BLACK EARTH
RUSSIA AFTER THE FALL
ANDREW MEIER

PRAISE

‘There is depth to Andrew Meier’s portrait of Russia, but breadth as well. The treasures lie in his love for the country and the nuances that emerge from his encounters with Russian soldiers, politicians, pensioners and public servants’

Books of the Year, Economist

‘Written with curiosity, wit and sensitivity [Andrew Meier’s Black Earth is] a superb and erudite journey into the Russia he loves and knows better than virtually any other writer of his generation: it is the best work of Russian reportage since the fall of Communism’

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

‘The best piece of journalism written about Russia in English, and likely to remain so for a long time … The detail, knowledge and, above all, understanding which reside in this book remind us of how good journalism can be: how the first draft of history can be its freshest, its most poignant and its most alive … a record of extraordinary quality’

Glasgow Herald

‘Andrew Meier is not only a highly skilled journalist but also a remarkable listener … Black Earth is compelling and richly readable’

Mail on Sunday

‘A remarkable book. From the powerful first paragraph to the hopeful last it grips and grabs and stays with you. Highly recommended’

Ireland on Sunday

‘Impressive, building up to a many-layered portrait of post-Communist Russia … Meier has a genuine affection for the country and its people, which helps him to see beyond the one-dimensional image one gets from foreign newspaper reports’

Independent on Sunday

‘Moving … fascinating … Beautifully written and serves as a forceful reminder of quite how hard it will be to make real changes in Russia beyond the Moscow ring road’

Literary Review

‘[Meier] talks to gangsters, apparatchiks, intellectuals, oligarchs. He gives us not merely the buzz and glitter of Moscow and St Petersburg, but the squalid house-to-house fighting in Chechnya and – a rare experience – distant decaying Sakhalin beyond the Strait of Tartary’

Books of the Year, Times Literary Supplement

DEDICATION

for Mia,

and for my parents

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Prologue

I. Moscow: Zero Gravity

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

II. South: To the Zone

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

III. North: To the Sixty-Ninth Parallel

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

IV. East: To the Breaking Point

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

V. West: The Skazka

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

VI. Moscow: “Everything Is Normal”

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Interview with Andrew Meier

Life at a Glance

About the Book

A Critical Eye

Afterword After Beslan

Russian Write Off

Read On

If You Loved This, You’ll Like …

To Find Out More, Andrew Meier Recommends …

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Author’s Note

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

HE HAD BEEN THEIR FIRST CHILD, the elder of two sons. After his death they had turned the darkest corner of the spartan living room into a shrine. A hazy black-and-white portrait, blown up beyond scale from an army ID, loomed above the reedy church candles and a thin bouquet of plastic flowers. They had draped a black ribbon over the photograph.

“When I served,” his father said, “I served the Motherland. ‘To serve with honor and dignity.’ That’s what they told us to do and that’s what I did. For twenty-eight years.”

Andrei Sazykin died in the summer of 1996. He was killed on the north-eastern edge of Grozny, before dawn broke on August 6, the parched day the rebels reclaimed their capital. The Chechens had swarmed back by the thousands. Seven other boys in his unit also fell that morning. Three weeks earlier Andrei had turned twenty.

For the Russian forces, the Sixth of August, as it became known, would live on. It would haunt them as a humiliation, the worst day of the war. For Andrei’s parents, Viktor and Valentina, it made no sense. They would sit in the dim light of their two-room apartment in Moscow and wonder how the Chechens had so easily retaken Grozny that day. Until the letters started to arrive. One after another, Andrei’s comrades began to write to his parents.

“And suddenly,” his father said, “everything came into this terrible perfect clarity.”

The letters were blunt.

“‘Your son served well,’” recited Viktor. He had read the words a thousand times, but he traced the lines with his forefinger. In his voice there were tears. “‘But he did not die in battle. He was sold down the river. We all were.’”

Valentina said the boys came to visit. They brought a video from their last days in Chechnya. It showed Russian officers, their shirts off in the severe heat of Grozny, playing backgammon with two Chechen fighters. They were smoking and drinking, all of them laughing.

“That was the afternoon on the day before Andrei died,” Viktor said. “The boys later pieced it together. There was no battle that morning. There was a deal. The Chechens paid their way through the checkpoints. The boys were slaughtered. And when the others went looking for the commanders, they were gone”

Months after their son’s death Viktor and Valentina brought a case, one of the first of its kind in Russia, against the Ministry of Defense. They sued to restore their boy’s honor and not, as the papers claimed, to get rich on compensation. They called his death a murder and vowed to seek punishment for those who killed him.

Several Augusts later, nearly five years to the day after their son died, I went to see them again. We had spoken in the intervening years. But I had never brought them the kind of news they craved, for I had failed to convince my editors that their son’s case was a story. I had, however, followed Viktor and Valentina as they waged their long campaign. They had started in their neighborhood court and fought all the way to Russia’s Supreme Court. They even won a hearing in the Constitutional Court. But at every station they lost.

Along the way Valentina lost her job. For two decades she had taught biology in the local school. Viktor meanwhile had been forced to get a job. He now worked twenty-four-hour shifts, four times a week, at an Interior Ministry hotel, a hostelry for visiting officers in Moscow. Their savings depleted, they had also lost their hope. All they had, said Valentina, was nashe gore (“our sorrow”).

“Tell me,” Viktor said, fixing his eyes on mine. “Because I can’t understand it. But you must know. Can a country survive without a conscience?”

In the days that followed our last conversation, I left Moscow after a stay of five winters and six summers. I had, truth be told, lived in the country for most of the last decade. I had seen out the last years of the Soviet experiment and witnessed the heady birth of the “new Russia.” I had seen the romantic rise of Boris Yeltsin-and the wreckage his era wrought: the inglorious battle for the spoils of the ancient regime (an industrial fire sale of historic proportion), the military onslaught in Chechnya (the worst carnage in Russia since Stalingrad), and the rapid decline in nearly every index, social and economic, that the state took the trouble to record.

I had traveled far beyond the capital, to the distant corners of the old empire. I had lived for years in the remains of the Soviet state amid the millions of spectral dead souls who walked its ruins, as well as the rising new class of rent seekers, instant industrialists, and would-be entrepreneurs, who raced to accumulate and acquire, lest their new world vanish as quickly as the old. I had interviewed Politburo veterans and Gulag survivors, befriended oligarchs and philosophers. But I had no answer for Andrei’s parents. I could only tell them that I hoped to write a book – not only to record my travels across Russia’s length and breadth but, above all, to try to make sense of their plaintive question.

I. MOSCOW ZERO GRAVITY

Vykhod est’! (“There Is a Way Out!”)

–Moscow metro slogan, 2001

ONE

IN THE OLD DAYS, before the breakneck final decade of the last century, before the end of empire and the epochal shift that followed in its wake, in the days when dissenters were dissidents and poets were prophets, when “abroad” meant Bulgaria, Budapest, or Cuba at best, when leather shoes and silk ties were not bought but “gotten,” when colleagues were “Comrades” and strangers “Citizens,” when HIV and heroin were exotic plagues born of bourgeois excess, when artists and soldiers pointed to ceilings and dropped their voices, when churches held archives and orphans, when lovers met in parks because apartments housed generations, when everyone professed to believe in the Party, the Collective, and Vodka but in truth trusted only Fate, God, and Vodka, I first came to Moscow.

By the time I left, I had lived there longer than in any other city. But Moscow, like the country that surrounds it, eludes one. It defies measurement and loathes explanation, as if inherently ill disposed to definition. Longevity in Russia does not always yield understanding. Neither does intimacy guarantee knowledge. Nor does the first sensation of walking the city’s poplar-lined boulevards and great avenues of granite, that first sense of awe and astonishment at the fairy-tale world turned nightmare, ever seem to diminish.

First impressions in Moscow fortunately do not lie. The city is built on an inhuman scale. Everything is by design inconvenient for Homo sapiens. The streets are so vast crossing them requires a leap of faith. The cars do not stop for pedestrians; more often they accelerate. The streets are so broad one can traverse only beneath them, through dimly lit passageways that shelter the refugees of the new order: makeshift vendors who hawk everything from Swedish porn to Chinese bras; scruffy preteens cadging cigarettes and sniffing glue; hordes of babushkas who have fallen through the torn social safety net and are left to sell cigarettes and vodka in the cold; the displaced stranded by the host of unlovely little wars that raged along the edges of the old empire. And everywhere underground the stench of urine lingers with the acrid aroma of stewed cabbage and cheap tobacco.

Aboveground the city seems to exist – as it did at its birth – to trade. Kiosks on nearly every corner, bazaars in every neighborhood. Even the outlying districts, more a part of the woods than the city, are overrun with feverish commerce. In the post-Soviet years, open-air wholesale markets, sprawling encampments of plastic tenting and cargo containers, lured tens of thousands each weekend. Here were the fruits of globalization, tinged inevitably with a Russian style: electronic and computer goods from the East and from the West, pirated software on CDs burned locally and on video, Hollywood blockbusters still unreleased in the States. The off-the-books trade united unlikely partners. A drug market sprouted one block from the Lubyanka, the once and present headquarters of the secret police, on a street where pensioners sold their prescriptions to hungry young addicts.

Slowly, too, the signs of the new opulence – the transfer of the state’s vast wealth into the hands of a chosen few – came to dominate Moscow’s implacable center. Vacant nineteenth-century mansions, the crumbling former residences of the prerevolutionary merchant class, became the ornate offices of new millionaires and billionaires, the men who soon took to calling themselves oligarchs. Even during the harshest years of the Communist era, Moscow had always been on the make. But in the mid-1990s, with the rise of powerful moguls like Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Vladimir Potanin, among a half dozen others, the Great Grab began. In the bedlam of the Yeltsin years, the profit margin grew into a gaudy obsession. “The primitive accumulation of capital” was what the oligarchs, remembering their Marx, called their thirst for the riches of the ancien régime.

This of course was “the New Moscow.” When I first stepped foot in the city in 1983, Moscow was grim and gray, a place of vast public spaces dominated by an eerie silence. It was the height of the age of Yuri Andropov, one of the last of the dour old men to rule the USSR. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was at its tragic height. I was then a nineteen-year-old undergraduate on a cheap one-week Sputnik tour. I had flown in from East Berlin with two dozen Bavarian high school students and, inexplicably, an older businessman from Buenos Aires who mesmerized the Kremlin guards with a new invention, a video camera.

My eyes glazed at the strange fairy-tale world. In the kaleidoscope of sounds and impressions, Moscow, it seemed, hosted another race on another planet. One encounter, above all the rest, remains indelible, fixed in the present. I sit on a low brick wall on a corner of Red Square. As I watch the crowds moving across the square, a young boy approaches. His name is Ivan. But I do not understand him when he tells me his age. He holds up ten fingers and folds down one pinkie. Nine, I understand. We cannot speak with each other. We only manage to establish two things. “Lenin tut,” Ivan says, pointing to the squat red granite mausoleum that sits across the cobbled square. “I Mama tam.” (“Lenin is here. And my mama’s over there.”) He waves a hand to swat the air, pointing to an office that lies far beyond this great busied corner of Moscow. That afternoon I made a vow to myself: I would return to Russia only once I had learned the language.

Five years later I did. In 1988 I came back as a graduate student from Oxford to study for a term. I never expected, of course, that I would stay on in Moscow to witness the USSR during its final gasps. After Oxford, there was only one place I wanted to be, where I had to be. I told family and friends that I was making my way as a free-lance journalist. In truth I was searching for any excuse to stay in Moscow. I was in love.

In those final, frenzied years of the Soviet Empire, Russian friends often wondered why I chose to live among them. My friend Andrei, then in the advanced stages of a doctoral dissertation on the liberalizing impulses of Josip Tito’s economics, was no Soviet patriot. The son of a middling Soviet bureaucrat, Andrei had a fondness for tie-dyed jeans and peroxided hair. He had offered to let me stay with him and his young wife, Lera, and their five-year-old daughter, Dasha, in their kommunalka, a communal flat they shared with a young woman and an old lady in one of the city’s most beautiful and crumbling prerevolutionary neighborhoods. Andrei and Lera were lucky; theirs was hardly the typical communal flat. The young woman worked in a sausage plant. She rose early, came home late, and at week’s end without fail brought home frozen pork. The old lady was even more accommodating; she rarely appeared.

