Jihad vs. McWorld (41 page)

The story of the societal malaise occasioned by Russia’s precipitous embrace of raw capitalism can perhaps best be told by narrating in brief what has become a dual attack on the Russian body (and body politic) and the Russian soul. The body politic’s decline is evident both in plummeting rates of political participation and the resurgence of nationalist and neo-Communist anti-Western demagogues among whom Vladimir Zhirinovsky is only the most notorious. The peril to the literal Russian body is still more startling: population statistics reveal a precipitous decline both in birth rates and life expectancy—reflecting a grueling present and a despairing future—while crime has come to stand as a metaphor for both crooked government and corrupt markets and the troublesome relations between them. The Russian soul is at risk because Russian culture and history are being infected by McWorld’s tawdry pop culture and pervasive materialism, the progress of which seems to be the marker of success for the new Russian postindustrial capitalism. Let me say a word about each of these before concluding my review of the Russian example.

The economics of the cold shower has left Russian politics wet and shivering. In the milestone elections held at the end of 1993, the
electorate expressed its frustration with the economy first of all by staying away in droves: over half did not vote at all, achieving in their first outing a dismal participation rate it took America two centuries to achieve. Those who did vote vented their resentments by pummeling Yeltsin’s reform party, Russia’s Choice, for which Yeltsin prudently declined to campaign and which received only 15 percent of votes cast. They chose rather to give nearly half of their votes to Yeltsin’s most radical critics: 23 percent to Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist “Liberal Democratic” party, over 12 percent to the newly revived Communist Party, and 8 percent to the Agrarian Party.
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That the Communists should win thirty-two seats so soon after Yeltsin set his tanks on the White House and drove Communist leaders like Rutskoi into the wilderness might seem astounding if it were not for the fact that Communists have either retaken or secured a share of power in all but five of the countries of the ex—Soviet Empire.
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Markets may liberate but what they have liberated in the East has been reactionary resentment.

The Zhirinovsky phenomenon has been sufficiently exploited in the media to merit just a few comments here. Russia’s Choice economic reformer Yegor Gaidar has compared him to Hitler, and there seems considerable evidence for the charge in Zhirinovsky’s autobiographical epic-ette
The Last Thrust to the South
. Bookstands associated with his party’s office sell Goebbel’s
Diaries
and
Mein Kampf
, and both in his writings and speeches he indulges in inflammatory rhetoric on the order of “I may have to shoot a hundred thousand people, but the three hundred million others [in revived greater Russia] will live peacefully.”
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Some observers think he is a symbol of the menace of Russian fascism but not himself a danger (he supposedly has some Jewish ancestors and is a political opportunist of the first order). Too foolish and outspoken, isolated now in a parliament that has been marginalized by Yeltsin and his government, he seems a somewhat less likely candidate for the 1996 presidential race than he once did. But he stands for the possible stillbirth of Russia’s democratic political life, and as such is a warning to optimists. He cannot be said to be a product of markets but he certainly is buoyed up by their devastating effects on many Russians.

The damage wrought by the frenzied transition to capitalism is clear in the body politic, but still more obvious in the vulnerability of
the actual Russian body. Environmental depredation, ruinous under communism, continues unabated.
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The people who live in the deteriorating environment are even worse off. Actuarial tables now give Russian men slightly less than sixty years to live, a male life expectancy lower than that of Indonesia or the Philippines. Meanwhile, Russian women are bearing children at a calamitous rate of 1.4 per person (down from 2.17 during the recent Soviet period and comparable today to the disastrously low rates in the eastern part of Germany.
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A society with Third World mortality rates and First World-weary birth rates is a society skeptical not only about democracy but about its very future.
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Soaring crime rates underscore the dangers to the Russian body. The most pessimistic observers have estimated that up to 40 percent of the Russian GNP is crime-related and up to forty thousand shops and small enterprises are reputedly owned or infiltrated by a thousand or more crime syndicates. Of several thousand crime families, 150 or so boast prominent international connections. According to Yeltsin himself, 80 percent of banks and private enterprises are paying tribute to the new Russian mafia
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—a term Russian criminals have chosen for themselves as they dress and act the part of the gangsters they encounter on Western videos of
The Godfather
and
Goodfellas
, as well as films noires from the 1930s featuring the strutting criminal portraits of Capone and others by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson (more testimony to the intersection of Jihad and McWorld).
²⁷

Moscow’s First City Hospital treats forty serious mugging victims daily, and the victims are not just casualties of street violence.
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Between 1989 and 1992, more than a thousand Russian policemen were killed in crime-related violence, while in 1993 alone ten directors of Russia’s largest commercial banks were murdered.
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In 1994, Yeltsin’s government moved frontally against what it called “criminal filth,” but the remedy appears no more conducive to democracy than the disease since it includes provisions to suspend civil liberties, to detain suspects without bringing formal charges for up to a month, and to legitimize nonconstitutional search and seizure procedures.
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In figures like Zhirinovsky, Jihad continues to stalk Russian society. But for the Russian soul, Slavophile and nationalist sentiments
may seem necessary fires to warm the long cold winter of McWorld. Nationalist folk songs are regularly pushed off the radio by Western rock music, and not even native Russian rock musicians can withstand the onslaught. Boris Grebenshchikov once sold rock albums in the millions: exposed to the competition of the “real thing,” he does well nowadays if he sells fifteen thousand.
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Is it a wonder then that even cosmopolitan Russians express a certain nostalgia for yesterday’s Greater Russia? Or that this nostalgia must compete with and is a distant second to the grasping desire for tomorrow’s greater markets? Nationalists resist Western culture, but slogans appear everywhere on behalf of the popular new cigarette West screaming, “Test the West!” What playwright Janusz Glowacki says about Poland applies to the sinking high culture of Russia and every other ex-Communist state: “Today, theaters close one after another. Warehouses are filled with books people used to risk their freedom to read. Weekly literary magazines are going bankrupt. Harlequin books are omnipresent, as are movies starring Schwarzenegger or Stallone.”
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Russia today sells more Barbies than babushkas and more Veronikas (a Russian imitation of Barbie) than Russian bears.
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Does this mean more or less choice? Traditional wooden toys are pushed off the shelves by Legos, plastic warriors, and Gameboys. The Gameboys are stealth cultural networks reaching into Russian homes and children’s minds with a steady diet of Western games, comic characters, and attitudes about competition, violence, consumption, and winning that are indispensable to McWorld’s marketing strategy. Russia’s famed Ministry of Culture, now the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, is well on the way to turning the nation’s artistic heritage into a theme park—to be sure, in the name of preserving a domain that can no longer depend on state subsidies. Six teams with names like the Swans and the Bears play in an American-style football league in Moscow and Coca-Cola is using its monopoly contract to make Coke, Fanta, and Sprite Russia’s national drinks.
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Zhirinovsky still attracts press attention, but a true Slavophile conservative like the author of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
is ridiculed or ignored by the general public. Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia in 1994 attracted more attention in the Western media than in the Russian press, although he now appears on his own television talk show. So much for the Russian soul.

It is of course finally exceedingly tricky to measure fairly the costs to Russia’s democracy, in the currencies of body or soul, of its precipitous entry into McWorld’s domain of capitalism and markets. Societies in rapid transition are always subject to stress, and seventy-five years of Bolshevism had left the Russian nation crippled in ways for which its people will pay a price for a long time to come, whatever successor system they manage to establish. