. There’s a gay theater group, and there’s something called the Rainbow Foundation for the Social Rehabilitation of Gays and Lesbians. Pamyat”—a neofascist group—“is still very antigay, but the tide is definitely toward liberalization, at least in the big cities. And gays do come flooding into Moscow. But there’s still a lot of self-hatred, depression, and suicide.”

A friend says, “I get my sense of community elsewhere. Russians
are very romantic people, but we’re not really very sexual. Intolerance drives people to suicide, but tolerance isn’t going to draw us into this Western fantasy of gay subculture and lifestyle.”

Keeping the Faith

I go to church in St. Petersburg, to Izmailovsky Cathedral, which was used as a silo by the Soviet government. It has been cleaned and restored, and services take place there again. The congregation includes a small grouping of young people. “I come for aesthetic reasons,” one tells me. “I think our Orthodox religion is very beautiful, but of course I don’t believe in it.”

Others do believe. In Moscow, I spend an afternoon with Masha Ovchinnikova, an artist in her late twenties whose work has great religious meaning. “The church is my life,” she says. “The only important thing. Pre-glasnost, you had to suffer to belong to the church; only true believers came. Now people are joining in huge numbers. A few are really inspired with faith, but most come because they mistake the philosophy of the church for ideology. They expected ideology as children, knew it from their parents. But they come without understanding, hoping only to be given absolute diktats. It is the tragedy of our church. These people have confused doctrine with totalitarianism.” Such people have also been the first to be won by the tides of American evangelists who have been sweeping across Russia lately, running large, vulgar advertisements, promising answers to the questions of a sick society.

The Orthodox Church excluded itself from Russian politics and life during the Communist period. “I was baptized at nineteen,” Ovchinnikova explains. “I had always seen myself as outside of my society: it was a kind of autism. The people within the church had never adapted themselves to social interaction. The new people who have come to the church are mostly those with no economic satisfaction or pleasure in their private lives. They come to the church because the church does not value these things, without understanding what the church does value.”

Some church members make their religion a cornerstone of right-wing nationalism. “The church must not involve itself in worldly questions,” says Ovchinnikova. “It is not a political body.” The church encourages the Russian habit of passivity. “A good life is a gift from God,” says Ovchinnikova. “It is folly to reach for this yourself.” The church has also bred intolerance and bigotry. “You will not be saved,” Ovchinnikova says to me pityingly, “because you are not part of our church.”

The Young Businessmen

The New Capitalists, the young businessmen, bankers, and stockbrokers, are visible everywhere. You see them in suits and ties, with their hair neatly cut, looking respectable but nonbureaucratic. It is a new look in Moscow. Few of these yuppies are involved in production, which is still state-dominated and tangled in bureaucracy. “We only trade and invest,” says Yaroslav Pachugin, twenty-five, an expert financial adviser at the private, profit-oriented Foundation for the Privatization of State Industry Through International Investment, “moving what already exists from one set of hands to another.”

He adds, “I earn much more than my parents. That embarrasses me; they are both accomplished professional people. But members of that generation cannot now learn what is necessary to function in capitalist terms. The basic structures of capitalism are no problem for us. We’ve all caught on about that.” He pauses. “What we still don’t understand, of course, is democracy.” I talk to Igor Gerasimov, who, at twenty-four, is general director of the Inkomtrust, a division of the vast Inkombank. He is responsible for the investment of private funds, which he places in real estate and foreign currency. “I usually get money to invest for between one and three months,” he says. “No one trusts the economy enough to let go of their money for longer. So investment in industry and construction is impossible. Also, our inflation is paralyzing.

“What I am doing is important. I have a moral duty to continue as a businessman, to help Russia to grow. I could not now choose
another way. Of course, I do this also for myself; I’d like a nice apartment, a dacha, a car, maybe even a Lincoln Town Car. But the more I take for myself, the more I help Russia.”

Russia’s Rich Are Different

While these businessmen make up a yuppie class, others form a financial aristocracy, the dollar millionaires, the nouveaux riches. At one end of a continuum lie the pure businesses; toward the middle, businesses dominated by the mafia; farther up, mafia activity based on business; and at the far end, pure mafia activity. Many of the very rich are at the mafia end of the spectrum, but not all of them. To succeed at the honest end of the spectrum takes an ability to deal with mafia threats, however, since they cannot be avoided.

I go to see Yuri Begalov, who owns, with two partners, Kvant International, a company whose turnover last year, I am told, was $1 billion. He is thirty; I have heard that he is honest and sophisticated. At his office in Profsoyuznaya, a modest enough location, he is wearing a cashmere blazer, flannel trousers, an Hermès tie, and a Patek Philippe watch. His Porsche is parked outside. Initially, we sit in a cramped Soviet-looking room to talk; then we move down the hall to a conference room, where we sit at a large table laid with crisp linen and set with bone china and heavy silver. The staff serves a five-course lunch of refined Georgian food, complete with various wines. Begalov is Armenian, but grew up in Georgia; he has imported an entire Georgian kitchen, housed in the office complex.

“To start a business in this country, you need connections more than you need anything else,” Begalov says. “So because my partners were both physicists, we set up a firm to specialize in business uses for scientific research. We went wherever our connections led us; any work was okay if it was profitable.” When the Moscow Exchange opened, Begalov saw that this was the next wave of opportunity, and he immediately took out a bank loan (loans were then very new) and purchased a seat. The Moscow Exchange works according to arcane and bizarre rules. “It was incredibly high risk,” he says, “and
my only real advantage was that I had taken the time to understand Russian business practice and Russian law, which almost no one else bothered to do.”

