The Oligarchs (5 page)

The shortages rubbed their emotions raw. Irina had seen the fire in people's eyes when suddenly bags of flour appeared in a store. Soon five hundred people were waiting, writing their place in line—their number—on their palms. The white-smocked counter lady was patient with the first hundred. Then she started snarling. She hated them. People would be begging. Please, give me two kilos of flour!

Once cans of condensed milk appeared, hundreds of blue cans, painstakingly arranged in a pattern on the counter. A year later, there was no sausage, only cheese and condensed milk. Then after another year, no cheese, only condensed milk. Then the condensed milk was gone!

There was bread and maybe sugar, but then the flour was gone. The shelves got more barren with each passing year, and one day the shelves filled up—with canned seaweed from the Far East, carefully arranged in delicate patterns, as the condensed milk had been. Although no one could eat it, the canned seaweed soon disappeared too.

Then there was the apple juice. Children always thirsted for something, but there was only apple juice, very poor quality, and even that was not always available. It came in three-liter jars with ugly labels haphazardly slapped on the outside. The juice tasted of iron because of the lid. A strong can opener was needed to pry off the lid, and very often the glass neck of the jar shattered in the process. The juice always had to be filtered through gauze to get the glass out of it.

One day Irina's sister-in-law called, shouted into the telephone, “Get dressed fast, Ira! Near the Sokol metro station, they have thrown out children's fur coats! Hurry!” She had used the verb “to throw out” but she meant put on sale. Irina's sister-in-law was 875th in line, and
she put Irina down for 876. They rushed to the spot every day, for days, as the line dwindled. Three, four hours a day they stood in line, every day, no time left for anything else. It took all their energy. When their turn came, Irina bought several small fur coats and sewed two of them together to make one coat for herself.

When jeans arrived in the 1970s, Irina remembered how her generation went crazy. Clothes were important because as poor as they were, it was the only thing that differentiated them from each other. People would deny themselves food to buy something flashy or extravagant. They knew they could never afford to move to another apartment, but they could buy something to stand out in a crowd. Irina's monthly salary as a schoolteacher was 110 rubles, but she spent 100 rubles for a pair of winter boots. It was not enough—she still had no winter coat. When the boots wore out, she bought a coat but had no boots. When she had a brown skirt, she had no blouse to match it; when she finally had enough for a blouse, the skirt was worn out. People had one pair of shoes for all occasions.

Within the Soviet Union, consumers had developed tastes. They were hungry for goods, influenced by what they could learn and hear about the West. But the Soviet Union did not produce contemporary consumer goods to satisfy them, and jeans were the symbol of all they lacked. The Soviet planners had not, at first, made allowances for jeans and only later supplied cheaply made imitations of the Western ones. But real jeans could be had, from travelers or scalpers, or in the special shops where the Soviet elite spent their special hard-currency certificates. The younger generation—Irina and her friends—wore jeans to the theater, to the office, anywhere, for months at a time.

The years of
marazm
turned them all into a vast, informal human network of connections and friends that spread from family to family, from apartment landings to workplaces, from Moscow to the distant provinces, a chain of
svyazi
, or connections, that helped them survive when the system could not provide. This network was part of the vast second economy, a shadow system that existed alongside the official world of five-year plans. The shadow economy thrived in industry, in retail trade, in black markets and everywhere that people were struggling to make up for the failures of Soviet socialism. Irina knew a relative who was on the admissions committee for an institute, a much sought-after school. People fought to get in, and her relative took favors from the applicants. “Where would I get meat or sausage or medicine?”
she had asked Irina once. “How would I manage without my
svyazi
? I would be a helpless nobody.” If you needed to see a doctor, you went there with a gift in your coat pocket, perhaps wrapped nicely in a treasured, brightly colored plastic bag. It wasn't bribery, but an accepted way of survival. To get Irina into a good hospital when her daughter was born, her sister-in-law had come up with several crystal vases and a couple of necklaces made of semiprecious stones for the head doctor.

The shadow economy nestled in the bosom of the official system. In the drive to shape a “new man,” liberated somehow from greed and envy, the Soviet authorities had devoted enormous effort to wiping out the spirit of entrepreneurship. The system sought to eliminate all private property and quash private economic activity beyond control of the state. The official orthodoxy was strict and severe: people went to jail for economic “crimes,” such as daring to buy and sell scarce goods or set up a small underground factory. The whole atmosphere, reinforced by decades of propaganda and penalties, created a cult of hatred toward those who made their own money. They were labeled speculators and criminals. Even so, the basic human instinct for entrepreneurship survived in this hostile climate. The desire to survive, to make the best of life, literally drove the shadow economy. The writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who served seven years in a prison camp for publishing his fiction abroad, recalled that in Soviet society all sorts of operations ran “on the left,” or beyond the realm of the state, for personal gain. Theft at a factory or a collective farm became a way of life; underground “production” thrived despite the risks. Sinyavsky told a remarkable story about workers at a Moscow tram depot who, at their own risk and peril, revived an old tram, already consigned to the scrap heap, and put it back on track as their own private enterprise. “Outwardly, it looked like any other state tram,” he recalled, “but inside, the driver and conductor were working not for the state, and the passengers' kopeks were not going to the state treasury. This was a private enterprise inside socialist city transport. Long after the crime was uncovered and the criminals imprisoned, people were still gleefully recalling the story of Moscow's private tram.”
¹

