The Oligarchs (15 page)

He was right. The coup attempt collapsed.

 

Luzhkov came out of the failed coup with a wellspring of respect in Moscow. For the first time, he was seen as a politician, not just as an apparatchik. As the coup attempt fell apart, Luzhkov faced the crowds in the streets and successfully persuaded them not to go on a revengeful rampage through the Communist Party offices at Staraya Ploschad. When angry crowds threatened to topple the statue of infamous secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, Luzhkov had it taken down carefully by a crane, realizing that the eighty-five-ton monument could wreck telephone cables and sewer lines underneath if carelessly felled.
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The coup had a debilitating effect on Popov. The collapse of the Soviet Union left him exhausted. When, after the coup, Yeltsin agreed to begin the rapid market reforms in Russia that came to be known as “shock therapy,” Popov was skeptical. He was also disappointed that Yeltsin passed over him.

Popov also faced trouble in the city. He collided almost constantly with the Mossovet. There were strong suspicions that Popov was making his own business deals on the side. The food situation in Moscow and Leningrad was still deteriorating. Popov had never shaken his fear that everything they had done could fall apart, and he would be blamed.

In December 1991, just as the union fell apart, Popov told close associates he wanted to quit. They urged him not to. Shakhnovsky
and Luzhkov went to see Yeltsin. It was the day the Soviet flag came down and Gorbachev relinquished the nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. They asked Yeltsin to forestall Popov's resignation. He did. In January, Popov again told a wider group that he would resign, but at a meeting of Democratic Russia, he was again persuaded to remain.

Bokser recalled that Popov was ill and suffered from constant back pain as a result of a mountain-climbing accident many years earlier. Popov was also losing interest in Moscow. He longed to join Yeltsin on the federal level, but there was no place for him, and he increasingly disagreed with the Gaidar government. In the city, it was Luzhkov, not Popov, who held the actual levers of power. On June 6, 1992, Popov resigned, leaving Luzhkov the leader of a chaotic, hungry metropolis of 9 million people.

And the
khozyain
was not quite ready.

I
N THE VAST colonnaded Leningrad Public Library, with twenty-eight reading halls, 17 million books, 300,000 manuscripts, and 112,000 maps, Nina Oding knew the location of a special drawer where forbidden books were kept. Oding was a young assistant in the mammoth library in the late 1970s, and when no one was looking, she would curl up next to the special drawer and read the prohibited books. They were mostly Western books deemed subversive by the Soviet state. Stored in the
spetzkhran,
a separate locked room, the books were brought out to the special drawer periodically, on request by foreign readers. For everyone else, access to the books required endless forms and permissions, and even then, the books would often inexplicably disappear and be unavailable. “Sorry,” the clerk would say, “the bindings are being repaired.”
¹

Why were these particular works secreted away? The regime did not say. It was one of those unfathomable absurdities of “developed socialism” that the system gave loving care to books it wanted no one to read. The books were obviously not totally banned because a great library like this one, opened in 1814, could not acknowledge that they did not exist. Rather, in the twilight of the Brezhnev years, the regime simply decided to hide them, sort of.

The Publichka, as young scholars fondly called the library, was a space for free thinking at a time when Soviet thought control still inspired anxiety. In the high-ceilinged sociology and economics reading room—they called it “Sotz-Ek”—there were several bibliographers, young men who knew everything from Tibetan language to the entire writings of Solzhenitsyn. They were sympathetic toward the interested reader, and once a bond of trust was established, they would talk freely about anything. In those days, the readers called Publichka the “cemetery of brains,” not because of the books but all the smart bibliographers, librarians, and readers who gathered there. There was a spirit of reading and debate in the air, especially in the smoking lounge and the cafeteria, a tiny place with just a few tables.
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Among those who gathered there were KGB agents and informers, but no one ever knew precisely the danger zone, the red line over which it was prohibited to step. The regime was old and sick, its fabled tentacles turning numb, its brain addled. Yet there was always a certain unpredictability that kept everyone from speaking out too loudly. Leningrad was known for an especially alert KGB division. Once a researcher came to the library and asked for forbidden books. He was told they did not exist. Then he came back—with the precise catalog numbers! He asked for them because he knew they were there, hidden away. The KGB began an investigation—where did he get the numbers?