A Russian sociologist I know says, “The opportunities in this country are completely wasted on the Russians.” I will hear this sentiment over and over. Begalov followed the move toward privatization within Siberia, and when he heard that a commodities exchange would open in Tyumen, he bought a seat. Oil was a vastly inefficient state-run industry: state-run wells passed oil to state-run refineries that sold it to state-run factories. Begalov went to the director of a Moscow factory and got a commission to buy oil, then went to the first day of the exchange and bought the oil offered. The members of the exchange telephoned around town to get more oil, and Begalov bought that oil as well, establishing market control.

Begalov became a dominant force in Siberian oil and helped it enter the world market. Initially, his business was not covered by the tax code, and his activity remained wholly unregulated; business law in Russia is so new, so tangled, and so badly constructed that a clever person can still circumvent it. “I don’t worry about whether I’m doing good for this society,” says Begalov. “It’s been relatively easy for me to be successful in this context. There’s surprisingly little competition.”

Aydan Salakhova is owner and director of Aydan Gallery. She is in some ways the best that the new Russia has to offer: intelligent, beautiful, sophisticated, knowledgeable, with good contacts in the East and the West. She is herself a talented painter, and her gallery has a sleek, finished quality unusual in Moscow. She shows many of the city’s best artists and sells work to informed Russian and foreign collectors. “I see myself as helping to educate this population,” she says. “They have money, but often they have no idea what to do with it. They buy cars. They buy apartments. They have showy parties with Gypsy music. And after that, they need someone to show them what is beautiful, how to live well. It’s like in your country, only faster. First you get money, then you want power, then you go for taste. Someone has to bring together our cultural riches with these newly wealthy and empowered people. It’s a social responsibility.”

I go to an exhibition, at Moscow’s Central House of Artists, of
the Rinaco corporate collection. Young bankers and artists pass and nod. “These people need each other,” says the curator, Olga Sviblova. “Everyone got money and culture from the Soviet state, a kind of forced diet of culture, but now culture is expensive and desirable; people have to interact with each other to get these things.”

“Yes,” says Sergei Volkov. “The ‘sophisticated’ businessmen now bring on the artists the way the unsophisticated ones bring on the dancing girls.”

A Life of Crime

You cannot get away from the mafia in Russia. Nothing happens without their knowledge and involvement; they are intimately connected to government, business, the military, even the arts. They are as visible as bureaucrats were in the Soviet system: you see their cars—top Western models without license plates. Most have a slick but sleazy look that is very much their own. The men have broad shoulders and tend to stand with their legs apart and their necks forward, in a pose Russians call “the bull.” Their women are usually pretty, expensively dressed, and completely silent. The Russian mafia is growing at an incredible rate, and more and more young people are choosing to join. “It used to be fashionable in Leningrad to have an artist for a boyfriend, or a rock singer or a journalist,” says Irina Kuksinaite. “Now, the attractive girls want mafia boys.”

One of my mafia contacts, a thirty-two-year-old Muscovite, says, “You know that in our country the government offers no structure or control. Without these things, a nation falls apart. The mafia is all that’s holding this country together. We do provide structure, and when we take over a business, that business works. It’s noble work. A young man of ambition, someone who wants to have an effect on this society, he’d have to be a moron to think the way to do it is to join the Parliament. If he’s smart, he’ll join the mafia.”

My contact is extremely charming and helpful. He explains which ethnic mafias (there are seven major ones) dominate which areas and provides a sort of ideological structure within which to understand all
mafia activity. He himself “takes over” companies, puts money into them, and then puts “good people” in charge of them. “Of course we all started off as petty criminals,” he says. “But with time, you move beyond that. The mafia includes most of the smartest people in the country.” He has become a patron of culture. “It’s sometimes hard to know how to spend all my money. And for me it’s a great pleasure to move in different circles. Many mafia people get bored by the company of other mafia people, and to move in different
tusovki
—that’s our ideal.” The art people are delighted by this patronage.

“We have a lot of fun in the mafia
tusovka
,” he says, “and we laugh a lot. When I get in trouble, the family helps; I was in prison in Finland, and they got me out. But it has its downside also.” I later learn that his partner was brutally murdered a few weeks ago because of a difference with another ethnic mafia that began when the partner’s wife, rather drunk, made insulting remarks at a restaurant.

Another mafia contact has been close to international drug traffic. He is twenty-five, good-looking, tremendously articulate, and entertaining. He is an expert at spending money: he puts together parties, buys art for mafiosi, makes useful introductions. He speaks excellent English and has read a surprising range of books. “The big guys in the mafia like this about me,” he says. “A few years ago, when organized crime was just getting into full swing, they were a bunch of coarse vulgarians. But then they saw all these American Hollywood movies about the Italian Mafia.
The Godfather
and so on. And they decided that they liked this idea of being hyper-refined and hyperpolite. Though, of course, there is still that common element, mostly doing the dirty work.”

“Killing people?” I ask.

“You’ve seen a lot of movies, too. Of course there are hit men around, but it’s very much out of fashion in sophisticated circles. The same guys who were killing each other a few years ago are now involved in financial manipulation, which is more pleasant and more profitable, white-collar. The killing part of the game—those people are really very unattractive.”