They lived a quarter mile from the Kremlin, but Andrei and Lera could not have been further removed from officialdom. Each night brought friends: rock musicians and military officers, actors and poets, tall, stunning women from Siberia, short, stunning men from Dagestan. Their cramped kitchen was always crowded with the voices of the emergent generation debating the issue of the hour, be it the chances for Gorbachev and glasnost, the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, or the legalization of hashish in Copenhagen.

The gatherings grew so big that one Sunday morning Andrei axed his way through a wall, expanding the tiny kitchen into an unused closet. As the nightly assemblies ran their course, accompanied by the ceaseless flow of bottle after bottle, the attention turned to me.

“Just why are you here?” someone would ask.

“He’s looking for a Russian bride,” someone would joke.

“He’s a spy,” another would jibe.

Whenever doubt or suspicion arose, Andrei saved me. “He just enjoys watching dead empires in decay,” he’d answer.

DAYS BEFORE THE COUP attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991, I left Soviet Russia. But in 1996, after a five-year remove, I returned again. This time I came with my wife, Mia, a native New Yorker and a photojournalist. We moved into a single room with a remarkable view. It was on the top floor of a fabled building that rose above the Frunzenskaya Embankment along the Moscow River. One side of the building overlooked the river and Gorky Park, the other – ours – had a view of the Novodevichy (New Maiden) Convent. On long walks along the river we would wonder at the glimmering cupolas of the Kremlin churches and savor the sweet air that wafted from the Red October chocolate factory across the way.

The building, erected in the lean postwar years, was a landmark. Stalin had built it not only as an elegant residence for his lieges but as evidence that their world would survive. This explained the decor. Our room stretched, at most, twenty-five by ten feet but boasted a corniced ceiling and an outsize crystal chandelier. Each month Nikita Khrushchev, the moon-faced grandson of the Soviet leader, came for the rent. The place belonged to his other grandfather, his mother’s father. The quarters were tight, even by Russian standards, but more than we needed. I had a fellowship to report from the war zones of the former USSR, and our plan was to spend as much time as possible on the road, traveling across Central Asia and the Caucasus. We took the place for a few months, and we stayed there three and a half years.

That fall I joined Time, trading the freedom of free-lancing for my first monthly paycheck as a journalist. Nonetheless, we stayed on in our room. As a “local hire” I got a bare-bones contract. We still slept on the couch, did the laundry in the bathtub, and delighted in the discovery of Belgian flash-frozen chicken in the corner market. We installed a steel door and scoured the local street vendors for fresh vegetables. Mia made friends with an Azeri woman, a refugee from the war between the Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabagh, who set aside her fattest potatoes and tomatoes for us. When rare visitors from home arrived, we made sure to prepare them for the elevator. We lived on the fourteenth floor. The elevator was wooden, a rickety antique that screeched as it slowly ascended. Invariably, it was pitch black inside. Now and then a neighbor screwed in a light. But it did not stay for long. Ten bulbs, I soon learned, equaled a bottle of vodka. In all our years in Moscow we never lived in the ghettos reserved for foreign diplomats and journalists, and for this we would be grateful.

The house was filled with stories and sources. Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s longest-serving henchmen, had lived on the next stairway over. (His daughter still did.) Next door to us lived Sasha, an aging underground painter who had been one of the first to stage avant-garde actions in the city streets. He still spoke proudly of the day under Brezhnev when he walked into a barren meat store and placed paintings of sausages and hams in its empty display counters. His wife, a restorer of fine art, worked for the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s grandest museum. Throughout the first winter that we shared a wall, she worked on canvases the soldiers had brought home from the Grozny Art Museum. Sasha was usually mild-mannered – except when he drank, which was often. One day he decided Mia would make a new drinking partner. He hovered outside our door, pounding it with a bottle of vodka, until as she refused, he sank to his knees, crying.

On the floor below lived Nina Aleksandrovna, a frail lady in her seventies who took a warm liking to us. Poor Nina was tortured by her son, Sergei, who seemed lost in a détente time warp. He wore faded denim shirts, unbuttoned low, and faded jeans. At least twice a week he would appear at our door to plead with me to translate some Beatles song. Sergei drank too much and worked too little.

Pyotr lived next door to Nina. A lanky hacker with a blond ponytail, he later showed me, as NATO jets bombed Belgrade, how he helped lead the attack on the North Atlantic Alliance’s mainframe. When we first met, Pyotr was a nineteen-year-old who resisted wearing shirts, no matter the weather. He and I spent long nights on the landing between our floors. We would look out at Novodevichy, the most fabled convent in Moscow. He rolled cigarettes – no filters, Dutch tobacco – and talked of his course work. He was majoring in one of Moscow State’s new fields, the Department of the Defense of Information. Pyotr was already one of Moscow’s more established hackers; he anchored a TV show on pirated computer games and had bought a small dacha. One night he told me who was paying for his education, the FSB. He was on a full ride from the secret policemen who had taken over for the old KGB.

TWO

IT WAS EARLY ON A CRISP Saturday morning in the short Russian fall, and something was not right. The mayor had sensed it. He was sure of it, in fact. Tiles crack. They break. They splinter. Linoleum, he calculated, would last. The mayor sat in the center of the head table in a prefabricated construction office built of American aluminum siding and Finnish plywood in the heart of Moscow. He stirred slowly in his chair, staring straight ahead, as if seeing something far beyond the realm of all the eyes gathered here and fixed upon his tonsured square head.

All along the tables that spread out to the mayor’s left and right big men sat stiffly. Early that morning they had stuffed themselves into dark suits. Now they wore faces of worry. The mayor folded his large, knuckly hands before him like a tent. The assembled understood: He was ready. Water was poured and cigarettes were stubbed out as the chatter subsided. The subject at hand – and the venue of this debate – was an important site, a new rehabilitation center for the city’s veterans wounded on the battlefields of Chechnya. Russia’s second campaign to defeat the Chechen fighters had entered its second year. The mayor was eager to show his compassion for the boys maimed in their service to the Motherland. The rehab center, an aide tugged me aside to whisper, was “especially close to the mayor’s heart.”

Yuri Luzhkov stood no more than five feet five inches, but he made his presence known. His outsize head was made even larger by the absence of hair and his large, piercing blue eyes. The mayor may have the build, and sartorial sense, of a head-banging enforcer in a James Cagney film, but he spoke softly and slowly. It was as if he had learned to rely on a lilting, unexpected cadence to disarm his interlocutors and draw them in. On this morning he sported a dark blue windbreaker and, even indoors, his trademark workman’s leather cap. He was more than ready, once his minions came to order, to hold court.

It did not take much. The mayor called upon the engineers, and one by one they stood, with a slight bow, as Russian schoolchildren have recited their lessons for centuries, to report the status of their work. “The plan will be completed ahead of schedule,” one boasted. “At least ten days ahead of schedule,” he quickly added.

“We have all the permits in order,” assured another.

“The windows have all arrived and been fitted,” said a third.

Then came the debate. A structural engineer, a man too far into his fifties to be so nervous in this setting, confessed, “We aren’t sure, just yet, quite how to proceed with the tiles or the linoleum for the flooring surface.” A whisper rippled through the construction trailer. “We checked with the engineers from the building institutes, and they have tested the tiles,” he hastened to add. “The tiles will last in terms of the pressure per square meter, and the longevity equivalency tests seem to have confirmed their preliminary findings. But the linoleum still has not been ruled out. We were” – and here, a long pause–“waiting to consult with you.”

The mayor sat still, taking in the parade of reports. In a corner of the room, I noticed a luminary of his inner circle, Shamil Tarpishchev, once Boris Yeltsin’s tennis coach, who fell from favor in a scandal involving the National Sports Foundation. Luzhkov, then Yeltsin’s bitter rival, had sheltered Tarpishchev, taking him under his wing as his adviser on sport. All the same, allegations of underworld associations continued to dog Tarpishchev but the truth of the matter remained unknown.¹

Once the last of the speakers resumed his seat, the mayor gathered in his large hands and, massaging his knuckles, launched a barrage of questions. How much would the tiles cost to cover the requisite area? How much would the linoleum cost? Would there be wheelchairs? How many? Had both surfaces been tested for these wheelchairs? He demanded statistics. Numbers were proffered. He asked for samples. Samples were produced. He wondered, Was the factory Russian? Or foreign? On it went. To his every question the mayor received a prompt answer.

And so it came to pass that Yuri Luzhkov, who on this chilly day could rightly claim a place among the most powerful men in all Russia, spent nearly an hour probing the virtues of linoleum versus tile. To the untrained eye, it was an inordinately detailed discussion of construction material. But to anyone who lived in the Russian capital in the final years of the twentieth century, it was a pageant of power intended to impress. For in a moment, once the mayor announced his decision – linoleum won out – the voice vote was unanimous. “Da, da, da,” rang out the chorus.

LUZHKOV HAS BEEN CALLED many things. A populist and an opportunist, Russia’s fattest oligarch, and a true khozyain, an autocratic boss in the patrimonial mold of the tsarist days of old.² Many of the sobriquets rang true. But one thing about Luzhkov always stood out: the need to make his mark. In the great Soviet tradition, Luzhkov was a builder. He had worked for decades in the Soviet chemical industry before taking over the Moscow city government in the early 1990s. Reelected in 1996 with more than 90 percent of the vote, Luzhkov would serve on into the new century. Muscovites adored him. As the decade after the Soviet fall closed, Yeltsin’s political and physical prowess faded ignobly away, Putin rose, and Luzhkov was stymied in his desire to rule Russia. But the mayor had succeeded in remaking his city, “the city of Moscow, the capital of our Motherland,” as he liked to call it, in his image.

“MOSCOW IS NOT RUSSIA.” It is the refrain of Westerners and Russians alike who have ventured into the Russian outback and returned to tell of its miseries. But what, then, is Moscow? In the years after the Soviet collapse, when so many of its denizens mistook license for liberty, the city grew infamous for the Babylon of its nightclubs and the upheaval of its unbridled free market. Yet it remains Russia’s heart, the grandest reflection, however warped, of its troubles and riches. With its wretched masses and gluttonous elite, Moscow is home to more than ten million, a population greater than that of many countries in Europe. Yet in its first post-Soviet decade no one so dominated the city as its boisterous mayor.

Lenin may have promised the Russian people a New Jerusalem, but Luzhkov set out to build it. In the mayor’s mind, the messianic destiny loomed large. For centuries Russians have harbored a vision of themselves as a chosen people and of Moscow as the Third Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, with its cult of martyrdom, is only partly to blame. There is also the bloodline: In 1472, when Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, wed the sole heiress to the throne of Byzantium, the niece of Constantine XI, Moscow claimed its right as the heir of Constantinople.

Zoë Paleologue took the name Sophia, and the Muscovites adopted the rituals and trappings of Byzantine power. Ivan III became the first Russian leader to call himself “tsar” – the Russified Caesar – and borrow the double-headed eagle as well.³ In Constantinople, the emblem made only rare appearances. In the land of the northern Slavs, however, the two-headed eagle was featured prominently. The Muscovites were eager to parade their imperial inheritance.⁴ It was only natural that Luzhkov set himself the task of restoring the symbols of the foundation myth. Yeltsin kept the red stars atop the Kremlin towers, but the mayor returned the gilded eagles to their perch. He also ordered that the Resurrection Gate, a fairy-tale entrance to Red Square of red and white brick, rise again. Stalin, eager to make room for the parade of missiles and tanks on Revolution Day, had leveled the seventeenth-century gateway. Once Yeltsin canceled the pageant, Luzhkov took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch. Like so many other pre-Bolshevik edifices, the gate was duplicated, exactly. Luzhkov now had a style, joked the head of the city’s Museum of Architecture: “Reconstructivism.”

