'Russia isn't Haiti and we won't be treated as though we were,' Yeltsin fumed to Clinton's point man on Russia, Strobe Talbott. T don't like it when the US flaunts its superiority. Russia's difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons, but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again! I repeat: Russia will rise again!'3
On the eve of the millennium, Yeltsin announced he was stepping down. He left the country mired in poverty, the wealth in the hands of a few greedy oligarchs and the army fighting a grim and demoralizing war in Chechnya.
Perhaps most troubling of all, Yeltsin's years in charge did not provide a clear idea of what kind of country modern Russia should be. Gleb Pavlovsky, a spin doctor and political technologist' who worked for both Yeltsin's and Putin's Kremlin, later told me about the panic during the handover period: 'There was a real sense that Yeltsin could leave and there would be utter chaos. Most of the population didn't recognize the Russian Federation as a real thing. They felt like they lived in some kind of strange offshoot of the Soviet Union. We had to ensure the handover, but we also had to create some sense of nation.'
Yeltsin, a man who had once embodied hopes of future prosperity, cut a sorry figure, of unfulfilled expectations and missed opportunities, as he gave his slurred farewell address on the eve of the millennium: 'I am asking your forgiveness for failing to justify the hopes of those who believed me when I said we would leap from the grey, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous, and civilized future. I believed in that dream. I believed we would cover that distance in one leap. We didn't.'
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I first travelled to Russia in January 2000, a few weeks after Yeltsin stepped down. I was eighteen, and before starting at university spent four months teaching English at a secondary school in Moscow. The Russian capital then was a dark, chaotic city. The cautious optimism that some people had felt about the future a decade earlier had all but evaporated. Life in the 1990s had progressed along the lines of a particularly implausible episode of a job-swap reality TV show: biochemists were now taxi drivers; market stallholders were CEOs. The criminals became the authorities and those who tried to stand up against them became the criminals. A few people had pilfered all the ladders, leaving the rest to be devoured by snakes.
The poverty among the majority of the population made for widespread squalor and rampant exploitation. At Komsomolskaya metro station, in the centre of Moscow, there was a Dostoyevskian tableau of despair on emerging at ground leveclass="underline" dazed homeless drunks, penniless grannies hawking a few sorry wares spread out forlornly before them on the concrete, and a shabby market selling cheap Chinese electronics and knock-off DVDs of hardcore porn.
Sex, which had been a taboo topic in Soviet times, was everywhere. At several points on the Garden Ring, the multi-lane highway that encircles the very centre of Moscow, prostitutes stood by the roadside in skimpy outfits, offering their services. Their leather-jacketed pimps paid off the police to turn a blind eye. Any sensible citizen knew to avoid the police, who were far more likely to shake you down for a bribe than help you out. Heroin abuse was rampant; the country was on its way to having the world's fastest-growing HIV epidemic. If Moscow was bad, outside the capital life was much, much harder.
The shortages of the late-Soviet period had created a nation of resourceful barterers, and now, absolutely everything was for sale: sex, marriage, a doctor's note to avoid being called up to fight in Chechnya, your acquittal or someone else's conviction in a court case, or a ready- made PhD thesis to boost your qualifications. The appeals to traditional Russian values', that would become official Kremlin rhetoric much later, resonated because of their aspirational quality: people wanted to believe in a country of supposed purity and chastity exactly because what they saw before their eyes was so at odds with it.
After my months in Moscow, I spent several weeks traversing Russia in the third-class platskart carriages of Trans-Siberian trains. The dormitories on wheels puttered across the endless Eurasian landmass, the air inside thick with a blend of sweaty feet, fish lunches, and a sooty tang emanating from the coal-fired samovars that dispensed boiling water for tea. I remember snippets of conversations with my fellow passengers in the open-plan carriages: a skinny young conscript who had nervously bade farewell to his parents and was en route to his army base; two gossipy matriarchs travelling on a four-day journey home to Irkutsk, after visiting children who had fled the nest to Moscow; a pair of go-go dancers from the Siberian city of Ulan Ude who dreamed of moving to South Korea and making a fortune working the restaurants and nightclubs there; and a duo of young wheeler-dealer businessmen from Vladivostok who force-fed me vodka amid much bravado and then vomited all over the carriage at night, much to the despair, if not the surprise, of the beleaguered attendant who had to mop up the mess.
My unexpected presence in the cheapest class was met with ever- changing combinations of warmth, aggression, inquisitiveness, drunkenness, and flirting, depending on the interlocutors, the time of day or night, and the general mood of the carriage. Back then, my Russian-language skills weren't good enough to launch complex conversations about nostalgia, or probe people's memories of the Soviet Union, which had collapsed less than a decade previously. But I remember a palpable sense of confusion with the state of affairs in the new country. A few young busi- ness-oriented types saw it as a time of great excitement and opportunity, but most people seemed lost on some kind of existential level—plaintive, overwhelmed, and alarmed by the chaos that a decade of'democracy' had brought. Two years earlier, a financial meltdown had meant millions of Russians lost whatever paltry savings they had managed to put aside. More recently, explosions had torn through several apartment blocks in the capital, supposedly the work of Chechen terrorists.4 People longed for normalcy and stability. This much-craved stabilnost' became an altar at which many freedoms would later be sacrificed.
Public opinion surveys from the time show that the majority of people were unimpressed with the new Russia. In March 1993, 63 per cent of Russians said they regretted that the Soviet Union had collapsed. By the end of 2000, the figure had risen to 75 per cent.5
After six months in Russia, I returned to Britain to go to university, but I already knew I would be back before long. The coexistence of beauty and horror, hope and despair, glory and absurdity was
frustrating and alluring in equal measure. Russia got under my skin, as it had done to foreigners for centuries.
I studied Russian and Soviet history at Oxford, and moved back to Moscow at the end of 2003, working for an NGO for a year before taking up journalism. The city was slowly becoming more prosperous and humane. Over the next decade, oil prices rose so high that, even allowing for the rampant corruption in Putins inner circle, money did trickle down and provide real benefits to people in the cities.
In Moscow and other major settlements, abject squalor disappeared from the central streets, and a middle class began to develop. With it came coffee shops, wine bars, and frequent flights to Europe. But trips to the regions were a reminder that for the majority of the country, life was still hard. The heroin and HIV epidemics worsened; when authorities did crack down on heroin supply, people switched to krokodil, a synthetic opioid made from cooking codeine pills, lighter fluid, and industrial cleaning products until they formed a brownish gunk. In Tver, just a couple of hours from Moscow, I met krokodil addicts whose flesh was quite literally rotting away from injecting the drug.