Public rejection of the shestidesitaniki’s ‘pathos’ and ‘idealism’ became the main raison d’être of their children’s generation. In 1992, in a television programme called Moment istiny (Moment of Truth), Andrei Karaulov, a journalist at Nezavisimaya gazeta (Independent Newspaper), talked to two intellectuals of his generation – Alexander Timofeevsky and Andrei Malgin. ‘What they [shestidesiatniki] cried over – we laugh at,’ Malgin summed up the motto of his generation. ‘You have to take life lighter and more ironically,’ he explained. Karaulov questioned his interlocutors: Did they support Yeltsin? ‘We would support him if he took the country down the same path as South Korea.’ What Russia needed, they argued, was an Augusto Pinochet who could reform the country and establish order while building capitalism.
Karaulov, who was also the son-in-law of Mikhail Shatrov, author of plays about Lenin, reprimanded his interlocutors for taking too radical a position. To him, the shestidesiatniki were neither right nor wrong – they were irrelevant. People like him, Karaulov said, were the real winners of August 1991. It was a disturbing thought.
The divisions between people and generations at the time of the Soviet collapse occurred not just along political lines – those were simply the most visible. Most people with a brain joined the ‘democratic’ camp whether they believed in it or not. Far less visible, and in the long term far more important, were the rifts that were opening up along moral and ethical lines.
The irony is that Karaulov, who appeared to be claiming the high moral ground, was arguably one of the most cynical Russian journalists. In Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick describes Karaulov as a ‘journalist-hustler the likes of whom I never had seen before or have since – at least not in Moscow’.1 One day Karaulov took Remnick to see the editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya gazeta, Vitaly Tretyakov. As they passed the KGB buildings on Lubyanka Square, Karaulov tried to sell Remnick – literally, and for dollars – ‘some crackpot spy-story documents involving the Bolshoi Theatre… When I refused Karaulov’s “tip” on the Bolshoi and explained the rules about not paying for information, he seemed alternately bemused and hurt. “Besides, you’d never find the place without me. You owe me for that at least.”’ In the following decade Karaulov would become one of the most despised figures in television journalism, whose Moment of Truth, even by the relative standards of Russian journalism, became a byword for cynicism and slander.
After the television programme, Malgin had a debate with Yegor Yakovlev, which he printed in his magazine Stolitsa (Capital City) under the headline ‘LOOK WHO IS GONE’.2 Yegor had just been fired as the head of Central Television – the job he had taken immediately after the August 1991 coup – and decided to start his last newspaper Obshchaya gazeta. Malgin attacked Yegor and his circle. ‘You served the power. You persuaded our poor, brainwashed generation that revolution is good, that socialism is even better and we should all march towards communism.’ Yegor tried to defend his generation. ‘You don’t understand the tragedy of our generation: we tried to improve the political system, not to bring it down… Was it possible? I don’t know. The problem was that whenever you try to improve the system, it begins to self-destruct.’ But, as Yegor argued, there was nothing wrong with the ideas of social justice and equality in themselves.
Malgin cut him short: ‘After everything the country had been through, to say anything good about socialism is indecent.’ A year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yegor was in no position to defend socialism as a political system, but he told Malgin that extolling capitalism and boasting about the bourgeoisie were equally improper. ‘Yet, in Russia everyone is now dreaming of capitalism in its most primitive and inhuman sense.’ At the end of the conversation Malgin told Yegor: ‘For young people – those who are not even thirty-four, but half that age – you are hopeless [as a generation].’ Yegor did not argue: ‘It is sad, of course, but I have to say that my generation has gone from the stage. One could, perhaps, publish a newspaper of a “gone generation” but every obituary in such a paper would mean that the paper had lost a reader.’
Yegor sensed the generational shift personally and acutely because it occurred within his own family. His son Vladimir Yakovlev was the founding editor of Kommersant, the first and most formative newspaper of the nascent capitalist era that became the manifesto of the ‘sons” generation. A true journalist, fond of an effective ending, Yegor marked the signing-off of his last issue of Moskovskie novosti in 1991 by interviewing his own son.
The conversation between the father and son was tense. Undercurrents ran through every question and answer and much was left between the lines. Politics did not interest Vladimir. When Yegor asked his son to come to Gorbachev’s leaving party hosted for journalists, Vladimir did not turn up. To him, Gorbachev and his father were history. He was far more excited by the opportunities that were opened up by the Soviet collapse to deliberate on the reasons for that collapse. He saw the Soviet system as a hindrance, an aberration that prevented people making money without falling foul of Soviet bureaucracy.
For Yegor, who was a Soviet man with a state salary, the idea of his son becoming an entrepreneur was incomprehensible. ‘I could never understand you, nor agree with you. Even in the smallest thing: in your readiness to receive money not from a state exchequer, but elsewhere…’ Yegor concluded the two-page spread with a reminiscence that had neatly encircled the conversation. ‘A quarter of a century ago, I published my first book. In it, I dwelled on the problem of fathers and sons. It was called I Walk Along With You, confirming that I was ready to carry on along my father’s path. I thought it was possible at the time. I dedicated it to my son, “Vovka [diminutive of Vladimir], a participant in future debates”. I could hardly imagine what kind of conversation I would have with him quarter of a century later.’3
Vladimir Yakovlev, named after his Ch.K grandfather, certainly did not plan to walk alongside his father. In fact, he directed his energy towards shaking off his father’s grip over him. Yet he shared some of his father’s traits, including his energy, ambition and belief in the transformative power of information and the printed word. Kommersant (its name comes from ‘commerce’) did not just reflect but defined and directed Russia’s transition to capitalism, in the same way as Moskovskie novosti defined Perestroika.
Like the capitalist era itself, Kommersant was born out of a co-operative that Vladimir Yakovlev had started in the late 1980s while working as a journalist at Ogonyok, the Perestroika weekly. The co-operative dealt in information and was a by-product of a journalistic assignment: an editor had asked Vladimir to write an article about how to open a co-operative and, in the interest of the story, to open one himself. Vladimir soon realized that while there was no shortage of people wanting to start a business, few of them had any idea of how to do so.