The mayor liked the myth of the Third Rome. The Orthodox elder Filofei, a monk in Pskov in the late Middle Ages, was among the first to raise the notion. At some time in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century Filofei sent the grand prince in Moscow a stern warning: “Perceive, pious Tsar, how all the Christian realms have converged into yours alone. Two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be.”⁵ “… and a fourth there shall not be.” Moscow would be the third and last Rome, completing a holy trinity. Even Byzantium had not made such a claim. How could the mayor not rejoice in the imperial inheritance? The myth entitled Moscow to the glory not only of Constantine’s capital – with its shimmering churches of gold told of in medieval Russian chronicles – but also of Rome, and even Jerusalem as well. “We are the New Jerusalem,” Luzhkov would purr on occasion. And he was not kidding.

IN LUZHKOV’S MOSCOW the appreciation of masonry work became something of a civic duty. As buildings went up around the city, construction sites became tourist attractions. When elegant shopping malls and business centers sprouted between the Stalinist facades, they came complete with viewing platforms for the citizenry to witness the new world rising.

One frigid night as the new millennium neared, I stood alone taking in one of the mayor’s most beloved sites. On the naked northern bank of the Moscow River, in the bend where the water slowly begins to chum westward out of the city, Luzhkov had forced on his fellow citizens a twelve-billion-dollar construction project, the biggest in the former Soviet Union. He envisioned the Moscow Siti, so named after London’s financial district, blooming into a bustling center of finance and trade, the heart of the new metropolis as it carried the country into the new age. A glossy brochure described the future “city within a city” in less than fluent English:

Having studied the experience of the world-famous centers: Wall Street and Manhattan in New York, the City in Greater London, Shinjuku in Tokyo, and La Défence in Paris, we have done our best to avoid certain mistakes … Our “Moscow-City” will live a full-blooded life … there will be dwelling blocks of corporate and profit houses, hotels, cinema and concert halls, exhibition grounds, clubs, restaurants and a unique aquapark with a series of basins, water chutes, amusement facilities, restaurants and cafés … the central core will feature multilevel car parkings and a mini-metro line.

The project was a Luzhkov dream drafted on blueprints back in the rosy days when the image of Boris Yeltsin standing defiant on a tank still dominated Russia’s political memory and the country’s fledgling stock market impossibly topped the world’s emerging markets.

I liked inspecting Luzhkov’s Siti. I watched the masses of men, in the tradition of Peter the Great’s minions, digging the enormous foundation pit, their thirty-foot-tall dump trucks crawling through the mud roads. Reduced by the size of the pit, they resembled armies of ants. By the time I began strolling by, the project had become the biggest of Luzhkov’s white elephants. From the nearby glassed-in Wiener Hof, a cozy Austrian affair that boasts a dozen drafts and demure waitresses in petit lederhosen, the view of the site was spectacularly eerie. Or so I thought as I stood one night alone on the Hof’s ice-glazed balcony, surveying the black expanse. It was well past midnight in Moscow, on a Sunday in midwinter, but in the construction site that sprawled before me in all dimensions, the welding brigades were clamoring away, their torches giving form to walls and girders of iron in the darkness below. Inside the Hof a cackling trio of Argentines were splashing through their expense account’s final hours. Their female escorts, young locals with limited Spanish, were checking their watches. Below I could make out at least five Kamaz trucks, their broad backs loaded with brick, metal, and mud, groaning across the craters. Against the starless sky, a crooked line of cranes revealed the contours of one man’s dream. I could see how, in the frozen mud of this mess, it would be easy to lose one’s perspective.

Then, in the middle of August 1998, the Russian economy crashed. August, in Russian politics, has long been a fateful month, and the move to devalue the ruble had long been foreseen. But no one expected the market to fall so hard, so fast. Overnight the government defaulted on forty billion dollars in bonds. Within weeks the ruble lost more than two-thirds of its value. Expatriate bankers and brokers vaulted for the exits. But “the Crisis,” as the politicians and the bankers called the crash, was kind to Mia and me. In the spring we were able to move from our one-room apartment into a beautiful flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Moscow’s criminally high rents tumbled as thousands of business ex-pats rushed to flee the sinking ship. We bought a bed from an oil and gas analyst and a sofa from a Big Eight accountant. We moved from a gray concrete edifice built for the elite of the Communist Party to another formidable postwar apartment block, this one built to house the dutiful officers of the NKVD – Stalin’s secret police – and their families.

Russia’s race to the free market slowed to a crawl. Luzhkov, however, saw no need to revise his grand plans. As I walked along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to work each day, I checked in on the progress of his Siti. Across the street from our new place, and down a block, a high-rise thirty-four stories tall began to take shape. Luzhkov had promised it would be a vital tower in the new financial hub, a luxury hotel for foreign bankers and brokers. After the crash, construction on the tower slowed. Luzhkov’s aides quietly allowed that it would not, as planned, be a hotel, but an office building. They also got rid of the name. Once it had been dubbed The Reformer. Now they opted for something more neutral. Tower 2000, they rechristened it.

Luzhkov forged on in his drive to build the Siti. At the foot of the tower’s concrete skeleton, and spanning the frozen river, was a “pedestrian shopping bridge.” Inside, a mechanized walkway allowed Russians to glide along the glass corridor, as if between terminals at some anonymous airport. The walkway passed glitzy shops offering Murano vases, Finnish cell phones, and Milanese dresses for preteens. This was Luzhkov’s bridge to the twenty-first century, intended as a conveyance to the free market. One day, the mayor imagined, the bridge would carry visiting capitalists across the river to Russia’s Wall Street. German bankers, Japanese brokers, South African traders would float effortlessly to the gleaming financial colossus on the far bank of the river – globalization’s Slavic headquarters. Throughout the years of construction the vast pit of mud received six football fields of concrete and the multilevel shopping bridge filled with popular boutiques and restaurants. But to many the Siti remained a pipe dream.

On the shopping bridge’s lower floor – the sort of space where in an American mall Santa would sit in December or the balloon man in spring – a miniature Moscow sat on display. Centered beneath a domed ceiling of stained glass, the architectural model, some twelve feet wide, spun dizzyingly fast under a glass globe. In the sanitized mock-up of one of the most unforgiving cities in the world, Moscow’s endless rows of Stalinist facades stood up orderly, tidily divided by non-existent trimmed evergreens. The rotting factories were stripped of their belching smokestacks. The city’s byways, swept clean and paved smooth, were sprinkled with a few handsome trucks and new automobiles. The river, repeatedly diagnosed a cholera incubator, was a sparkling aquamarine. Upon it floated a barge and what appeared to be a cruise ship.

There were no people in the model city. Instead, the spotlights were fixed tight on a set of gleaming translucent skyscrapers that burst from the city’s heart. Lit from above and beneath, they towered above the gray mass. The centerpiece, a tower far taller than all the others – part Empire State, part TransAmerica, but quintessentially Luzhkovian – lured the eye. On a mural on the wall nearby the radiant towers were transposed over an image of the Kremlin lit up at night. The towers dwarfed the Kremlin.

The lineage of the mayor’s blueprint was Stalin’s Dvorets Sovietov, the Palace of Soviets. This earlier design was immensely complex, but Stalin’s aim had been simple: He wanted the world’s tallest building. The blueprint called for the palace to be higher than the Empire State Building, capped by a statue of Lenin bigger than the Statue of Liberty. In 1931 Stalin detonated the world’s largest Russian Orthodox Church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Dvorets Sovietov, however, was never built. Eventually a bog formed in the crater until Khrushchev filled it with a giant outdoor swimming hole for the proletariat. In 1991, Luzhkov, once an avowed atheist who found religion after his first election, set about to resurrect the cathedral. As a result of $330 million contributed by a legion of ignoble courtiers, Christ the Savior soon rose again.⁶ And so, with God well housed, the mayor had turned to building a home for the free market.

One morning I saw a young couple, noses pressed to the glass, standing transfixed by the cardboard city. Like so many of the pilgrims who came to see this model of Moscow, they were eager and hopeful witnesses to the birth of the new Siti. They tried to locate their apartment in the model city, but it spun too fast. They spent another moment, then moved on.

“Think it’ll ever be built?” the elfin girl, her long hair braided low below her waist, asked her companion.

“No,” he replied. “Of course not.”

THREE

IN MOSCOW I WAS AFRAID every day. Not that I would be attacked. I had been, but not harmed. No, my fear was derived from bad news, the flow of death, violent and early death, that courses through each day in Moscow. As luck would have it, we lived a floor beneath a celebrity, a would-be banker who helped run a notorious pyramid scheme that bankrupted thousands when it crashed in the first post-Soviet years. He was well protected. In the morning, he posted flint-chinned bodyguards with short-stock Kalashnikovs buttoned inside their suit coats at his door and on every landing of our stairwell. At night, he didn’t let us sleep. Big footsteps pounded overhead at all hours. One of his guards, it seemed, stood post all night. In the morning I would be sure to cough, sniffle, or shuffle loudly to let the guards know I was coming their way. I bade them good morning as they rebuttoned their jackets.

Paul Tatum, a onetime Republican fund raiser from Oklahoma and a well-known man about Moscow, was the most famous foreigner killed. Pravda, in 1990, had announced his arrival with creamy praise. Tatum, Pravda said, “has a dream, an American dream … He dreams of the day when a tiny American oasis will grow in the center of the Soviet capital.” The “oasis” was the Radisson Slavyanskaya, Russia’s first deluxe Western-style hotel and business complex. Coowned with the Moscow city government, it grew into a bustling hotel that hosted visiting American presidents. “My baby” Tatum liked to call it. But as later was the case in so many of the so-called joint ventures, before long the natives made moves to muscle him out – at times literally. A long, nasty fight ensued.

Tatum was killed on Halloween night in 1996, the week I started at Time. I was working in the bureau on a Sunday evening when a few blocks away Tatum, as he entered an underground walkway, fell to the ground in a hail of bullets. Eleven of the twenty shots hit him. I had often seen him around town. The last time had been on the summer night earlier that year when Yeltsin won his improbable reelection. Tatum made the rounds at election headquarters. “I’m gonna win this war,” he vowed to all who would listen. As the TV correspondents reported Yeltsin’s “miraculous comeback” and “the end, perhaps forever, of the Communist threat to Russia’s young Democracy,” Tatum was his usual cocksure self “United we stand,” he declared, “and divided we fall.”

Tatum was by no means alone. Each day I scanned the local wires: an English engineer found burned to death in his own apartment; an American television producer, a Californian in his thirties who came to Moscow to do good, stabbed to death; a young Canadian diplomat discovered dead in his living room (victim of a slipped mickey, the reports said); a German chef beaten to death on a central street, his face “torn.” There were many more, but those who succumbed to Moscow’s violence were rarely foreigners. We were invisible. Compared to the newly moneyed local elite, we were poor.

“Not likely these days,” said my friend Lyona, the son of a Soviet general lavishly decorated for his service to military intelligence, when I told him how Mia and I had been robbed in Moscow once before, in 1991. That had been back in the old Soviet days, when foreigners were few in number and far richer than their neighbors. In one hour, as we shopped at a local market, our place had been stripped. The thieves took everything – and tidily hauled it off in our suitcases. They even took the telephone. “No one will touch you now,” Lyona said. It was nothing against foreigners, he said. It was just that Russian thieves now wanted real money.

Now they went after the New Russians. The so-called Noviye Russkie–a deliberate play in Russian on “nouveau riche” – were those who had managed to grab a slice of the spoils and grown preposterously rich overnight. Most Russians, being Old Russians, naturally hated the New Russians. In the jokes that Russians addictively tell each other, they had replaced the Chukchi, a desperately poor native people of the Russian north who had long suffered as the favored butt of Soviet jokes. Lyona was right. The New Russians had become the new target.

I HEARD COUNTLESS TALES of horror from friends and neighbors. But none was more frightening than the one I heard T*** tell. I believed it right away because I believed everything he told me. He was the only Russian I ever met who had survived, flourished even, in the upper reaches of the Soviet Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church. His business, at least on the wintry day we met in the center of Moscow just off Pushkin Square, was oil. The church’s oil. Early in the Yeltsin era, the Orthodox Church won the right to export, tax-free, millions of barrels of Russian crude each year. T*** now worked for the trading company the men of the cloth had set up. The work, he said, was pretty much the same as what he did in the old days. “Only now instead of the general secretary, I serve His Holiness.”

