Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (27 page)

When Nina Stepanovna was laying into me during that final session she asked me: “Why did you sell your wedding dress?” The question shored up my skepticism, as my wedding dress was in a trunk in my parents’ attic. But now that I considered it I realized how shrewd it was. Her patients all came from Russia. When hyperinflation was raging, every married woman would have scanned her possessions for anything of value to sell. She gauged the question wrongly only because she had never met a woman who came from a land so far away that her life was not ruined by the post-Soviet collapse. She was not leafing through some holographic image of my wardrobe. She was challenging me on the subject of power, as she did the other women. Hold on to what is important, she was reminding me: do not think that by sacrificing yourself to your men, your children, you can make up for that abuse of power that is visited on everyone, but on women most of all.

“Give me gold,” she asked me harshly at one stage. I was wearing only my gold wedding ring, and I was not going to give her that. During the long pause that followed I could feel my fellow patients looking at me, thinking how rich I was, and how mean. Well, what the hell? It was just a ring. When I tugged at it, stung by the implication, Nina Stepanovna seized my hand and stopped me.

“Give me gold,” she demanded again, more roughly. Again, I pulled at the ring, and again she stopped me.

“Give me gold,” she repeated.

“No,” I said this time, crossly.

At this her pale, frog-like face cracked open in an enormous smile.

“You see?” she said, ruffling my hair. Yes, maybe I was beginning to.

On the fourth day I recovered, as mysteriously as I had collapsed. Only then did Ira admit what Nina Stepanovna had told her in confidence: I would be ill for three days. After that, the curse would be lifted.

1999–2004

V
LADIMIR PUTIN, A CAREER OFFICER IN THE FSB (FEDERAL SECURITY
Service), became prime minister in August 1999. He became acting president when a derelict Yeltsin stepped down at the end of the year. His elevation returned to power a security elite that had been marginalized since the fall of Soviet power. For them, the end of communism was the great geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Their policies would be driven by a burning sense of shame. The governing idea of the new regime would be the need to restore Russia’s greatness.

The month Putin became prime minister saw Chechen separatists invade neighboring Dagestan. A series of explosions in residential buildings across Russia, ostensibly caused by Chechen terrorists, also killed some three hundred people and sent shock waves through the country. The vigilance of a local man prevented a further explosion in Ryazan which bore the hallmarks of having been planted by the FSB. Thus was the public prepared for the start of a new Chechen war, together with the emergence of a strong leader.

The failure of the first Chechen war was seen as a humiliation to be avenged. In the course of this new military campaign in Chechnya, Putin started transferring the task of pacification from the Russian army to pro-Kremlin Chechen militias. Akhmad Kadyrov was “elected” president in Chechnya’s first elections in October 2003. After he was assassinated the following May, his son Ramzan, whose militias proved even more brutal than the Russian army, became his de facto successor.

After the second Chechen war began, terrorist attacks inside Russia became a feature of life, heightening people’s feeling of insecurity. Strong rumors of the FSB’s involvement accompanied some of them. The seizure by Chechen fighters of a Moscow theater in October 2002 did Putin’s popularity no harm, although 129 Muscovites were killed along with the fighters when the building was stormed.

The culmination of these attacks occurred in September 2004, when Chechen fighters occupied a school full of children and adults in Beslan, North Ossetia. Bungled intervention by Russian troops left hundreds dead (officially, 340, but in fact far more) and a stench of obfuscation coming from the Kremlin. Once again, rumors of the state’s murky involvement were rife. Putin’s popularity faltered, but soon recovered.

From the start, Putin declared it his mission to reassert the power of the state: what was good for the state was a priori good for Russia. On the domestic front, his first major step was to call the regional governors to heel and form seven vast regions, governed by his appointees. Next, he destroyed the independent media empires of Berezovsky and Gusinsky. By the summer of 2001, the old hierarchical state structure was starting to reemerge.

Putin proceeded to set up a series of institutions which imitated the functions of democracy, while remaining under state control: virtual “political parties,” a “free press,” and an “independent judiciary.” He encountered little opposition. For most people “democracy” was by now synonymous with gangs, wild speculation, and the absence of regulation. They wanted order and stability.

Putin’s popularity was cemented by the buoyant economy: ever since the financial crash of 1998 it had been growing at an average 6.4 percent a year. This was chiefly due to the price of oil. When he came to power it stood at $17 a barrel, and it had been rising ever since. Other measures helped: nonagricultural land could now be bought. Barter was no longer playing a significant role in the economy. Putin had also succeeded in revolutionizing the system of tax collection, and introduced a new flat-rate income tax.

