The Oligarchs (16 page)

Then Glazkov came upon a simpler analogy. The Brezhnev decree was like a huge, sophisticated aircraft, he said. Imagine the complex structure of the wings, the cockpit, the whole interlinked set of hardware. It was all here in the blueprint of Decree 695. Just one problem with this beautiful design, Glazkov said.

There were no engines.

From that night, the three friends kept up their debate, and once they got back to Leningrad they decided to do something about it. Speaking out too loudly would be risky, probably useless. They decided to write an article together, trying to explain why all the searching for the “indicators” was a failure—why the perpetual motion machine could not really work. Chubais arranged to have the article published in an obscure journal.

They met in their kitchens or the dark, one-room communal flat where Chubais lived. On the last night before the deadline, Glazkov was still having difficulty putting their ideas down on paper. “We sat there till morning, and by morning he managed to finish it,” Chubais recalled. What they had put on paper was a revolutionary idea, for them. They declared that the search for the fabled “indicators” of socialist industrial progress was essentially useless. All the struggle to measure factory output, labor, and production was in vain. Why? None of the hundreds of artificial “indicators” could possibly take into account what was happening across a vast economy with millions of decisionmakers. Only one powerful, single tool could take into account all those complex decisions: prices set by a free market. But at the time, in 1980, talk about free prices could bring trouble. Chubais and his friends had stumbled on a hugely important realization, at least for themselves, but what could they do with it?

The Chubais family kitchen echoed with arguments about Soviet power, economics, war, and dissent. The debates left a deep impression on Anatoly, youngest of two sons. His father, Boris, was a Soviet Army tank man whose unit had been surrounded on the Lithuanian border at the outbreak of World War II in 1941. Boris Chubais managed to break out of the blockade and survived the war, later serving as a commissar—a political indoctrinator of the troops. He was an unshakable believer in the Soviet system. “My father is one of those rare men who sincerely believed in Soviet power, in its ideas, in the Communist power, in Stalin,” Anatoly recalled.
⁵

His older brother, Igor, was born in Berlin in 1947, and Anatoly was born June 16, 1955, in Belarus. The family moved constantly, almost two dozen times, as Boris Chubais taught at military schools throughout the Soviet Union. Boris Chubais reared his sons with a military man's sense of basic decency. Igor Chubais recalled that his father took seriously the ideals offered by Communist propaganda. “I was formed on these ideas of honesty, justice, mutual help, solidarity, these kinds of things. But later on, I started to understand, they say one thing—and do another.”
⁶

Igor Chubais's doubts about the Soviet system were sealed on August 21, 1968, when Soviet troops rolled into Czechoslovakia to suppress a reformist movement. “In August 1968,” he recalled, “it became clear to me that the authorities were lying. I didn't want to be deceived. And I concluded to myself, they are lying.”

Igor, then twenty-one years old, was visiting a classmate on a summer holiday in Odessa and organized a one-man protest, carrying a Czech flag, in front of a statue of Lenin. “I was shouting, ‘Get out, invaders!' and holding out this flag,” he recalled. Nobody came, nobody saw it, and Igor was not arrested. But the spark of dissent against the system had been ignited. Back home in Leningrad, he wrote a mildly provocative article for the university wall newspaper (at that time one copy of a paper was simply hung on a wall for everyone to read) about the invasion. Igor choose his words carefully. The article created a stir. After the next class period, Igor saw all the students gathered around the article, reading it. Then he came back again after another class. “No wall newspaper. No paper! It had been taken away. So it actually hung for only twenty minutes.”

A few months later, Igor's class received the results of their Lenin
zachyot
, a test to see how well they knew Lenin and other Communist
dogma. At a ceremony to announce the results, the dean and the local party bosses were present.

They called the roll. Ivanov. “Passed.” Petrov. “Passed.” Sidorov. “Passed.” Chubais. “No.” A silence. When some students protested that Igor knew Lenin as well as they did, the party boss said the decision was final. Igor recalled that “I didn't want the Lenin
zachyot
anyway” but when he saw the party boss a few days later, he asked why it had been denied. The party man answered: “You are not only not going to get the credit, we are going to expel you from the university.”

Igor's rebellion reverberated at home, where the intense arguments began. Anatoly was then fourteen years old. “At home, almost every day, active battles and disputes took place between my father and my brother—constantly and nonstop,” Anatoly Chubais recalled. “Very long disputes, and I observed that process. Although there were two completely opposite approaches, there was one subject of conversation : the country, the history, the present times and the future.” The arguments went well beyond Czechoslovakia—they fought over philosophy, economics, and the reasons for the Soviet economy of shortage. They once had a fight over why there was no sausage in the stores. When Boris Chubais's friends would come over, Igor would debate them too—it was that kind of home. The son could speak his mind, and Boris Chubais tried, openly, to persuade Igor he was wrong.

The thrust and parry of debate at home fascinated young Anatoly and left a lasting impression on him. After listening to his father and older brother—both graduates and specialists in philosophy—he decided that he preferred a more concrete discipline, economics. The philosophy debates were too abstract.

Boris managed to talk to the dean and Igor was not expelled. But the son's dissent caused his father a great deal of trouble. Boris Chubais was teaching at a military school of higher education. One day a general arrived from Moscow to lecture about the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The general waxed eloquent about how Soviet troops were “restoring socialism in Czechoslovakia.” Igor Chubais, who had attended out of curiosity, could not contain himself. After the lecture he marched up to the general and declared bluntly, “I know another story. You are mistaken. Things are different.”