T*** was fond of sushi, sweet Georgian wine, and sayings like “Creeds come and go, but I’m still here.” Over lunch he digressed from a discussion of the church’s role in building the market economy to a description of the forgotten world of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, Brezhnev’s long-serving ideologist and gray cardinal. Though dead for decades, Suslov remained one of the few old Party bosses who still conjured fury among Russians. My neighbor Valery, a kindly retiree from the Soviet Foreign Trade Ministry, hated him as the symbol of Politburo excess. Valery’s aunt, a nurse who spent her life ministering to the Party elite in the Kremlin hospital, had regaled him with tales of Suslov’s enemas. Each morning he came to the Kremlin hospital for his daily fruit juice. Not to be outdone, his wife demanded fresh trout each week, flown in from Lake Sevan in Armenia. But none of this troubled T***. His tale concerned Suslov’s grandnephew, a forty-year-old banker named Vladimir Sterlikov. Sterlikov, it was said, once lived in the dacha of Galina Brezhneva, Brezhnev’s daughter, who had a weakness for diamonds, drink, and circus performers. For a time Sterlikov had worked for Pravda. Now he was the deputy head of the Russian Bank for Reconstruction and Development–“until recently,” T*** added with relish.

“It was early one morning out on Rublyovka …,” T*** said, setting the scene. He was careful to call the Rublyovskoye Schosse by its nickname, the Rublyovka. He was letting me know that he too graced Moscow’s most prestigious artery. Clogged morning and night with convoys of Bavarian sedans, the Rublyovka was the gateway to the off-hours realm of the elite. It was the road that bore the city’s richest and mightiest into town from their fortified cottedgi, cozy five-story affairs nestled in the birches just beyond the city limit. Because it led directly to the residences of the mayor of Moscow, the prime minister, the cabinet, and, of course, the president himself, the Rublyovka was also the most heavily guarded road in Russia.

“It was early in the morning,” T*** repeated, pausing between sips of green tea, “when Suslov’s poor grandnephew met his bitter end.”

A waitress in traditional Russian peasant dress, a nod to the prerevolutionary undertones of the menu before us, interrupted T*** to unveil his swordfish, a taste for which he had acquired, along with the affection for green tea, during an extended Asian stint, back in his days as a “journalist” reporting to the Central Committee’s foreign relations office. T***, many whispered, was KGB in those Asian days. Some insisted that he still was. But T*** just laughed at all the talk and maintained that he was merely a journalist, a student of the Japanese language and culture, and, above all, a loyal, if less than devout, follower of the Party line.

As soon as the waitress took her leave, he continued.

“Sterlikov’s driving his Saab, or rather his driver-bodyguard is, in from the dacha when all of a sudden a cop speeds past, cuts in front of them, and forces them to pull over. The cops ask the driver for his license. Then they say they want to check the engine number. So the driver opens the hood. Just as he leans over the engine – pop. They shoot him in the back of the head. Poor Sterlikov starts to get out of the car to see what’s going on, and one of the cops shoots him. Six bullets in the chest. Died later in the hospital.”

T*** took a sip from his bone china teacup and watched my eyes contract. But I had heard such tales before. The Moscow tabloids were full of them. “Never open a door for anyone in uniform” was one of the first rules a landlord taught a foreign tenant. The hit men, we were told, had access to the proper uniforms and even genuine IDs. Cop cars? No problem. T*** was undeterred. It was not the end of the tale, he said. “The cops were hit men,” he said. “But they were also cops.”

Another sip, right pinkie raised, to let it sink in.

“How do I know all this? Sterlikov worked for one of our banks. A recent hire and not the best. But he brought a certain pedigree, and we owed a favor to a friend. The poor guy was killed by real policemen. We don’t know their names, but we know what happened.” The bank, he explained, had conducted its own investigation. The cops had been hired to kill. They were moonlighting.

T*** returned to his fish. As for Sterlikov, he checked out clean. No extravagant debts. Nothing certainly to get killed over. And he hadn’t been at the bank long enough to steal anything. He fell victim to a stupid blood feud. Banker for banker, that kind of thing.

“But the cops,” T*** said, wiping the edges of his red lips with an ironed napkin, “now isn’t that something?” He marveled at the accelerated evolution of the criminalization of the organs of law enforcement. He refolded the napkin and revealed a grin. Once we had left the restaurant, I watched T*** trundle off down the snowy boulevard and disappear into the noonday thicket of cars and passersby on Pushkin Square. He almost seemed pleased.

FOUR

BEYOND LUST AND FEAR, Moscow breeds power. You cannot help feeling that you are trespassing in its path. Every effort is made to impress upon the populace its privileged proximity to the unlimited power of the state. This is not just state power as in other countries. This is not merely the pomp of officialdom, but the deliberate demonstration of the state’s power over the people, an ever-present slap in their face.

It is midmorning. You walk through the cold, dank underpass, lit by long fluorescent lamps. At one end stand two grandmothers, selling cigarettes, hand-knit caps, dried flowers. The underground walkway fills with the sounds of an accordion. A mournful Russian ballad. Every day the accordion player, a Moldovan refugee, is here busking. Every day he squeezes out the same song. It is a long underpass. When at last you emerge and climb the stairs up into the cold wind of the far side of the street, you suddenly hear it: the silence. Nothing announces the power like the silence.

Kutuzovsky Prospekt may well be the broadest street in Moscow. At its widest it has seven lanes in each direction. In its center the road is divided by a lane reserved for the political and financial elite, or at least any Russian sufficiently well moneyed or well connected to procure the coveted migalka, a little flashing blue light that, once affixed to a car roof, announces the right of the faceless passenger hidden behind the curtained, smoked windows to break any traffic rule or regulation. In the morning, as the city’s bankers and bureaucrats rush toward their offices, the road is filled with cars and heavy trucks trying to tack their way into the center. The roar of the traffic, with all fifteen lanes fully loaded, is deafening. Walking the sidewalks of Kutuzovsky, as I did nearly every morning, can be unpleasant.

Until the silence comes. It happens at least twice a day, usually in midmorning and just before the sun sets. You are walking down the sidewalk, and then, in a single moment, you realize something has changed, something is amiss. All you hear is the crunch of your boots on the hard snow. On the street, the slow-moving river of cars has not simply stopped; it has disappeared. (In minutes a road as wide as a highway is completely cleared.) The trolley buses have pulled over and stand along the edge of the prospekt. The citizens too, waiting at the bus stops, stand still. Everyone waits. Hundreds of poor souls, trapped in the stilled traffic, sit mute in their parked cars. The street has frozen into a photograph, and you are the only one moving through it.

For several minutes nothing stirs. Then suddenly a black Volga, an illuminated migalka fixed to its roof, speeds down the middle of the prospekt. Then another, and a third, a fourth. And then the chorus of sirens accompanying the flashing lights. A convoy of automobiles, a dozen in all, each duly impressing the motionless citizenry with its size, speed, and cleanliness. As men, women, and schoolchildren (and the secret policemen in plain clothes sprinkled among them) stand and watch, a squadron of BMW militsiya sedans sweeps past, followed by an extended black Mercedes limousine and a quartet of oversize Mercedes jeeps. As the convoy passes, the cars leave a ripple of turned faces on the sidewalks.

A visitor might imagine the world had stopped because of a dire emergency. But the Muscovites frozen in place along this vast slate gray avenue recognize the scene for what it is: their president, the leader of all Russia, making his way to work. More than twenty miles of roadway in the Russian capital are closed in this fashion every day. In a city already paralyzed by too much snow and too many cars. And still no one complains, ever. It is the essence of power, Moscow style. It is naglost. In general, naglost is an unseemly blend of arrogance, shamelessness, and rudeness. In this instance it is the contemptuous disdain of the rights of ordinary Russians.

FIVE

IN THE COVETED neighborhood of Nikitskiye Vorota, nestled among small parks and large embassies and tucked behind the poplar-lined boulevard that circumscribes the city center stands a surprisingly modest apartment building where the new guard meets the old guard. No. 15 Leontievsky Pereulok, a squat seven-story building of beige brick and broad balconies, has an exterior that bears few distinguishing marks except for a row of Soviet-era plaques that honor a half dozen of its previous residents. Built in 1962 for Politburo members evicted from the Kremlin living quarters when Khrushchev tore them down to build his massive Palace of Congresses, the building housed Party overlords, titans of Soviet industry and arms, and even Dolores Ibárruri, the famed doyenne of the Spanish Communists. More recently, the chief of the International Monetary Fund mission in Moscow, a jovial bald economist with a hefty pinkie ring, lived here in the old flat of Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister.

“That’s the apartment of Mikoyan, designer of the MiG,” Nikita Khrushchev told me one evening as we toured the building where he had lived since childhood. “And in that apartment,” he exclaimed, “lives Lenin’s niece!”

Just below the IMF chief, in a sprawling apartment filled, I imagined, with an overstuffed Warsaw Bloc living room set, lived Grigori Vasilievich Romanov, among the oldest of the old guard. One sub-zero afternoon in midwinter, as the air chilled to a glass-sharp edge, I set out to meet Romanov. He commanded me to stand, alone, on Ulitsa Tverskaya beneath the iron statue of Yuri the Long-Armed, founder of Moscow. Across the street looms Luzhkov’s office, the lavishly remodeled Moscow Communist Party headquarters. A red electric sign at the Central Post Office flashed seventeen degrees below zero. I spent twenty minutes examining every passing face, but I had patience. I had been waiting to see Romanov for two years.

I spied him shuffling slowly, painfully, down the crowded sidewalk long before he spotted me. As he approached, a silver Mercedes, a For Sale sign taped to its rear window, nearly ran him down. He was short, no more than five feet five inches, and I remember hearing how Romanov, back when he was in the Politburo, had placed his desk atop a raised platform to make himself appear more imposing. He wore a gray topcoat, with a thin sweater beneath. A faint stubble shaded his sagging square cheeks; tuffs of gray jutted from beneath his brown fur hat. At seventy-five, and despite a recent heart attack, he was in far better shape than his phone voice had led me to believe. His pale blue eyes, however, were tearing from the cold wind.

“It’s not that I don’t trust journalists,” he declared straight off, dabbing his eyes with an ironed blue handkerchief “I don’t trust anyone. But someone has to say what has happened here. Someone has to speak of Russia’s misery.”

Romanov came to the West’s attention in the 1980s, when he and Mikhail Gorbachev served as lieutenants to Andropov and his ailing successor, Konstantin Chernenko. Romanov was the darling of the Politburo’s hawks, the truest of the cold warriors, but upon Chernenko’s death, he was ousted by Gorbachev. He had not spoken to a foreigner in years. “The only people he hates more than foreigners,” joked Nikita, “are reporters.” But I had long badgered him, calling him first thing in the morning once or twice a week. At last he relented. He agreed to meet-only in public, “in an hour.”

His rant that winter day was almost pauseless. “Gorbachev will pay for his sins! I can’t stand the sight of his pig’s mug! He’s a traitor! A traitor to the Motherland! He’s sniveling about how no one here thanks him, about how ungrateful Russians are to him. To hell with Gorbachev. He started this disaster. He was a catastrophe, a peasant who had no right coming to the big city … Yeltsin? Who is Yeltsin? A swine who drinks. He got drunk on power. I can’t even speak of him. He’s a criminal. A common thief who’s robbed his Motherland and killed his people. All these Gaidars, Berezovskys, these so-called oligarchs, they’re all Yeltsin’s little children. Now they want to ban the Communist Party. Do you think all people are born the same? Of course not. Some are born to make things – to create, build, and work. Others are born to take, to steal. Gorbachev is one of the takers. He started the fashion. Now look where it’s led us.”

To some, Grigori Romanov was an oddity, a hapless relic shuffling toward his life’s end. He was, to be sure, a diehard Communist who had chewed sour grapes ever since he fell hard from the Soviet Olympus. But oddly enough, in advanced retirement, far from his rarefied life among the Party elite, Romanov echoed the lament of many a common man in Russia. In the years after the Soviet collapse, he had found company. Romanov had no power now, but he took solace in the knowledge that millions of Russians shared his views. His principal conviction – Ran’she bylo lushche (“Things were better before”)–had become the motto of his generation. And the dirty secret, only conceded in the capital sotte voce by the ascendant Young Reformers, was that they were right. For many of his generation, things were indeed better before – for them.