Popular though Putin was, his strategy produced problems. He had come to power as a modernizer. But the regime he introduced was in many respects ill-suited to the task of modern government. There was a price to be paid for having centralized power, for having undermined the judiciary, reined in the press, and destroyed the political opposition. Without horizontal supports and counterbalancing powers, the bureaucracy was doomed to inefficiency and, above all, to corruption. Gone was the freewheeling corruption of the 1990s, which had put power in the hands of gangs. The streets were safe now, but the state bureaucracy itself was infected with corruption, from top to bottom.

Western business interests were becoming alarmed about the state’s increasing high-handedness. In October 2003 the oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years in prison and the assets of Yukos, Russia’s largest private company, were redistributed to those close to Putin. Khodorkovsky, alone among the oligarchs, had made the mistake of starting to use his wealth to support the development of democracy in Russia.

Once hopes that the West would launch a great postcommunist Marshall Plan died, an anti-Western mood began to set in among Russia’s elites. The decision by the Western powers not to dismantle NATO fed this mood, and NATO’s air strikes against Serbia in 1999 stoked the flames. Russia’s new sense of isolation was increased between 1999 and 2004 by the choice of three former Soviet republics and four former satellites to join both NATO and the EU. Their admission directly contravened the agreement between Gorbachev and US Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 not to “expand the zone of NATO.”

Putin’s decision to support George W. Bush’s war on terror after the attacks on New York in September 2001 defied this new anti-Western mood. However, the overture was poorly reciprocated by the new Republican administration: US aid to Russia was cut back. America withdrew from its thirty-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Congress confirmed the old Cold War Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked its trade relations with Russia to levels of Jewish emigration. The United States also failed to throw its weight behind Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization.

Most ominously from the leadership’s point of view, when two former Soviet republics (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine at the end of 2004) turned their faces westward in “color revolutions,” the hand of the United States was deemed to have played a critical role. Fears of this happening in Russia would become a governing political factor from now on.

One of the Kremlin’s responses was to declare its ideological independence from Western theories concerning the legitimacy of the state. Vladislav Surkov formulated the concept of sovereign democracy to describe Russia’s autocratic government. This vested the regime’s legitimacy not in the people or their votes, but in the strong national identity of its governing elite.

2004

CORDELIA OF THE STEPPES

“There, you see,” said Khanin. “What’s the most important feature of the Russian economic miracle? Its most important feature is that the economy just keeps on sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, while business keeps on growing stronger and expanding into the international arena.”

VIKTOR PELEVIN
.
Homo Zapiens

Lying back on my top bunk, I surrendered to the rhythm of the train. I was traveling overnight to Saratov. My companions were a wiry sergeant-major from Engels and a young couple from Moscow, she pregnant, he pink and porcine, going to visit her parents. Russian Germans by origin, they had grown up in central Asia and arrived back in Russia with nothing, refugees from nationalism.

In the mid-nineties it was hard not to be infected by the collective anxiety on such journeys—all those stories of passengers being gassed, of murderers bundling bodies off the train at dead of night. Now that seemed a long time ago. The rituals of the sleeper worked their soothing magic: the bulky attendant brought us sheets and tea, and we ate our picnics. Outside, the trunks of the birches gleamed.

The sergeant-major, proud that the army had kept him on beyond retirement age, was poor and lively: a skier, he sailed on the Volga, played the guitar, and grew flowers and vegetables. The young businessman and his saleswoman wife had no time for hobbies, they admitted shyly. By the time they got home from work, they had no energy left to do anything but watch television. But soon they would be able to start building their house.

This conversation dried up rather suddenly. I watched my companions coming up against something which embarrassed them, a line running through our compartment. The young couple belonged to the new middle class, which numbered some thirty million by now. Every day the distance between this new class and the rest of their compatriots was growing.

As the train drew into Saratov, I thought of my friends. Misha and Tatiana obviously belonged to this new class. But I was less sure on what side of the line I was going to find Anna.

•  •  •

Since my last visit to Saratov Misha had become Mikhail Ivanovich: an important man. In his early forties now, his face and the curve of his shoulders expressed dogged determination. He had filled out and become self-assured.

With the help of that processor which had sat unused for years in a shed in Marx he had now cornered 35 percent of the market for sunflower oil in Saratov province. He sold his virgin oil right up and down the Volga, as well as in Moscow and parts of Germany.

The Solntse factory was now enclosed by tall gates. A row of tall silos for storing seed had sprung up. The plant employed 180 people; working night and day, it produced some six hundred tons of oil a year. When I first met Misha, Rodon, the secret electronics factory for which he once worked, was the largest employer in Marx. Now this role had passed to Solntse. Since my last visit, Solntse was awarded a prize by an independent panel as one of Russia’s one hundred finest products.

