Trond Andresen
**********************************************************
These observations were made during a study trip to Moscow from 17
May-14 June 1996 and continue a series begun in 1992. They are
mainly anecdotes, not a "balanced" account or a comprehensive
analysis of the Russian situation, and this year are influenced by
the presidential election campaign.
I again use this occasion to compliment and thank the people at
the Academy of Labor in Moscow for the efficient and friendly way it
organized our stay. After 16 years of cooperation, they continue to
keep doing better.
I welcome dialogue on these notes. For information about similar
study trips in 1997, please contact me at 71450.1223@compuserve.com
or efenster@igc.apc.org
==========
Moscow Notes: 1996
Copyright (c) 1996 by Eric Fenster
High life
This year being in Moscow began in Brussels. During the
stopover there, a businessman from northern Russia was checking in
ahead of me. He behaved with all the modest pretension of the newly
rich, but the residence was... a youth hostel. With him was a
muscular bodyguard in the typical jogging attire.
When the room price, about $20, was quoted, the businessman
turned silently to his bodyguard, who drew a wad of bills from a
hidden pocket, peeled off the amount, solemnly took the change and
then returned everything to its cache.
The two climbed the stairs to claim their rooms, but reappeared
minutes later. "There are no towels or sheets." Informed that both
could be rented, the money ritual was repeated with all the dignity
that remained, but a further humiliation was in store when the
businessman learned that the hostel's doors would be locked at 1 am.
There could be no serious carousing on this Western business trip.
A year later
The first changes upon arrival in Moscow seemed positive. Our
baggage arrived in the delivery area before we did and customs had
done away with declarations of trivial sums of cash (under $500) or
of travelers checks. We would only learn later that Moscow
bureaucrats had invented ways temper any relief. Registering our
stay took nearly the whole month. The central and district offices
of OVIR, the organism responsible for this, refused to do so, but
meanwhile the police were visiting our residence and threatening to
fine our host institution for having unregistered guests. Finally
OVIR announced we would become early victims of a new policy in
Moscow. In place of the old quick stamping of the visa, a long form
had to be filled out and submitted with two photos. Then wait.
In central Moscow the building campaign that formed part of
Mayor Luzhkov's consolidation of power had progressed since a year
ago. The rebuilt Savior's Cathedral had been topped of with a gold
dome visible from most of the city. In the Metro and on the streets,
there were frequent appeals to help fund the construction, made by
itinerant priests and nuns, many of whom, according to Muscovites,
were fakes.
The artificiality of the remake of this church, large but not
otherwise distinguished when first built last century, had already
drawn plenty of scorn from the press and intellectuals, who
associated it mainly with the mayor's political ambitions. Even more
bizarre was the six-storey underground luxury shopping center rising
on the Manege Square just of Red Square. Yes, rising. The steel
framework now jutted well above ground level and seemed destined to
destroy the space and harmony of that central historical spot, but
who is to judge that despite all its other problems such a shopping
complex is not a vital priority for Moscow?
A few steps away, the view into Red Square and across to St.
Basil's was blocked by the new Resurrection Gate, thrown up during
the year in a matter of weeks. A tiny chapel containing an ersatz
icon is embedded into the side facing the city and the gate is
topped by the imperial tsarist crest. This new shrine did not soften
the demeanor of a policeman who spotted an old woman seated
opposite, well clear of pedestrian traffic. Beside her was a small
cardboard box with a slot into which passers-by might drop alms. The
cop walked over, said nothing, poked her in the chest with his
nightstick, put the heel of his boot onto the box, and slowly
twisted back and forth to crush it flat while he glared
contemptuously at the woman. That done, he strolled off haughtily,
while she picked herself up off the ground and disappeared.
Two weeks later, I saw a similar scene in front of the
Leningrad train station. The square there, half a dozen steps above
street level, is packed with hundreds of sellers, but a policeman
driving through the crowd spotted somebody he didn't think belonged,
a woman who had five bottles of vodka lined up to sell. He backed up
his car, turned and drove up the steps to crush the bottles under
the wheels. Slowly, and fixing the woman with the same scowl of
contempt that also said: I am Power, you can do nothing.