Nina Oding was an acute observer of the crowds who surged in and out of the library. A short woman with a mane of curly auburn hair and mischievous eyes that could burst with enthusiasm or darken in seriousness, she possessed a splendid memory of the varied readers who came every day to the Sotz-Ek. She knew them by their faces and their ID numbers, which she easily memorized. Among them, she remembered a tall, handsome young man with striking strawberryblond hair who was always hanging out, reading books on economics and politics. His name was Anatoly Chubais.

For the curious young academics of the time, Chubais and his generation, fear of the KGB was not an omnipresent dread, but it meant a certain cautious way of talking to each other in public. It became second nature. Everywhere around them was evidence that the system was slowing down, that the economy and industry were gradually becoming dysfunctional, that the leadership was corrupt and selfaggrandizing, but the young academics still spoke only in whispers and coded language. Their words about “perfection of the mechanism
of production” were as gray as the stone face of the Leningrad Engineering Economic Institute at 9 Marat Street in the center of the city, where Chubais was an up-and-coming young professor.

Sometime after spotting Chubais at the library, Oding was assigned to a job at his institute. It was not by choice. She considered herself a freethinker, not a Communist Party member, and she believed that was why, after graduation from the university, the party bosses sent her to a dreary research institute for applied economics. “The economists at that time were these funny people,” she recalled years later. “It seemed to me I had fallen into some kind of horror. They were all so woodenheaded. And ideological! And I was a progressive historian.”

The institute was among hundreds where Soviet specialists were supposedly working on the colossal unsolved problem of the Brezhnev era: how to make socialism work better. In thousands of small cubicles, surrounded by identical blond wood cabinets, thin curtains, and green plastic-hooded desk lamps, in classrooms lined with chalkboards and half-empty cups of tea, Soviet researchers strove to find a “scientific” answer that would repair the ailing socialist machine. The researchers dutifully spent years examining the creaking cogs of Soviet industry, if only to find out how to nudge them forward or at least arrest the decay. They searched for “indicators,” or clues, that would show how to stimulate a 2 percent improvement in labor productivity or 3 percent higher steel output. Every industry—machine building, coal mining, agriculture, metallurgy, and dozens more—had its own group of institutes going through the same motions. The one all-encompassing, great indicator of market capitalism, free prices, was not a possibility in Soviet socialism, so hundreds of thousands of researchers spent tedious years looking for other, inevitably artificial measurements of what was right or wrong, good or bad in economic life. Many of the researchers knew, or at least guessed, that their quest for the perfect “indicator” of socialist progress was futile.

Soon after her arrival at the institute, Oding was sent to the annual mandatory autumn pilgrimage to harvest potatoes on a collective farm. The entire institute went off to the eastern edge of the Leningrad region, a remote, depressed corner of the Soviet empire with rutted dirt roads passable only by tractor. The countryside offered a welcome break from the grind of seminars and endless discussions about perfecting socialism at the institute. They lived in old wooden barracks. By day, they banged together crude wooden crates
and yanked potatoes from the ground, and by night they sang, drank, and talked. They were invigorated by the clean air, the soreness of tired muscles and the pain of sunburn, and by the influx of new friendships and the promise of romance.

They worked in shifts at the farm. Oding quickly recognized Chubais on the opposite shift. He was tall, with a long, handsome face and a complexion that quickly reddened when he grew emotional or angry. He came across as a very serious young man, dutiful, and a natural leader. He was correct, cautious, and sure of himself.

