A Russian Tragedy

The second part of the demographic problem is the collapse of a health care system that was one of the best things about the ussr. Epidemics of tuberculosis, hepatitis, hiv/aids, and other communicable diseases are spreading out of control, and people are dying simply because they are not being treated.

Only the New Russians can afford health care. But death rates are also skyrocketing among working-age males due to alcoholism, drug use, tuberculosis, violence, and suicide. Forty-two thousand Russians a year are being killed by samogon, home-brewed alcohol, and other intoxicating beverages like eau de cologne, aftershave, and cleaning fluids. This is the third part of the demographic crisis: a pattern of self-destruction and cultural demoralization similar to that of native people on reservations in North America. Demographers predict that in twenty years there may not be enough Russian citizens to staff the military or the workforce.

There is no restaurant at the hotel, so I walk fifteen minutes back out through the forest and down the highway to a trucker’s café. The café has no customers, only the boyfriend of the waitress, who is watching the Russian version of Supernanny on a grainy black-and-white TV. Many young women from the countryside work as nannies for the children of biznesmeni in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the men are their bodyguards. Too many of the women prostitute themselves to pimps who promise to get them to the West, and those who make it there often end up as sex slaves.

The owner of the café, a bald, fleshy Armenian, upon hearing that he has a foreign customer, comes out of the kitchen and sits with me. He has been in Yasnaya Polyana since 1982, when ethnic strife forced him to leave his home in Tashkent. “To tell the truth,” he says, “during Communism the people knew that if they got sick, they’d be taken care of. Now 60 percent of our girls have syphilis and other venereal diseases,” he says, wildly exaggerating what is nonetheless a hideous reality. “Under socialism it was not like this. But you weren’t allowed to own property. And now I have my own café. Even with all the problems, I prefer the way it is now.

“This land is rich,” he says. “The problem is that Russians don’t work. They only drink. If this land belonged to the Armenians, if they were living here . . .” He runs his forefingers across his chin, suggesting how prosperous they would be.

On the way back to the hotel, I cut through the woods. Passing the charred remains of bonfires littered with empty bottles of samogon, I wade through a meadow of thistles and yarrow up to my nose. Mountain ashes sag with scarlet berry clusters. The brief Russian summer is lush and intense. I come to a path that skirts a village beside the hotel. An old man approaches. He has a white mastiff straining on a leash, looking as if it would tear me apart if he turned it loose. The man passes without a greeting or even a nod. No dobryi vecher or anything. None of the old nomenklaturi, I have noticed, give you the time of day. I wonder what horrors this man carries inside him, what horrors he has seen and maybe even participated in. I pick a sprig of wild mint and give it to Victoria, who is pulling a twelve-hour shift at the reception desk and is glad to have the work.

Flicking on the TV in my room, I watch a documentary about a gang of neo-fascist punk nationalisti in St. Petersburg. They have shaved heads and tattoos on their bare, thick upper arms, and they are mugging and stomping people on the sidewalk and inside the metro. The camera operator is a few feet away, complicit in the assault. The gang is committing these atrocities for the camera. This is followed by a police show in which a young woman is brutally raped in a vacant, rubble-strewn lot in Moscow. This is the urban life that beckons young people from the villages.

Most new arrivals to Moscow find lodging in the Kafkaesque labyrinth of khrushchevki that rings the capital. They rent rooms in mouldering concrete buildings constructed in the fifties, during the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, with their dark, dangerous, urine-stinking stairwells. I first had a taste of these faceless habitats in 1993 when, on assignment for Esquire magazine, I tracked down the kgb “honey-pot” who seduced Navajo marine guard Clayton Lonetree at the American embassy, getting him twenty-five years in Leavenworth for the information he gave her.

But life in the low-rent parts of Moscow and St. Petersburg has always been grim. Recall the squalor of Raskolnikov’s digs in Crime and Punishment. I curl up with Turgenev’s Nest of the Gentry, a novel about romantic anguish on the country estates of Tula in the 1830s. The tale is like Pride and Prejudice, but more lyrical, and the suffering of the characters, being Russian, is more exquisite. The happiness the two young lovers are able to achieve lasts no longer than the lush, intense Russian summer. It seems like such an innocent, oblivious world. The servants are the servants, the serfs are the serfs.

No one questions this.