Money
For some time already, Moscow's pride was the fame it had
achieved fame for overpricing anything meant for foreigners on
expense accounts or for New Russians, but many goods and services
for "normal" people had remained within reach. Now, despite all the
stories of inflation coming under control, the prices for things
like a Metro ride or a phone call had gone up 2-1/2 times. If it
were true that the average Moscow salary was the equivalent of
$185/month, the monthly transit pass would claim 20% of that and one
would have to work 40 minutes just to buy a loaf of bread. Fruits
and vegetables cost more than in West Europe (already higher than in
the US). The same was true of soft drinks, even when they were
bottled close by at Russian labor costs.
The volumes of goods and services being traded meant that, in
Moscow at least, many people had incomes--hidden or otherwise--that
did not correspond to the averages. On the other hand, when I
greeted a desk clerk on arrival in our residence and asked her how
she was, she skipped pleasantries and pointed to her eye. It wasn't
the discoloration from a recent operation that bothered her, but the
fact that she needed more surgery to remove a cataract and her
clinic had just gone private. She was facing blindness for lack of
$200. The dezhurnaya (concierge) on our floor was working to
supplement a $60/month pension that shrank to $40 after she'd paid
her utility bills but before she had eaten. Before retirement, she
had practiced legal medicine.
These were not the desperately poor, though. One day while
walking with a friend, who is 23 and anything but mercenary or
cynical, we came upon an old lady who was begging. Look, said my
friend, I can choose to give to her or not give to her; that is my
freedom. And she can choose to beg or not to beg; that is hers.
I was somewhat stunned by this Russian caricature of the old
saw that rich and poor have the same right to sleep under the
bridge. "What do you mean she has a choice? She begs or she dies."
Nobody dies of starvation in Russia, was the reply. All have
enough to buy bread. For the rest, it's their problem to take the
initiative to act on their own behalf.
It was hopeless to argue that this was a poor reward for
somebody who had probably raised children and grandchildren, worked,
and suffered through the war. The old lady drifted off into the
jungle modernized Russia had prepared for her. My friend went on to
explain why she'd not accepted an offer to move to another company
at higher pay because it would not have been honorable to desert her
present employer (and, besides, the other company was mafia
infested).
Production
The Russian economy remains focused on trade. Almost all food
and virtually everything else are imported, to a great extent by the
millions of "shuttles" who, in medieval tradition, get from China,
Turkey or the West what they are able to carry back and sell. We
made three attempts to see something being PRODUCED.
In Vladimir the director of a furniture factory explained
(ranted) that between taxes that would take more than 100% of his
profits and railway shipping fares practically equivalent to the
cost of his products, he had a warehouse piled up with unsold goods.
He managed to pay wages, he said, only by selling furniture people
came to collect themselves. "Demagogue!" snorted our Vladimir host.
In Moscow we visited a machine-building factory that made
automated production lines. Same complaints about taxes, but a claim
that the company had orders from France and elsewhere and was able
to keep working, even though the work force had dropped from 3,500
to just a few hundred. After the talk, we went into the factory, and
I had people put on the headsets I use with a wireless microphone
when we are in noisy places. The precaution was useless; there
wasn't a single person working, although the factory was in good
order and there were signs of recently built machinery.
They're at lunch, was the explanation. So we went to the
cafeteria to eat, too. Empty as well, except for a total of about a
dozen people we saw during our stay. They go home for lunch so as to
save money, was the next analysis offered. Maybe, but at $1 or so
the cooked meals here cost less than the ingredients alone would
cost in the markets.
The management at both the Vladimir and Moscow factories
insisted that the drastic work force reduction came not from layoffs
but by voluntary departures, mainly people who chose to "do
business." Both also claimed that their best workers were the ones
who left this way.
In Moscow, the factory was privatized under the option that
required the workers to buy at least 50% of the shares. The
director, however, ended up owning 5% by himself, and since the
salaries of plant directors under the Soviet system were not
especially higher than those of workers, some machinations had to
have occurred. In fact, worker privatization in which the directors
became the true new owners was typical throughout the country.
