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By David Remnick
It was the summer of 1991. The Soviet regime was crumbling like week-old bread, and my wife and I were scheduled to fly home to New York for the last time, ending a nearly four-year stint in Moscow—mine for the Washington Post, hers for the New York Times. The flight was scheduled for August 18, a Sunday. A few days before, I had interviewed Aleksandr Yakovlev, who had been Mikhail Gorbachev's closest aide throughout the perestroika years. The "forces of revenge" within the party and the KGB, he said, were preparing a putsch.
I didn't know what to make of his comment except to put it in the paper. The next day, at a party with some Russian friends on the Moscow River, we talked about Yakovlev's prediction. My friends and I agreed—a coup seemed far-fetched. The Soviet Union, after all, was no banana republic.
"But I will tell you one thing," I said, in the plummy tone of one rehearsing his valedictory. "Check out Moscow in a few years, and there will be shopping malls everywhere."
"You've gone nuts," said my friend Sergei. "Oh, you're right!" Sergei's wife, Masha, said mockingly. "Downtown will look just like Fifth Avenue. Be sure to visit!"
So that was the consensus: no coup, no shopping malls. The world would change, to be sure, but Moscow could forget about Sears, much less Saks Fifth Avenue. A couple of days later the first prediction went sour. There were tanks parked not a hundred yards from my front door on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The coup was on. (It was over three days later.)
Less earth-shattering to historians, perhaps, is the fact that the second prediction—"the shopping malls vision," as my friends dubbed it on the spot—came true far more quickly than I had imagined. Capitalism may be creeping only slowly and erratically into provincial cities like Tambov, Stavropol, and Vologda, but in Moscow the signs of money are now everywhere: advertisements, billboards, finishing schools, neon, Nikes, and, by God, shopping malls.
To visit Moscow in the five years since the collapse of communism and the Soviet state is to be thunderstruck on a daily basis. Street names change overnight, erasing honors given decades ago to Bolshevik warriors; youth gangs form, recapitulating, in their way, the history of young people in the West—Hippies, Punks, Grungers, Skinheads, Metal Heads, Tolkienites; a gay bar opens down the street and features "transvestite night"; the Lubavitcher Hasidim set up a synagogue and are lobbying the government for possession of a trove of manuscripts stored away for decades in the damp corners of the Russian State Library; the Hare Krishnas come jangling across Red Square trailing clouds of incense; a 19th-century downtown apartment building is cleaned out by mafiosi who have decided "to privatize" the place. The involuntarily gentrified are told, not asked, to accept an apartment so far from the center of town that it is nearly in the center of Minsk. The changes reach to the most basic stuff of everyday life. Lines are rare now, but there are more homeless living in underpasses, train stations, city parks. The body politic has eroded so quickly that the Russian body has followed suit: The life expectancy of an average Moscow male is 57 at last count—a dramatic drop from the mid-60s just five years earlier. At the same time the number of car owners—and the level of traffic—has doubled. In Moscow only the weather is more or less the same as it was.
Not long ago, on one of many trips to Moscow since the Soviet collapse, I met a woman named Larissa Pavlova. She was a teacher who now sold old clothes evenings and weekends to supplement her family's income. Countless thousands of Muscovites work second and third jobs to get by in a world of higher prices, greater appetites, and disappearing social guarantees. "Moscow is filled with what our good Comrade Lenin called contradictions," she said. "The rich get richer and the rest of us tread water or drown. I work much harder than I did in the old days, and sometimes that makes it hard to remember what we've gained. Freedom is sweet, but it's also a heavy, heavy load."
The rules of class and privilege in Moscow are approaching the draconian code of the industrialized West. Money talks and nobody walks. If you have cash (or a credit card) in Moscow, you can taste it all: lobsters flown in from Maine, salmon from Scotland, caviar from Azerbaijan, lamb from Auckland, pineapple from Hawaii. Visitors to Moscow in the seventies remember well the dreary ritual of eating at restaurants offering shoelike "cutlets" and bonelike "chicken tabaca." Now there is every cuisine imaginable—even Russian, if you look hard enough. One night at a Chinese place not far from my old apartment, I asked for hot-and-sour soup but was informed by the waiter that this was a northern Sichuan restaurant, not southern, and would I consider one of a dozen other soups?
There are other cities in Russia that have, each in its own way, joined this process of transformation—Nizhniy Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok—but the center of it all is still Moscow. There really is no second place. Even St. Petersburg, with its historical role as the window on the West, cannot compare. More than 60 percent of foreign investment in Russia is in Moscow. The banks, the businesses, the political actors, the cultural and intellectual institutions, the information and communications nexus, the trends in fashion, language, and popular culture—all of it is centered in the capital. In some provincial cities a single natural resource can transform the lives of the top layer of the population—oil in north-central Russia, nickel in Norilsk, diamonds in Yakutia—but the deepest transformations are in Moscow, which, with nearly nine million people, is among the world's biggest cities.
"You cannot understand Russia just by understanding Moscow," the reform politician Grigory Yavlinsky told me, "but without understanding Moscow you can't understand the future."
"I suppose I'm a patriot," Masha Lipman, a journalist friend of mine, told me, "but to tell you the truth, there are times when I feel as if Moscow is an entirely separate country, and I don't mind a bit."
If you have money in Moscow, you might live in a gated mansion outside town and send your kids to boarding school in the Alps; you also might meet your end in a contract hit, blown to smithereens by a car bomb ignited by state-of-the-art remote control. If you have money in Moscow, you might be invited to a party at a Mexican restaurant (as I was) and meet a young television executive who will tell you, deadpan, "When I was a diplomat in Rangoon, I was bringing socialism to Burma. Now I'm the guy who brought Santa Barbara to Russia!" If you have money in Moscow, you might slap down several thousand dollars to join a private club; the highlight of the evening at one now defunct establishment was a rat race, featuring real rats sprinting through a neon-lit maze. (The race did not begin until a dwarf dressed as an 18th-century page rang the bell.) The owner of a nightclub called the Silver Century is planning to open a new club near Lubyanka Square within firing distance of the old KGB headquarters. He has announced a fervent desire to have party games. He said he would hold mock arrests and serve dishes like "Brains of the enemy of the people." Outside one club I talked to a guard named Vasya, a wiry and ancient man, who told me, "When I was a boy, we used to hunt down rich people and jail them. Now we guard them. For money."
Everyone is looking for a taste of "the sweet life." Hundreds of women in Moscow have quit their low-paying jobs as teachers, doctors, and engineers and have taken to selling cosmetics for Avon, for Mary Kay. (A pink Cadillac in modern Moscow would not be out of place; there are now dealers for Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Saab, and BMW.) The Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, is dying, but a newer version called Pravda Pyat (Pravda Five) has started publication in search of the more "left leaning" souls of Generation X. Venerable literary monthlies like Novy Mir (New World) hang on, mostly thanks to the largesse of American financier George Soros, but a former Maoist from the Netherlands, Derk Sauer, is making a fortune with Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy. Exams in scientific socialism are, of course, no longer required in universities, and business schools are filling up as soon as they can be opened. On Marshal Rybalko Street a producer named Aleksei Karakulov runs a school for children who want to become supermodels. There is a market for all this. Propaganda has shifted from the ideological to the corporate. In today's Moscow the pouty mug of Claudia Schiffer is nearly as ubiquitous as Lenin's once was.
The leaders of the Soviet Union were determined that the capital of their revolution exist in a realm devoid of imperialist history. The mythology and ideology of Bolshevism required the destruction of all previous myths and ideologies. Nineteen seventeen was meant to be year zero. In 1918 Lenin decreed that all tsarist monuments had to be replaced by monuments dedicated to "the liberation of labor." Those churches that were not leveled by an order of the Kremlin and the wrecking ball were either left to decay or were transformed into stores, warehouses. One was replaced with a public toilet. Renaming streets has always been a part of revolutions—the French found this even easier than toppling heads into baskets—and under the Bolsheviks street names resonant of monarchy or commerce were renamed. Meat Traders Street, for instance, became Kirov Street.