The remark triggered a very unpleasant investigation by the Leningrad Military District headquarters of one of its most determined Communist Party ideologists, Boris Chubais. The turn of events was
alarming, especially to his wife, Raisa. “My mother reacted to it very nervously,” Igor recalled. “And I understood, and everybody at home understood, that my father could be dismissed, and then we would be left without any means of survival.” Years later, Boris Chubais confessed to his elder son that a KGB man had come to him asking who Igor's friends were.

But the commission investigating Boris Chubais found out what the son already knew: he was committed to the system. “They only saw that he was quite an orthodox Communist,” Igor later recalled. “And there was nothing to punish him for.”

The episode showed Anatoly Chubais how the system reacted when it was challenged. He saw how the party tried to punish his father, a man born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, who wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled “The Full and Final Victory of Socialism in the USSR” and devoted every day to advancing toward full Communism. The evidence suggests that, in his most formative years, the unspoken lesson for the young Chubais was that for new ideas to sprout, they needed protection. New voices also needed to be backed up by an iron will because they were always in danger of being silenced.

 

Anatoly Chubais loved the thrill of driving his own car. He drove fast and determinedly, always pushing his reactions to the edge. In Leningrad, he had a small yellow Zaporozhets, a rear-engine Soviet car made in Ukraine. “He drove at terrifying speed,” recalled Oding, who was one of his oldest friends. “He would come to our house like that. The sound of the car was still whistling in his ears. It was as if it was a flying Mercedes. He loved that car, awfully.” Another friend, Vladimir Korabelnikov, recalled that the car was dirty, “horrible,” but gave Chubais more free time every day because he did not have to wait for a bus. Chubais would beg his friends to join him camping outdoors, and he drove the Zaporozhets to the forests outside of Leningrad, where they went hiking and rafting. What he loved more than anything else was whitewater rafting. They would build the square rafts on the spot, lashing together some logs and then steering them awkwardly in the rushing water and jagged rocks—it was sometimes dangerous, always a thrill.
⁷

Chubais could also be terribly stubborn about ideas. Many of his friends recalled that Chubais needed to believe in an idea at all times.
Once he gripped a steering wheel, it would take enormous effort to pry his fingers off, to persuade him to change direction. He was extraordinarily determined. That was one of the great strengths of his character, but it created blind spots.

At the time of the debate on the farm, Anatoly was still very committed to improving the socialist system. In 1983 he defended his thesis at the Leningrad Institute. It was entitled “Research and Development of Methods of Planning, Improvement, and Management in Specialized Scientific Research Organizations.”
⁸
Oding recalled she was going to skip the Chubais presentation because it seemed so predictable, but she changed her mind at the last minute. He defended the theme brilliantly, even emotionally, she recalled. He was articulate and well-spoken, and self-assured. For months afterward, “there were echoes” of that defense.

 

Privately, Chubais was beginning to shed his orthodoxy. Korabelnikov said one of his clearest memories was of Chubais telling him that he realized that economics ruled all, and that the only way to change the Soviet system was through economics. Others recall that Chubais eschewed Russian literature. He didn't have time: he was reading political economy.

After the debate on the collective farm, Chubais, Glazkov, and Yarmagaev were cautious. They knew they could not antagonize the system or alarm the KGB or the party by shouting that the search for indicators was futile. They had to move carefully, even secretly. There were very few people they could really share their ideas with. Yarmagaev knew another young researcher, Sergei Vasiliev, at the Leningrad Financial Economic Institute, which was somewhat more prestigious than theirs. One evening, about the time Chubais had defended his thesis, Glazkov invited Vasiliev to the Economics and Engineering Institute on Marat Street.

It was very late in the evening, Vasiliev told me, and the halls of the institute were quiet. Brezhnev had died the year before and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, the one-time KGB chief, was signaling some desire to end the years of stagnation. The signals were faint—they had to be read between the lines of turgid essays in the official press—and it was not at all clear that Andropov knew a way out. But there was a hint that Andropov at least had a sense the system was failing.

Glazkov confided to Vasiliev that under Chubais they had created a secret team at the institute. It was “semiunderground,” Vasiliev recalled.
⁹
He asked, what kind of team? “To change the system,” Glazkov replied. “To change the economy through economic reform.”

 

Vasiliev became the fourth member of the cadre, joining Glazkov, Yarmagaev, and Chubais, and he was regarded as the intellectual powerhouse in those early years. Chubais organized a low-key seminar on economic reform. A dozen or so people came to the meetings and gradually broached some of the progressive ideas they had been thinking about. Glazkov's role was to find the right kind of people and, very carefully, invite them, without raising suspicion. Yarmagaev was, as always, a fountain of ideas and energy who enjoyed a sharp debate. Vasiliev was the brains, the most highly educated and erudite.

Chubais became the curator; he organized the seminar, nurtured it, and protected it. He was not the leading economist or thinker, but he made space for new ideas in the otherwise stultifying political atmosphere of the time. He could get the required permissions and avoid trouble. He was, at twenty-eight, an up-and-coming researcher, albeit from a second-tier institute. Among his friends, Chubais forced the team into a certain discipline. “Without him, it would have just been talk in the kitchens,” Glazkov said. “Nothing else. No seminar. No real work. No article, which the three of us wrote.”

“He had a good reputation in the institute,” Glazkov recalled. “Therefore, he had a good opportunity to arrange the seminars. It wasn't an easy thing at the time.” The idea of organizing a seminar, for example, to study progressive reforms in Hungary could easily have brought trouble from the KGB. “Everything was ideological,” Glazkov recalled. “The Communist Party is watching, and that's why you needed permission. It's not easy. But Chubais could get it. He was a Communist Party member! He could be trusted! That's how we did it.”