Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (14 page)

I go out several times with another contact who is part of the Azerbaijani mafia. On our first such evening, we go to an expensive
restaurant in a hotel owned by a well-known Western chain. We sit down at the best table with a few heavies; one of them takes out a lump of hash the size of a baseball and starts to roll joints. I am a bit startled. “Do you think it’s a good idea to smoke hash in the middle of this restaurant?” I ask. “You know, this is a Western hotel.”

He laughs. “My friend wondered whether you would mind if we smoked here,” he says to the manager, gesturing languidly at the lump of hash.

“Please,” says the manager, looking rather green. “Have a nice smoke. You do whatever you like.” He stands smiling meekly at us.

At a party a few days later, one of the young mafiosi offers to introduce me to his boss, a plump man with blond hair and a scruffy beard. We have a nice chat about cars. He hopes that what I have been learning is interesting. “Our mafia is the best,” he says.

“And what do you actually do?” I ask brightly.

His eyes narrow. “You know, you seem like a very nice guy, and I know about your project here, and if some guys want to talk to you, that’s up to them. But I think you should be careful. I would really hate for something unpleasant to happen to you.” He smiles meaningfully.

I have recently heard talk of a Latvian journalist who was researching a story on the mafia when he disappeared; he turned up dead in an alley with seven bullets through his body. This image has not been comforting.

“Now I have a question for you. And I hope you know the right answer.” The boss lowers his voice conspiratorially. “I have a problem with which someone from the West should be able to help me.” I am overcome with dread; this is how one gets sucked into crime. “I have terrible trouble with dandruff,” he says, “and I wanted to know whether Head and Shoulders shampoo from America really works or whether you can send me something else from your country?”

Shortly before I leave Moscow, I have dinner with him. He has decided that I am okay in the wake of my shampoo tips. We discuss politics, restaurants, fashion. “You’ve had a good trip here?” he asks. I have. “You have some problems with people in Moscow?”

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

“You know,” he says with a big smile, “a hit man in our country costs just twenty dollars. I can arrange this for you if you want.”

I assure him that I do not need such services.

“Well”—he gives me his card—“here are my numbers. If you have problems in America, you can also call me. A hit man for New York is twenty dollars, plus airfare, plus one night hotel fee.”

The Politics of Change?

The rigidly hierarchical Communist system meant that important positions in Soviet politics could be occupied only by people of advanced years. Younger politicians, whatever their ambitions, operated in the meek language of the bureaucracy, avoiding transgressions, exercising what little power they had in terms dictated by their superiors.

The idea that members of the younger generation can hold meaningful positions in Russian politics is still novel. “Even the strong democrats who say they want change,” says Romuald Krylov, thirty, chief of the department of art and culture for the central district of Moscow, “are uneasy seeing me in a senior bureaucratic position. They would prefer to find a sixty-year-old man with no interest in art and culture. It’s what they’re used to.”

That is a hundred times more the convention in national government. Yegor Gaidar’s brief tenure as prime minister demonstrated to the people of Russia that new policies might come from young people. Gaidar’s politics were deliberately shocking; the younger generation in Russian politics show tremendous variety in their language and their policies, but they seem to be tired of the idea of utopia. In the West, younger politicians talk of radicalism while older ones are conciliatory; in Russia it is quite the reverse. What is both comical and disturbing, however, is that this move toward moderation seems to come not from a spirit of cooperation, but from a general understanding that the rhetoric of compromise will be the best line to power.

It is impossible to pinpoint the individuals who will be in power in three years’ time, but it is possible to look at the character of this
generation as a whole, to try to understand what kind of younger people have chosen to enter the political fray, and how, and why. Perhaps twenty-five men under age forty are helping to define the younger voice in Russian politics, and several hundred others follow in their footsteps. The range of their sentiments and abilities can perhaps be grasped by looking closely at three: Andrei L. Golovin, people’s deputy and chairman of the Faction Smena–New Politics; Aleksandr A. Kiselev, president of the executive committee of the Russian Movement for Democratic Reform; and Sergei B. Stankevich, counselor to the president of Russia on political affairs.

