The Oligarchs (28 page)

Under Ravenskikh's tutelage at the institute, students pushed the boundaries of what was permissible. They could breathe more freely at the institute than on the formal stage. Gusinsky and his class read and staged a part of Nicholai Erdman's play
The Suicide,
a black comedy about an ordinary Soviet citizen who is driven by despair to attempt suicide but is finally too cowardly to carry it out. The play had been banned in 1932 and was never officially staged in the Soviet Union.

For graduation, students were required to stage a play in a real theater, not at the institute. Moscow was the center of theatrical life, yet it was nearly impossible for students to stage their diploma plays in the capital, and it was quite common to look for a stage in the provinces. For his diploma work, the equivalent of his graduate thesis, Gusinsky went to Tula, a hardscrabble industrial town south of Moscow. At the Tula State Dramatic Theater during the 1979–1980 winter season, the ever enthusiastic, ever thin, ever emotional Gusinsky staged
Tartuffe,
by Jean-Baptist Molière, the seventeenth-century French playwright. The show was billed as a comedy, an experimental one-act play by students. Importantly, it borrowed fragments from a work on Molière by the twentieth-century Russian writer and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, which Bulgakov wrote in the second half of 1929.
³
As Gusinsky was well aware, Bulgakov had focused on the relationship between the artist and power, between Molière and Louis XIV. The tense relationship between artist and dictator was one that Bulgakov knew well through his own great heartache and pain in the early Stalin years. His play about Molière was rehearsed for four years—but banned after only seven performances.

By 1979 Bulgakov was no longer totally prohibited but was still informally proscribed. Gusinsky's performance in Tula gained a popular following in part because it also was slightly beyond what was usually
permitted by the authorities. The audience entered the theater to guitar music or a band. Alexander Minkin, a lively, bearded drama critic who later became a well-known Moscow journalist, had studied at the theater institute at the same time as Gusinsky. Minkin concentrated on theory and criticism, while Gusinsky's training was practical as a stage director. Minkin told me that Gusinsky implored him to come to Tula to see the premiere—to take an
elektrichka,
a commuter train, four hours to Tula!—but he refused. “I thought in advance that it was going to be horrible, it was going to be rubbish,” Minkin recalled. “I didn't think he was a good director.” Moreover, he added, “Moliere is always very boring. He is a classic, but a boring one. That is why I believed neither in Gusinsky nor in the fact that he could stage Moliere.”
⁴

But Minkin changed his mind and went to Tula, and Gusinsky's production turned out to be a popular hit. “I laughed so much, my stomach ached,” Minkin recalled. “It was done with such taste, with such humor!” According to the
Moscow News
, the house was full every night, and Tula youth talked about nothing other than
Tartuffe
.
⁵
Gusinsky was the heart and soul of his company, working with them late at night, driving them home in his car, bringing them gifts of sausage from Moscow.

Gusinsky had been lucky in Tula; the authorities allowed him to stage a play that was slightly off-key to the trained ear of the Soviet propagandist. Moreover, Gusinsky had added sonnets from Shakespeare, including a strongly antiauthoritarian sonnet at the close.

“It was not against Soviet power, it was about a rebellion of a man, an artist, against any power,” Gusinsky remembered. “And it was not anti-Soviet; it was just that they are all crazy, all our fucking Soviet power, all those Communists—they believe that anything going beyond certain boundaries is aimed against them.” Gusinsky took his play to Kiev, where it was closed down by the party city committee for being anti-Soviet after a few performances. The party bosses wrote a complaint to the Central Committee in Moscow. “It was probably then that I learned that I could not march in formation,” Gusinsky recalled, referring to the rigid conformity demanded by the party.

Gusinsky “stubbornly wanted to stage the next play in Moscow,” Minkin told me. “Year after year, he went and bowed from the waist to everybody—to the Culture Ministry of the USSR, to the Culture Ministry of the Russian Republic, to the Cultural Department of
Moscow. He went everywhere, including all the theaters. He asked them to give him a stage. He asked head directors, theatrical leaders—nothing. And every week he hoped, because someone had promised him something. And he waited, waited, and waited. And another six months passed, and nothing again. He started anew, and he was given some promise anew, and he waited again. But that was horrible. He wasn't doing anything! There was energy in him like an atomic bomb, but there was no way out.”

