Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

All along the tables that spread out to the mayor’s left and right big men sat stiffly. Early that morning they had stuffed themselves into dark suits. Now they wore faces of worry. The mayor folded his large, knuckly hands before him like a tent. The assembled understood: He was ready. Water was poured and cigarettes were stubbed out as the chatter subsided. The subject at hand – and the venue of this debate – was an important site, a new rehabilitation center for the city’s veterans wounded on the battlefields of Chechnya. Russia’s second campaign to defeat the Chechen fighters had entered its second year. The mayor was eager to show his compassion for the boys maimed in their service to the Motherland. The rehab center, an aide tugged me aside to whisper, was “especially close to the mayor’s heart.”

Yuri Luzhkov stood no more than five feet five inches, but he made his presence known. His outsize head was made even larger by the absence of hair and his large, piercing blue eyes. The mayor may have the build, and sartorial sense, of a head-banging enforcer in a James Cagney film, but he spoke softly and slowly. It was as if he had learned to rely on a lilting, unexpected cadence to disarm his interlocutors and draw them in. On this morning he sported a dark blue windbreaker and, even indoors, his trademark workman’s leather cap. He was more than ready, once his minions came to order, to hold court.

It did not take much. The mayor called upon the engineers, and one by one they stood, with a slight bow, as Russian schoolchildren have recited their lessons for centuries, to report the status of their work. “The plan will be completed ahead of schedule,” one boasted. “At least ten days ahead of schedule,” he quickly added.

“We have all the permits in order,” assured another.

“The windows have all arrived and been fitted,” said a third.

Then came the debate. A structural engineer, a man too far into his fifties to be so nervous in this setting, confessed, “We aren’t sure, just yet, quite how to proceed with the tiles or the linoleum for the flooring surface.” A whisper rippled through the construction trailer. “We checked with the engineers from the building institutes, and they have tested the tiles,” he hastened to add. “The tiles will last in terms of the pressure per square meter, and the longevity equivalency tests seem to have confirmed their preliminary findings. But the linoleum still has not been ruled out. We were” – and here, a long pause–“waiting to consult with you.”

The mayor sat still, taking in the parade of reports. In a corner of the room, I noticed a luminary of his inner circle, Shamil Tarpishchev, once Boris Yeltsin’s tennis coach, who fell from favor in a scandal involving the National Sports Foundation. Luzhkov, then Yeltsin’s bitter rival, had sheltered Tarpishchev, taking him under his wing as his adviser on sport. All the same, allegations of underworld associations continued to dog Tarpishchev but the truth of the matter remained unknown.1

Once the last of the speakers resumed his seat, the mayor gathered in his large hands and, massaging his knuckles, launched a barrage of questions. How much would the tiles cost to cover the requisite area? How much would the linoleum cost? Would there be wheelchairs? How many? Had both surfaces been tested for these wheelchairs? He demanded statistics. Numbers were proffered. He asked for samples. Samples were produced. He wondered, Was the factory Russian? Or foreign? On it went. To his every question the mayor received a prompt answer.

And so it came to pass that Yuri Luzhkov, who on this chilly day could rightly claim a place among the most powerful men in all Russia, spent nearly an hour probing the virtues of linoleum versus tile. To the untrained eye, it was an inordinately detailed discussion of construction material. But to anyone who lived in the Russian capital in the final years of the twentieth century, it was a pageant of power intended to impress. For in a moment, once the mayor announced his decision – linoleum won out – the voice vote was unanimous. “Da, da, da,” rang out the chorus.

LUZHKOV HAS BEEN CALLED many things. A populist and an opportunist, Russia’s fattest oligarch, and a true khozyain, an autocratic boss in the patrimonial mold of the tsarist days of old.2 Many of the sobriquets rang true. But one thing about Luzhkov always stood out: the need to make his mark. In the great Soviet tradition, Luzhkov was a builder. He had worked for decades in the Soviet chemical industry before taking over the Moscow city government in the early 1990s. Reelected in 1996 with more than 90 percent of the vote, Luzhkov would serve on into the new century. Muscovites adored him. As the decade after the Soviet fall closed, Yeltsin’s political and physical prowess faded ignobly away, Putin rose, and Luzhkov was stymied in his desire to rule Russia. But the mayor had succeeded in remaking his city, “the city of Moscow, the capital of our Motherland,” as he liked to call it, in his image.

“MOSCOW IS NOT RUSSIA.” It is the refrain of Westerners and Russians alike who have ventured into the Russian outback and returned to tell of its miseries. But what, then, is Moscow? In the years after the Soviet collapse, when so many of its denizens mistook license for liberty, the city grew infamous for the Babylon of its nightclubs and the upheaval of its unbridled free market. Yet it remains Russia’s heart, the grandest reflection, however warped, of its troubles and riches. With its wretched masses and gluttonous elite, Moscow is home to more than ten million, a population greater than that of many countries in Europe. Yet in its first post-Soviet decade no one so dominated the city as its boisterous mayor.

Lenin may have promised the Russian people a New Jerusalem, but Luzhkov set out to build it. In the mayor’s mind, the messianic destiny loomed large. For centuries Russians have harbored a vision of themselves as a chosen people and of Moscow as the Third Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, with its cult of martyrdom, is only partly to blame. There is also the bloodline: In 1472, when Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, wed the sole heiress to the throne of Byzantium, the niece of Constantine XI, Moscow claimed its right as the heir of Constantinople.

Zoë Paleologue took the name Sophia, and the Muscovites adopted the rituals and trappings of Byzantine power. Ivan III became the first Russian leader to call himself “tsar” – the Russified Caesar – and borrow the double-headed eagle as well.3 In Constantinople, the emblem made only rare appearances. In the land of the northern Slavs, however, the two-headed eagle was featured prominently. The Muscovites were eager to parade their imperial inheritance.4 It was only natural that Luzhkov set himself the task of restoring the symbols of the foundation myth. Yeltsin kept the red stars atop the Kremlin towers, but the mayor returned the gilded eagles to their perch. He also ordered that the Resurrection Gate, a fairy-tale entrance to Red Square of red and white brick, rise again. Stalin, eager to make room for the parade of missiles and tanks on Revolution Day, had leveled the seventeenth-century gateway. Once Yeltsin canceled the pageant, Luzhkov took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch. Like so many other pre-Bolshevik edifices, the gate was duplicated, exactly. Luzhkov now had a style, joked the head of the city’s Museum of Architecture: “Reconstructivism.”

The mayor liked the myth of the Third Rome. The Orthodox elder Filofei, a monk in Pskov in the late Middle Ages, was among the first to raise the notion. At some time in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century Filofei sent the grand prince in Moscow a stern warning: “Perceive, pious Tsar, how all the Christian realms have converged into yours alone. Two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be.”5 “… and a fourth there shall not be.” Moscow would be the third and last Rome, completing a holy trinity. Even Byzantium had not made such a claim. How could the mayor not rejoice in the imperial inheritance? The myth entitled Moscow to the glory not only of Constantine’s capital – with its shimmering churches of gold told of in medieval Russian chronicles – but also of Rome, and even Jerusalem as well. “We are the New Jerusalem,” Luzhkov would purr on occasion. And he was not kidding.

IN LUZHKOV’S MOSCOW the appreciation of masonry work became something of a civic duty. As buildings went up around the city, construction sites became tourist attractions. When elegant shopping malls and business centers sprouted between the Stalinist facades, they came complete with viewing platforms for the citizenry to witness the new world rising.

One frigid night as the new millennium neared, I stood alone taking in one of the mayor’s most beloved sites. On the naked northern bank of the Moscow River, in the bend where the water slowly begins to chum westward out of the city, Luzhkov had forced on his fellow citizens a twelve-billion-dollar construction project, the biggest in the former Soviet Union. He envisioned the Moscow Siti, so named after London’s financial district, blooming into a bustling center of finance and trade, the heart of the new metropolis as it carried the country into the new age. A glossy brochure described the future “city within a city” in less than fluent English:

Having studied the experience of the world-famous centers: Wall Street and Manhattan in New York, the City in Greater London, Shinjuku in Tokyo, and La Défence in Paris, we have done our best to avoid certain mistakes … Our “Moscow-City” will live a full-blooded life … there will be dwelling blocks of corporate and profit houses, hotels, cinema and concert halls, exhibition grounds, clubs, restaurants and a unique aquapark with a series of basins, water chutes, amusement facilities, restaurants and cafés … the central core will feature multilevel car parkings and a mini-metro line.

The project was a Luzhkov dream drafted on blueprints back in the rosy days when the image of Boris Yeltsin standing defiant on a tank still dominated Russia’s political memory and the country’s fledgling stock market impossibly topped the world’s emerging markets.

I liked inspecting Luzhkov’s Siti. I watched the masses of men, in the tradition of Peter the Great’s minions, digging the enormous foundation pit, their thirty-foot-tall dump trucks crawling through the mud roads. Reduced by the size of the pit, they resembled armies of ants. By the time I began strolling by, the project had become the biggest of Luzhkov’s white elephants. From the nearby glassed-in Wiener Hof, a cozy Austrian affair that boasts a dozen drafts and demure waitresses in petit lederhosen, the view of the site was spectacularly eerie. Or so I thought as I stood one night alone on the Hof’s ice-glazed balcony, surveying the black expanse. It was well past midnight in Moscow, on a Sunday in midwinter, but in the construction site that sprawled before me in all dimensions, the welding brigades were clamoring away, their torches giving form to walls and girders of iron in the darkness below. Inside the Hof a cackling trio of Argentines were splashing through their expense account’s final hours. Their female escorts, young locals with limited Spanish, were checking their watches. Below I could make out at least five Kamaz trucks, their broad backs loaded with brick, metal, and mud, groaning across the craters. Against the starless sky, a crooked line of cranes revealed the contours of one man’s dream. I could see how, in the frozen mud of this mess, it would be easy to lose one’s perspective.

Then, in the middle of August 1998, the Russian economy crashed. August, in Russian politics, has long been a fateful month, and the move to devalue the ruble had long been foreseen. But no one expected the market to fall so hard, so fast. Overnight the government defaulted on forty billion dollars in bonds. Within weeks the ruble lost more than two-thirds of its value. Expatriate bankers and brokers vaulted for the exits. But “the Crisis,” as the politicians and the bankers called the crash, was kind to Mia and me. In the spring we were able to move from our one-room apartment into a beautiful flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Moscow’s criminally high rents tumbled as thousands of business ex-pats rushed to flee the sinking ship. We bought a bed from an oil and gas analyst and a sofa from a Big Eight accountant. We moved from a gray concrete edifice built for the elite of the Communist Party to another formidable postwar apartment block, this one built to house the dutiful officers of the NKVD – Stalin’s secret police – and their families.

Russia’s race to the free market slowed to a crawl. Luzhkov, however, saw no need to revise his grand plans. As I walked along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to work each day, I checked in on the progress of his Siti. Across the street from our new place, and down a block, a high-rise thirty-four stories tall began to take shape. Luzhkov had promised it would be a vital tower in the new financial hub, a luxury hotel for foreign bankers and brokers. After the crash, construction on the tower slowed. Luzhkov’s aides quietly allowed that it would not, as planned, be a hotel, but an office building. They also got rid of the name. Once it had been dubbed The Reformer. Now they opted for something more neutral. Tower 2000, they rechristened it.

Luzhkov forged on in his drive to build the Siti. At the foot of the tower’s concrete skeleton, and spanning the frozen river, was a “pedestrian shopping bridge.” Inside, a mechanized walkway allowed Russians to glide along the glass corridor, as if between terminals at some anonymous airport. The walkway passed glitzy shops offering Murano vases, Finnish cell phones, and Milanese dresses for preteens. This was Luzhkov’s bridge to the twenty-first century, intended as a conveyance to the free market. One day, the mayor imagined, the bridge would carry visiting capitalists across the river to Russia’s Wall Street. German bankers, Japanese brokers, South African traders would float effortlessly to the gleaming financial colossus on the far bank of the river – globalization’s Slavic headquarters. Throughout the years of construction the vast pit of mud received six football fields of concrete and the multilevel shopping bridge filled with popular boutiques and restaurants. But to many the Siti remained a pipe dream.

On the shopping bridge’s lower floor – the sort of space where in an American mall Santa would sit in December or the balloon man in spring – a miniature Moscow sat on display. Centered beneath a domed ceiling of stained glass, the architectural model, some twelve feet wide, spun dizzyingly fast under a glass globe. In the sanitized mock-up of one of the most unforgiving cities in the world, Moscow’s endless rows of Stalinist facades stood up orderly, tidily divided by non-existent trimmed evergreens. The rotting factories were stripped of their belching smokestacks. The city’s byways, swept clean and paved smooth, were sprinkled with a few handsome trucks and new automobiles. The river, repeatedly diagnosed a cholera incubator, was a sparkling aquamarine. Upon it floated a barge and what appeared to be a cruise ship.

There were no people in the model city. Instead, the spotlights were fixed tight on a set of gleaming translucent skyscrapers that burst from the city’s heart. Lit from above and beneath, they towered above the gray mass. The centerpiece, a tower far taller than all the others – part Empire State, part TransAmerica, but quintessentially Luzhkovian – lured the eye. On a mural on the wall nearby the radiant towers were transposed over an image of the Kremlin lit up at night. The towers dwarfed the Kremlin.

The lineage of the mayor’s blueprint was Stalin’s Dvorets Sovietov, the Palace of Soviets. This earlier design was immensely complex, but Stalin’s aim had been simple: He wanted the world’s tallest building. The blueprint called for the palace to be higher than the Empire State Building, capped by a statue of Lenin bigger than the Statue of Liberty. In 1931 Stalin detonated the world’s largest Russian Orthodox Church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Dvorets Sovietov, however, was never built. Eventually a bog formed in the crater until Khrushchev filled it with a giant outdoor swimming hole for the proletariat. In 1991, Luzhkov, once an avowed atheist who found religion after his first election, set about to resurrect the cathedral. As a result of $330 million contributed by a legion of ignoble courtiers, Christ the Savior soon rose again.6 And so, with God well housed, the mayor had turned to building a home for the free market.

One morning I saw a young couple, noses pressed to the glass, standing transfixed by the cardboard city. Like so many of the pilgrims who came to see this model of Moscow, they were eager and hopeful witnesses to the birth of the new Siti. They tried to locate their apartment in the model city, but it spun too fast. They spent another moment, then moved on.

“Think it’ll ever be built?” the elfin girl, her long hair braided low below her waist, asked her companion.

“No,” he replied. “Of course not.”

THREE

IN MOSCOW I WAS AFRAID every day. Not that I would be attacked. I had been, but not harmed. No, my fear was derived from bad news, the flow of death, violent and early death, that courses through each day in Moscow. As luck would have it, we lived a floor beneath a celebrity, a would-be banker who helped run a notorious pyramid scheme that bankrupted thousands when it crashed in the first post-Soviet years. He was well protected. In the morning, he posted flint-chinned bodyguards with short-stock Kalashnikovs buttoned inside their suit coats at his door and on every landing of our stairwell. At night, he didn’t let us sleep. Big footsteps pounded overhead at all hours. One of his guards, it seemed, stood post all night. In the morning I would be sure to cough, sniffle, or shuffle loudly to let the guards know I was coming their way. I bade them good morning as they rebuttoned their jackets.

Paul Tatum, a onetime Republican fund raiser from Oklahoma and a well-known man about Moscow, was the most famous foreigner killed. Pravda, in 1990, had announced his arrival with creamy praise. Tatum, Pravda said, “has a dream, an American dream … He dreams of the day when a tiny American oasis will grow in the center of the Soviet capital.” The “oasis” was the Radisson Slavyanskaya, Russia’s first deluxe Western-style hotel and business complex. Coowned with the Moscow city government, it grew into a bustling hotel that hosted visiting American presidents. “My baby” Tatum liked to call it. But as later was the case in so many of the so-called joint ventures, before long the natives made moves to muscle him out – at times literally. A long, nasty fight ensued.

Tatum was killed on Halloween night in 1996, the week I started at Time. I was working in the bureau on a Sunday evening when a few blocks away Tatum, as he entered an underground walkway, fell to the ground in a hail of bullets. Eleven of the twenty shots hit him. I had often seen him around town. The last time had been on the summer night earlier that year when Yeltsin won his improbable reelection. Tatum made the rounds at election headquarters. “I’m gonna win this war,” he vowed to all who would listen. As the TV correspondents reported Yeltsin’s “miraculous comeback” and “the end, perhaps forever, of the Communist threat to Russia’s young Democracy,” Tatum was his usual cocksure self “United we stand,” he declared, “and divided we fall.”

Tatum was by no means alone. Each day I scanned the local wires: an English engineer found burned to death in his own apartment; an American television producer, a Californian in his thirties who came to Moscow to do good, stabbed to death; a young Canadian diplomat discovered dead in his living room (victim of a slipped mickey, the reports said); a German chef beaten to death on a central street, his face “torn.” There were many more, but those who succumbed to Moscow’s violence were rarely foreigners. We were invisible. Compared to the newly moneyed local elite, we were poor.

“Not likely these days,” said my friend Lyona, the son of a Soviet general lavishly decorated for his service to military intelligence, when I told him how Mia and I had been robbed in Moscow once before, in 1991. That had been back in the old Soviet days, when foreigners were few in number and far richer than their neighbors. In one hour, as we shopped at a local market, our place had been stripped. The thieves took everything – and tidily hauled it off in our suitcases. They even took the telephone. “No one will touch you now,” Lyona said. It was nothing against foreigners, he said. It was just that Russian thieves now wanted real money.

Now they went after the New Russians. The so-called Noviye Russkie–a deliberate play in Russian on “nouveau riche” – were those who had managed to grab a slice of the spoils and grown preposterously rich overnight. Most Russians, being Old Russians, naturally hated the New Russians. In the jokes that Russians addictively tell each other, they had replaced the Chukchi, a desperately poor native people of the Russian north who had long suffered as the favored butt of Soviet jokes. Lyona was right. The New Russians had become the new target.

I HEARD COUNTLESS TALES of horror from friends and neighbors. But none was more frightening than the one I heard T*** tell. I believed it right away because I believed everything he told me. He was the only Russian I ever met who had survived, flourished even, in the upper reaches of the Soviet Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church. His business, at least on the wintry day we met in the center of Moscow just off Pushkin Square, was oil. The church’s oil. Early in the Yeltsin era, the Orthodox Church won the right to export, tax-free, millions of barrels of Russian crude each year. T*** now worked for the trading company the men of the cloth had set up. The work, he said, was pretty much the same as what he did in the old days. “Only now instead of the general secretary, I serve His Holiness.”

T*** was fond of sushi, sweet Georgian wine, and sayings like “Creeds come and go, but I’m still here.” Over lunch he digressed from a discussion of the church’s role in building the market economy to a description of the forgotten world of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, Brezhnev’s long-serving ideologist and gray cardinal. Though dead for decades, Suslov remained one of the few old Party bosses who still conjured fury among Russians. My neighbor Valery, a kindly retiree from the Soviet Foreign Trade Ministry, hated him as the symbol of Politburo excess. Valery’s aunt, a nurse who spent her life ministering to the Party elite in the Kremlin hospital, had regaled him with tales of Suslov’s enemas. Each morning he came to the Kremlin hospital for his daily fruit juice. Not to be outdone, his wife demanded fresh trout each week, flown in from Lake Sevan in Armenia. But none of this troubled T***. His tale concerned Suslov’s grandnephew, a forty-year-old banker named Vladimir Sterlikov. Sterlikov, it was said, once lived in the dacha of Galina Brezhneva, Brezhnev’s daughter, who had a weakness for diamonds, drink, and circus performers. For a time Sterlikov had worked for Pravda. Now he was the deputy head of the Russian Bank for Reconstruction and Development–“until recently,” T*** added with relish.

“It was early one morning out on Rublyovka …,” T*** said, setting the scene. He was careful to call the Rublyovskoye Schosse by its nickname, the Rublyovka. He was letting me know that he too graced Moscow’s most prestigious artery. Clogged morning and night with convoys of Bavarian sedans, the Rublyovka was the gateway to the off-hours realm of the elite. It was the road that bore the city’s richest and mightiest into town from their fortified cottedgi, cozy five-story affairs nestled in the birches just beyond the city limit. Because it led directly to the residences of the mayor of Moscow, the prime minister, the cabinet, and, of course, the president himself, the Rublyovka was also the most heavily guarded road in Russia.

“It was early in the morning,” T*** repeated, pausing between sips of green tea, “when Suslov’s poor grandnephew met his bitter end.”