The private dairy farm near Moscow we'd been following for
several years was near ruin. The owner had been killed in 1993,
apparently for not cooperating with the mafia, the state farm broke
the lease on pasture land in 1994, and now the herd had dropped from
80 to 7 and the daughter had married and "escaped" to the city. The
district's construction boom of multi-story luxury homes for New
Russians, which explained the land policy, had continued.
Unable to arrange a visit to the dairy farm, we went cross the
road to a family farm, created in 1992, to produce eggs. With an
essentially no-interest loan the government gave then to encourage
private farming, the family had built a 98 m by 18 m (320 ft by 60
ft) concrete barn and installed cages for more than 25,000 chickens
and an automatic egg harvesting system. There was not a single bird,
though. The government was no longer involved, bank interest rates
were 213%, but they would not give loans for more than 3 months. It
was impossible to get the chicks or feed necessary to even begin.
The family was subsisting on the output of three cows and a few
other animals and doing odd jobs for a neighboring summer "pioneer"
camp, now open only to rich children, and for owners of the palatial
dachas. They said they would probably vote communist in the
election.
We revisited the town of Kirjatch, about 100 km from Moscow, in
order to make another comparison against a French TV documentary
filmed there in 1993. Whether because town notables were still
unhappy about the association of our visit with a film they
considered too negative or because things had worsened so much as to
be embarrassing (the factory in town was barely functioning), we
were not received officially. Olga, the independent newspaper editor
who had helped the French TV crew, did not hesitate though. She set
up a meeting at the machine-building college. Everybody there was
upbeat about both their technical and business programs (the latter
based upon the hands-on American junior achievement model) and the
facilities did seem very adequate. All the graduates had found
employment, we were told, but rarely in the fields for which they
had been trained.
Olga said her newspaper had failed and that she was unemployed
and living on what she grew in her garden. According to her,
unemployment was the lot of over half the town's population. The
person in charge of the employment office claimed the figure was
only a few per cent. Officially that was so, but he agreed the rate
was far higher when one included people employed but not paid, those
on forced vacations, those who didn't register because there was no
point, etc. On the other hand, in Kirjatch as elsewhere people were
earning money as shuttles and in other undeclared work.
How would the town vote in the presidential election?
Communist, Zhirinovsky... even Yeltsin, in Olga's view. She would
abstain, she said, because she recognized only one authority.
Human infrastructure
The principal at the comprehensive school we'd visited for
years was as energetic and optimistic as ever even though, with
about 1,800 pupils, he had to operate on two shifts. A different
demographic problem would come in the near future. Housing under the
Soviet system was distributed giving priority to couples with a
young child, so in the giant new apartment complex where the school
was located the ages within families tended to be similar. That
meant that a wave of children would pass through the nursery and
comprehensive schools, leaving a trough in its wake.
The major task of Russian schools, as elsewhere in Europe, is
less to prepare children for employment than to acculturate them to
the arts, sciences, history and traditions of the society in which
they will live. Even with the pragmatic orientation of the new
economy, the principal felt he could still achieve that mission.
The problem was money. The budget provided only $20 per pupil
per month, and about one-fourth of that went for salaries. While a
highly qualified teacher might earn as much as $200-250 per month,
there were few in this category, and the average salary of the
school's personnel was just $80 per month. In the context of
Moscow's prices, nothing.
This would explain what we heard from parents. "Good" schools
demanded an unofficial (and illegal) entrance fee that could be
several thousand dollars. The need to donate for other activities
could arise from time to time during the year. Moreover, if a child
was having any kind of problem, a teacher was likely to propose to
find a good tutor himself, for example) who could give extra help
for, say, $10 or so per hour.
Likewise, after a hospital administrator told us during a visit
that medical care was still free and gave us an idea of the low
salaries for doctors, she had no hesitation responding to a question
about the practice of giving "presents" to doctors. Of course there
are presents, she said, lots of them.
Whatever, in both the education and health it became necessary
to earn one's livelihood through work on the side, whether within
those sectors or doing something totally irrelevant to them.
