Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

(#litres_trial_promo) And so, with God well housed, the mayor had turned to building a home for the free market.

One morning I saw a young couple, noses pressed to the glass, standing transfixed by the cardboard city. Like so many of the pilgrims who came to see this model of Moscow, they were eager and hopeful witnesses to the birth of the new Siti. They tried to locate their apartment in the model city, but it spun too fast. They spent another moment, then moved on.

“Think it’ll ever be built?” the elfin girl, her long hair braided low below her waist, asked her companion.

“No,” he replied. “Of course not.”

THREE (#ulink_5a042873-a502-59bd-bdfd-5933c7abaef0)

IN MOSCOW I WAS AFRAID every day. Not that I would be attacked. I had been, but not harmed. No, my fear was derived from bad news, the flow of death, violent and early death, that courses through each day in Moscow. As luck would have it, we lived a floor beneath a celebrity, a would-be banker who helped run a notorious pyramid scheme that bankrupted thousands when it crashed in the first post-Soviet years. He was well protected. In the morning, he posted flint-chinned bodyguards with short-stock Kalashnikovs buttoned inside their suit coats at his door and on every landing of our stairwell. At night, he didn’t let us sleep. Big footsteps pounded overhead at all hours. One of his guards, it seemed, stood post all night. In the morning I would be sure to cough, sniffle, or shuffle loudly to let the guards know I was coming their way. I bade them good morning as they rebuttoned their jackets.

Paul Tatum, a onetime Republican fund raiser from Oklahoma and a well-known man about Moscow, was the most famous foreigner killed. Pravda, in 1990, had announced his arrival with creamy praise. Tatum, Pravda said, “has a dream, an American dream … He dreams of the day when a tiny American oasis will grow in the center of the Soviet capital.” The “oasis” was the Radisson Slavyanskaya, Russia’s first deluxe Western-style hotel and business complex. Coowned with the Moscow city government, it grew into a bustling hotel that hosted visiting American presidents. “My baby” Tatum liked to call it. But as later was the case in so many of the so-called joint ventures, before long the natives made moves to muscle him out – at times literally. A long, nasty fight ensued.

Tatum was killed on Halloween night in 1996, the week I started at Time. I was working in the bureau on a Sunday evening when a few blocks away Tatum, as he entered an underground walkway, fell to the ground in a hail of bullets. Eleven of the twenty shots hit him. I had often seen him around town. The last time had been on the summer night earlier that year when Yeltsin won his improbable reelection. Tatum made the rounds at election headquarters. “I’m gonna win this war,” he vowed to all who would listen. As the TV correspondents reported Yeltsin’s “miraculous comeback” and “the end, perhaps forever, of the Communist threat to Russia’s young Democracy,” Tatum was his usual cocksure self “United we stand,” he declared, “and divided we fall.”

Tatum was by no means alone. Each day I scanned the local wires: an English engineer found burned to death in his own apartment; an American television producer, a Californian in his thirties who came to Moscow to do good, stabbed to death; a young Canadian diplomat discovered dead in his living room (victim of a slipped mickey, the reports said); a German chef beaten to death on a central street, his face “torn.” There were many more, but those who succumbed to Moscow’s violence were rarely foreigners. We were invisible. Compared to the newly moneyed local elite, we were poor.

“Not likely these days,” said my friend Lyona, the son of a Soviet general lavishly decorated for his service to military intelligence, when I told him how Mia and I had been robbed in Moscow once before, in 1991. That had been back in the old Soviet days, when foreigners were few in number and far richer than their neighbors. In one hour, as we shopped at a local market, our place had been stripped. The thieves took everything – and tidily hauled it off in our suitcases. They even took the telephone. “No one will touch you now,” Lyona said. It was nothing against foreigners, he said. It was just that Russian thieves now wanted real money.

Now they went after the New Russians. The so-called Noviye Russkie–a deliberate play in Russian on “nouveau riche” – were those who had managed to grab a slice of the spoils and grown preposterously rich overnight. Most Russians, being Old Russians, naturally hated the New Russians. In the jokes that Russians addictively tell each other, they had replaced the Chukchi, a desperately poor native people of the Russian north who had long suffered as the favored butt of Soviet jokes. Lyona was right. The New Russians had become the new target.

I HEARD COUNTLESS TALES of horror from friends and neighbors. But none was more frightening than the one I heard T

tell. I believed it right away because I believed everything he told me. He was the only Russian I ever met who had survived, flourished even, in the upper reaches of the Soviet Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church. His business, at least on the wintry day we met in the center of Moscow just off Pushkin Square, was oil. The church’s oil. Early in the Yeltsin era, the Orthodox Church won the right to export, tax-free, millions of barrels of Russian crude each year. T

now worked for the trading company the men of the cloth had set up. The work, he said, was pretty much the same as what he did in the old days. “Only now instead of the general secretary, I serve His Holiness.”

