This is how the bodies had ended up in the pit. The gang was so confident that no one was coming after them that they had barely bothered to cover the latest bodies with much earth. They just tossed them into the pit. Some reports suggested that the mob leader gang-raped, then murdered, his own fourteen-year-old daughter. Distraught families begged the police for help but got none. In one telling case, the police even actually began to investigate the brother of the missing teenager, however unlikely it was that he had murdered her. When the gang was finally arrested they were linked to fourteen murders and suspected of up to fifty in total. Yet they were not even the biggest killers in Nizhny Tagil. They were nothing compared to the tidal wave of drugs and addiction that had hit the Urals after Gorbachev started ‘restructuring’.
The collapse hit Nizhny Tagil harder than most. Everything – from the roads to the factories and the hospitals received no investment and fell into disrepair. The collapse of the Soviet Union is something very literal here. It was the collapse of public services. Workers went unpaid and mafia gangs brazenly shot each other on the streets. With the bureaucracy and the economy in breakdown, the city was at its most vulnerable to a tidal wave of heroin from Central Asia. Russia found itself with open borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which turned into trafficking routes for Afghan heroin as the farmers of these former Soviet states and satellites turned to the drugs trade to make up for the loss of agricultural subsidies from Moscow.
Socially, it was as if the city had been hit by a plague. The population fell by almost 100,000 between 1989 and 2002. Heroin addiction and Aids had been rarities in the Soviet Union. They now became ubiquitous. Drug use exploded by 400 per cent between 1992 and 2002.20 The number of heroin addicts climbed during the Yeltsin and Putin years from virtually nil to almost 2.5 million.21 There are today a minimum of 1 million Aids cases in Russia, which also consumes almost one-fifth of the world’s heroin.22 Alcoholism rose, with as many as 0.5 million drinking themselves to death every year.23
Nizhny Tagil and the rest of the Sverdlovsk region were amongst the hardest hit of all ‘oblasts’ in Russia. The addiction rate in the province did not double or treble, but jumped more than seventy-four times over, between the years 1990 and 2000. One of the many who turned into a junkie was the brother of Vasily Sigarev, a playwright from Nizhny Tagil. He wasn’t a playwright in those days but was driving whores around at night. He would wait outside in the car until they came back. Luck brought him to Ekaterinburg; talent found him a stage in Moscow, for plays that combine the despair of Samuel Beckett with the brutality of a Russian cop-thriller. They are about boys drinking the night before being sent to Chechnya, about an abusive couple lost at a clapped-out railway station, but essentially they are all about this one speech, in one play, that an actor yells out at the audience:
When you get back to your capital you can tell them how people live in Russia, ‘cause they don’t have the faintest idea. Even if God was supposed to knock us out equal, we’re only equal on the outside. Two arms, two legs and a head with a body. Every other way we’re different. We’re so different it’s frightening.24
Why had people ever voted for Putin in the first place, then? I began to ask Vasily this question as we went into his apartment. Outside children were playing in a skip. ‘Go on… take a picture of our poverty then, if you’re so interested in it!’ These two-room apartments were mostly bought on mortgages from the plant. We sat on his balcony and drank beer and smoked a packet of tarry Apollo-Soyuz. ‘I voted for Putin twice,’ he explained. He had four main arguments.
• Workers’ salaries had risen from 2,500 rubles a month to 35,000 rubles a month.
• Street killings had stopped (more or less).
• He had gone on holiday to Egypt (once).
• He had bought a computer (for his son).
In fact Vasily’s decision to stop voting for Putin and choose Prokhorov, the liberal-minded oligarch asked to run by the Kremlin to catch protest votes – ‘He’s the best manager in the country. He’d manage all this mess really well’ – caught two themes that he shared with the other workers in the factory I spoke to. In industrial Russia there was a similar sense of angst at the dysfunctions of Putinism, but it was not phrased around rights like in Moscow, but inefficiency. There was complete indifference to the freedoms of the media, Khodorkovsky (‘That Jew deserves jail!’) or the right to compete fairly in the elections, but real anger at the squalid state of public services.
‘In the 1990s it was so much worse. It was a dangerous time,’ sighed Vasily. ‘Things have got better. But Navalny that provocateur is right – things will not get any better as the United Russia party is the party of crooks and thieves. All the policemen and the judges and the bureaucrats that I know that are stealing in Nizhny Tagil are members of that party… But there’s one guy you have to meet. Go meet Bychkov. He’s the leader of the opposition here. Good lad.’
So I went to meet Egor Bychkov. This man in his early twenties represents a trend that obsesses Moscow intellectuals for good and ill. The watchword for the post-Soviet intelligentsia has been ‘civil society’. The Soviet Union, with all under the control of the state, infantilized Russians by giving them nothing to take responsibility for. In Yeltsin’s Russia, when the state suddenly declared it no longer assumed the responsibility to provide for them, it created a social vacuum in the country. The post-Soviet state was responsible for nothing, whilst post-homo Sovieticus was also responsible for nothing. The metaphor for this sorry state of affairs became the stairwell. The privatized flats people lived in were immaculate, but the common stairwells, for which the state no longer held responsibility were neglected, filthy and almost always foul. They stood for the complete disregard for public space in a privatized Russia.
Hope, for the intelligentsia, was supposed to lie amongst ‘civil society’. Average Russians were expected to slowly emerge from a post-totalitarian mindset and assume responsibility through NGOs, charity and activism. Though part of such thinking, like in the USA, was the hint that people should ‘do for themselves’ what the state had chosen not to pay for, there was also a distinctly post-Soviet absence of social engagement by the older generation and the new middle class. ‘At first we didn’t understand the country was falling apart,’ as Surkov put it.25
Egor Bychkov and the ‘City Without Drugs’ was both exactly the kind of organization the intelligentsia had been waiting for and the kind of movement they deeply feared. Like most things in Putin’s Russia this ‘NGO’ was born at the crossroads of seemingly contradictory forces. It is a ‘civil society initiative’, but at the same time it carries many of the aggressive, paranoid and nationalistic memes of Putinism itself. It is an organization that describes itself as anti-authoritarian, but born not out of the fight against social oppression, but from where the state is weak.
The ‘City Without Drugs’ began at the beginning of Putin’s reign, in 2000. The drugs rate had exploded 500 per cent since 1992.26 In Sverdlovsk region the streets of its capital Ekaterinburg, the locals say, had turned into ‘shooting galleries’ and dealers hovered in every stairwell. Its founder is a man who captured the shift in a generation of young men in the Urals from the wanton, often joyful embrace of 1990s chaos and criminality to an overwhelming rejection of it and craving for moral, political and social order. That man was Evgeny Roizman. He is a social activist with a criminal past, a Russian nationalist proud to be half-Jewish, who leads an ‘NGO’ fighting the drugs trade and aiming to cure addicts with the methods of a criminal gang, who runs a system of private ‘re-education’ camps, whilst also an icon-collector and a loving father of three.