Among the difficulties and contradictions, there were
astonishing success stories. Not five years ago I brought a group of
auditors and accountants to give a seminar introducing the standard
methods in these fields. At that time, our host institution, with
only a couple hundred teaching and other staff, employed 25
bookkeepers to handle its own finances, and all the books were kept
manually. This year the same institution was already graduating its
second class of accountants and auditors.
Four years ago, I brought banking consultants to give
introductory lectures to Russian bank employees. Today there are
hundreds of Russian banks that successfully navigate in some of the
most complex and unstable political and financial settings one can
imagine.
There was also evidence that the country had passed through a
stage in its transition. When we arrived at our residence, the
"investment firm" that had occupied an annex was gone. So was the
flood of television commercials for similar companies that had
thrived on pyramid schemes, making the quick-footed well off while
making off with the savings of most "investors." In a matter of
months, these speculators on high inflation had completely
disappeared.
A chance street encounter led to a discussion with the co-owner
of a small downtown Moscow cafe-restaurant about what it was like to
establish and run a small business. Over an excellent and reasonably
priced meal, he explained the general factors that his business
represented in microcosm. First, a mafia "roof" was necessary and,
in his case, desirable and comfortable. Government inspectors and
tax collectors had no interest in whether a business succeeded or
not; if they came for their money and it wasn't available, they
would shut a place down without a second thought. The mafia, having
a longer term stake in the business's success, provided a start-up
loan and kept the government agents at bay. Second, nobody would be
willing to work if full wages and the consequent progressive income
taxes were declared, so many of the financial data had to be hidden.
Our entrepreneur had a relative and a close friend for associates,
trustworthy partners being essential, and since one of his previous
jobs had been as a bodyguard he may have had more than a client's
role with those who provide protection to small businesses.
Politics
"Communists win!" Might that be the most accurate headline for
4 July 1996 after the second round of the presidential election,
with a choice of Zyuganov and the remnants of the old Party or the
nomenklatura who moved laterally when change came so as to base
their power on wealth instead of privilege?
Moscow was festive in May and June. Typical was the "Mayor of
the Year" celebration next to Red Square on May 18. There were
stands featuring folk artists and products from many parts of the
country, mostly the Caucasus region, and a prize of $110,000 to the
person chosen as the best mayor. Somehow it turned out to be the
mayor of Moscow.
Mr. Luzhkov was certainly popular for all the development he
had undertaken in the city, and while everybody was certain his
pockets were lined by every project, nobody seemed to care. Leaving
nothing to chance, Luzhkov had one of his supporters run against
him. By law, an election had to have at least two candidates, and
the risk that the real opponents would withdraw and force
cancellation of the voting had to be avoided. Luzhkov took almost
90% of the vote, a score nearly as high as in the good old days.
He also endorsed Yeltsin, and the poster of the two of them
shaking hands with the new cathedral in the background was plastered
to nearly every billboard spot in the city. One could search a long
time to find a poster for any of the other presidential candidates.
All of the TV channels worked to support the current
leadership, especially NTV, Independent Television. NTV, through
reports by its own correspondents, had been the only channel to
constantly challenge the rosy government version of events in
Chechnya. The channel's owner, who was also the owner of a major
bank, was thus no friend of the president and had been subjected to
an armed attack on him and his bodyguards in late 1994 by Yeltsin's
personal militia. The magnate was an ally of Mayor Luzhkov, however,
and Luzhkov had made his peace with Yeltsin after winning the battle
with the president's privatization chairman, Anatoly Chubais, over
how privatization in Moscow would occur and under whose control.
Television did not just slant its coverage in favor of Yeltsin,
it organized it programming in his favor. The last week before the
election one could see: "Alexander Nevsky," a film about Peter the
Great, a film about Tsar Nicholas II including the killing of the
family in 1918, a dramatic film of life inside Stalin's Kremlin,
films about World War II, "Burnt by the Sun," and so on. All that
was heroic and glorious in Russia's long history and all that would
recall the evils of communism passed by the screen. An Armenian
friend of mine was genuinely distraught one afternoon over the
injustice of killing the children of Nicholas II, but it didn't
occur to him that the film he had seen the night before was part of
an election propaganda crusade. In short, whatever the value of the
cause (and perhaps in ironic contradiction to it) the degree of
control over the media and the methods employed resembled nothing so
much as the communism the campaign was meant to oppose.
