Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (19 page)

While I was visiting their country, the Russians were having an election. A momentous election. This was the first time in the 1,100–year history of the country that a national leader was being freely chosen by democratic means. And it might be a big election for everyone else in the world, too. Because running neck and neck were Boris Yeltsin, the man who almost single-handedly removed the Denver boot of bolshevism from the now freely spinning snow tire of Russian society (to coin a metaphor), and Gennady Zyuganov, a damned Communist.

Was the Soviet Union about to reunify? Was the Evil Empire coming back? Would the Russians vote themselves voteless? Would the tanks roll again? (The military commanders will have to pay some heavy bribes if they plan to park any armored vehicles near Moscow’s more-fashionable restaurants.) Or would Russia continue on the straight and narrow path of modern political economy, eventually turning into a gigantic frozen Singapore? (Picture Lee Kuan Yew trying to cane a full-grown Russian.)

The only people who seemed to be unconcerned about the Russian elections were the Russians. When questioned about the vote, Russians, even loyal partisans, campaign volunteers, and candidate advisors, prefaced their answers with a shrug—the kind of shrug that can be delivered only with Russian-sized shoulders. I asked a Russian friend who would be the next president. He shrugged and said, “Yeltsin.”

“How much will he win by?” I asked.

“I didn’t say he would win. I said he’d be the next president.”

Enormous state power exists in Russia whether the head of this state is elected or elects himself. And with such power goes tremendous governmental inertia. This either meant that no matter who got elected, nothing would change, or it meant that all the changes would keep happening, no matter who got elected. The Russians didn’t know, and, busy as they were trying to make a living, they weren’t that eager to find out. If Zyuganov and his ilk got in, the corrupt bureaucratic Soviet holdovers, the so-called dingycrats, would continue to run things. And if Yeltsin was returned to power, the dingycrats’ partners in corruption, the crime-and-business parvenus called New Russians, would continue getting rich.

The New Russians are an amazing bunch. The men wear three-piece suits with stripes the width and color used to indicate no passing on two-lane highways. Shoulder pads are as high and far apart as tractor fenders, and lapel points stick out even farther, waving in the air like baseball pennants. The neckties are as wide as the wives. These wives have, I think, covered their bodies in Elmer’s and run through the boutiques of Palm Springs, buying whatever stuck. Their dresses certainly appear to be glued on—flesh-tight, no matter how vast the expanse of flesh involved. Hair is in the cumulonimbus style. Personal ornaments are astonishing in both frequency and amplitude. There was a David Bowie concert in Moscow in June 1996, and according to the
Moscow Times,
the loudest sound from the expensive seats was the rattle of jewelry.

Most of the New Russians, like the dingycrats, had government connections in the old Soviet Union. They were at the heart of the socialist beast, and when it collapsed, they found themselves in perfect position to feast on the carcass.

Drinking with Dmitry Volkov one night, I said, “Maybe you should have cleaned house in Russia. Maybe after the attempted coup in 1991, you should have hanged the Communists.”

“No,” said Dmitry. “What would it have mattered if Goebbels had hanged Himmler?”

Like many other places in the world, Russia is a land of contrasts between old and new. But these are not the cute contrasts between old and new that telecommunications companies love to use in TV commercials—Zen masters faxing each other blank pages. In Russia, the contrasts are all scary. I visited a radio station on election night, a radio station still using vacuum tubes in its broadcast equipment. There was a Toshiba laptop in the studio. And this ordinary piece of journalistic equipment was alarming. The laptop, with its crisp design and neat finish, made the whole building look like it had been built by apes. Apes on the take. The place was no more than fifteen years old, and the plaster was flaking, the floor tiles were buckling, the walls were crooked, the windows didn’t fit. The carpet was unraveling into long, smelly coils. You could break down the doors with a blunt remark. And there, on a wobbly table with a veneer top wrinkled like a relief map of the Urals, sat the little Toshiba, doing the one thing that nothing made in the Soviet Union ever seemed to do: It worked.