Romanov lived on some sixty dollars a month. As a veteran of the blockade of Leningrad, he said he deserved much more. “I’m entitled to several war pensions. I’m a veteran and an invalid. And I received the Hero of Soviet Labor. Politburo privileges? What a joke! We have nothing. No dacha, no car, no privileges at all. Only the apartment.”

Once it was a very different story. After rising through the Party ranks, he ran Leningrad, Russia’s second city, for twenty-five years, until he was summoned to Moscow by Andropov in 1983. He survived various Politburo wars, until he was finally outflanked by the ascendant Gorbachev.

“In February 1985, Chernenko called me out to the dacha,” Romanov told me. “He was weak. He sat up in bed. I stood beside him. ‘Just wait,’ he said. ‘Relax. It’ll come to pass.’ He relied on the defense sector. He knew the importance of our work. He never wanted Gorbachev … We all knew Chernenko couldn’t last long. He was in very bad shape. So were most of the others, for that matter. They were all old and sick. Gromyko and the rest. There were two candidates discussed at that time: Vladimir Shcherbitsky and Romanov … No one talked about Gorbachev with any seriousness.”

A few weeks later Chernenko died, and within hours Gorbachev wrested control of the Politburo in a late-night five to four vote. It was a bit of spectacular luck, or so his biographers have held, that the three committee members who were Gorbachev’s chief opponents were absent from Moscow.

“The week before Chernenko died, my wife and I flew to Vilnius,” Romanov said. “They had given us a trip to Lithuania, to a sanitarium. The day Chernenko died, we were there. They said the plane would only fly the next day. They met that day, hours after he died. But the three most senior members of the Politburo weren’t present! Kunaev was in Almaty. Shcherbitsky was in the States. And I was in Lithuania. By the time we got back to Moscow he’d already done it. That fast. That was it. It was agreed to in public of course at the Politburo meeting and at the plenum. But he’d already cut the deal in secret with all of them. And you think the timing, Chernenko’s death, I mean, was all accidental?”

In the aftermath Romanov was stripped of power. He had long been renowned as an epicurean lush, ridiculed as the “Last of the Romanovs.” Gorbachev’s cronies played upon that reputation, spreading the rumor that to celebrate his daughter’s wedding. Romanov had ordered the caterers to use Catherine the Great’s Sèvres from the Hermitage. Worse still, the story went, a few pieces had been smashed. By July Romanov had been summarily retired and sent, according to another rumor fed to reporters, to dry out.

Did he ever regret, I wondered, not making it to the top?

“No,” he retorted. “I’m just sorry the wrong man did. The traitor. Because if it had been me, the invasion never would have happened.”

SIX

Please, put it in a bank … Please, let’s put it in a foreign bank.

–Vladimir Putin advising the relatives of those who died on the nuclear submarine Kursk on what to do with their compensation⁷

EVER SINCE RICARDO, economists have built intricate mathematical models to explain and forecast how markets will move. Calculus, however, assumes reason. When Russia crashed in the summer of 1998, there was little rational about it. “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1921. “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” Russia under Yeltsin was less a test market for the “Invisible Hand” or shock therapy than a new Babylon where the wheeling and dealing were nasty, brutish, and, for many in August 1998, lethal.

In the dawn of the new market those who would play its princes, if only for a while, needed gastronomic palaces where they could feast in the unreality of their reality. Across Moscow elite men’s clubs sprouted, with reliable security and robust wine cellars. Fashioned from the pages of Tolstoy and Pushkin, the clubs were draped in pre-Bolshevik bliss. Whether or not such bliss had ever existed didn’t matter. Artifice and excess were the object. In their urge to build a new world, the plutocrats imported Swiss chefs, Austrian furniture, English nannies. Having grown fat on the spoils of the Motherland, they could bask in the shimmer of their own money.

Tucked discreetly off Moscow’s Ring Road, two blocks down from the Institute of Biological Structures, which handles the annual repair work on Lenin’s corpse, is Club T. For a time it was considered among the finest restaurants in Russia. It should be, since it was designed as a private reserve for the new plutocracy, its very own “21” Club. Guests are vetted by videophone. The ten or so tables inside reflect absolute elegance, their pink tablecloths radiant under crystal and gold chandeliers. One corner of the dining room is heavy with the smell of Cuban cigars, another with the high notes of French perfume and Armenian cognac. Silk drapes keep the outside outside. Gold seraphim dance on the walls, their pudgy arms hoisting aloft little gilded candles Large mirrors announce your entrance, reassuring you that you belong, that you’ve arrived. The mirrors also assist the discreet diner to find the famous faces hidden across the room.

One evening, as the cold wake of the crash forced its survivors to renew their exit strategies, I invited four of the earliest American pioneers to join me at Club T. Paul Tatum of course was not the last American investor to see his dream sour in Russia. By the time Russia crashed in 1998, countless frontiersmen had been scalped, fled for home, or moved on to the next gold rush. But the quartet of Americans I invited to dinner – Bill Browder, Peter Derby, Charlie Ryan, and Boris Jordan – who, when their portfolios were at their fattest, controlled several billions of dollars of investments in Russia, remained.

Derby, a New Yorker of Russian descent, had arrived first, opening Russia’s first foreign-owned commercial bank in 1991. Jordan, another prodigal son of Long Island’s Russian diaspora, with roots among the Whites who fled the Revolution, had come in 1992 to help run Crédit Suisse/First Boston’s Moscow outpost. By 1995, having reaped billions of dollars in the privatization scheme, he had left to found Russia’s first Western-style investment bank, Renaissance Capital. The 1998 crash forced a divorce that split the bank, and Jordan for a time found himself isolated and on his own.

Browder, the soft-spoken grandson of, ironically, the American Communist leader Earl Browder, had also arrived in 1992, having run an equity fund for Robert Maxwell and later the Eastern European markets for Salomon Brothers. In April 1996 he founded the Hermitage Fund, a high-end hedge fund that at its peak boasted $1.2 billion in assets. By 1997 Hermitage had returns of 228 percent; Browder’s return on his initial capital was 725 percent.

Ryan first came to Russia after working at the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Together with one of Russia’s leading reformers, former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, Ryan founded the United Financial Group, which, by 1998, managed more than a billion dollars in assets. With his main line roots and mainstream résumé, he was an anomaly, a reflective banker. “Of course the money brings us here,” Ryan told me in 1997. “But it’s much more than that. We’re building something entirely new. Okay, you can get stability and good returns in the U.S. But can you get the buzz?”

Over snails and caviar, king prawns, and medallions of New Zealand lamb, the evening’s theme, at my request, was “What went wrong?” For the next three hours, the foursome pointed fingers at the IMF, former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, inborn Russian corruption, falling commodity prices, the global recession, prudish U.S. investors, prudent Asian investors, again the IMF. Jordan inevitably dropped the name of every player in Russia, from Kiriyenko to Soros, and declared early on: “This’ll help them” (“this” being the crash, “them” being the Russians). Derby spoke in breathless arias on the chronology of the fall. Ryan waxed philosophical, and Browder concluded, “Sadly, this is a crash with too many morals.” Sadly, too, the meal, by far the most expensive I had ever eaten, got lost in the burlesque of charge and countercharge.

“The basic problem is you can’t control a company in this country,” stated Jordan.

“You can have controlling stakes,” said Browder.

“And get ripped off on every level,” parried Jordan.

Derby announced that his number two, “a great Russian guy,” would go to jail in days. (In fact, he didn’t.) Derby paused, then said: “We will stay and try to be honest and fulfill our responsibilities.”

“This country’s so corrupt they fucked themselves,” added Browder.

“Bill, you obviously don’t believe that,” replied Jordan, “or else you didn’t do your fiduciary duty for your clients, investing a billion in the place.”

At this moment the joust between Browder and Jordan was interrupted by the governor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev, a blithe opportunist, who stopped by for a round of handshakes. When the governor floated away, Derby seized his chance. “The worst thing about it was there was no reason to default,” he said. “Absolutely none. There wasn’t that much debt coming due, like twelve billion dollars over the six weeks. And it was ruble-denominated. There were reasons to take action, but not to default on the domestic debt.”

“Any country will default if they can’t roll over their debt,” noted Browder. “If the U.S. couldn’t sell T-bills for a month straight, they’d have a big fucking problem. But the thing that’s most damaging is the collapse of the banking system …”

“This place never had a banking system,” scoffed Derby.

“It had a system where you made payments,” Browder retorted. “You can’t make payments now.”

“The banking sector did not take savings, invest it, and get growth through investment,” said Derby.

“There was no multiplier effect,” Ryan summed up.

“And the reason you don’t have people breaking the windows here is that they didn’t deposit their money in the banks,” said Jordan.

“This is one the great mysteries of Russia,” Ryan noted. “No one’s had a job in a lot of towns for years. But car ownership in those same towns has gone up by two hundred percent. Consumer durables are way up. And at the same time no one’s rioting. That’s a clear sign that no one’s being very honest about their real net worth or about their real sources of income.”

“Let’s say you’ve got twenty-five percent of your money in the bank and seventy-five percent in your mattress,” said Browder. “Eventually your mattress money is going to disappear.”

Tuxedoed waiters unveiled course after course with remarkable flair, raising broad silver lids from big silver plates, making sweeping bows in unison. As the evening wound down, Browder, more puckish than the rest, observed, “There used to be Third World countries. Then they became Developing Countries. Then Less Developed Countries. Then the wall came down, and we got Emerging Markets. Well, folks, now they’re gone, too.”

With dessert the conversation drifted to talk of the price of bodyguards, the best tax havens for billionaires, and the travails of Bermudan citizenship. Over coffee, Jordan offered a parable: Back when it was flush, the Central Bank decided to buy an American satellite to monitor electronic trading across Russia’s eleven time zones. No sooner had the satellite been launched than it spun out of orbit. Eventually it disappeared altogether.⁸

SEVEN

So many wonderfully fine women can hardly be seen in any country in one assemblage.

–Cassius Marcellus Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist Lincoln sent as America’s emissary to Alexander II

ANOTHER STREAM OF PROSPECTORS had started in the last days of the old USSR. American men, weighted with middle age and regret, began to come to Moscow to troll. Back then they were searching for a woman they had heard of, the charming and servile Russian antifeminist, the alluring woman who could be wife, lover, cook, cleaner, and mother all in one. Moscow, the American lonely hearts believed, would be their mecca. For thousands, it was.

In the hotel bars and nightclubs you ran into all sorts: human rights lawyers and postdoctoral scholars, cardiologists, and even astronauts. Most of the men spoke no Russian, knew nothing of Tolstoy or Pushkin. To them, the girls were “Natashas,” one and all, and Moscow was heaven. That was in the pioneer days. As time moved on, the marriage market slumped. “Russian bride” agencies still claimed a strong niche, but many of the men who came to Moscow now wanted only one thing. Sex ruled the night, and the dollar was the coin of the realm.

During Bill Clinton’s last presidential visit to Moscow, Mia and I went for a beer at a new hotel on Tverskaya, Moscow’s main drag. We found half a dozen Secret Service agents lining the bar. (After Tatum’s murder the White House was relieved that a new American hotel had opened in Moscow.) Nearby sat several other Americans, from their banter, junior-level White House adjutants. The Secret Service on that night was more than happy to share a tip. “Go to Night Flight,” one agent in a pinstriped suit said, “and you’ll never regret it.”

Night Flight was Swedish run and scarcely resembled a bordello, but it was famed for offering Moscow’s most beautiful, and most expensive, prostitutes. (“DO IT TONIGHT,” said its ads at the airport, tempting new arrivals.) The cover was steep, the Secret Service agent said, twenty dollars after 9:00 P.M. “But,” he added, “it’s the best twenty bucks you’ll ever spend.”

If Night Flight was the high end, the Hungry Duck anchored the low end. Run by a Canadian innkeeper who opened his first bar in Moscow in 1993 and housed in the old House of Culture for Soviet Workers in the Arts, a few minutes’ walk off Red Square, the Duck, as the bar was known among ex-pats and natives alike, grew world famous. The Washington Post even dubbed it “the wildest bar in the world.” While it lasted, it was certainly one of the most vulgar, with drunken sex in its dark corners and vomit on its floors.