T

was fond of sushi, sweet Georgian wine, and sayings like “Creeds come and go, but I’m still here.” Over lunch he digressed from a discussion of the church’s role in building the market economy to a description of the forgotten world of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, Brezhnev’s long-serving ideologist and gray cardinal. Though dead for decades, Suslov remained one of the few old Party bosses who still conjured fury among Russians. My neighbor Valery, a kindly retiree from the Soviet Foreign Trade Ministry, hated him as the symbol of Politburo excess. Valery’s aunt, a nurse who spent her life ministering to the Party elite in the Kremlin hospital, had regaled him with tales of Suslov’s enemas. Each morning he came to the Kremlin hospital for his daily fruit juice. Not to be outdone, his wife demanded fresh trout each week, flown in from Lake Sevan in Armenia. But none of this troubled T

. His tale concerned Suslov’s grandnephew, a forty-year-old banker named Vladimir Sterlikov. Sterlikov, it was said, once lived in the dacha of Galina Brezhneva, Brezhnev’s daughter, who had a weakness for diamonds, drink, and circus performers. For a time Sterlikov had worked for Pravda. Now he was the deputy head of the Russian Bank for Reconstruction and Development–“until recently,” T

added with relish.

“It was early one morning out on Rublyovka …,” T

said, setting the scene. He was careful to call the Rublyovskoye Schosse by its nickname, the Rublyovka. He was letting me know that he too graced Moscow’s most prestigious artery. Clogged morning and night with convoys of Bavarian sedans, the Rublyovka was the gateway to the off-hours realm of the elite. It was the road that bore the city’s richest and mightiest into town from their fortified cottedgi, cozy five-story affairs nestled in the birches just beyond the city limit. Because it led directly to the residences of the mayor of Moscow, the prime minister, the cabinet, and, of course, the president himself, the Rublyovka was also the most heavily guarded road in Russia.

“It was early in the morning,” T

repeated, pausing between sips of green tea, “when Suslov’s poor grandnephew met his bitter end.”

A waitress in traditional Russian peasant dress, a nod to the prerevolutionary undertones of the menu before us, interrupted T

to unveil his swordfish, a taste for which he had acquired, along with the affection for green tea, during an extended Asian stint, back in his days as a “journalist” reporting to the Central Committee’s foreign relations office. T

, many whispered, was KGB in those Asian days. Some insisted that he still was. But T

just laughed at all the talk and maintained that he was merely a journalist, a student of the Japanese language and culture, and, above all, a loyal, if less than devout, follower of the Party line.

As soon as the waitress took her leave, he continued.

“Sterlikov’s driving his Saab, or rather his driver-bodyguard is, in from the dacha when all of a sudden a cop speeds past, cuts in front of them, and forces them to pull over. The cops ask the driver for his license. Then they say they want to check the engine number. So the driver opens the hood. Just as he leans over the engine – pop. They shoot him in the back of the head. Poor Sterlikov starts to get out of the car to see what’s going on, and one of the cops shoots him. Six bullets in the chest. Died later in the hospital.”

T

took a sip from his bone china teacup and watched my eyes contract. But I had heard such tales before. The Moscow tabloids were full of them. “Never open a door for anyone in uniform” was one of the first rules a landlord taught a foreign tenant. The hit men, we were told, had access to the proper uniforms and even genuine IDs. Cop cars? No problem. T

was undeterred. It was not the end of the tale, he said. “The cops were hit men,” he said. “But they were also cops.”

Another sip, right pinkie raised, to let it sink in.

“How do I know all this? Sterlikov worked for one of our banks. A recent hire and not the best. But he brought a certain pedigree, and we owed a favor to a friend. The poor guy was killed by real policemen. We don’t know their names, but we know what happened.” The bank, he explained, had conducted its own investigation. The cops had been hired to kill. They were moonlighting.

T

returned to his fish. As for Sterlikov, he checked out clean. No extravagant debts. Nothing certainly to get killed over. And he hadn’t been at the bank long enough to steal anything. He fell victim to a stupid blood feud. Banker for banker, that kind of thing.

“But the cops,” T

said, wiping the edges of his red lips with an ironed napkin, “now isn’t that something?” He marveled at the accelerated evolution of the criminalization of the organs of law enforcement. He refolded the napkin and revealed a grin. Once we had left the restaurant, I watched T

trundle off down the snowy boulevard and disappear into the noonday thicket of cars and passersby on Pushkin Square. He almost seemed pleased.

FOUR (#ulink_0d674530-463d-5c9e-8f75-168911b6e65e)

BEYOND LUST AND FEAR, Moscow breeds power. You cannot help feeling that you are trespassing in its path. Every effort is made to impress upon the populace its privileged proximity to the unlimited power of the state. This is not just state power as in other countries. This is not merely the pomp of officialdom, but the deliberate demonstration of the state’s power over the people, an ever-present slap in their face.

It is midmorning. You walk through the cold, dank underpass, lit by long fluorescent lamps. At one end stand two grandmothers, selling cigarettes, hand-knit caps, dried flowers. The underground walkway fills with the sounds of an accordion. A mournful Russian ballad. Every day the accordion player, a Moldovan refugee, is here busking. Every day he squeezes out the same song. It is a long underpass. When at last you emerge and climb the stairs up into the cold wind of the far side of the street, you suddenly hear it: the silence. Nothing announces the power like the silence.