I was blaming this wild incompetence on Marxism until I walked in St. Basil’s Cathedral, that mountain of Persian domes and painted dazzle that is the very symbol of Russia, not to mention the symbol of U.S. TV anchormen broadcasting from Russia and telling us what’s what. One thing they don’t tell is that the inside of St. Basil’s is a dusty jumble of catacombs and closets, badly made and primitively decorated—that the whole thing is really just a pile of bricks and timber, and more like something molded out of mud by kids than a real piece of architecture.

St. Basil’s was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, 350 years after the cathedral at Chartres. According to legend, Ivan had the architects blinded to keep them from building another. Perhaps he went too far, but he certainly should have had them beaten over the head with a book of lessons about how to make vaults and arches.

Barbaric touches persist in Russia. Packs of wild dogs roam the streets of Moscow. One pack lived by Red Square, lurking on Vetoshny Street in the back doorways of the GUM shopping mall. Another pack lived behind the best hotel in town, mine, in an alley directly below my window. They barked all night and slept all day, tempting me to open my casements in the middle of the afternoon and shout, “Sit! Fetch! Roll over!” for a couple of hours.

Russia possesses more recent vulgarities, too. Lenin remains on display by the Kremlin walls, laid out like a bad ideological salad under a big glass sneeze guard. Not many people come to see the dead maniac anymore, but the military sentinels are still there, as serious as ever, and still empowered, as all government authorities in Russia always have been, to make your life a misery if you laugh or moon the sarcophagus.

A few days after the election, I took the night train to St. Petersburg. It was still dusk when I left at midnight. I dozed for a while in my compartment, but by 4:30 the sun was up. I sat on my bunk watching the dormant countryside, sipping terrible sparkling apricot wine that I’d bought by mistake at a party-hearty kiosk. The meadows, marshes, and birch forests were spread with a low-hanging mist and dusted with Queen Anne’s lace. In the little clusters of farmsteads, only the corrugated roofing and the occasional single thread of electric wire indicated modern times. The houses were built of logs with gables, eaves, and small, deep-set windows decorated with hand carvings.

There is an open-air museum, the Skansen, in Stockholm, where dwellings like these have been preserved. The home that I saw in the Skansen that most resembled the homes I was looking at now dated from the sixteenth century. In Russia, people are still living in them. Potato plants grew up to the front doors. Open wells and outhouses stood in the yards. I counted one truck and a motorcycle. This is the part of Russia that’s closest to Western Europe. This is the route between the nation’s two historic capitals. And for one complete hour, looking out that train window, I did not see a paved road.

In the morning in St. Petersburg, I went to the Winter Palace. From across the Russian-size expanse of Palace Square, it was an impressive building, becoming less so as I walked toward it, following the path that charging Bolsheviks didn’t actually take when they didn’t really storm the Winter Palace, which wasn’t in fact defended by the czar and his minions but by members of a moderate provisional government. But it made a great visual in the Sergei Eisenstein film
October,
and that is more than the Winter Palace does in person. It is painted call-the-lawn-service green picked out in lardy white and cheap gilding. Ugly statues and clumsy urns line the cornice tops. Whole families of servants used to live up there, performing such tasks as keeping the royal plumbing from freezing by dropping hot cannonballs into the cisterns. They built huts between the chimneys and fed goats on the grass that grew on the roof.

The building was designed in 1754 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli. He spent most of his life in Russia, and it shows. The look is Go for Baroque. In unimaginative decoration, coarseness of detail, and infelicity of proportion, the Winter Palace has everything Stalin would want 200 years later.

The Hermitage museum, housed inside, is not much better. There is spectacular art—El Greco’s
The Apostles Peter and Paul,
Filippo Lippi’s
Adoration of the Infant Christ,
Leonardo da Vinci’s
Benois Madonna,
Rembrandt’s
Descent from the Cross.
But there is so much art that, just as a statistical matter, some of it would have to be spectacular. And most of it’s junk. There are Titian rent-payers, Peter Paul Rubens factory seconds, Watteaus painted by the yard, rooms full of Dutch genre paintings that explain the phrase “in Dutch,” and a batch of Fragonards that should have gone to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. All of this is slapped on the walls at random, hanging in full sunlight in galleries with the windows standing open.

