The tenets of Soviet ‘morality’ and socialism were removed only to reveal a vacuum of morals – in itself the result of the Soviet experiment of breeding a new being. The transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet society was accompanied by a change in perception of what makes one succeed in life. In 1988, 45 per cent of the country felt it was ‘diligence and hard work’. In 1992 only 31 per cent felt these would get you anywhere. The factors that gained importance, on the other hand, were ‘good connections’, ‘dexterity’ and ‘being a good wheeler-dealer’. The first Russian businessmen had all those qualities and boasted about them.22
In June 1992 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Menatep Bank, published a book that could be considered a manifesto of a new capitalist man. He called it Chelovek s rublem (Man with a Rouble) – an ironic take on a famous Soviet play about the Bolshevik Revolution, Chelovek s ruzhiem (Man with a Gun). Imitating the combative style of 1930s agitprop, Khodorkovsky wrote:
MENATEP is the realization of the right to riches… Our goals are clear, our tasks are defined – we aspire to be billionaires… Membership of the Communist Party was a good school for us… The Party took away a lot, but it also gave us a lot: experience, connections, life status. Not to use all these would have been a mistake… Enough of living according to [Vladimir] Ilyich [Lenin]! Our compass is Profit, gained in strict accordance to the law. Our hero – His Financial Majesty, the Capital, since only he can lead to riches as a norm of life. Enough of utopia, the future is Business! A man who can turn a dollar into a billion is a genius.23
The laws did not really apply, but profit was certainly the compass. One ‘genius’ who turned a dollar bill into millions through an alchemy of Russia’s banking system was Alexander Smolensky, the owner of Stolichny Bank, who lent money to Kommersant.
A man with no higher education who began as a typesetter in a state printing house made his first money in the 1970s by printing Bibles for the black market. After a two-year jail sentence for the theft of state property (ink and paper), he worked in construction and decoration firms, selling building materials on the side. In the early 1990s Stolichny Bank handled co-operators’ accounts. He used the rouble to speculate on the foreign currency exchange rate. With the rouble depreciating nearly 100 per cent between 1991 and 1994, this was easy money made quickly. ‘You give money in the morning and collect your earnings in the evening. It was like a machine that was printing money,’ Smolensky explained.24
Vladimir Yakovlev borrowed money from Smolensky partly to pay for the paper’s new editorial offices. As part of the ‘debt service’, Yakovlev blocked any negative news about Smolensky and allowed an occasional puff story to appear in print. Kommersant journalists got their own measure of Smolensky’s bank, though. Their salaries were paid into Stolichny accounts and when, in 1998, Russia defaulted on its domestic debt, Smolensky declared his bank insolvent and froze deposits while reshuffling assets into a new banking empire. Kommersant journalists later managed to get their money back. But foreign investors, who had put more than $1 billion into it, never did. All they deserved, Smolensky said in an interview to the Wall Street Journal, was ‘dead donkey ears’.25 Such was the newspaper, such was the capitalism.
The 1991 turmoil brought to the surface not the hardest working, but the most impertinent. ‘Men with a Rouble’ were the biggest winners of the Soviet transition to capitalism and the main beneficiaries of the mass privatization. Gaidar entrusted privatization to his friend Anatoly Chubais, another participant of the economic seminars in the 1980s. Both men saw its aim as breaking the communists’ grip on the commanding heights of the Russian economy and creating a class of proprietors who would have a vested interest in liberal reforms. ‘We were perfectly aware that we were creating a new class of owners and we did not have a choice between an “honest” privatization and a “dishonest” one. Our choice was between “bandit communism” or “bandit capitalism”,’ Chubais explained.26
To create a veneer of inclusion and justice, the reformers decided to sell state firms for special vouchers issued to all 148 million people in the country. Yeltsin unveiled the ‘privatization cheque’ on 19 August 1992 – the first anniversary of the August 1991 coup – as a reward for people’s defiance. In fact the cheques were just a marketing gimmick since their value was determined not by the nominal figure of 10,000 roubles printed on them but by the amount of property on sale. But when Chubais went on television and told people, most of whom had no idea what ‘shares’ meant, that each voucher was worth two Volga cars, metaphorically speaking, everyone took it literally, only to realize that they had been duped.
Instead of symbolizing reward, the vouchers came to symbolize deceit. Not knowing what to do with these ‘vouchers’, most people either sold them straight away or entrusted them to mutual funds that sprang up overnight, promising to invest them in gold and diamonds and disappearing without a trace. Yet, in the course of two years, 70 per cent of the state economy, including natural resources, was sold.[3] A new class of private owners was created and the free market experiment began.
Confident that its audience had increased and that it needed information to manage its new wealth, the weekly Kommersant turned into a daily. If Russia was to have a proper market, it had to have a proper business newspaper first. ‘For those who don’t know what A2 [format] is – it looks like the Wall Street Journal,’ Kommersant addressed its readers. ‘For those who don’t know what Wall Street Journal is, it looks like Pravda – in terms of the page size… A daily newspaper of such a size – at least a relatively NORMAL newspaper – has not been published since 1917… We’ve decided to try.’27
Nobody really knew what ‘normal’ was, but, like the title of КоммерсантЪ-Daily, it consisted of two parts – Russia’s pre-revolutionary past and its Western ‘daily’ future. This ‘normal’ life was supposed to be organized by a ‘normal’ daily newspaper. The mention of Pravda in Kommersant’s jokey editorial was not entirely accidental. A ‘collective organizer and propagandist’, as Lenin called newspapers, Pravda in the 1930s tried to model a New Soviet man – an exemplary worker and citizen – and set the tenets of the state-dominated, collective life. Seventy years later, Kommersant assumed a similar role in setting the tenets of the new capitalist orders dominated by the individual. It tried to model a new type of man and called him a ‘New Russian’ (spelled in English): ‘Clever, calm, positive, and rich – these are the people who are forming a new elite and who are setting a new style and new standards of living.’28
Kommersant hailed private values and initiative and above all success – something that the vast majority of the country, brought up on the ideas of paternalism and equality, had little affinity with. Almost 90 per cent of New Russians, according to Kommersant, considered themselves self-made people who had had a lucky break. To visualize a new Russian, Kommersant made a short advertisement with a young, suave actor who had all the attributes of an ‘ideal’ reader: a dark suit, a tie with a pin, a shirt with cuff-links, talking on a massive satellite phone, sitting in the back of a limousine, an office in some Stalin-era factory club and a copy of Kommersant-Daily in hand. ‘Your newspaper, boss,’ an invisible voice intoned.
3
The majority of Russians supported market reforms and the privatization of land plots and small businesses, but not of large factories and natural resources. Still, most saw entrepreneurs as a positive force that could pull the country out of its economic trough.