The first time I braved the Duck, I ended up bartending. I had come to interview the club’s impresario, Stanley Williams, a black deejay from Brooklyn who had recently emerged from a Moscow prison cell. Caught up in a sweep targeted against African students in a Moscow disco, Stanley had been arrested for possessing “less than an ashtray” of marijuana. In the end the charges were dropped, but by then he had spent nearly two years in Moscow’s worst jails. I was writing a story on the miserable state of Russian prisons – the prison population had risen to more than a million, and the prisons had become one of the world’s leading TB incubators – and I wanted to talk to Stanley.

I arrived too late. Stanley was already behind his turntables. So I was put to work, pouring beer behind the bar. All eyes were fixed on the male strippers who paraded on top of the long bar that ringed the center of the club. “We usually get upwards to eight hundred in here on Friday nights,” Stanley screamed as Puff Daddy blasted out from huge speakers. (Nine hundred and twenty girls, he said, were the house record.) Stanley had stacked the speakers on top of one another, building a barricade to protect him from the sweating masses. “It can get a little–” I could not make out the end of his sentence. But I saw what he meant.

The Duck’s managers, relying on the laws of physics and desire, had mastered the art of maximizing the sexual tension a single room can permit. The girls, many of whom had to survive long train journeys to get here, got in free. They drank – only hard liquor – for free. Men were allowed entrance only after 9:00 P.M. They gathered in a long queue outside the bar, like bulls locked in a chute awaiting a rodeo’s opening bell. The effect naturally was dramatic. The sweating mass of Russian teenaged girls danced harder and harder as the music grew faster and faster, while the older, mostly Western men lusted all the more publicly. As the fever swelled, one, then two, then many more girls took to the bar to dance. Before long they had ripped off their blouses and bras. It was not rare, Stanley would say, for the action to go farther, much farther than that.

In the years that followed the crisis, Moscow’s nightlife grew serious. As Yeltsin departed and Putin entered, a new stodginess threatened to reign. Many of the landmark stops along the ex-pat map of Moscow closed. The Duck was one of the last, but it, too, shut down. The woman who ran the former House of Culture that housed the club was eighty-two-year-old Olga Lepeshinskaya, a former Bolshoi prima ballerina. Still known as Stalin’s favorite, Lepeshinskaya was not pleased her beloved building was hosting a bacchanalia. She launched a campaign to evict the foreigners. The Canadian owners had survived countless death threats and an attempted kidnapping, but eventually the police raids, even though the owners had paid out some two hundred thousand dollars in bribes, killed the business.

One of the final blows came when a clutch of Duma deputies, of the Communist and nationalist bent, checked in on ladies’ night. They arrived just as Dylan, the Duck’s six-foot male stripper from Nigeria, wearing little but gold spangles, was “dancing” on the bar, with several young Russian females, to the blasting strains of the Soviet national anthem. Weeks later one of the Duma deputies in a speech on the parliament’s floor, grew red in the face. “If this were Washington,” he screamed, “they would hang that Negro!”

EIGHT

IN ALL THE YEARS I lived in Moscow, I never had a car. Each day I would step out onto the curb and raise an arm–“voting” the Russians call it – and almost always in an instant at least one car, sometimes an entire lane, would screech to a stop. For a journalist, few modes of transport could be more rewarding. For Muscovites, and Russians in cities across the country, turning your car into a gypsy cab is what even the most educated and skilled did – and do – to get by. Over the years I enjoyed my share of ambulances, hearses, KGB Volgas, and Kremlin Audis. In the privacy of their cars, I sat beside the dispossessed and displaced: a nuclear engineer who had helped to design the SS-20s once pointed at the United States; a Yakut wrestler who pulled off the road, opened his palm, and tried to hawk a two-carat Siberian diamond; an ex-KGB colonel who had spent his career reading dissidents’ mail and now complained that the state had abandoned him; an Armenian gas smuggler who drove an armored BMW he could no longer afford to fill with gas. Each day brought a new round of coincidental interlocutors. Rarely did they stay silent for long. Like the coachmen in the stories of Gogol or Tolstoy, they steered the talk effortlessly from the weather – the dreadful snow or the dreadful heat – to politics – the ineluctable triumph of the “den of thieves” in the Kremlin – before settling into a long disquisition on the country’s dreadful past and dreadful predicament at present. Each, above all, was certain to recite, as if by rote, his – and occasionally her – own canto of loss.

One hot and humid summer morning in the final days of Yeltsin, I was sitting with such a stranger, an out-of-work air traffic controller whose dove gray face streamed with sweat. We were stuck in his 1986 Lada on a two-lane street that divides one of Moscow’s largest cemeteries. For some unknown reason, he had turned onto this street even though it was bumper to bumper with cars. For nineteen minutes we had not moved. I watched the minutes tick off on the dashboard clock. The clear plastic cover of the clock was cracked, but the hands continued to move. I had long ago missed the interview I’d set out for when I met the man sitting next to me. He seemed a bright enough fellow, this man who once guided Aeroflot jets through the Soviet skies, but he did not realize that I was a foreigner and he had no understanding of why I could be exasperated.

He had a point. In Moscow, after all, time spent frozen in place was not without its lessons – even in a traffic jam. Soon the more enterprising drivers usurped the sidewalk. Still, they did not crawl far. Two black BMWs, their windows smoked, moved toward us, negotiating for space with the little blue migalka lights on their roofs: government cars. At the same time, a Mercedes 600, the largest model the Germans ever made, eased right to make good use of the sidewalk. In the Yeltsin years of excess the Mercedes 600 had become the chariot of choice among the Moscow elite. In one year in the 1990s, more shestsoty, as the luxury cars were known in Russian, were sold in the Russian capital than in all Germany. Others of course now tried to follow the Mercedes offroad, but almost immediately one follower, an old Zhiguli two-door, hit an asphalt crater and stalled. The sound of metal on stone hinted at axle damage.

The tension grew, but everyone stayed silent. A few men swore to themselves. No one honked. After nearly an hour we still had not seen the end of the block. I was staring at the same dozen drivers and their passengers and at the rows of tombstones that ran deep amid the lean trees. At the hour mark the honking started. It was naturally without purpose or direction. A Volga to our right gave out. The poor soul in it was forced to evacuate. There was nowhere to move the car and no one willing to help its driver. Instead, a burly fellow in a Land Cruiser read him the riot act. There is nothing as pleasing, it would seem, to a Russian driver as a stream of blue swearing. The yelling did no good. The Volga was rooted in place.

We inched forward. As the second hour approached, the driver said he did not mind the wait. When he worked the tower at the airport, he’d often have to stay awake for double shifts. Sometimes there were long stretches through the night when not one plane would land. I noticed that the gas gauge of the Lada was on empty, even to the left of empty. A young girl, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, rollerbladed through the maze of metal. She was blond and wore earphones. Three cars ahead of us, in the lane to our left, sat an army truck, with an open flatbed ringed by wooden slats. It held four or five large metal barrels. At first it was not clear what the barrels contained-until I saw the pool of liquid forming beneath the truck. Then I saw the trickle dripping from one of the barrels, the one lying on its side.

“Yes,” the former air traffic controller said. It was gas. “And in a second, when some fool drops his cigarette out the window, that truck will go up like an open oil well on fire.” We went on sitting in place. I began to smell the gas. We were in the middle of five lanes of cars. We could not move anywhere. I looked left and right. On all sides drivers and passengers and passersby were smoking. I counted nine lit cigarettes.

The scene became Felliniesque in its absurdity. Another car broke down. A young woman emerged from it. She had light brown hair and was wearing a white tank top and oversize sunglasses. Two volunteers abandoned their cars to come to her rescue. At the top of the second hour a crane, unattended and parked, appeared up ahead in the right lane. Nearby stood a truck with a green canvas roof On the back of the truck a small yellow sign stenciled in black announced LYUDI (“PEOPLE”). The truck was filled with conscripts. Inside the heat of the canvas, the soldiers were sweating. They did not, as is the usual practice, extend a hand to cadge cigarettes.

We inched again. Up ahead a new obstacle, a parked trolleybus. Its power lines unstuck, it was forced from its lane by the cars that had occupied the sidewalk. At last we reached an intersection. In the sea of cars, the roads, two central arteries in the middle of the Russian capital, were unrecognizable. The traffic lights changed colors overhead, but no one paid them any heed. Only one lone Mercedes 600, big and black, tacked against traffic to the far side of the road and managed to move ahead. “A whale,” the former air traffic controller said of the Mercedes as he and I sat in silence and watched it move slowly out of sight.

NINE

AN ADVENTUROUS documentary filmmaker, a friend informed me, spent a year touring the Russian outback as the last century closed. He visited dozens of small out-of-the-way towns and villages, everywhere asking the local children the same single question: “Who was Lenin?” Somewhere in his travels a little girl in an audience far from Moscow grew excited. “I know!” she exclaimed. “Lenin was the first amphibian who came ashore. He was the one who crawled from the water, learned how to walk, climbed atop an iron tank, and called for everybody to follow him.”

DESPITE THE END OF the empire, the Seventh of November, Revolution Day, remained a holiday in Russia. In 1996, Yeltsin, having failed to bury the Party back in 1991, decided to try something different. He gave it a new name, the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. Like most of Yeltsin’s grand gestures, the rechristening was a failure. Sergei Kovalyov, the Duma deputy who spent ten years in the Gulag and served as Andrei Sakharov’s closest protégé after Gorbachev freed the physicist from his internal exile in Gorky, called it yet another foolhardy try at a top-down purification of the nation, the state’s attempt to relegate the old way of life to history.

“What does this mean, ‘Accord and Reconciliation’?” Kovalyov asked me one afternoon in his cramped Duma office. “These are empty words when people still carry Stalin portraits in parades. A day of national mourning would be a bit more appropriate. We don’t need a new holiday. We need to teach our children that Lenin and Stalin were the progenitors of a criminal regime, that they were mass murderers.”

Kovalyov, a shy, soft-spoken man who wore the same thick Soviet-style glasses as when I met him a decade earlier, was the first to say he had never wielded the clout of Sakharov. But amid the din of the Duma his voice resounded with moral sobriety. He shared a story that had stunned him. A student had come to see him. At one point in their conversation Kovalyov mentioned the passing of the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, once best known in the West by his pseudonym, Abram Tertz, who, along with another young Soviet writer, Yuli Daniel, was arrested in 1966 and imprisoned for publishing abroad.⁹ As Kovalyov recounted for the student the saga of the Sinyavsky and Daniel trial that attracted worldwide outcry, the student had laughed. “How can you laugh at a writer who was arrested?” Kovalyov had asked him. The student said he’d imagined the story was a joke. “He just couldn’t believe,” Kovalyov said, “it was ever possible to be sent to jail for writing literature!”

Five years after Yeltsin renamed November 7, a poll in 2001 found 43 percent of those queried yearned for the return of Revolution Day. Another pollster asked: “Imagine that the October Revolution is happening before your eyes. What would you do?” Of the respondents, 22 percent said they would support the Bolsheviks; 19 percent said they would cooperate with them in part; 13 percent said they would leave the country. Just 6 percent said they would fight Lenin and company.¹⁰

IN 1990S MOSCOW the remnants of the Soviet intelligentsia liked to talk about expiating guilt. The villains of Soviet power, the forlorn and graying dissidents liked to say, needed their own Nuremberg. They knew there never would be one. Russians have not embraced any attempt at a Vergangenheitsbewältigung, what Germans, true professionals in matters of national repentance, call the process of coming to terms with the past. It is said to be cathartic, offering a kind of deliverance. Russian has no such word.¹¹ In Russia, no attempt on a social scale has been made to examine the totalitarian past, to learn not simply how the Soviet state functioned but how Russians themselves formed that state, to concede the crimes of the past.

One afternoon I stopped by a roundtable discussion held by several former KGB chiefs. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the true believer who had run the Lubyanka under Gorbachev until he turned against him in the coup of August 1991, went blank when a reporter, a Russian woman in her twenties, asked his opinion of the virtues of repentance. “What is there to repent?” Kryuchkov replied. He seemed more puzzled than angered. “We have nothing to regret; we only tried to save the Union. It’s those who unleashed the present chaos who should think about repentance.” History, I feared, had made a stunning return, only to be forgotten just as quickly.