The place looks like Art Club for Czars. Which it was. Catherine the Great bought European art collections wholesale and shipped them to her private quarters. “Only the mice and I admire all this,” she gloated.

Russia is a country that didn’t even become medieval until Ivan the Terrible introduced feudalism in the late 1500s, a country where the small landowner was known as a
smerd,
a “stinker.” Russia never had a Renaissance, never had a Reformation. There was no Enlightenment here, no Romantic period, no
Rights of Man,
no parliamentary reform. What little Industrial Revolution Russia had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia never had a Roaring ’20s, a Booming ’50s, a Swinging ’60s, or a Me Generation. There was just one Them Generation after another. Standing in the Hermitage, you realize just how far out in the suburbs of Western civilization Russia is.

Of course, America is pretty far out in sophistication’s subdivisions, too. An American instinctively understands big, silly, sprawling, clumsy St. Petersburg. It’s an artificial capital like our own, willed into existence from nothingness, built in a swamp as worthless as the District of Columbia’s, and designed and laid out the way Washington was by arty-farty foreigners who loved grand vistas and hated places to park.

St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Czar Peter the Great as a base for Russia’s navy. Russia didn’t really have a navy. Russia didn’t even own the land. This corner of the Baltic coast was occupied Swedish territory and didn’t officially become part of Russia until the Peace of Nystad, in 1721. The climate was terrible. There was nothing to eat. No building supplies existed. The Neva River regularly flooded. And Russia already had a principal city and seat of government that no one was interested in leaving.

Peter the Great was no more daunted by these things than a good American would be, though he used some Russian methods to overcome the difficulties. He press-ganged 40,000 workers. They died of cold, starvation, and disease. The next year, he press-ganged 40,000 more. And so on. For nearly six decades, every carriage, wagon, boat, barge, or sled entering St. Petersburg had to pay a toll of building stones—very inconvenient things to carry in the troika’s change tray. In 1712, Peter simply ordered a thousand families to the new capital and told them they were “required to build houses of beams, with lath and plaster, in the old English style,” the first recorded instance of a “themed” development.

That stuff rapidly succumbed to fire and rot, but St. Petersburg retains the fake-o-la look of an eighteenth-century Epcot Center. The mansions are supposed to be like Italian villas, but they’re crammed wall on wall, as though they were town house condominiums. The czars had pads all over the map—Summer Palace, Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, New Hermitage—each looking like it came from Palaces for Less. And St. Petersburg has canals. The city is sometimes called the Venice of the North. But not very often. This is Venice as interpreted by a U.S. real-estate mogul: “Give me a bigger ditch. And lose the canoes.”

St. Petersburg is a city of largeness. You could hold the Reno air races in Palace Square. St. Isaac’s Cathedral is big enough for God to come down from heaven and feel like He was rattling around in there. The hall corridor on each story of the Grand Hotel Europa makes a loop sufficient in size for a high-energy-particle accelerator. (No doubt some interesting quarks could be produced by collisions between protons and room-service waiters.)

And Russians are a people of largeness, too—large bodies, large gestures, large voices. In fact, Russians are enormous. Being an average-size American in St. Petersburg is like being a girl gymnast at a Teamsters convention. And these are Russians who were raised on potatoes and suet and bread that you could use for a boat anchor. Envision them after a generation of good nutrition. Twenty years from now, Americans may ask themselves if winning the cold war was worth losing the Super Bowl.

To an American used to cute, fussy little Western Europe, Russia is…not a breath of fresh air, certainly, since the place is kind of
smerdish,
but it’s like mail from home. News that your dog died, maybe, but mail from home nonetheless. There’s something very American about Russia, despite a history as deprived and unlucky as ours has been hopeful and rich. The historian Ronald Hingley says the saga of Russia has been marked by “a peculiarly Russian tendency for tragedy to mingle with high farce.” But Hingley is British, and what would he know? That doesn’t sound peculiarly Russian to Americans. It sounds like the Clinton administration.