The Moscow theater world was crowded and competitive, and it would have been painstakingly difficult for Gusinsky to break into it under any circumstances. He had good connections, having studied under Ravenskikh and the renowned Yuri Lyubimov, director of the Taganka Theater. But he still could not break down the barriers and get a play to the stage in Moscow. Gusinsky believed the reason was anti-Semitism, and perhaps his lack of talent. “I am a Jew. It was prohibited. Plus, in fact, I was not a very talented stage director.”

Through the early 1980s, Gusinsky searched in vain for a place in the theater. His quest was a long and frustrating one. “Many times he told me, ‘This is my last attempt,'” Minkin remembered. “‘If they deceive me once more, if they don't let me stage a play, I will go into business. I won't take it any longer.'”

He found work organizing public events such as concerts and sports. As stage director for Ted Turner's Goodwill Games in 1986, he organized the opening and closing ceremony, setting up performances at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses for the foreign participants. He enjoyed good connections with the Komsomol and the KGB. But when I asked him about it years later, he said it was dreary. “I was simply earning money,” he said.

Minkin was more blunt. “That was shit,” he recalled of the events Gusinsky organized. “For a theater director to be involved in that was horrible. Is this real work for a director—to stage how girls walk and throw those stupid sticks? No, that's impossible.” Minkin recalled that Gusinsky was still dreaming of a break into the theater at the beginning of
perestroika,
hoping that changes in the political mood might leave him an opening. But one day his organizing of public events took a turn for the worse because of a stretch of black ribbon.

In the early days of
perestroika,
Gusinsky organized a Day of the Theater, sponsored by the Komsomol city committee. On the broad main avenue in Moscow then known as Kalininsky Prospekt, Gusinsky
set up a string of small outdoor cafés with special themes: one for writers, one for artists, one for musicians. “All was well because this was a day of culture, and I took very earnestly everything that Gorbachev was saying—here, it started, freedom came.” But one thing had not changed: the party tightly controlled public space, especially open squares and buildings. Kalininsky Prospekt was a special street, the route that party leaders and others took to the Kremlin. Some of the artists who were helping Gusinsky decided to
change
the way Kalininsky Prospekt looked, and they laced the trees with black ribbon. It was a harmless gesture, but some low-level KGB men took offense. Gorbachev might see it as his limousine sped toward the Kremlin! They hauled Gusinsky before the Komsomol city committee and accused him of anti-Soviet activity. As he had many times before, Gusinsky got his back up. He lashed out. He argued with the Komsomol chiefs as they demanded he change this, change that, hew to the party line. And they insisted that he apologize to everyone in the Gorkom, the city Communist Party committee.

Gusinsky erupted. He shouted that they were fools, that their parents had been fools, that they would die fools. He slammed the door and walked out. The Day of the Theater was to be held in two days. They canceled some of the events and flooded the rest with uniformed and plainclothes security men, a tactic designed to throw a wet blanket on any public event. The local KGB men wanted to lock up this impertinent young man, Gusinsky, and throw away the key, but Gusinsky told me years later they did not succeed. They “were prevented from eating me up, let's put it this way,” he recalled. “I was not staging any more mass performances; this was the last one. But they were not given the chance to finish me off.”