Years later, Lev Timofeyev, an economist who frequently wrote about everyday life, recalled how the shadow economy spread through the official one. “A shadow beef filet is sold at a state-owned shop by a meat salesman, whom we know personally,” he said. “Shadow wood grows in a state-owned forest. A physician renders shadow service to
shadow patients in a state-owned hospital. Shadow goods are produced in the sphere of legal production. Shadow trades happen in the offices of official enterprises—both sellers and buyers of the shadow market occupy certain positions in the official administration. Even two soccer matches—a legal and a shadow one—take place simultaneously at the very same soccer field.” This was a reference to an official match that, in the shadow world, was “fixed” beforehand for a bribe.
²

No one ever thought they could get along without their own private networks, and decades before, a word had appeared in Russian,
blat
, which captured the basic dynamic of the shadow economy. It was once a faintly notorious word having distant connections to thieves, but the expression had evolved to refer simply to using friends and connections to get something. In the world of
blat
and
svyazi
, those who controlled the scarcity, those at the choke point of the shortage, like the butcher, held real power in people's lives. Although officially the Soviet authorities did not approve, the truth was that
blat
grew up because the Soviet system had failed—had created so many shortages and wants that people had found another way to satisfy them.
³

Irina and her generation wanted more—much more—than the system could provide. The Soviet Union felt like a prison cell sometimes, the walls unyielding. The authorities strictly controlled travel abroad, monitored mail from outside, and put overseas publications under lock and key. They even saw evil in copy machines, which were locked up. Igor Primakov, a computer scientist, recalled how he would often cradle his shortwave radio on his lap and settle into his favorite easy chair, which could swivel in a 360-degree circle. At night during the 1970s, when Western radio broadcasts were jammed, he slowly, methodically, rotated the chair, exactly one degree right, two degrees left, three degrees right, until he could pick up the BBC or Radio Liberty. He learned English from the radio. Another force that broke down the walls of the Soviet Union was the Beatles. Against Soviet state ideology and mythology, the Beatles left an indelible mark on the youth of Irina's generation, who painstakingly copied down the stanzas of their songs, learning the English word by word.

By the early 1980s, the system had begun to weaken, and the way of life outside—including the often lavish capitalist lifestyles portrayed in American pop culture—increasingly seeped through. The most dramatic break was a technological invention: the videocassette recorder. When VCRs began to be smuggled in to the Soviet Union
during the early 1980s, there was no stopping the flood tide of movies, and with the movies came a spellbinding glimpse of Western prosperity. The movies were easily circulated from hand to hand, and night after night, young people would stay up watching Western films, sometimes three in a row until dawn. They observed the other life closely: the clothes, the manners, the talk, and the meaning of money and wealth. They were awed when a Hollywood film character casually opened the refrigerator in his apartment: it was always full!

Primakov and his wife, Masha Volkenstein, a sociologist, recalled for me years later how they and their friends loved to play Monopoly, which someone had smuggled in from Spain. For a year, they stayed up late into the night in pursuit of Boardwalk and Park Place. It wasn't so much the money as the feeling of a Western casino, of freedom—it was Monte Carlo they were dreaming about.
⁴

The day-to-day reality was a sullen struggle to survive, any way they could. The seemingly monolithic face of the Soviet centrally planned economy was in fact full of cracks, and they spent their lives squeezing between these cracks. When Irina's train stopped at Kupavna, she and her daughter rushed off, walking down the platform and across the tracks, down a path and toward the dacha. Kupavna was a poor village, and the local store offered only meager goods: fat in a huge bowl covered with flies, brown soap, cotton fabric in rolls, and vodka—an endless supply of vodka. Irina did not even bother to look inside. After leaving her things at the dacha, she walked through a small stand of birches to a forbidding wall, a barrier of prefabricated concrete slabs so high you couldn't see over it. And you were not supposed to go through it. The wall was the monolithic face of the system.

Beyond the wall lay a base for navy personnel, a military outpost. They called it the
gorodok
, little town. Irina had no idea what they did there and didn't care. She looked for a gap in the wall. The holes were patched over almost as quickly as people could find them. There—yes!—the slabs had separated. Irina slipped inside and made a beeline for a squat building near the main gate, Military Store 28. Officially, it was just for naval officers and their families, but no one noticed as Irina took a place in the line waiting for stuffed cabbages, sausage, and cheese. She had just found another crevice in the crazy world of the shortage economy.

Once again, for one more day, she had found a way to survive.
⁵

From the time he was a boy, Vitaly Naishul knew that numbers could speak the truth. His father had been a mathematician who calculated orbits for Soviet space satellites. His mother also was a mathematician, and so was his sister. Naishul graduated from the mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. They were a family of the intelligentsia. His father held a sensitive, top-secret post, the details of which he was careful never to discuss at home, yet he also listened to the BBC and Voice of America on the radio. Naishul wanted to work as a mathematician too and kept his faith in numbers. He felt that they spoke logically, even powerfully—one thing you couldn't bend was the answer. There was truth in mathematics, and in the Soviet system of the 1970s it had not been ruined by ideology. Two plus two equaled four, and not even the system could change that. Or so it seemed.

Naishul was assigned a researcher's job in the Economic Research Institute of the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan, a citadel of the Soviet system. Naishul did not see himself as a builder of Communism. He wanted to be a mathematician, and took the job gladly.