But since the collapse of the old regime and the rise of Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's popular and all-powerful mayor, there has been an attempt through the manipulation of symbols in Moscow to prove to Russians and the world that the country has reentered the flow of history. Moscow City Hall has a special office in charge of renaming streets or, better to say, re-renaming. Kirov Street is Meat Traders Street again. The process of re-renaming is so widespread that no one knows where anyone is going anymore—a fairly apt metaphor for just about anything in post-Soviet Russia.
One of the more modest institutions in town that has marked well the speed of historical change in Moscow has been the Museum of the Revolution on Tver Street. In the lobby, where it had once been possible to buy volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, there is now a shop offering a stuffed Mickey Mouse, Solzhenitsyn's How to Reform Russia, baseball trading cards, and Lego sets. Another shop acts as a trading post for Communist-era desiderata: propaganda posters, Komsomol pins, party banners, Lenin busts, Stalin busts, medals, a complete set of Brezhnev's ghostwritten memoirs. Sacred objects are now sold as kitsch. The young man named Aleksandr Fomin who runs the shop told me that sometimes he can unload the "high-end" material from the twenties for thousands of dollars.
"I don't collect any of this stuff myself," he said. "Who could stand to look at it? After all, I practically grew up in the new times. To me, this is just business."
Upstairs, the museum's exhibits on Soviet history have about them a sense of rueful irony. A propaganda picture of the happy masses ("Thanks to the Party for Our Happy Childhood!") hangs next to a picture of slum children in an industrial city. History is recaptured with nothing censored or missing: the labor camps, the stampedes at Stalin's funeral, the repression of artists and writers, the brutalities of industrialization and collectivization, the extraordinary triumph of the war. Perhaps only one figure is consciously slighted. Gorbachev, still so hated in Moscow for dismantling the old system, merits only one small display case.
In his otherwise thin and unrevealing book, Moscow, We Are Your Children, Mayor Luzhkov tries to paint an alternative vision of the city's past. Using photographs, paintings, drawings, and old maps, Luzhkov describes a Moscow as glorious as Rome, a city rich with commerce, character, and architecture. Just as Stalin was determined to create a new Moscow by destroying remnants of the pre-Soviet past, Luzhkov is determined to create a new Moscow by rebuilding many of those same places. Russian workers and workers hired from abroad have in just a few years rebuilt or restored the National Hotel, Resurrection Gate at the entrance to Red Square, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Zoo, Gorky Park, and dozens of other sites. The outer Ring Road, once known as "the road of death," is now decently lighted and as smooth as any ordinary highway in the West. A grandiose war memorial has opened on Marshal Grechko Prospekt. The complex includes a church—a mosque and a synagogue are planned—and a fountain, lit red at night, the better to evoke the bloodshed of the war. Outside the Kremlin gates the vast Manezh Square became a vast pit during the construction of an underground mall that will include several levels of offices, stores, banks, parking, and who knows what else. Luzhkov has also announced plans to build a financial center modeled on the City of London.
While the story of President Boris Yeltsin in the mid-nineties has been one of political and physical decline, Luzhkov is ascendant. In the 1996 elections, while Yeltsin struggled his way to the finish line, Luzhkov barely had to campaign to win nearly 90 percent of the vote. Luzhkov's reputation in Moscow is like that of Richard Daley at his peak in Chicago. Everyone assumes he uses less than ethical means to achieve constructive ends and almost everyone excuses him everything. When he was first appointed to a top municipal job in 1990, members of the Moscow City Council asked him whether he was a democrat, a communist, or, perhaps, an independent.
"I have always been loyal to one platform and will remain loyal to one platform—the administrative platform," Luzhkov declared. He was a builder. He got things done. (Never mind exactly how.) Operating almost independently of the national government, he acts as the economic overlord of the center of Russian wealth. The Russian press rarely dares to criticize him, not least because his master-builder reputation and his blunt, even nationalist, rhetoric have made him so popular.
