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Hope for Russia
By Keith Moon*
An occasional contributor to American Diplomacy gives an assessment of where Russia stood in the summer of 2004, followed by insightful stories of Russians he has known over the years. This we find an unbeatable approach to understanding that nation today. –Ed.
This was a horrifying summer for Russia. Within the last two months, two planes were blown out of the sky by bombs, an explosion at a busy subway station in Moscow killed ten and injured dozens, and a band of terrorists took a school full of teachers and students hostage. Nearly 500 Russians—including a shocking number of children—have been killed by Chechen militants this year, adding to the hundreds more who were killed in terrorist incidents in 2002 and 2003. On the surface, it would seem that Russia is in a crisis that is as serious and frightening as anything it has been forced to endure in the last two decades.
If one reads the Western or Russian press, the economic state of Russia seems to be not much better. According to the news, President Vladimir Putin's government spends most of its time trying to control ambitious oligarchs like the jailed CEO of Yukos Oil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, while older Russians struggle simply to keep themselves going on a subsistence level. In Moscow, it is easy to find symbolic representations of a divided economy. In Red Square, below the dignified 15th century wall of the Kremlin, Lenin's Mausoleum still houses the iconic Communist leader's body, and the faces of Andropov, Brezhnev, and even the cruel Stalin peer out from atop their monuments alongside the building. Directly across the Square, meanwhile, the understated but readily obvious sign of a Louis Vuitton store epitomizes the opposite end of the economic spectrum, not unlike the Bentley and Bulgari stores just a few blocks away. In a city with more billionaires than any other in the world, Moscow has flown the flag of extreme high-end capitalism since the Soviet Union's demise in 1991. Louis Vuitton vs. Lenin is no mere geographic happenstance, say the media: this is what Russia is. For those blessed few inside Russia's Ring Road, Moscow's downtown, life is grand. For everyone else, life is poverty and misery.
But the story is more complex than that. A walk through the busy and shiny stores in the underground Manezh mall complex, built within a few hundred meters of the Kremlin's perimeter, confirms that it is mostly ordinary Russians shopping in those stores. All over the downtown areas in Moscow and St. Petersburg, outdoor cafes take advantage of the summer street crowds and are filled. The world's largest discount furniture store has opened on the road in from the international airport, where new Western-style suburban homes are popping up at every turn. Russia's economy is growing at a blistering clip for the fourth year in a row, and the capital flight to Europe of the bleak Yeltsin years seems finally to have ended.
My first trip to Russia (then the USSR) was in 1983, and I have now traveled there ten more times. I have been able to watch the quiet development of Russia's new middle class on a more personal level for nearly a dozen years. Below are two stories—two hopeful stories—of everyday Russians, young men who represent a transformation of the country to a healthier and more stable era in its history. Russia will not be without its moral contradictions and immense difficulties in my lifetime: its history is simply too laden with horrors for that. But Russia will grow and build on the strength of its citizens, and that success is already beginning to show.
In 1993, when I first met Sergei (Seryozha to his friends), he was an earnest and unglamorous student of math. He had fallen in love with a woman named Lena that year and his ambitions were steady and simple: he wanted to finish studying and move on to a job and a family. He dressed simply and neatly—even his Polish-made jeans were iron-creased—and he refused to be taken in by the fast money and changing economic times around him. Seryozha liked my stories of life in the United States much as he must have enjoyed stories of his wife's childhood: they were a window into a previously unknown world, not one that he even necessarily aspired to experience.
I saw Seryozha again some years later in the spring of 1999. The Russian economy had been walloped by the government's default the previous summer on some debt obligations, and the major cities were still reeling from the blow. The stock market, tiny as it was, fell an astonishing 83% that year, piercing a hole in the ballooned dreams of nascent investors and driving millions out of work.
But Seryozha had stayed mostly out of that fray. He owned no stocks and he had never bought into the pyramid schemes and illegal jobs that were being scooped up by young men all over the main cities of Russia. He and I ate a simple dinner that winter at one of the new Russian fast-food restaurants that had popped up in McDonald's shadow. Seryozha was now a builder, keeping his fortunes afloat by working as regularly and as efficiently as possible.
The intervening years have been kind to Seryozha. When I returned to Russia this summer, he took me and a friend to the trendy Petrogradskaya section of St. Petersburg for dinner. The restaurant he chose, a warm, hunting lodge of a place, was picked more for its sentimental value for him than for its fanciness, though it certainly met that criterion as well. It seems that Seryozha, divorced from Lena some years ago, had met his second wife at this restaurant, and for him that represented a turn in his fortunes that was worth celebrating. After years of studying math and doing small construction jobs, Seryozha started to work for a place in 2000 that recognized his talent and eventually made him the boss. He sold the company and now has joined some monster conglomerate building company that specializes in factories and apartment complexes. Seryozha drives an Audi, vacations in Venice, and actively plans for the education of his two sons, both under age 3. This determined man preferred the role of Tortoise to his contemporaries' Hares, and in 2004 he is reaping the upper middle class rewards of his patience.