Kutuzovsky Prospekt may well be the broadest street in Moscow. At its widest it has seven lanes in each direction. In its center the road is divided by a lane reserved for the political and financial elite, or at least any Russian sufficiently well moneyed or well connected to procure the coveted migalka, a little flashing blue light that, once affixed to a car roof, announces the right of the faceless passenger hidden behind the curtained, smoked windows to break any traffic rule or regulation. In the morning, as the city’s bankers and bureaucrats rush toward their offices, the road is filled with cars and heavy trucks trying to tack their way into the center. The roar of the traffic, with all fifteen lanes fully loaded, is deafening. Walking the sidewalks of Kutuzovsky, as I did nearly every morning, can be unpleasant.

Until the silence comes. It happens at least twice a day, usually in midmorning and just before the sun sets. You are walking down the sidewalk, and then, in a single moment, you realize something has changed, something is amiss. All you hear is the crunch of your boots on the hard snow. On the street, the slow-moving river of cars has not simply stopped; it has disappeared. (In minutes a road as wide as a highway is completely cleared.) The trolley buses have pulled over and stand along the edge of the prospekt. The citizens too, waiting at the bus stops, stand still. Everyone waits. Hundreds of poor souls, trapped in the stilled traffic, sit mute in their parked cars. The street has frozen into a photograph, and you are the only one moving through it.

For several minutes nothing stirs. Then suddenly a black Volga, an illuminated migalka fixed to its roof, speeds down the middle of the prospekt. Then another, and a third, a fourth. And then the chorus of sirens accompanying the flashing lights. A convoy of automobiles, a dozen in all, each duly impressing the motionless citizenry with its size, speed, and cleanliness. As men, women, and schoolchildren (and the secret policemen in plain clothes sprinkled among them) stand and watch, a squadron of BMW militsiya sedans sweeps past, followed by an extended black Mercedes limousine and a quartet of oversize Mercedes jeeps. As the convoy passes, the cars leave a ripple of turned faces on the sidewalks.

A visitor might imagine the world had stopped because of a dire emergency. But the Muscovites frozen in place along this vast slate gray avenue recognize the scene for what it is: their president, the leader of all Russia, making his way to work. More than twenty miles of roadway in the Russian capital are closed in this fashion every day. In a city already paralyzed by too much snow and too many cars. And still no one complains, ever. It is the essence of power, Moscow style. It is naglost. In general, naglost is an unseemly blend of arrogance, shamelessness, and rudeness. In this instance it is the contemptuous disdain of the rights of ordinary Russians.

FIVE (#ulink_cadd7793-44ae-5a48-9e91-7676d48d1bf8)

IN THE COVETED neighborhood of Nikitskiye Vorota, nestled among small parks and large embassies and tucked behind the poplar-lined boulevard that circumscribes the city center stands a surprisingly modest apartment building where the new guard meets the old guard. No. 15 Leontievsky Pereulok, a squat seven-story building of beige brick and broad balconies, has an exterior that bears few distinguishing marks except for a row of Soviet-era plaques that honor a half dozen of its previous residents. Built in 1962 for Politburo members evicted from the Kremlin living quarters when Khrushchev tore them down to build his massive Palace of Congresses, the building housed Party overlords, titans of Soviet industry and arms, and even Dolores Ibárruri, the famed doyenne of the Spanish Communists. More recently, the chief of the International Monetary Fund mission in Moscow, a jovial bald economist with a hefty pinkie ring, lived here in the old flat of Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister.

“That’s the apartment of Mikoyan, designer of the MiG,” Nikita Khrushchev told me one evening as we toured the building where he had lived since childhood. “And in that apartment,” he exclaimed, “lives Lenin’s niece!”

Just below the IMF chief, in a sprawling apartment filled, I imagined, with an overstuffed Warsaw Bloc living room set, lived Grigori Vasilievich Romanov, among the oldest of the old guard. One sub-zero afternoon in midwinter, as the air chilled to a glass-sharp edge, I set out to meet Romanov. He commanded me to stand, alone, on Ulitsa Tverskaya beneath the iron statue of Yuri the Long-Armed, founder of Moscow. Across the street looms Luzhkov’s office, the lavishly remodeled Moscow Communist Party headquarters. A red electric sign at the Central Post Office flashed seventeen degrees below zero. I spent twenty minutes examining every passing face, but I had patience. I had been waiting to see Romanov for two years.

I spied him shuffling slowly, painfully, down the crowded sidewalk long before he spotted me. As he approached, a silver Mercedes, a For Sale sign taped to its rear window, nearly ran him down. He was short, no more than five feet five inches, and I remember hearing how Romanov, back when he was in the Politburo, had placed his desk atop a raised platform to make himself appear more imposing. He wore a gray topcoat, with a thin sweater beneath. A faint stubble shaded his sagging square cheeks; tuffs of gray jutted from beneath his brown fur hat. At seventy-five, and despite a recent heart attack, he was in far better shape than his phone voice had led me to believe. His pale blue eyes, however, were tearing from the cold wind.