A Russian Tragedy

July 2006. A marshrutka, or public minivan, pulls out of Yuzhnaya metro station, headed for the coal-mining town of Shchekino, two hours south of Moscow. Soon it is zipping through birch forest and meadows spattered with wildflowers. The soil here, in the oblast of Tula, is rich, but little farming is going on. Instead, gated communities of large, close-packed modern dachas, the weekend retreats of the New Russians (as they are called), are reclaiming abandoned fields. A sumptuous glossy magazine I flipped through in Moscow had an advertisement for one of these new developments with a photograph of a man in a business suit mowing his lawn in front of his palatial apricot stucco dacha. The magazine is intended for the new elite, the small percentage of the population who own almost everything and have near-total control over the economy. Many of them are former members of the kgb or the Federal Security Service (fsb), the kgb’s principal successor after perestroika, who have reinvented themselves as capitalists or high government officials since the collapse of Communism in 1991. The same amoral, cold-blooded bastards who betrayed the Communist experiment are now betraying the democratic experiment. When Russians are bad, they’re right up there with the worst of them.

Thirty-three-year-old Ramon, one of the passengers, works as a security guard for one of these biznesmeni. He is going home for a few days to visit his wife and two daughters. “I don’t know what kind of work my boss is into,” he tells me, “but he’s paying me 15,000 rubles a month (about $665), four times what I can make in Shchekino.”

Shchekino has been going downhill since the coal gave out in 1994. “Seventy percent of Shchekino is over fifty years old. We are dying,” Ramon goes on. This is true of rural Russia in general. Tens of thousands of villages have been abandoned in the last five years. Further south and away from Moscow, there are villagers living on as little as $50 a month. Whole regions of Siberia have been depopulated. In the far north, the population has declined by one-third since 1989. Russia’s population is declining by 560,000 people a year. The average life expectancy for a man is only fifty-eight years, lower even than Iraq’s. The villages are dying, the people are dying, the population is dying. Russia’s sixteen-year-old capitalist democracy has produced a rural-exodus crisis, a demographic crisis, and a health crisis. The country meets many of the criteria of a failed state. It is not taking care of its citizens.

Another passenger is also a security guard in Moscow, and a third man works on an oil rig in the Barents Sea, two months on, two months off. He, too, is coming home to his family. Then there is a woman who works as a computer programmer in Shchekino and her daughter. They seem more comfortably off — part of a middle class that makes up roughly 20 percent of Russia’s population and is the best hope for the country. The rest of the population might be in desperate straits, but no one in the marshrutka is blaming the Putin government. They think Putin is an enormous improvement over the drunken Yeltsin or even the reformer Gorbachev, “who sold Russia to the Americans,” as the woman says. “Putin is a stabilizer.”

What do Russians see in this man, who was the director of the fsb before he took office in 1999 and seems to have ice in his veins, I wonder. How could someone who seems so bent on turning Russia back into a police state be so immensely popular? Don’t they remember the seventy years of horror they suffered?

I personally embrace Vladimir Vladimirovich enthusiastically on both cheeks and hope he lives up to his people’s admiration and expectations, having no interest in becoming the latest of dozens of critics of the regime to be rubbed out. The last was Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death from his fifth-storey window on March 2. A military correspondent for the daily Kommersant, Safronov was working on a story about the Kremlin’s furtive sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and jet fighters to Syria.

Just one day earlier, Paul Joyal, a US expert on Russian intelligence, was shot by two men in his driveway. He had just accused the Russian government, on nbc’s Dateline, of poisoning former kgb agent Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous November. Litvinenko had blown the whistle on murders and corruption in the Putin regime. He was exposed to a minute amount of a little-known, lethally radioactive isotope, polonium-210, which took twenty-one days to kill him.

The month before that Anna Politkovskaya, who had written about the torture of Chechens by the Russian army in the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment elevator. And two years before that Paul Klebnikov, the Moscow editor of Forbes Russia, was shot dead in the street. Klebnikov had just begun to investigate the 1995 murder of a Russian TV journalist, Vladislav Listyev.

As a writer of Russian ancestry, it has been impossible to ignore the extensive coverage of the assassinations of these colleagues and compatriots. While there is no direct evidence linking Putin to the killings, and they were already happening years before he took office — although, if the regime was involved, the fsb, which Putin was once head of, would presumably have carried out some of them — they represent an alarming trend. Let’s just say there’s no disputin’ Putin. My people sure seem to like their leaders brutal and ruthless. What does this woman mean by “a stabilizer,” I wonder. Like Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Nicholas I, and Stalin? Maybe the real question is, what is the subtext? Stabilize for what? So Putin can return Russia to her former greatness and usher in a Fifth Empire (following the Kievan, Muscovite, Romanoff, and Soviet) — a new form of parliamentary absolutism for political scientists to ponder: totalitarian democracy. Backed by state control over the massive oil-and-gas sector, is Putin simply providing the theatre, the demonstration of being in total command, with the power over his subjects that démocratie à la russe and historical precedent require?

Shchekino’s one hotel is booked solid by “sportsmen,” so I take a five-minute cab ride to Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo Tolstoy’s estate is. At the end of a long drive through a dark forest of ancient birch and lindens, there is a hotel that used to be a rest home. The roof of the central columned section, built in the fifties in the Russian imperial style, has caved in, but one of its wings has rooms. I take one for two nights. The receptionist is a local blond beauty named Victoria. The chambermaids are a voluptuous girl from Bulgaria and a slender, raven-haired stunner from Tashkent. Every tenth young woman in Russia is a knockout. Such lush, fertile creatures, such compelling, unfathomable eyes — but they aren’t having children. This is one of three components of Russia’s demographic problem. The birth rate has fallen to 1.3 children per woman, far short of the 2.2 needed to stabilize the population. Only 12 million women are in the most fecund age bracket, twenty to twenty-nine, and in a few years there will be only 8 million. They aren’t reproducing because most Russians cannot even think about having a family. There is no social infrastructure — schools, health clinics, buses, playgrounds, etc. In many rural communities and urban neighbourhoods, the proletariat has been abandoned.