Back at the institute, he worked on the problem of “perfecting socialist research and development.” Chubais was not an orthodox economist, Oding later recalled, but he was no dissident, either. He was, if anything, always diligent and a favorite of the older professors. He had been admitted to the Communist Party at a very early age, which was unusual. He would brush off the flirtatious girls with a soft unyielding smile, and they would turn away, proclaiming loudly, “He's hopeless!” But around friends he was engaging and goodhumored. Like everyone in those years, Chubais was fond of the Beatles. He liked jazz, but you'd never find him listening to the Sex Pistols or Alice Cooper. He was a very upright young man.

 

At night, there was little to entertain them at the collective farm; a tractor would take hours to get to the nearest cinema. So they talked into the early morning. Here in the
glubinka,
or deep countryside, they were free of the KGB. On an October evening in 1979, Chubais and two friends from the institute began to argue about their seemingly endless search for socialist industrial perfection. One of the friends was Grigory Glazkov, a quiet, thoughtful specialist on the problems of industrial automation. The other was Yuri Yarmagaev, an emotional mathematician who generated ideas like the sparks from a welder's torch. Yarmagaev was an anti-Soviet radical, Glazkov a levelheaded analyst who critiqued every idea, and Chubais an establishment man. Chubais was twenty-four years old, his friends both just a year older.
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The long argument that night was the moment that changed their lives.

“It was a special year,” Glazkov later remembered. “The Brezhnev era had a certain life cycle. It was very vigorous in the late 1960s, when Brezhnev took power. By 1975, it was the beginning of the end.
This was the turning point when the system began to fall apart. By the end of the 1970s, it was completely rotten. There was complete disbelief, complete disappointment in the existing Soviet system. Anybody with brains was very disappointed and very unhappy with the system. And in 1979, I think the system made one last attempt to fix itself.”

The attempt came in an order from Brezhnev. The elusive search for “indicators” of socialist progress had gone nowhere. The economy of shortages grew worse. The factories made junk for consumers. So the scientific researchers in all the institutes were ordered to begin a new quest to improve the quality of the socialist industrial machine. And the blueprint for this new search was contained in Brezhnev's Decree 695. It was a huge, thick book of instructions. “It tried to be a system of measuring everything,” Glazkov recalled. “Measuring economic success. Industrial success. Success in productivity and quality and so on. And that was the end, actually. The beginning of the very end of the system.”

During the night at the
kolkhoz,
the three friends argued whether Decree 695 would work.

Yarmagaev was sure it was doomed. He had worked in a factory. He said socialist industrial perfection was utter nonsense. “Everything is lies. There is no such thing as a socialist economy. Everyone is stealing. Everything is plundered.” When Chubais argued that there were “interests” in the socialist economy held by different groups, Yarmagaev shot back: “Let's take the director of the factory. He has one interest. His interest is in getting more money into his own pocket.”

Chubais self-confidently and ardently defended Decree 695. He had once aspired to become a big factory director and he personally worked on the problems of measuring socialist industry. Glazkov recalled Chubais as a very tough debater. The Chubais approach was not to take an argument whole, but to take it apart, piece by piece. “Look,” he said, according to Glazkov, “if we do this and that, and all this, and that, why is it not going to fly?”

When I asked Chubais about the debate more than two decades later, he remembered it clearly.
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“I was really a supporter of the decree,” he recalled. When Yarmagaev lambasted the document, Chubais felt his friend was being too emotional. He, by contrast,
knew
what was in the huge document, appreciated its complexity, its depth, all the professional effort that had gone into writing it. He grew exasperated. “How can he be saying all this is useless and purposeless?” he recalled thinking of Yarmagaev's tirade.

Glazkov turned to Chubais. He had trouble articulating what he wanted to say. He knew he could not win over the demanding Chubais with scientific arguments, because he didn't have any. “I just had a gut feeling that this thing is impossible,” he recalled. He told Chubais that the whole Brezhnev decree was like a complex perpetual motion machine. They could debate all night about the various details, about the flywheels, gears, and pulleys. But, Glazkov said, the larger issue is that perpetual motion is impossible. It was a fruitless quest! It just won't work.