IN SEARCH OF LEVITY in matters of remembrance, I learned to seek the gentle counsel of Semyon Samuelovich Vilensky. Semyon was in his early seventies when we first met, but his handshake, I was reminded each time I entered his two-room apartment on Moscow’s northwestern edge, remained a nutcracker. A short, stocky man with a white curly mane, Semyon had bushy white brows and soft blue eyes that flashed when he smiled. His face, expressive and animated, invariably reminded visitors of Einstein.

Semyon established the ritual of our visits: first tea, strong tea; then a beloved cigarette; lastly crackers or cake, whatever the kitchen held. Only then did we get down to business. The apartment seemed sparse, but it was crowded. The wall of cabinets in the living room was filled with manuscripts. For more than four decades he had collected the works-memoirs, short stories, poems, plays, novels, diaries-of the zeks, the prisoners who suffered in Stalin’s labor camps. “Zek” was camp slang, a word that grew out of the Gulag architects’ bureaucratic shorthand; z/k stood for zaklyuchennyi, a prisoner.

By now Semyon had thousands of manuscripts. It was a miracle they had survived. With a wide grin, Semyon liked to share his secret. “The babushkas,” he said. The grannies. “It’s all thanks to the babushkas.” For twenty-five years, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, he traveled the country. He spent six months in Moscow, six months on the road. He was not wandering, though he said the warmth of rural Russia saved him. He was slowly, quietly saving the literary heritage of the camps.

“In those days where could you keep manuscripts written by zeks? Only in villages, far from Moscow, in the hands of old ladies. So I’d take to the roads of the countryside and walk. I’d go from village to village. And the babushkas took me in, and without fear or doubt, they took the manuscripts and hid them.”

He did not think his archive a great achievement. “Camp survivors like to write,” he said. “And by now their relatives know I will take anything and lose nothing.” Moreover, he was not happy merely to have rescued the manuscripts. He had vowed to put them into print. In the late 1980s, once glasnost began to free Moscow’s printing presses, Semyon started to reel in his scattered manuscripts. In 1989 he founded a group known as Vozvrashchenie (The Return), and although he was the sole full-time staffer, began steadily to publish the manuscripts. In 1990 he got a copying machine, a gift from George Soros. By 2001 he had published more than fifty volumes, but the copier remained his primary press. For a decade a repairman had fixed it gratis. “His father,” he joked, “must have been in the camps.”

Semyon of course was a survivor himself He served on the Kremlin’s Rehabilitation Commission, a body established by Yeltsin and chaired by Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s former ideologist, that attempted to restore the good names of the victims of Stalinism. He was the commission’s sole Gulag veteran. He did not, however, like to speak of his own experience. Only bit by bit did I piece it together. He had been arrested just after his twentieth birthday–“For poetry,” he said. It was in 1948. He had been an eager student of literature at Moscow State, and he had done a stupid thing. He recited one of his poems to a circle of friends. One of his lines–“Agents surround us and the first among them is Stalin” – caught the ears of an informer. He was accused of “anti-Soviet agitation” and “terrorist intentions” and jailed first in the Lubyanka, then in a transit prison before being sent off to the dreaded mines of the Kolyma camps in the Far East. As Zek No. I-1620 he spent more than six years in Kolyma.

In 1955 Semyon got out. In 1962 he tried to get his first anthology of camp literature published – by the Kolyma regional government. “It would have been an important beginning,” he said. He even secured a story from Varlam Shalamov, the camp survivor whose Kolyma Tales had earned Solzhenitsyn’s envy. The book was typeset in 1963, but “at the last minute Moscow ordered all writers not officially residing in Kolyma excluded.” They printed a collection of Kolyma works, but not any by camp writers, many of whom lay buried in the local cemeteries. Semyon vowed to right that wrong, a vow he had spent the next quarter of a century fighting to fulfill.

Tea at Semyon’s lasted for hours. He took his time. His anarchic brows danced, his hands flew through the smoky air. As he braided old stories for a new audience, a smile coiled up and flashed. His conversation sounded Socratic, his tales almost rabbinical. He liked to end his discourses with a moral. He dispensed them like benedictions. But he always arrived at the same destination, the tragic conclusion that these first years after the Soviet fall were no exception. Russians had never come to terms with their past. “We barely had enough time to ask the right questions,” he said, “let alone try to answer them.”

TEN

“I JUST FLEW IN from Seoul,” announced the voice on the phone, waking me at 4:17 A.M. “And from the height of thirty-five thousand feet, it suddenly made sense: This place was not intended for habitation.” I hung up and soon fell back into a deep sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. But I knew who had called.

Viktor Pelevin, whom by then I had helped label “the voice of the new generation,” had grown into a friend. Since the fall of the USSR, Russians have bemoaned the flood of pulp fiction as how-to manuals on everything from the Internet to the Kama Sutra filled their bookstores. But just as Moscow critics were ready to pronounce Russian literature dead, Pelevin came of age. His modern satires, laced with ontological meditations and wild flights of a psychedelic imagination, soared to the top of the best-seller lists. By his early thirties Pelevin had become the literary celebrity of the post-Soviet generation.

With a degree from the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering and a passion for Zen Buddhism, he did not seem the top candidate for the title. But in 1993 his first book of stories, The Blue Lantern, won an immediate audience and Russia’s “Little Booker” prize. His first novel, Omon Ra, won high praise. Moscow’s critics, never particularly cordial to newcomers, hailed it as the first landmark of post-Soviet literature. Ever since, Pelevin has proved spectacularly prolific, cranking out roughly a novel a year.

But it was his novella The Yellow Arrow that I kept close. In under fifty pages, Pelevin creates a metaphoric world that reveals Russia’s predicament, a train bound for a broken bridge that neither stops nor arrives anywhere. The admixture of satire and mysticism is heady. The train’s passengers, stranded in an iron coffin hurtling into infinite darkness, mimic the desperate last resorts of Russians, devolving into hunter-gatherers, swindlers, and madmen.

Pelevin soon gained a cult of envy. He was, rivals said, too clever by half. “But I’m not doing anything new,” he pleaded. “I’m just writing what I see in my head.” His works were sold in bookstores and kiosks across Russia. But his influence extended far beyond his readership. Pelevin changed the lexicon of Russia’s hip urban youth, many of whom never read his books. By the time Generation “P,” a novel about the travails of a Russian copywriter, came out, it was hard to exaggerate his reach. The title was meant as a pun on Generation X and the Pepsi Generation. P stands for pizdets, a crude, but beloved, swearword that ends the sentences of young Russians everywhere. It means, alternately, “the absolute best” or “the absolute worst.” Yet given the book’s, reach, the P might as well have stood for Pelevin.

On RuNet, the Russian Internet, Pelevin Web sites sprouted. Girls carried his novels in nightclubs and pored over them in the metro. In my travels I found Pelevin everywhere: a Pelevin band (heavy metal) in Pskov, a Pelevin disco (techno) in Samara, even a Pelevin movie (a bootleg film of a novel) in the works in Yaroslavl. In the West, meanwhile, his works became the focus of academic symposia. Pelevin had a constructive response to celebrity. He hid. He adopted the pose of a Slavic Pynchon or Salinger. He refused to be photographed or appear on television. Naturally, his fame only grew.

One night well into my last summer in Moscow, Pelevin and I met up at Justo, a sushi restaurant/nightclub high on the high end of the market. Justo was opened by the son of Iosif Kobzon, an aging crooner with a bad wig who was known as the Russian Frank Sinatra. For decades Kobzon has been the king of Estrada, the Soviet equivalent of a national lounge singer. For a time Kobzon was not able to visit the United States, thanks to the State Department’s suspicions that he had mob connections, a charge he strongly denies.¹² His son’s place attracted the city’s most-traveled and, no matter the season, best-tanned crowd.

Viktor ordered sushi and tea. He had a fabled reputation as a chemical experimenter on a par with Jim Morrison. But he does not smoke or drink. He meditates. He is a devout Buddhist. He now shuttled among Moscow, Tibet, and South Korea, where he went for extended Zen retreats. In his work Pelevin spoke to Russia’s bedlam, but he never preached. Too many generations of Russian writers, he said, had been priests of the state’s propaganda. Stalin had demanded that writers be “architects of the soul.” Too many Russian novelists had lived off “the literary collective farm.” The reality of Russia, now more than ever, was too surreal, he said, to explain away in black and white.

Pelevin had just returned from a South Korean monastery. For a month he had eaten only rice and seaweed. For hours each day he had sat and stared at a blank wall. It didn’t sound like fun, I ventured. It wasn’t, he said. “But it’s the best therapy I’ve found for living in this place.”

Once he had asked advice on an English title for a novel. Now I returned the favor. He pushed for something that rang of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy but echoed the new era as well: “Something Putinian.”

“Crime and Immunity,” I suggested.

“Crime and Deportation,” he countered. “More in keeping with the times.”

“War and Crime?” I offered.

“Too timely,” he said. “What about War and Piss? Or even better, Vor and Piss.” He was on to something. Vor is Russian for “thief” and to a Russian ear, “peace” and “piss” are hard to distinguish. And on it went for hours.

One of our best efforts was Golaya Pravda (The Naked Truth). We had met at the time of the Kremlin’s attack on NTV, and as Putin drove Russia’s first private network into friendly hands, freedom of speech, or the lack thereof, had dominated public discourse. Putin and his men tried to argue that Russia’s airwaves were free and open. They had a point. The television channels were closed to political opponents, but they were certainly not straitlaced. The Naked Truth proved that.

Saturday nights at eleven a comely young brunette named Svetlana Pesotskaya appeared on a Moscow channel to read the news. She began the broadcast fully clothed, and then, as she ran through the news of the day, she slipped off her clothes. Soon she was topless. Svetlana did not let nudity get in the way of a good interview. Communist parliamentarians were her most frequent interlocutors. They sat next to her and, trying their best not to stare at her breasts, plowed on about the dire state of agriculture, the defense forces, or Russian-Japanese relations. The Naked Truth, at least among a press corps in search of a story, was a hit.

As a full moon rose and the club reached capacity, Viktor and I left. The street outside had become a parking lot of black German sedans and American Jeeps. The interior lights of the cars illuminated faces engrossed in crime thrillers, chauffeurs keeping warm. We walked for blocks, past the Tretyakov Gallery, past MinAtom, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, past the Central Bank, before we parted. I walked on alone toward St. Basil’s and Red Square, across the broad stone bridge that spans the Moscow River. It was nearly two in the morning, and the streets were empty. Only the river churned darkly below.

Once, years before, Viktor and I had sat on a bench on the edge of Pushkin Square. The city seemed to stream before us. It was a chill spring day, and the sun had brought out the crowds. Zhirinovsky had commandeered a truck and turned it into a soapbox. He was hectoring a crowd to defend Saddam Hussein against the Satan in Washington. A man stopped to ask us the time. He also asked if we knew that Yeltsin was a war criminal. I told Viktor that day how lucky he was. As a writer in Russia, a hip young writer who wore black leather and dark sunglasses and protected his persona as religiously as Pynchon, he would find it hard to fail. The West was dying to discover a new voice in the Soviet rubble. “You’ll be big,” I predicted.

“You’re the lucky one,” he replied. “The old is over here, and the new has yet to begin.”

We agreed; few people get to experience zero gravity on earth.

ELEVEN

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN a state in decay? How do you explain a country where the death of an ideology has displaced millions? How do you explain a government that announces a 50 percent increase in defense spending when the poverty line cuts through a third of its households and its poor souls face new epidemics of HIV and TB, suicide and drug abuse and, most pervasive of all, the old scourge of alcoholism? Where people do not fear the future, they fear – with good reason – the past.

In Russia nothing political stays unchanged for long. Kremlin intrigues, however transfixing they may be, do not suffice to draw a faithful portrait of Russia a decade after the Soviet fall. Russia of course has changed. But for far too many of its inhabitants it remains an Old Testament land, a place of plagues and floods, of locusts and blizzards and power outages without end. I knew I would have to go far from Moscow, as far as the points of the compass could lead me, to chart a deep map of the country, to learn how Russians not only survive but struggle to find meaning in the ruins of empire.