Andrei Golovin holds to what he calls a centrist line. Russian politics tends to function in extremist terms, and I am intrigued by the idea of a centrist party. “Those who call themselves democrats,” he says, “are radicals, left-wing radicals. Your government supports them because you think that if you don’t, the right will take over. But we are really closer to you and to your national interests than are those radicals. When Clinton was elected, I assumed he would see this and understand it; it’s so disappointing to us that he continues the paranoiac foreign policies of President Bush. Doesn’t he see that Russian, American, and international interests all lie with the center, with something mediated and controlled? The danger does not come from the red or the blue, but from the fact of extremes locked in battle.”

Golovin, in his midthirties, has an arrogance that sometimes borders on condescension, but his arguments are compelling. Five years ago he was a physicist at a research institute. With perestroika, he moved toward government service. He sketches out military, economic, and civil policy; his centrism reminds me more of Swedish socialism than of anything else. “You talk in your country about a stable government that represents the middle class,” he says. “We at Smena are the government of the middle class.”

I ask, “But is there really a Russian middle class? Do people in this country want compromise? Who are your constituents?”

“If we were in power, there would be a middle class, and they would want compromise. If we come to power, we’ll have support everywhere. And we’ll get rid of most of these ruinous economic reforms, to permit the reemergence of a middle class.”

I point out that within democratic systems this is not the usual sequence of events, that you are supposed to have support before you get elected.

“Well,” he says, “there is no freedom of the press in this country. The left-wing press is underwritten by our government; and so is the right-wing press, because fear of the right wing drives support to the left. We don’t get that kind of media play. It’s hard to do dramatic PR for a centrist position; it’s not eye-catching. The radicals, Communists, and fascists used to be in the same party, and they all have a Bolshevik mentality. We’re clean. We were never part of the Soviet bureaucracy. I’m frightened by the movement here toward a sort of Latin American situation, in which power comes from the mob and the government is beholden to illicit special interests.”

Then his expression softens. “This is a great civilization.” He gestures out the window. “We can interact in a civilized fashion. Why should people vote for us? Because we’re intelligent and honorable. Print my photo and my biography next to Yeltsin’s photo and his biography, and ask yourself who has led a good life, with a commitment to public service, and who is an old Communist, steeped in misguided ideology and corruption? We want to establish reasonable laws. In fifteen years, when I am president, Bolshevism, extremism, will be dead.”

Golovin is eloquent and moving, but he evinces a curious disdain for the realities of his own country. He seems not to understand that you cannot impose civility on an entire society. He talks a lot about pragmatism replacing ideology, but fails to recognize the essential ideological basis for his pragmatism, which was designed to create a pragmatic society where one does not now exist. “It will take a long time to de-ideologize this society,” he says, apparently unaware that a program to de-ideologize a society is finally very ideological.

With Golovin’s description of the “radicals” as “Bolsheviks” ringing in my ears, I go to see Aleksandr A. Kiselev, whose ardent belief in democracy is unaffected. But if Kiselev had been active thirty years ago, he would, unquestionably, have defended the cause of Communism with equal conviction; indeed, he was a big wheel in the Komsomol (the youth organization of the Communist Party)
when he was an adolescent in Volgograd, and the Communist Party was still the Communist Party. When we meet, Kiselev is wearing a powder-blue suit that, eleven sizes larger, might have belonged to Brezhnev; he looks like “a typical bureaucrat.” He continually answers concrete questions by saying, “We must have democracy in order for the people to be strong” or “We must ask the people in what kind of state they wish to live and build accordingly.”

The Movement for Democratic Reform, which he leads, is the remains of the political machine that propelled Yeltsin into power, and it is as close to a political party as anything gets right now in Russia. Kiselev’s answers to my questions, especially after Golovin’s passionate clarity, feel inauthentic and banal. He batters me with statistics. I ask him whether the majority of the Russian people want democracy at all, of any kind, and he looks puzzled and plunges into the details of last week’s parliamentary debate. He has no impulse toward abstract thinking or large inquiries.