"Luzhkov is the most natural creature of this Russian transition," said Sergei Stankevich, who had been both deputy mayor and an adviser to Yeltsin before running off to the United States when he was accused of taking a $10,000 bribe. "Luzhkov is a fish very much in the water. This is a time when the market exists, but under the strictest supervision of the state. He is father, administrator, supervisor, boss. He encourages those private initiatives that are ready to cooperate with him. He is honest—in his understanding of honesty—and does not betray his own people. Of course, he created the necessary guarantees for himself, but this is one of the rules of the time. Still, he deserves respect."
The most central and mythic instance of historical reconstruction in Luzhkov's Moscow is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the largest church in Russia. No construction project embodies more of the earnestness and hypocrisy, more of the grandiosity of the resurrection of Russia than the rebuilding of a cathedral that had been looted and dynamited at Stalin's order in 1931.
The story of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is magic realism, Russian style. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, Alexander I signed an edict ordering that there be a contest among architects to design a cathedral commemorating the great victory of the Russian people and the people's gratitude to God for the preservation of Russia. The cathedral took decades to build, but when it was finally consecrated in 1883, it was, if not the most beautiful of churches, certainly the most ambitious. There were five gold domes, the highest of which was as high as a 30-story building. There were 14 bells in four separate belfries—their combined weight was 65 tons.
"It might not have been the most exquisite of churches, but even nonbelievers like me used to go there, if only to be with our friends and congregate in the park outside," Lev Razgon, a writer and camp survivor, told me.
One afternoon I visited the construction site along the Moscow River—the precise location of the original church. Crews were working around the clock. There was a small exhibition hall on the grounds. The focus of this little museum was a television and videotape player that played, over and over, the history of the cathedral's rise and fall. Along with a fifth-grade class out for a field trip, I took a seat and watched. The narrator, in a grave March of Time voice, described how in the early twenties as Lenin's campaign against the church went into high gear, services at the cathedral were ordered stopped. Almost every church in the city was "smashed, liquidated." Priests were jailed, executed, or, at the very least, co-opted by the state. One priest, the narrator said, had his tongue cut out, his eyes scooped from the sockets. "Such was the state's struggle against the 'opium of the people.' " The children watched, still and absorbed. I couldn't help but think that, just a few years before, Soviet schoolchildren learned a history quite opposite to this one.
The decision to destroy the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was made in secret, and by July 1931 secret-police operatives and young Komsomol workers began the process through a gigantic looting operation. They wrenched huge slabs of marble off the walls, cut down the bells from the belfries, pried off the crosses, the icons. Finally, on December 5, 1931, demolition experts set off a series of high-explosive charges to finish the job.
Stalin's intention was to replace the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (a symbol, for him, of the archaic) with the Palace of Soviets, so enormous that it would tower over the greatest symbol of modernity at the time, the Empire State Building. For Moscow this building would embody the permanence and the genius of the regime. It would be its Pyramids of Giza, its cathedral at Chartres. Stalin approved a design that was, in fact, 115 feet higher than the Empire State Building, and the statue of Lenin he envisioned at the top would be so huge that it would be twice the size of the Statue of Liberty—Lenin's index finger alone would measure 15 feet.
Stalin's design came to the most banal of ends. The foundation soon became an enormous and stagnant pool. What was delayed by water would soon be put off indefinitely by world war. For years the Palace of Soviets remained nothing more than a reeking sump surrounded by a wooden fence. After Stalin's death his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, decided to convert the construction site into what it had been for years. He ordered the construction of an outdoor heated swimming pool. "The biggest in the world."
The new post-Soviet masters of Moscow are, in their way, no less pretentious, no less interested in aggrandizement, than the old masters. Luzhkov & Co. make François Mitterrand, famous for his penchant for gigantism, seem like a putterer.
And yet, all cities are the result of the vanities and the haphazard tastes of their masters. Moscow could do worse than have a mayor who wants, at once, to rebuild the old and give free rein to the new. The cathedral project will cost 300 million dollars at the very lowest estimate and will result in a near-exact copy of the original. Building began on Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1995, and the exterior should be completed this year, the 850th anniversary of the city.