Misha had started farming, too. Indeed, he was the largest private farmer in the district. Three years ago, knowing nothing about agriculture, he took over a bankrupt collective farm in what had once been a Russian German village. His land now measured forty kilometers from end to end and encompassed three villages.

He had equipped the room off his own large office as a gym, full of gleaming equipment. He regarded the increasingly anti-Western political mood in Russia as so much posturing. His own horizons had grown along with the business. His family holidays were spent in France now; Tatiana dressed in Max Mara, and he relied on Germany’s agricultural fairs to keep him up to date with farming techniques and machinery.

So Misha had realized his dream, become a powerful businessman. Why was it then, I kept asking myself, that I did not feel more like celebrating my friend’s success? Something was missing when Misha talked about his work. The zest, the appetite for adventure had gone. He seemed strangely subdued.

Misha’s farm manager, Viktor Goldantsev, drove me around the farm in his jeep. An elegant, balding man with gold-rimmed glasses and a well-cut suit, he cut an improbable figure in that rural landscape. He knew nothing about farming when Misha invited him to run the operation. But it was a shrewd choice. Viktor knew how to make things happen: for years he ran a nuclear power plant in the ice-bound north, Murmansk. He was enjoying himself now. “When we took it over, the place was a wreck,” he shouted as we drove across the steppe, looking over vast fields of mixed crops. “The irrigation was broken—everything was. There wasn’t a single tractor—and no one’d been paid for two years!” Last year the farm turned a profit for the first time. “But it’ll take a generation or two before people here learn to work again normally.”

Misha himself was making the fifteen-hour trek back from Ukraine. He was driving against the clock, bringing his elderly mother to live with the family in their luxurious apartment in Saratov. Misha’s mother had worked the land all her life. Although she was nearly eighty, through the years of inflation, when city people could not manage on their earnings, she had kept her two older children and their families fed from her plot of land. Only when she grew too blind did she give it all to them, like King Lear, and go to live with them. Now they had declared themselves fed up with housing her. She was too difficult: her precious Misha could look after her. The old woman was horrified at the prospect of being dependent again, and on a daughter-in-law with whom she had little in common. Tatiana was worried, too. For a start, she could barely understand the old woman’s thick Ukrainian burr.

When I met the old woman, Lyuba (short for Lyubov, “Love”) was being entertained by her seven-year-old granddaughter Nadezhda (“Hope”), whose blonde face adorned every bottle of Solntse oil. Not much larger than her granddaughter, she wore a white kerchief, flowered housecoat, and heavy woollen stockings. Sitting on the edge of her bed in the large flat with its parquet floors, she looked bewildered. Her nut-brown face was plowed with lines and she gazed out from sightless eyes. “So good to me, so good,” the old woman kept muttering. Tatiana’s kindness had upset all the old woman’s expectations.

Lyuba was the reason why Misha had survived in the jungle of Russian business, where so many other decent, clever people failed. She had come through the great famines of 1932–1933 as a child younger than Nadezhda now. That genocidal famine killed more Ukrainians than any war in the country’s history. The facts had been so harshly suppressed that no one knew what the toll was—five million, possibly as many as eight. For decades the famines were mentioned in no Soviet book, no newspaper or speech. But Ukrainians understood why they happened, and it was not shortage of grain. It was the result of a policy aimed at breaking the spirit of Ukrainian independence, and the resistance of its peasantry to collectivization.

Although Lyuba and her four brothers survived, malnourishment left her unnaturally small. Those whom famine spared, war did not. All the men in the family went on to die at the front, except one brother, who died later of his wounds. Lyuba married at eighteen. After begetting two children, her petty criminal husband abandoned her. She and her mother remained on the collective farm, effectively enslaved. For like all the kolkhoz workers, she was not allowed to leave the land; nor paid in money or kind for her labor. In order to feed her family, she had to set to work tilling her own plot at the end of her working day.

A strong woman, she had a fiery temper and unshakable will. At the age of thirty-seven she met a man older than herself who had fought in the war, been arrested, and gone to camp on some trumped-up fraud charge. By the time he was freed his wife had long ago remarried. Misha’s father could not have been more unlike his temperamental little wife. He had a saintly sweetness. He never raised his voice, or told his wife off. “He was so gentle that when he stroked his little son he would go like this,” said Tatiana, passing her hand over her daughter’s head a centimeter away, without quite touching.