Kiselev is one of the advocates of a new constitution; in fact, a new constitution is really his movement’s raison d’être. “We will impose this democratic constitution on the Parliament and on the people,” says Kiselev. “And then Yeltsin will explain it to the people, and when they hear him explain it, they will understand that it is good.” I comment that this agenda does not accord with existing laws. “Well,” says Kiselev, “criticize Yeltsin for breaking the laws if you want, but in fact everyone breaks them. The current constitution is so bad that most people don’t bother with it.”

I spend the afternoon with Sergei B. Stankevich, Yeltsin’s counselor on political affairs. Russian politics is unpredictable, but character is distinctive; of these three men, this is the only one who could run a country. He is at the moment unpopular and has severed his ties to various movements that might have helped him to greater success, but unpopular in Russia can turn to popular in hours, and Stankevich has had moments of great popularity. He has recently distanced himself from Yeltsin, though he has kept his Kremlin office and official position. In the past, when Yeltsin has acted strangely and unpredictably, Stankevich has been the one to explain.

Stankevich has neither Golovin’s pragmatic idealism nor his pristine
record, and he is not free of Communist-type language. He has often been accused of dirty politics and was at the center of a small scandal last year when a great deal of government money went to an almost nonexistent music festival. He is said to have used his influence to get apartments for family members and to arrange other special favors. “You’re seeing Stankevich?” asked a friend from the old underground. “Make sure you take a bath afterwards.” But Stankevich has a quality of immense competence; sitting in his large Kremlin office, one is lulled into a sense that politics is straightforward. He pursues his political vision with the clear knowledge that his kind of democracy will benefit not only Russia, but also himself.

“The reforms in this country have come in waves,” he says. “The first was Gorbachev’s wave, which began in 1985, peaked with perestroika, and began its downward turn with the election of Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation. The goals of this first wave were to introduce controlled elections and controlled free speech while preserving the system and retaining Communist Party control. These goals were accomplished. But the leaders of the first wave failed to introduce a new political or intellectual paradigm, and so they had to fall.

“The second wave was Yeltsin’s wave, which included such men as Andrei Sakharov, and the goal was to remove Communist ideology from its predominance and to establish basic freedoms: free speech, a free press, and a parliamentary system. These goals were accomplished. This wave peaked during the coup in 1991. In 1992, the second wave broke when state control was in large part lifted from the economy. The second wave failed to invent a new Russia, to balance this country’s racial, ethnic, and religious mix, to achieve the crucial joint goals of being market-oriented and socially responsible. The second wave has been heading downward for a year and a half.

“Now it’s time for the third wave, the base for which is already in place. It will begin in earnest with the elections and with the adoption of constitutional reform. The first goal of the third wave will be to establish a constitution and system of rule that allow for cooperation rather than competition among the branches of government. We will create a representative government, so that the republics now acting
semiautonomously will feel that their representatives are involved in establishing national laws and that they are therefore bound by those laws. We will remain socially responsible, but we will take reasonable steps toward economic reform. I think we will accomplish these goals with moderate, conciliatory behavior, to create a single, strong, united Russia. We have passed the time when you can rule this country by standing on top of a tank.”

This seems a surprising line from someone who is still a presidential adviser—Yeltsin is the one who stood on top of a tank—and I press Stankevich on it. He implies that Yeltsin is undependable, a people’s hero but not a professional. “Yeltsin could conceivably be at the helm for the third wave if he accepts its conditions,” Stankevich says. “But the third wave must belong in large part to my generation.” The new Russian politics is younger politics. Unlike many younger politicians, however, Stankevich has built his career slowly. He was a great favorite of Gorbachev’s and later headed the strategic staff for Yeltsin’s political campaigns. When the coup was declared, he flew home from a holiday, went to the Russian White House, and stayed with Yeltsin for all three days.