After watching the film, I met with one of the Orthodox priests, Father Mikhail Ryazantsev, who runs the little museum and is preparing for the cathedral's opening. "The re-creation of the cathedral is a matter of historical justice," he said as the flock of children flowed by us. "After years of forgetting and the oblivion of our history since 1917, we are now coming back to our roots. We are recovering the memory of our ancestors."
The idea and the symbolism of rebuilding the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and so many other monuments ruined during the Soviet period has not escaped criticism. Since television and the printed press are controlled either by the state or bankers who depend on their friendly relations with the state, one does not frequently hear criticism of such projects. But modern, implicit censorship has nothing like the power of the old Soviet variety; contrary opinion is never entirely stifled.
The most prominent critical voice on the rapid transformation of Moscow is that of Aleksei Komech, the director of the Institute of Art Studies. "The annihilation of landmarks is rather rare nowadays, but we are still losing something because the construction interests are determining the character of the city," Komech told me one afternoon at his institute's plush downtown headquarters. "Charm is being lost. Historical Moscow is disappearing before our eyes. The mayor is very authoritarian and has uncultivated tastes. From 1989 to 1991 it was fashionable to take the public's advice. Now it is very different. Let them speak, but we will do what we want. There is an incredible search for the grandiose: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the war memorial, the Manezh underground mall. Pretentiousness prevails."
The Moscow intelligentsia—a skeptical lot—were fairly unanimous in their opposition to the cathedral project and the general transformation of the Moscow skyline. But most were less stern than Komech; they tended to irony more than anger.
Leonid Parfyonov, a popular television host and documentary filmmaker, smiled brightly when I asked him about the new cathedral towering over downtown Moscow.
"To some degree I agree with Komech," he said. "This is a junk copy of a Russian original that was never much good in the first place. It's also disgusting to watch former members of the Central Committee act pious and more religious than the patriarch himself. This is a cathedral being built by men raised in an era of Romanian furniture sets thinking they are Louis XIV. And yet there is vitality, real life in all this. This is an aesthetic built on illegal money and faux Orthodoxy and tawdriness. But what else is there? This is our life! To get angry at this is to be angry with life itself."
The transformation of Moscow is not only a matter of bricks and mortar. The rapid transition from communism, a system in which all were, as Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prizewinning poet, put it, "equal in poverty" to one in which the world is almost oppressively filled with opportunity and unfairness, has been delicious for the lucky few and a shock to nearly everyone else. It takes cunning, flexibility, privilege, and youth to make one's way in the new world. Suddenly an outwardly classless society has fractured into classes of radically different experiences and levels of wealth, and the result has been a Moscow filled with resentment, confusion, and jealousy. These emotions are the fuel of modern Russian politics.
Tourists in Moscow understandably stick to its dense downtown, and that is where the wealth is. But most ordinary people live in the vast and dreary housing developments that go on for miles. And in neighborhoods like these there are no shopping malls, no luxury hotels. Change has radiated to the periphery almost as slowly as it has to cities hundreds of miles away. There are more soup kitchens and charity organizations around now, but the state has not caught up with demand. While many old people make up for pensions lost to inflation by receiving help from their more nimble and successful children and grandchildren, not everyone is so lucky. During the 1996 election campaign I met an older couple who told me they lived on a diet of oatmeal and bread and not much else. They were voting communist, they told me, because "this brave new world is so cruel."
Even the intellectuals who dreamed for decades of an open society now feel a sense of disillusion. "Before the fall there was a uniformity to life," my friend playwright Aleksandr Gelman told me. "Everyone was more or less equal. Everyone lived more or less OK, or equally badly, but no one was rich. Everyone dreamed about freedom, and this united them. People could recognize each other, who they were, with just a couple of words. This created a certain ambience, a quality of human relations. It wasn't always wonderful, but it was familiar. Suddenly lots of artists and composers and writers began to live quite badly. There was no government support. Their lifestyle changed. They didn't become opponents of democratic reform, exactly, but discontent grew. And so now freedom is associated not with joy entirely but with a depressed state."