I first befriended Vadik in 1991 when he and his wife took me in for a month while I was doing grant work in what was then Leningrad. That summer, life for him was relatively simple and successful: as a cook in a restaurant, he found a (black) market for unused goods at the end of the day, selling much-needed food to his neighbors and friends. The Soviet Union was about to come to an end, though it was impossible to see that end or believe it from within. Vadik had carved out a small, mildly lucrative space for himself in the bloated and inefficient Communist system and things were going well.
When I next saw him and his friends in 1994, Vadik had parlayed his under-the-table job into something far more lucrative; compared with Seryozha's Tortoise, Vadik was playing the quintessential Hare. At the St. Petersburg airport, I was picked up in a black Italian sedan. All the men wore leather trench coats, and for the first time in my life I rode in a car with a handgun in the side pocket. Money, booze, and friends were everywhere and what had been a side business in food had grown into an intricate web of small-time gangsters. The Soviet Union was dead, and these were the men and women who were going to take the most advantage of that fact.
By 1999, the last time I saw him before this summer, Vadik had been hit hard by the New Russia, as harsh and unforgiving a place as any I had ever seen. In the midst of the 1998 economic debacle, Vadik lost everything he owned--a car, some nice clothes, a television, a stereo system--to his partner and best friend, who got caught up in the fledgling world of narcotics, smuggled up through Chechnya. Vadik's common-law wife walked out on him when the money disappeared, and he was forced to move into a dingy one-bedroom apartment on the distant edge of St. Petersburg with his retired mother and unemployed sister. Vadik, a father of two, turned thirty-two that year.
Vadik hit rock bottom that year when his mother died; in fact, he was forced to leave her dead on his kitchen table for days before her funeral because he could not afford for the body to be moved more than once. When that was done, he committed himself to get out of the mafiya business altogether and got rid of all his guns. He gave up drinking and smoking, two remarkable achievements for a Russian male, and he set out to find legal work.
When I saw him this summer, Vadik had re-built his life. He has been married for four years, has a 3-year old daughter, and has a regular job. He drives an old Russian Lada, a virtual tin can compared to his elegant Italian Lancia, but it is paid for and legally his. His wife and he have gutted his mother's old apartment, tearing down non-supporting walls to create a breezy Japanese-style flat, refurbishing it with faux wooden floors and Ikea furniture. Their plan is to sell the place and move into something slightly bigger, though they are content to stay on the wooded and quiet outskirts of town. Vadik knows his fast life is behind him: he will never again get rich quick. What he has done, though, is move slowly but inexorably into the middle class, a middle class that is Russia's last best hope. Like Seryozha, he speaks always of the future, and in his eyes, it can't help but be brighter than the past.
Russia is by no means out of the woods. In early July, the American editor of Forbes Russia, Paul Klebnikov, was gunned down 100 yards from his office building, an apparent victim of mob violence. His murder reflects the lawlessness and brutality that still pervade Russian business, especially at its highest end. (It was widely speculated that Klebnikov, only 41 years old, was killed for the indiscretion of publishing a Forbes list of Russian billionaires. It seems that most of Russia's wealthiest want to draw as little attention as possible to how they obtained their money, even willing to kill a journalist to keep their secrets.)
But Paul Klebnikov was an optimist, a hopeful admirer of a country that he had studied for a lifetime. As magazine publisher Steve Forbes wrote about him, "[Klebnikov] thought that Russia, despite setbacks, was entering an era in which a lawful, innovative, opportunity-enhancing, free-enterprise kind of capitalism was beginning to emerge. Indeed, he felt that a new Russia was aborning that would, to use Abraham Lincoln's words, 'appeal to the better angels of our nature.' Paul passionately believed in this better Russia."
It would be no more correct to define Russia by the tragedies of this summer than it would be to use the airplane attacks of September 11th and the murders at Columbine to explain everyday life in the United States. The challenges before this emerging nation remain significant and sometimes indescribably difficult, but the majority of Russians want nothing more than stability and growth. I believe, as Paul Klebnikov believed, that a more reasonable Russia will prevail and the country will finally live up to its magnificent potential. As the elegant writer Alexander Pushkin wrote about St. Petersburg—Seryozha's and Vadik's home: "Now, city of Peter, stand thou fast/ Foursquare, like Russia; vaunt thy splendor!"
May that splendor be on full display the next time I visit.
October 5, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Keith Moon has taught Russian language and history at The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut since 1989. This is his fourth article for American Diplomacy. Back