The episode proved a valuable lesson for Gusinsky. He realized that he had to work on maintaining good relations with people in power, even if he despised them. At the time, he was quietly protected by a high-ranking party official, Yuri Voronov, who was deputy head of the Culture Department of the Central Committee. There was another episode too. According to a close friend, Gusinsky in this period was also caught trading hard currency, which was forbidden. No charges were ever brought against Gusinsky, the friend said, but as a result of the brush with the authorities, Gusinsky established close ties with some KGB officers. Gusinsky came to the attention of Filipp Bobkov, a deputy KGB director who headed the notorious Fifth Main
Directorate, which waged war on dissidents. Bobkov, whose job included keeping tabs on the intelligentsia, may have found Gusinsky a valuable source of information about what was happening in the theater. Many years later, Bobkov became part of Gusinsky's corporate high command. Gusinsky was learning how to cultivate friends in high places.
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The world of the early cooperatives in Moscow was wild and unpredictable. The whole idea of entrepreneurship had been labeled criminal in Soviet times, and the first businessmen were often regarded with deep suspicion, as hustlers at the edge of society, a ragtag bunch of experimenters and gamblers. In 1988 and 1989, Gusinsky fit in among them perfectly—he had the imagination and the guts. His almost instant success with the copper bracelets showed him how to make money fast, and his experience with the black ribbon scandal had pointed toward another essential ingredient of success: connections. The Communist Party was still all-pervasive; authority and power were something that had to be bought. To make money, Gusinsky realized, he needed connections. An aspiring businessman could not simply close his door and keep to himself; he needed to succor bureaucrats and politicians, to have friends in the KGB and the police. Gusinsky was an early and avid student of the nexus between wealth and power. He practiced cultivating politicians and security men, harboring them and exploiting them.

At first, the draw of power, the absolute beauty of making money by your own ingenuity and someone else's permission slip or signature, was appallingly simple. After the bracelets bonanza, Gusinsky opened a new cooperative that made cheap figurines, copies of famous Russian artworks from molded plaster. They were covered with a microthin layer of copper, using special chemical baths. As with the bracelets, the costs were minimal, the profits fantastic, and the copies were beautiful—as long as you did not notice the plaster core. Hood ornaments for foreign-made cars were very popular too; he made a mint with imitation Jaguar hood ornaments. But to duplicate Russian art he needed protection. He wanted to formally export the fake figurines, which would mean handling hard currency, and that was another reason he needed protection. Moreover, Gusinsky's cooperative was officially registered as part of the Soviet Cultural Foundation,
of which Raisa Gorbachev was a board member. This government foundation was prohibited by Soviet law from engaging in commercial activities; if he flaunted the law, there could be trouble. Again Gusinsky found a way out by using his connections. He turned to Voronov, the Central Committee man who had protected him during the black ribbon scandal, and managed to get a letter of permission from the Soviet prime minister, Nicholai Ryzhkov, allowing him to export his fake figurines for hard currency. It is not clear precisely why the party man helped Gusinsky. But for Gusinsky, it was a fantastic mix: plaster, permission, and hard currency. Gusinsky told me it was his first big political success, and it led to more.

“I realized then there are ways of working with the authorities,” Gusinsky said. At some lower levels, it was as simple as bribes. But Voronov and bureaucrats in the Central Committee were above this petty corruption, Gusinsky realized. He discovered that at higher levels, the trick was to establish good relations with officials. Finally, he learned somewhat later that it was also possible to influence the very highest officials, but the approach, the delicate dance, must be handled with great care. The key was to offer something the official needed to advance his career. Then bribes weren't even necessary, not even a good personal relationship, Gusinsky discovered. The official would almost always help, out of self-interest. “So it was always important for me to understand, what does this boss need?”

The most important boss Gusinsky would befriend in these years was Yuri Luzhkov, the stout, strong-willed bureaucrat who had been put in charge of Moscow's chaotic vegetable bases and also licensed the cooperatives. Gusinsky and Luzhkov had their quarrels and differences, but their paths were intertwined for more than a decade.

In the late 1980s, Gusinsky recalled, Luzhkov would meet well into the early morning hours with the young entrepreneurs of the cooperatives. Luzhkov listened patiently to their problems. It was foolish to go to Luzhkov's office before midnight because that's when he
began
working with the new businessmen, often not finishing before dawn. For Gusinsky, it was amazing: the average person in Moscow might wait on line for a week to see a local bureaucrat, but here was a man who was deputy head of the Moscow city executive committee who would see every single cooperative businessman in his waiting room before going home.