“The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” writes Aleksandr Herzen, the Russian political philosopher, in From the Other Shore. “But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow.” Herzen was writing of the European revolutions of 1848, but his words echo across Russia today. “Between the death of one and the birth of the other,” he concludes, “much water will flow, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

I stared at the huge map on our wall at home and plotted my route. I would travel to the country’s extremes, to the corners where no “Kremlin insiders” dwelt and few oligarchs set foot. I wanted to go to the Russian lands where no one had dined with Berezovsky or vied for an audience with Luzhkov, where few cared about the Byzantine struggles that entranced Moscow and fewer still fretted about the price of Siberian crude on the world exchange. I wanted to go to the regions where Russians had seen little of the rewards of the new era but felt much of its pain. I wanted to listen to the land’s survivors and survivalists, to those who lived in its far-flung corners without the slightest expectation that anything good should ever come to a people who deserved so much better.

II. SOUTH TO THE ZONE

ONE

WE WERE, AT LONG LAST, on the outskirts of Aldy, an ancient village of overgrown fruit trees and low-slung tin roofs on the southern edge of Grozny, the Chechen capital, and Issa was singing, “Moi gorod Groooozny, ya po tebe skuchaaayu … no ya k tebe vernuuus, moi gorod Grozny moi.”

He was an imposing figure, just over six feet, his chest and shoulders so broad he appeared taller. Issa liked to keep his silvering hair shaved on the sides of his head and at the back of his neck. The cut lent him the stern air of a military man or a Soviet bureaucrat of stature, an image, as was no doubt the intent, to intimidate at the checkpoints. More often silent, Issa broke into song when the air around him grew too quiet. Now, just as the roadblock, the last one before Aldy, rose into view, Issa was singing at the top of his lungs.

“Moi gorod Groooozny,” he wailed. “My city, the city of Grozny, oh, how I miss you, but I shall return to you …”

There were four of us in the rattling Soviet Army jeep, known endearingly as a UAZik, pronounced wahzik, in the common parlance. Lord knows what image we projected to the well-muscled, sunburned, and deeply suspicious Russian soldiers at the checkpoints. Sometimes they were drunk. Nearly always they were scared. In Chechnya, I’d learned, checkpoints were the measure of one’s day. People did not ask, “How far it is?” but “How many checkpoints are there?” Each day we crossed at least a dozen.

On this sweltering morning in July, we had already passed seventeen. The posts were the center of activity amid the ruins of the city. Conscripts maintained the constant vigil, checking the cars and their passengers, while their officers, hands on radios, sat in shaded huts off the road. But this post was nearly empty, and the OMON officer who stopped us, a pit bull from Irkutsk, was not in a good mood. His arms and neck glowed with the burned pink skin of a new arrival. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a bandanna over his shaved head. Tattoos, the proud emblems of Russian soldiers and prisoners, covered his biceps. “Slava” (“glory”) adorned the right one. It could be a name or a desire. He wore no shirt, only a green vest fitted with grenades, a knife, and magazine clips to feed the Kalashnikov he held firmly in both hands. His fingers seemed soldered to it.

We may have looked legit, but we were a fraud. Issa ostensibly was a ranking member of the wartime administration in Chechnya, the Russians’ desperate attempt at governance in the restive republic of Muslims, however lapsed, Sovietized, and secularized. He had the documents to prove it, but the man who signed them had since been fired. Issa knew the life span of his documents was limited. At any checkpoint his “client,” as he had taken to calling me, could be pulled from the jeep, detained, interrogated, and packed off on the next flight to Moscow.

At fifty-one, Issa boasted a résumé that revealed the successful climb of a Chechen apparatchik. Born in Central Asian exile, in Kyrgyzstan, five years after Stalin had deported the Chechens in 1944, he had graduated from the Grozny Oil Institute in 1971. For twenty-one years he worked at Grozneft, the Chechen arm of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry. He spent the last Soviet years, until Yeltsin clambored onto the tank in 1991, in western Siberia, overseeing the drilling of oil wells in Tyumen. He spoke a smattering of French, a bit of Arabic, and a dozen words in English – all learned, he liked to tease, during stints in Iraq and Syria.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, life went sour fast. Djokhar Dudayev – the Soviet Air Force general who was to lead the stand against Moscow – returned to Grozny, and the fever for independence seized the capital. Issa, then a director of one of Chechnya’s biggest chemical plants, took up arms against the insurgents. In the fall of 1993, more than a year before Yeltsin first sent troops into Chechnya, with Moscow’s backing Issa and his fellow partisans rallied around a former Soviet petrochemicals minister and staged a pathetic attempt to overthrow Dudayev.¹

He was careful not to dispense details, but the scars were hard to hide. His right forearm had a golf ball-size hole, remnants of a bullet taken on the opposition’s line north of Grozny in September 1993. The bullet had pierced his arm and lodged in his left shoulder. A few months later Dudayev’s freedom fighters got him again. Kalashnikov fire had ripped his stomach, intestine, and lungs, leaving a horrific gnarl of tissue in the center of his body. He’d moved his family-a wife, two boys, and a girl – to Moscow. But he wanted to be clear: He never wanted to fight. “We never loved the Russians,” he said. “We just hated that corrupt little mafiya shit.” He was speaking of Dudayev, the fallen independence leader, the man many Chechens, much younger and more devout, now called the founding martyr of the separatist Islamic state, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as Dudayev had ordered his native land rechristened.²

In front of me, behind the wheel, sat Yura. Projecting a genuine sweetness, he was a good-looking kid with blue-green eyes and blond hair that his mother cut short each week with a straight razor. He had thin cheeks, covered with freckles and shaded by the beginnings of a beard. Just twenty-two, he was lucky to have made it this far. He belonged to one of the world’s most unfortunate species; he was an ethnic Russian born in Chechnya. “Our Mowgli,” Issa had jibed, equating Yura with Kipling’s jungle boy. Everyone laughed. There was no need to explain. Mowgli was raised by wolves. The Chechens, centuries ago, had made the wolf their mascot, the embodiment of their struggle.

The last of the crew, bouncing beside me in the back seat of the car, was Shvedov. It was a last name – few ever learned his first – that meant “the Swede.” There was nothing, however, Swedish about him. He had a tanned bald head and a scruffy dirty brown beard and mustache. He carried an ID from the magazine the Motherland, but his paid vocation was what is known in the field as a fixer. For decades he earned a living, or something approximating it, by getting reporters in and out of places they had no business being in. Usually genial and often hilarious, he could be brilliant. But Shvedov’s greatest attribute was that he did not drink. I had known him for years but never traveled with him. After only three days I discovered my own heretofore unknown homicidal urges coming on strong. Somehow I had missed Shvedov’s worst sin: He talked without pause. (When he did not talk, he clacked his upper dentures incessantly on a set of lower teeth blackened by a lifetime of unfiltered Russian tobacco.) A colleague who traveled with him often had offered a tip: “Keep a cigarette in his mouth.” But even smoking, Shvedov talked.

THE SIBERIAN PIT BULL barked at Yura. “Turn off the car,” he instructed. Issa politely tried to ply his documents, but the soldier would have none of it. “Forget your papers, old man,” he shouted. Shvedov, seeing the worst coming, proffered his press card from the Motherland. The OMON officer from Irkutsk had never heard of the honored Soviet monthly, which Shvedov insisted still existed, even though its readership could no longer afford to subscribe. “Stay in the car,” the officer yelled at the insistent bald man in front of him, before turning his sights on me.

“Get out,” he then commanded me.

One thing I’d learned about checkpoints long ago was it was best not to get out – ever. By now we had been stopped so often a routine had formed. A soldier would approach, profanities would rain, we would offer documents, another soldier would lean closer, we would wait, and then, the formalities exhausted, we would be waved through. Silence, I had learned, was the best policy. But this fellow wanted me out of the UAZik. He yelled again. He wanted to frisk the car, search its innards, rummage our bags. I tried to demur. I offered to help.

Undeterred, he opened the door and, with his Kalashnikov, nudged me aside. He lifted the seats, opened the metal canisters underneath, and, maintaining his silence, rifled our bags. When he was done, he grunted and jumped from the UAZik. Yura sat frozen until Issa ordered him, through his teeth, to turn the key, turn the goddamned key. As we moved on, I watched the soldier retreat to his roadside squalor, half a tent strung to a tree and a broken chair posted in the hot sun. With his back to us, he flicked his left hand sharply through the air, as if to swat an insect. We were beneath him.

We drove on, numb to everything but the sun, the dust, the bumps. Issa had stopped singing. Only the roar of the helicopters overhead accompanied us, and then, suddenly, as we turned off the road, the silence returned. We had entered a village without discernible life. No cars, no people. The first trees were tall, bare stumps, their branches shorn long ago. Then yards, all untended, their green veils grown too thick or too thin. Everywhere the branches, heavy with fruit, hung low. The season had come, but no one was picking. Everywhere there was only the weight of the still air. We had arrived.

I had marked Aldy, this Chechen village, on the map of Chechnya I had bought on a Moscow street corner months earlier. Aldy was the destination I’d set myself and shared with no one when I began the journey to the south. Something horrific, unspeakable, had happened here five months before. On a cold Saturday in midwinter, Russian forces had committed one of the bloodiest of the Chechnya massacres in this village. No one will ever know the true body count, but in Aldy on February 5, 2000, Russian soldiers had summarily executed at least sixty civilians.

A half circle of a dozen Chechen men, some lean and strong, others gray and bent over, huddled in a caucus as we drove in. Yura parked the UAZik across the road from them. They did not move from the lonely shade. One man, young, fit, and prominently armed, gripped the Kalashnikov on his shoulder. He wore full camouflage and tiny sunglasses. He could have been on either side, a fighter loyal to the rebels or a Chechen police officer in the Russians’ employ. Issa didn’t like the look of the sunglasses.

I got out, alone, and walked toward the men. One of the older men was separating leaves from a thin branch in his hands. As I approached, the young Chechen stepped forward. In his hands was the AK-47, shiny and new. Strapped across his chest was a leather bandolier, bulging with clips, grenades, and a pair of wooden-handled knives. A century and a half earlier Alexandre Dumas père had noted the Chechens’ love of weaponry during a romantic romp across the Caucasus in 1858, a time when the Chechens struggled against the tsar. “All these mountain fighters are fanatically brave,” wrote the creator of The Three Musketeers, “and whatever money they acquire is spent on weapons. A Chechen … may be literally in rags, but his sword, dagger and gun are of the finest quality.”³

I told the armed man that I was a journalist, an American. I’d come to talk to people who were here the day “they” came. We did not shake hands, but he nodded and shifted the rifle from his hands to his shoulder. “Walk with me,” he said. The sunglasses, their gold frame catching the sun, covered his eyes. Slowly we crossed the dirt road and headed away from the jeep, away from my guides, away from the Chechen men standing against the wall of metal gates and fences.

Oddly, a calm enveloped me. I kept walking, afraid to lose pace. Three options formed in my mind. This fellow is taking you around the corner, just out of sight of your companions, where you’ll be summarily executed; or he’s intent on kidnapping you, leading you to a house nearby to be sold on down the road from there; or he’s bringing you to see someone – an elder? – who will listen to your best introduction and then either bless your presence in the village or send you away.

I had come to Aldy prepared. By March an amateur video, forty-six minutes long, made by the villagers had surfaced in Moscow. It featured corpses and widows. I had interviewed the lucky ones; the survivors who’d made it out. I had studied the reports, detailed and methodical, of the human rights activists. But I wanted to learn more than the extent of the massacre. I wanted to understand the motivation behind the horror. Aldy was not, as an American diplomat, a man of high rank and expertise in Russia, had tried to convince me, “just another case of Russian heavy-handedness.” It was a conspicuous illustration, in miniature, of Russia’s military onslaught in Chechnya.

The young Chechen led me on. But even before we reached the gate of the house, a wave of relief hit, and my shoulders settled. I knew where we were going. I had memorized a hand-drawn map of Aldy’s long streets. We were calling on the man the fortunate ones had told me to see first, Shamkhan, the village mullah.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.