Dead Souls
The face of Putinism that stares out of mass corruption is neither one of liberal or state-capitalist authoritarian modernization. The allegations that the Russian elite could consider it acceptable to divert funds for medical equipment in order to build a palace – in a country with a health care catastrophe where, on average, male life expectancy is at the same level as impoverished Papua New Guinea or Pakistan – is truly outstanding. They show that though the Putin regime may have ideological tendencies, and stated ambitions towards modernization and state strengthening, its politics is dampened by its avarice.
The face of the regime seen in the mirror of such allegations is one that is neither wholeheartedly interested in building an authoritarian ‘China’ nor modernizing into ‘Europe’, as its political ambitions are knotted into financial interests. It is a regime whose insiders would never truly confront the West, for risk of losing their assets, nor which would appear capable of improving the state to Western standards, for risk of undermining their hold on them. Worse still, having directed such a massive transfer of assets, Putin is vulnerable that should he leave power they could be redistributed again.
‘Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them,’ wrote the young Marx, ‘for our fate will be to become the first living people to enter the new life.’35 This was the spirit of Yeltsin’s court and Putin’s Moscow, the stage for Surkov’s ‘puppet shows’. This was the capital of a country where the oligarchs and the power brokers – with the most unlikely of CVs – had not inherited, but seized huge pieces of the Soviet raw materials complex. They felt they had won out where everyone else had lost; they felt they had understood how to live in a country where everyone else was drowning – because they were geniuses. The Putin court, those that had survived, those that triumphed, felt not only incredible self-worth, but also the right to incredible privilege. To quote Surkov:
We must all agree with the following proposition, genius is always in the minority, but their doings make the majority richer. And the majority must understand, that there are privileges, which we give to talented people…36
CHAPTER SIX
DIZZY WITH SUCCESS
BY 2006 RUSSIAN fiction had taken a darker turn. The writer Vladimir Sorokin was so appalled by what he saw as the political drift towards a dictatorship that he wrote Day of the Oprichnik. The year is 2028 and the monarchy has at last been restored. The nation has burnt its passports on Red Square. Russia is walled off behind a great wall and the Oprichniks – as the dedicated servants of the sovereign are known – roam Moscow raping the wives of their enemies, constantly taking bribes and guzzling imported narcotics, before repenting fervently before the Lord. But proud, imperial, holy Russia is just an illusion. The entire country is economically dependent on China. Asiatic settlers are everywhere in Siberia and dominate commerce even in Moscow. The ruler’s own children are brought up speaking Mandarin. On instructions from the Kremlin, one Oprichnik is ordered to take banned classics to be burnt by a Siberian witch. He begs her for a sight of the future, as she tosses Anna Karenina into the fire, but she just snarls, ‘The country will be alright.’1 This is a thin satire on Putin’s state. Yet the idea of a country dominated by an arrogant, at times criminal, elite was not just a flight of fancy. Sorokin had been harassed and sued by the Kremlin’s youth groups for ‘pornography’ and his works had been thrown into a giant papier-mâché toilet before being dynamited. But outside the cramped and dimly lit offices of a tiny, ageing and ignored circle of human rights activists – nobody seemed to care. Why?
The short answer as to why Russians shrugged off creeping authoritarianism is – supermarkets. The long answer is that during the 2000s Russia enjoyed the first period of macro-economic stabilization since the mid-1980s, finally bringing dividends to the masses from de-Sovietization. Macro-economic stabilization brought about a social transformation. Between the 1998 default and the outbreak of financial crisis in 2008 Russia ceased to be a shortage economy and became a consumer society. This meant that the 2000s for everyday people was not just a decade of weak institutions and creeping authoritarianism – but globalization. The same trends of opening up to the world, mass foreign travel and foreign investment that were changing China and Brazil, were remaking Russia. This boom helped build an emerging middle class, which now armed with cheap mobiles and computers, was making the leap into the consumer lifestyles that Russians had craved since the USSR began falling short of rising expectations in the 1960s. The people loved it and associated it with Putin. In the Moscow suburb of Zuzino, one housewife once bluntly told me, ‘I lost interest in politics when I stopped having to shop in the market and started to shop in the hypermarket.’ She spoke for millions.
The material hardship that Russians endured during the shortage economy of the late Soviet Union and the Yeltsin depression was endlessly contrasted with the consumer society that has come to Russia during Putinism. For instance, in the 1980s condoms disappeared from Moscow for months; shortages saw toilet paper also disappear. Economic collapse in the late Soviet era meant that by 1989 the average person spent 40–68 hours a month standing in line.2 By April 1991 fewer than one in eight of those polled said they had seen meat recently in state stores, whilst fewer than one in twelve had seen butter.3 In the 1990s millions of state employees were often not paid at all. Others were regularly given their pay cheques in vodka or meat, if they were lucky. There were bread shortages comparable to those last seen in Western Europe immediately after the Second World War. The economy was in such a dire mess in 1998 that large enterprises were doing 73 per cent of their business in barter.4
In those first few years of Putin, the Moscow that I got to know was a dirty place in a poor state of repair. It felt like a wrecked satellite of Europe, whose people constantly asked you to bring the unobtainable from the West, before apologizing over and over for ‘our Russian poverty’. Its sense of style was summed up in leopard-skin print and leather jackets. The streets were full of the corporations of the dying – whimpering street children by the railway stations, staggering babushkas by the metro gates, shivering prostitutes on the boulevards. Twice, both in winter months, I saw collapsed old women in the metro tunnels. The drab, darkly dressed crowds stepped over them. I was certain they were dead, but I too stepped over them.
This was nothing surprising. The metro was where the homeless usually went to die in winter, to die where it was warm. This Moscow, the one I first criss-crossed, was a city so full of countless disfigured homeless alcoholics, in their thick, stinking, putrid uniforms of dirty, dark clothes, sweating and staggering between the monuments of the defeated and drawn to the bustle of the imperial train terminuses (Belarus, Kazan, Kiev, Kursk, Leningrad, Yaroslavl…), that it was as if a race of zombies lived side by side with the Muscovites. These, the ‘bamjee’, were the victims of the Yeltsin depression and the abandonment of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. They had always been many, but as I was told again and again, as I asked about this dying underclass, no one could quite explain how it had undone so many.
In the winter, when the temperature can fall as low as –30ˆC, when car headlamps and the street lights make the snow as bright as the night moon, they would gather around vents, trying to keep going all night so not to stop, not to fall into the exhaustion that turns into frozen death. In the day they would try to sleep in the metro, especially on the carriages of the circle line, in the cavernous marble Stalinist halls, by the baroque mosaics, under austere colonnades, in the dingy light, by the roar of the trains on platforms designed by the red architect Alexey Dushkin after examining drawings of ancient Egyptian tombs. This is where many, in this underground populated by thousands of russet-coloured wild dogs, gave up, especially in February, and died.