When Misha was little his grandmother was struck by lightning as she was working in the fields. Had she not fallen into a puddle, she would have been killed outright. The lightning burned her right down her back. So great was the pain that she could not bear it; she hanged herself.

Now, the sole survivor of those years sat in her room missing her own bed, her dog, the cow and hens which her daughter had wasted no time taking over. Misha came back from work late and went into the darkened room where his mother sat alert, waiting. He handed her an ear of wheat from his fields. Lyuba’s sight was almost gone and it was dark, but she only needed to feel the ear of wheat: “Three weeks it’ll be ready—not a day before, mind.” Then her youngest child sat on the floor and talked to her as he could to so few people about the difficulties of his day and the toll success was taking on him: “I can’t go on, Mother. I’m just too tired …”

“You’ll do it, son,” Lyuba reassured him. “You’ll go on.” He would because she had, because he was her beloved son.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

As long as I stayed with Misha and Tatiana in their fine new flat, driving in the car, I was insulated from the real Saratov. But when I moved to Anna’s I began to appreciate what had happened in the city.

Although Russia’s economy was growing steadily, Saratov had regressed to another century. Old wooden buildings were leaning at tipsy angles along the piss-reeking streets. Headscarved women sat begging, intoning interminable prayers. Homeless men with matted hair, faces burnished by alcohol, rummaged through overflowing rubbish bins. Yet every now and then an immaculately modern girl would emerge from one of the topsy-turvy houses and pick her way to work down the ruined road.

At a crossroads, police outriders were clearing the traffic aside for the governor’s cavalcade of six black limousines. As they shot by, sirens blaring, I wondered whether the tinted glass in their car windows was dark enough to obscure the disrepair of the fine nineteenth-century buildings past which they sped. Built by merchants flush with money from the wheat and timber trade, those façades with their fine wrought-iron balconies were merely decrepit when I first visited Saratov. Now they were fit only for demolition. The odd new shop-front, chic café, or arcade with slot machines had been clapped on. A huge cathedral had also shot up from nowhere. But these bright splashes were like lipstick on the face of a wino; they merely threw the dereliction into sharper relief.

Of Saratov’s population of one million, some thirty thousand people were living in high-rise blocks which were condemned as too dangerous for habitation, according to Anna’s paper. New blocks were going up all the time. In theory, 15 percent of the flats in them were allocated to social housing. In practice, these, too, were being sold off privately. The old ones were just falling down. The month before my visit, two more collapsed. In one, which was fully occupied, an entire side wall fell away at dawn one day. How no one was killed remained a mystery. The residents trooped outside and waited until they realized that, this being Saratov, no one was going to bandage them up and offer them somewhere else to live. So they returned to the ruins and got on as best they could with their lives.

The man presiding over this disintegration was Ayatskov, the notoriously corrupt Yeltsinite governor of Saratov province. Putin’s attempts to remove him had so far failed. He was the man whose corruption Anna started investigating all those years ago when he was the city’s deputy mayor, before learning that her stories were being spiked because he had bought up the paper she was working for.

For years, the law was after him, but he enjoyed protection high up in the pyramid of power. One prosecutor began a trial case against him for pocketing millions of dollars on some deal involving American combine harvesters. But that was suspended. Meanwhile, every street kiosk in the city paid “rent” directly to him. The most visible display of his wealth was the Wagnerian castle he built himself out in the country, and the private plane which flew him to it.

Anna, who covered such cases in her capacity as law correspondent, was welcoming. With her boyish figure and monastic bob, she looked barely older than when we first met. She was less awkward and better dressed now. But a light had gone out behind her eyes. She looked huddled over somehow, as if some string holding her up had been cut.

Last time we met, I was so proud of her. She had come into her own. She was using her interviews to explore the extent to which each person is responsible for their past, and that of their country. She was helping her readers expand their sense of the rights and responsibilities which attached to them as individuals, rather than the state. When I left her I was feeling, yes, this is how that civic space needs to be built in Russia; it will take time, but one day, surely, it will end up being realized in a new contract between the rulers and the ruled.

That felt like a long time ago now. I knew Anna too well to expect from her a straightforward account of this missing period. Only when she told me that she had stopped writing poetry altogether did I realize quite how depressed she was. For her poetry mattered more to her than anything.

One day I went into her office at
Saratovsky Arbat
and sat reading back copies of the paper while she worked. The paper was more than usually parochial. Anna’s articles were mostly about crime, but they were dull, with little of their old ambition.

I tried not to be disappointed. After all, Putin had come to power announcing in his Open Letter that “the stronger the state, the freer the individual.” To anyone old enough to remember Soviet-speak, the message was clear and only a little more prolix than the three slogans of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH