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Three (#u0b84b45d-0f02-56ec-b8b6-b54d45efd473)
Four (#u820e6a67-efa1-5668-a144-79fa9b73da00)
Five (#ub6029f25-f1fc-5a23-adef-e03c64cb1ad8)
Six (#ue7fead79-ba42-5c2a-83bd-8302d1cc3f66)
Seven (#u22f4fbe1-ffb0-5535-9fb0-34ce239cf0ce)
Eight (#uddf663b1-f580-5ef9-a442-23c77b0acc84)
Nine (#uc0851bd7-f0d0-56d5-8b8b-f41d349f4b3a)
Ten (#uc35c30cc-6757-50c4-b37c-75075244604c)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#ub2148b22-07aa-5ffd-b94f-cf26aa6c2d02)
About the Author (#u9c4f8c66-f3a7-53b0-b977-82402af58e3c)
Interview with Andrew Meier (#u2c94d865-9f81-52e1-99f6-335934ce92ed)
Life at a Glance (#u696f0cc3-f85c-55f4-b7a5-778750f890ba)
About the Book (#u5250125e-e6b5-5ba7-a6f8-c6f5a191ed77)
A Critical Eye (#ud0b56e36-3788-5b50-b44a-626802a47f26)
Afterword After Beslan (#u8a6581e7-d678-58eb-9da0-bc8bb70cc0bc)
Russian Write Off (#u84a68993-9c1e-5df2-a744-dff7d1aabef3)
Read On (#u414c2722-a6bc-54f8-a998-f3073e0788e2)
If You Loved This, You’ll Like … (#u0b04fd06-417e-5b0e-8a74-04e4c16bb1fe)
To Find Out More, Andrew Meier Recommends … (#u422dfbe5-8a4c-5ab4-9338-931d75a9a046)
Bibliography (#uea89a77d-5762-591e-8158-fe94aa7cbd1a)
Index (#u236673ef-df5d-534c-9d26-3706b16d9040)
Acknowledgments (#ua435ec62-5172-50e2-87ad-bcbcb50b81f9)
About the Author (#u3324f2c9-9757-51a7-b5c3-44168ddbaec0)
Author’s Note (#u43782561-eb5f-5fc5-9a2b-cb2ade721b31)
Notes (#uc7ec24cf-a160-52ce-bda2-6a1b03394acb)
Copyright (#ue87fd1fe-ec9d-599b-a1cf-c60459087b23)
About the Publisher (#u340e9a53-abf8-54a0-b4ec-324d67a71a0f)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_481c7a06-5978-5263-9dd0-18b932914085)
HE HAD BEEN THEIR FIRST CHILD, the elder of two sons. After his death they had turned the darkest corner of the spartan living room into a shrine. A hazy black-and-white portrait, blown up beyond scale from an army ID, loomed above the reedy church candles and a thin bouquet of plastic flowers. They had draped a black ribbon over the photograph.
“When I served,” his father said, “I served the Motherland. ‘To serve with honor and dignity.’ That’s what they told us to do and that’s what I did. For twenty-eight years.”
Andrei Sazykin died in the summer of 1996. He was killed on the north-eastern edge of Grozny, before dawn broke on August 6, the parched day the rebels reclaimed their capital. The Chechens had swarmed back by the thousands. Seven other boys in his unit also fell that morning. Three weeks earlier Andrei had turned twenty.
For the Russian forces, the Sixth of August, as it became known, would live on. It would haunt them as a humiliation, the worst day of the war. For Andrei’s parents, Viktor and Valentina, it made no sense. They would sit in the dim light of their two-room apartment in Moscow and wonder how the Chechens had so easily retaken Grozny that day. Until the letters started to arrive. One after another, Andrei’s comrades began to write to his parents.
“And suddenly,” his father said, “everything came into this terrible perfect clarity.”
The letters were blunt.
“‘Your son served well,’” recited Viktor. He had read the words a thousand times, but he traced the lines with his forefinger. In his voice there were tears. “‘But he did not die in battle. He was sold down the river. We all were.’”
Valentina said the boys came to visit. They brought a video from their last days in Chechnya. It showed Russian officers, their shirts off in the severe heat of Grozny, playing backgammon with two Chechen fighters. They were smoking and drinking, all of them laughing.
“That was the afternoon on the day before Andrei died,” Viktor said. “The boys later pieced it together. There was no battle that morning. There was a deal. The Chechens paid their way through the checkpoints. The boys were slaughtered. And when the others went looking for the commanders, they were gone”
Months after their son’s death Viktor and Valentina brought a case, one of the first of its kind in Russia, against the Ministry of Defense. They sued to restore their boy’s honor and not, as the papers claimed, to get rich on compensation. They called his death a murder and vowed to seek punishment for those who killed him.
Several Augusts later, nearly five years to the day after their son died, I went to see them again. We had spoken in the intervening years. But I had never brought them the kind of news they craved, for I had failed to convince my editors that their son’s case was a story. I had, however, followed Viktor and Valentina as they waged their long campaign. They had started in their neighborhood court and fought all the way to Russia’s Supreme Court. They even won a hearing in the Constitutional Court. But at every station they lost.
Along the way Valentina lost her job. For two decades she had taught biology in the local school. Viktor meanwhile had been forced to get a job. He now worked twenty-four-hour shifts, four times a week, at an Interior Ministry hotel, a hostelry for visiting officers in Moscow. Their savings depleted, they had also lost their hope. All they had, said Valentina, was nashe gore (“our sorrow”).
“Tell me,” Viktor said, fixing his eyes on mine. “Because I can’t understand it. But you must know. Can a country survive without a conscience?”
In the days that followed our last conversation, I left Moscow after a stay of five winters and six summers. I had, truth be told, lived in the country for most of the last decade. I had seen out the last years of the Soviet experiment and witnessed the heady birth of the “new Russia.” I had seen the romantic rise of Boris Yeltsin-and the wreckage his era wrought: the inglorious battle for the spoils of the ancient regime (an industrial fire sale of historic proportion), the military onslaught in Chechnya (the worst carnage in Russia since Stalingrad), and the rapid decline in nearly every index, social and economic, that the state took the trouble to record.
I had traveled far beyond the capital, to the distant corners of the old empire. I had lived for years in the remains of the Soviet state amid the millions of spectral dead souls who walked its ruins, as well as the rising new class of rent seekers, instant industrialists, and would-be entrepreneurs, who raced to accumulate and acquire, lest their new world vanish as quickly as the old. I had interviewed Politburo veterans and Gulag survivors, befriended oligarchs and philosophers. But I had no answer for Andrei’s parents. I could only tell them that I hoped to write a book – not only to record my travels across Russia’s length and breadth but, above all, to try to make sense of their plaintive question.
I. MOSCOW ZERO GRAVITY (#ulink_2ea3e5a7-c9e3-5698-bf95-38d781c666ee)
Vykhod est’! (“There Is a Way Out!”)
–Moscow metro slogan, 2001
ONE (#ulink_bd6b84aa-d2d2-5665-b03e-aab1ca1a1db4)
IN THE OLD DAYS, before the breakneck final decade of the last century, before the end of empire and the epochal shift that followed in its wake, in the days when dissenters were dissidents and poets were prophets, when “abroad” meant Bulgaria, Budapest, or Cuba at best, when leather shoes and silk ties were not bought but “gotten,” when colleagues were “Comrades” and strangers “Citizens,” when HIV and heroin were exotic plagues born of bourgeois excess, when artists and soldiers pointed to ceilings and dropped their voices, when churches held archives and orphans, when lovers met in parks because apartments housed generations, when everyone professed to believe in the Party, the Collective, and Vodka but in truth trusted only Fate, God, and Vodka, I first came to Moscow.
By the time I left, I had lived there longer than in any other city. But Moscow, like the country that surrounds it, eludes one. It defies measurement and loathes explanation, as if inherently ill disposed to definition. Longevity in Russia does not always yield understanding. Neither does intimacy guarantee knowledge. Nor does the first sensation of walking the city’s poplar-lined boulevards and great avenues of granite, that first sense of awe and astonishment at the fairy-tale world turned nightmare, ever seem to diminish.
First impressions in Moscow fortunately do not lie. The city is built on an inhuman scale. Everything is by design inconvenient for Homo sapiens. The streets are so vast crossing them requires a leap of faith. The cars do not stop for pedestrians; more often they accelerate. The streets are so broad one can traverse only beneath them, through dimly lit passageways that shelter the refugees of the new order: makeshift vendors who hawk everything from Swedish porn to Chinese bras; scruffy preteens cadging cigarettes and sniffing glue; hordes of babushkas who have fallen through the torn social safety net and are left to sell cigarettes and vodka in the cold; the displaced stranded by the host of unlovely little wars that raged along the edges of the old empire. And everywhere underground the stench of urine lingers with the acrid aroma of stewed cabbage and cheap tobacco.
Aboveground the city seems to exist – as it did at its birth – to trade. Kiosks on nearly every corner, bazaars in every neighborhood. Even the outlying districts, more a part of the woods than the city, are overrun with feverish commerce. In the post-Soviet years, open-air wholesale markets, sprawling encampments of plastic tenting and cargo containers, lured tens of thousands each weekend. Here were the fruits of globalization, tinged inevitably with a Russian style: electronic and computer goods from the East and from the West, pirated software on CDs burned locally and on video, Hollywood blockbusters still unreleased in the States. The off-the-books trade united unlikely partners. A drug market sprouted one block from the Lubyanka, the once and present headquarters of the secret police, on a street where pensioners sold their prescriptions to hungry young addicts.
Slowly, too, the signs of the new opulence – the transfer of the state’s vast wealth into the hands of a chosen few – came to dominate Moscow’s implacable center. Vacant nineteenth-century mansions, the crumbling former residences of the prerevolutionary merchant class, became the ornate offices of new millionaires and billionaires, the men who soon took to calling themselves oligarchs. Even during the harshest years of the Communist era, Moscow had always been on the make. But in the mid-1990s, with the rise of powerful moguls like Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Vladimir Potanin, among a half dozen others, the Great Grab began. In the bedlam of the Yeltsin years, the profit margin grew into a gaudy obsession. “The primitive accumulation of capital” was what the oligarchs, remembering their Marx, called their thirst for the riches of the ancien régime.
This of course was “the New Moscow.” When I first stepped foot in the city in 1983, Moscow was grim and gray, a place of vast public spaces dominated by an eerie silence. It was the height of the age of Yuri Andropov, one of the last of the dour old men to rule the USSR. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was at its tragic height. I was then a nineteen-year-old undergraduate on a cheap one-week Sputnik tour. I had flown in from East Berlin with two dozen Bavarian high school students and, inexplicably, an older businessman from Buenos Aires who mesmerized the Kremlin guards with a new invention, a video camera.
My eyes glazed at the strange fairy-tale world. In the kaleidoscope of sounds and impressions, Moscow, it seemed, hosted another race on another planet. One encounter, above all the rest, remains indelible, fixed in the present. I sit on a low brick wall on a corner of Red Square. As I watch the crowds moving across the square, a young boy approaches. His name is Ivan. But I do not understand him when he tells me his age. He holds up ten fingers and folds down one pinkie. Nine, I understand. We cannot speak with each other. We only manage to establish two things. “Lenin tut,” Ivan says, pointing to the squat red granite mausoleum that sits across the cobbled square. “I Mama tam.” (“Lenin is here. And my mama’s over there.”) He waves a hand to swat the air, pointing to an office that lies far beyond this great busied corner of Moscow. That afternoon I made a vow to myself: I would return to Russia only once I had learned the language.
Five years later I did. In 1988 I came back as a graduate student from Oxford to study for a term. I never expected, of course, that I would stay on in Moscow to witness the USSR during its final gasps. After Oxford, there was only one place I wanted to be, where I had to be. I told family and friends that I was making my way as a free-lance journalist. In truth I was searching for any excuse to stay in Moscow. I was in love.
In those final, frenzied years of the Soviet Empire, Russian friends often wondered why I chose to live among them. My friend Andrei, then in the advanced stages of a doctoral dissertation on the liberalizing impulses of Josip Tito’s economics, was no Soviet patriot. The son of a middling Soviet bureaucrat, Andrei had a fondness for tie-dyed jeans and peroxided hair. He had offered to let me stay with him and his young wife, Lera, and their five-year-old daughter, Dasha, in their kommunalka, a communal flat they shared with a young woman and an old lady in one of the city’s most beautiful and crumbling prerevolutionary neighborhoods. Andrei and Lera were lucky; theirs was hardly the typical communal flat. The young woman worked in a sausage plant. She rose early, came home late, and at week’s end without fail brought home frozen pork. The old lady was even more accommodating; she rarely appeared.
They lived a quarter mile from the Kremlin, but Andrei and Lera could not have been further removed from officialdom. Each night brought friends: rock musicians and military officers, actors and poets, tall, stunning women from Siberia, short, stunning men from Dagestan. Their cramped kitchen was always crowded with the voices of the emergent generation debating the issue of the hour, be it the chances for Gorbachev and glasnost, the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, or the legalization of hashish in Copenhagen.
The gatherings grew so big that one Sunday morning Andrei axed his way through a wall, expanding the tiny kitchen into an unused closet. As the nightly assemblies ran their course, accompanied by the ceaseless flow of bottle after bottle, the attention turned to me.
“Just why are you here?” someone would ask.
“He’s looking for a Russian bride,” someone would joke.
“He’s a spy,” another would jibe.
Whenever doubt or suspicion arose, Andrei saved me. “He just enjoys watching dead empires in decay,” he’d answer.
DAYS BEFORE THE COUP attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991, I left Soviet Russia. But in 1996, after a five-year remove, I returned again. This time I came with my wife, Mia, a native New Yorker and a photojournalist. We moved into a single room with a remarkable view. It was on the top floor of a fabled building that rose above the Frunzenskaya Embankment along the Moscow River. One side of the building overlooked the river and Gorky Park, the other – ours – had a view of the Novodevichy (New Maiden) Convent. On long walks along the river we would wonder at the glimmering cupolas of the Kremlin churches and savor the sweet air that wafted from the Red October chocolate factory across the way.
The building, erected in the lean postwar years, was a landmark. Stalin had built it not only as an elegant residence for his lieges but as evidence that their world would survive. This explained the decor. Our room stretched, at most, twenty-five by ten feet but boasted a corniced ceiling and an outsize crystal chandelier. Each month Nikita Khrushchev, the moon-faced grandson of the Soviet leader, came for the rent. The place belonged to his other grandfather, his mother’s father. The quarters were tight, even by Russian standards, but more than we needed. I had a fellowship to report from the war zones of the former USSR, and our plan was to spend as much time as possible on the road, traveling across Central Asia and the Caucasus. We took the place for a few months, and we stayed there three and a half years.
That fall I joined Time, trading the freedom of free-lancing for my first monthly paycheck as a journalist. Nonetheless, we stayed on in our room. As a “local hire” I got a bare-bones contract. We still slept on the couch, did the laundry in the bathtub, and delighted in the discovery of Belgian flash-frozen chicken in the corner market. We installed a steel door and scoured the local street vendors for fresh vegetables. Mia made friends with an Azeri woman, a refugee from the war between the Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabagh, who set aside her fattest potatoes and tomatoes for us. When rare visitors from home arrived, we made sure to prepare them for the elevator. We lived on the fourteenth floor. The elevator was wooden, a rickety antique that screeched as it slowly ascended. Invariably, it was pitch black inside. Now and then a neighbor screwed in a light. But it did not stay for long. Ten bulbs, I soon learned, equaled a bottle of vodka. In all our years in Moscow we never lived in the ghettos reserved for foreign diplomats and journalists, and for this we would be grateful.
The house was filled with stories and sources. Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s longest-serving henchmen, had lived on the next stairway over. (His daughter still did.) Next door to us lived Sasha, an aging underground painter who had been one of the first to stage avant-garde actions in the city streets. He still spoke proudly of the day under Brezhnev when he walked into a barren meat store and placed paintings of sausages and hams in its empty display counters. His wife, a restorer of fine art, worked for the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s grandest museum. Throughout the first winter that we shared a wall, she worked on canvases the soldiers had brought home from the Grozny Art Museum. Sasha was usually mild-mannered – except when he drank, which was often. One day he decided Mia would make a new drinking partner. He hovered outside our door, pounding it with a bottle of vodka, until as she refused, he sank to his knees, crying.
On the floor below lived Nina Aleksandrovna, a frail lady in her seventies who took a warm liking to us. Poor Nina was tortured by her son, Sergei, who seemed lost in a détente time warp. He wore faded denim shirts, unbuttoned low, and faded jeans. At least twice a week he would appear at our door to plead with me to translate some Beatles song. Sergei drank too much and worked too little.
Pyotr lived next door to Nina. A lanky hacker with a blond ponytail, he later showed me, as NATO jets bombed Belgrade, how he helped lead the attack on the North Atlantic Alliance’s mainframe. When we first met, Pyotr was a nineteen-year-old who resisted wearing shirts, no matter the weather. He and I spent long nights on the landing between our floors. We would look out at Novodevichy, the most fabled convent in Moscow. He rolled cigarettes – no filters, Dutch tobacco – and talked of his course work. He was majoring in one of Moscow State’s new fields, the Department of the Defense of Information. Pyotr was already one of Moscow’s more established hackers; he anchored a TV show on pirated computer games and had bought a small dacha. One night he told me who was paying for his education, the FSB. He was on a full ride from the secret policemen who had taken over for the old KGB.
TWO (#ulink_d9437d77-0257-5bb9-adac-67573a971ba7)
IT WAS EARLY ON A CRISP Saturday morning in the short Russian fall, and something was not right. The mayor had sensed it. He was sure of it, in fact. Tiles crack. They break. They splinter. Linoleum, he calculated, would last. The mayor sat in the center of the head table in a prefabricated construction office built of American aluminum siding and Finnish plywood in the heart of Moscow. He stirred slowly in his chair, staring straight ahead, as if seeing something far beyond the realm of all the eyes gathered here and fixed upon his tonsured square head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“… 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.
And so, with God well housed, the mayor had turned to building a home for the free market.
