‘Moscow in December 1991 is one of my most painful memories. Grim food lines, even without their usual squabble and scenes. Pristinely empty shops. Women rushing about in search of any food to buy. Dollar prices in a deserted Tishinsky market. An average salary of seven dollars a month. Expectations of disaster were in the air.’15 This is how Yegor Gaidar, who took charge of and responsibility for the Russian economy, remembered the month when the Soviet Union came to an end. There was talk of hunger, complete paralysis of transportation, collapse of the heating system. Russia was bankrupt.
On 2 January 1992 Gaidar removed the state regulation of prices for most products, which led to a threefold increase in the price of food, revealing an inflation which had been previously hidden by shortages and which now wiped out people’s nominal savings. Destroying worthless rouble savings was the only way of making money work again. A few weeks later, Gaidar lifted restrictions on trade, allowing people to sell anything anywhere, and removed import barriers.
Almost overnight central Moscow filled up with makeshift trading stalls. People – young and old – came to sell anything they had – a pair of socks, a bottle of vodka, a packet of butter, pornographic magazines, Bibles, apples, anything. It was an unseemly sight, but in the winter of 1991 nobody was thinking about aesthetics apart from Kommersant, of course. The younger and more energetic travelled to Turkey and China, filling up cheap plastic holdalls with jackets, coats and underwear, and brought them back for sale. These shuttle traders clothed the country. This was not a sign of poverty. It was a liberation of forces and instincts that had been fermenting under the surface of official Soviet propaganda for years and were constrained by the state. The people who sold bread and butter on the street did so not because they themselves could not afford it, but because they were allowed to trade.
In the early 1990s Russian capitalists bubbled up from underground. They were black-marketeers, opportunists, adventurists, hustlers and so on. Most of them had cut their teeth in co-operatives. They were colourful and they marked themselves out by dressing brightly, extravagantly and mostly tastelessly. They favoured purple and fluorescent yellow jackets. But bright did not mean beautiful or nutritious. Poisonous flowers or plants often mark themselves out in bright colours – a form of defence or a warning to birds and animals: eat me and you will die.
These bright bubbles were Kommersant’s people, whom it wished to fashion and educate, but above all to whom it wanted to give a veneer of respectability and self-awareness as a class – or to use Lenin’s term, ‘class consciousness’. ‘The most important quality in a newspaper is not its information or emotions, but a sense of social belonging. You pick up a newspaper and you feel part of a certain class,’ Vladimir Yakovlev explained.16 The paper appeared first; the class came later.
Kommersant organized life that lacked structure into rubrics and subjects. ‘We have always argued at our editorial meetings which page this or that character should go on. Is he on page two – which was about economic policy and those who made it – or should he be on the business pages, or should he be moved to page nine which was about crime,’ recalled Elena Nusinova, an editor who started along with Yakovlev at Kommersant. ‘The usual progression was from an official, to a businessman, to a criminal. Although sometimes it worked the other way around. The conversation went like this: “Should he be on your page or on mine? OK, let him stay on your page (business) one more time, and then he will move to mine (crime) unless they kill him first in which case he moves to obituaries.”’17
The early 1990s was a wild and entrepreneurial time, when anything seemed possible. The state was weak and private initiative and individualism were strong. It was, perhaps, the freest time in Russian history. As Vladimir Yakovlev said, ‘We were like kids in a kindergarten with real machine guns.’18
Kommersant was the flesh and blood of Russian capitalism and and bore some of its unattractive birthmarks. It was partly funded by an American grain trader Thomas Dittmer, whom Vladimir Yakovlev had courted in the late 1980s.[1] Dittmer, who hosted Vladimir Yakovlev at his forty-two-acre (16.2-hectare) Chicago estate, was so impressed with his chutzpah and ambition that he agreed to finance $400,000’s worth of equipment for Kommersant in return for exclusive rights to Kommersant or Postfaktum information in the West.[2] (Vladimir was planning to have an English-language edition of Kommersant.) This did not stop Pavlovsky trying to peddle the content of Postfaktum to Dow-Jones and Reuters directly.
Within a few months of launching a short-lived English-language edition of Kommersant, Yakovlev started to lose interest in Dittmer and his Refco trading business and decided to ditch the arrangement. After a series of rows, Vladimir, in order to free himself from any obligations, secretly renamed Co-operative Fakt – with which Dittmer had signed a contract – as Joint Stock Company Fakt. ‘There is no Co-operative Fakt any more. And if there is no more Co-operative Fakt, there is no more Kommersant,’ Vladimir explained to Copetas. This was a very Russian way of doing business. At the same time Vladimir Yakovlev was negotiating a new deal with a French media group, La Tribune de l’Expansion, which agreed to pay $3.5 million for a 40 per cent stake in Kommersant.
Yakovlev argued that from a legal point of view the deal with the French holding did not contradict his arrangement with Dittmer. ‘Refco had the right to all our content outside Russia. The French formed a joint venture with us. But from the point of view of human relationships, it was questionable.’20 In the early 1990s, though, nobody asked questions about the ethics of doing business. ‘There were no rules. A businessman was driven or stopped only by what was inside him. Some people thought it was OK to steal, but not OK to kill. Some people thought it was OK to kill, but not to touch family members,’ said Nusinova.
The new class of businessmen that emerged from the rubble of the Soviet economy thought of themselves as the champions of capitalism as they understood the word. In some ways they were victims of a Soviet propaganda and ideology that portrayed capitalism not as a set of rules and ethics based on the ideas of honest competition and fair play, but as a cut-throat cynical system where craftiness and ruthlessness were more important than integrity, where everyone screws each other and where money is the only arbiter of success.
Russian capitalism had nothing to do with Weber’s Protestant ethics. It was not built on a centuries-long tradition of private property and feudal honour and dignity. In fact it hardly had any foundation at all, other than the teaching of Marxism-Leninism that described private property as theft. Since they favoured property, they did not mind theft. The words ‘conscience’, ‘morality’ and ‘integrity’ were tainted by ideology and belonged in a different vocabulary – one that was used by their fathers’ generation. ‘For us these were swear-words which the Soviet system professed in its slogans while killing and depraving people,’ Vladimir Yakovlev said.21
1
Yakovlev was introduced to Dittmer by an American journalist and one of