In Moscow especially, but in other big cities as well, political jokes have given way to jokes about the new rich—the New Russians. The gibes are what any American or Briton would recognize as nouveau riche jokes. One New Russian says to another, "I just bought the most fantastic tie in Paris. It cost $300!" "Oh really?" says the other proudly. "I just bought the same tie for $400!"
And so on. These jokes, so often told by people of superior education and declining incomes, portray the New Russian as loaded, lucky, and preposterously crude. The jokes are like those once told about oil sheikhs and their vulgar new mansions in Beverly Hills. There is also an air of perishability about the New Russian of legend and fact. I heard about the owner of a health club in Moscow who was desperate for new members; so many of the old members had been rubbed out in mob hits. It sounded like the beginning of a joke, a fable. But it was told to me as true.
The mob is a vivid presence in everyday life. Mobsters run protection rackets, car-heist rings, import-export scams; on a "higher" plane they bribe government officials for trade licenses, state contracts, and sweet deals on the privatization of one enormous industry or another. Mobsters are as present as the snows. There are certain hotels, certain restaurants and nightclubs, where one would have to be a blithe spirit indeed to go without a prayer and a bulletproof vest.
And yet, for most people, it is the pervasive ethic of mobsterism that is even more painful. While it's unlikely that an ordinary person or even a foreign tourist will find himself in the midst of a mafia razborka—a showdown—there is every chance that dishonesty will visit. With the fall of the old regime, law enforcement is weaker and suggestible. It seems that nearly every time I've gone to Moscow lately the police pull me over, or the friend I am driving with, and charge us with some bogus violation. Their goal is to extract a bribe: $20, $50, more. It seems the price goes up all the time. When I asked a city official about this, he looked at me with pity and said, "What do you expect from a fellow who earns a hundred dollars a month? Honesty? You try it."
Ironically, one of the most skeptical voices about the vibrant and chaotic culture of the new Moscow is that of the man who initiated the city's freedom in the first place. Mikhail Gorbachev retains a priggish—call it Leninist-puritanical—view of consumer society, of wealth. In general he longs for the Moscow that he first saw as a young man come from the provinces to university.
"I think that a lot of what's happening is inappropriate," he told me one morning at his office. "It's the immorality I regret the most. Those who led this democratic process led a purge of everything that had been accumulated in this society for decades. They twisted everything in knots. Those who campaigned against privileges now build themselves gigantic palaces. They snatched up property. They have been like pigs at the trough. I am shocked by this. And for the Russians, this excess of American advertising—well, it's not all negative, but there is so much excess. In the first years after 1991, television was flooded with American and foreign movies."
Unlike most Muscovites, I admire Gorbachev, but it is easy to see that he is, in many ways, a man of his generation. He is missing the complexity of what is really out there on the streets and in the clubs. One memorable night not long ago I went with some friends to a nightclub called Pilot that was filled not with mobsters or obnoxious nouveaux riches, but rather with kids in their teens and twenties, students and young professionals, out for a good time. The rock bands on stage played a mix of American and British pop and new Russian songs; somehow the language of Pushkin extended a hand to Chuck Berry. Everyone danced. Everyone ate and drank. And no one got shot. The night, which lasted until breakfast, was at once normal, cosmopolitan, and Russian.
For younger people, like Leonid Parfyonov, the television commentator, it is natural that Moscow has become an international city and, at the same time, is distinctly Russian.
"That initial inferiority complex is gone, and now there is a kind of sense of wholeness," Parfyonov told me over lunch at a restaurant called Twin Pigs. "People now think, 'OK, so they live well in the West. And we can visit when we want. But we like it here in Moscow better. We're a tougher people, and life here is interesting now. We'll spend New Year's Eve watching a Grundig television and drinking Swedish vodka and eating American salmon and French cheeses. But we'll sing our songs. Russian songs. That is who we are now in Moscow. We are a city of everywhere.'"
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