But why? Most in my American group accepted the notion of the
Soviet Union as an evil place--one person was shocked to learn that
"kremlin," despite ominous Cold War connotations, was just the
Russian word for fortress and that Red Square had received its name
centuries ago--with a captive population yearning for freedom. How
then to understand why it was necessary to pull out all stops, to
lavishes promises worth trillions of rubles, to commandeer the
media, to threaten civil war... to safeguard against the real
possibility that Russians would freely restore to power the party
that had oppressed them?
Taking sides
The vice-president of an elite economics academy figured in
these notes four years ago, supporting Gaidar's team as the only
group Russia had that could undertake reforms and scorning Gorbachev
for mistakes in Russian grammar that excluded him from respect by
intellectuals. I hadn't seen him since, but in the meantime he had
advised the government, overseen a project to rewrite many of the
country's textbooks (doing several himself) and developed this
academy.
This one-time Young Communist League leader still turned livid
at any hint of Russia's return to that form of life and still seemed
intent on picking up arms to resist such a relapse (even if the
comfortable contours achieved through a sedentary profession made
the physical expression of his determination quixotic).
His current exemplary hero was Pinochet, which made some of us
in the room squeamish, but more telling were the paradoxes in his
analysis. Russia today had to be understood in relation to the
adoption of the most "deadlocked" form of Christianity a millennium
ago (the thousand-year mentality of subservience was also the theme
of writer Vassily Grossman in "Forever Flowing"), the fact that the
Reformation never reached the country, the abolition of serfdom only
in the last century, and traditions of criticizing instead of
producing and of redistributing from the rich to the poor. The
result of this history, he claimed, is a permanent
lumpenproletariat.
One has to take seriously elements of this analysis, but what
followed was more disconcerting. His opinion was that this
lumpenproletariat was immutable, and since it could not be salvaged
it simply had to be discarded through time. As "proof" and support
he claimed that certain American intellectuals, sociologists and
others unspecified, had written similar conclusions with respect to
poor blacks in the USA.
To what extent was the contemptuous dismissal of huge numbers
(a majority?) of his fellow countrymen by this member of the
intelligentsia--a class, it must be understood, that carries much
more weight in Russia than in the West--perhaps the most candid (and
accurate?) expression of the attitude of the "reformers"?
Another professor's assertion that "research had proven" that
only about 8-10% of people were born with the genetic capacity for
leadership and entrepreneurship was not inconsistent. Neither, but
in a different way, was the self-indulgent conspicuous consumption
by the New Russians and their seemingly deliberate obliviousness to
anything societal.
Maybe there are clues here to how people approached the
presidential election. During the month I did not meet one person
who was FOR Yeltsin. If, in the United States, it has become common
for many people to vote FOR the lesser evil, Russians in 1996 voted
AGAINST what they considered the greater evil. Those voting Yeltsin
were voting against a return to the previous communist regime or
against instability. Those voting Zyuganov were voting against
Yeltsin and what the reforms had done to their personal lives and to
their concept of their country.
To the extent that nobody seemed pro-Yeltsin, the winner has no
popular constituency, a potentially dangerous situation considering
the demands the transition will continue to make.
On the other hand, the statement made by Alexander Lebed after
his appointment following the first round of the election may have
profound consequences. In an extraordinary comment on his new boss,
he growled, "I have not one reason to like Boris Yeltsin. Not one!
There is an idea and he just happens to be its bearer."
For so long, Russians sought the Good Tsar who would provide
their well-being. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were the most recent quests,
and like others they were adored on arrival and assassinated on
departure for failing to provide.
Lebed really committed a kind of verbal regicide, in effect
asserting that there is no longer a Tsar in Russia. Even the boomlet
of admiration he himself enjoyed was based upon the belief that he
might curtail disorder, not upon the expectation that he could make
life better, and he may find himself cast aside after having served
the electoral purpose.
By rejecting all pretenders, even the incumbent, to a throne,
the people chose to strike at their obsequious past. Whether they
can go on to successfully shape the "idea" is the story of Russia's
next chapter, but consciously or not they did vote FOR something.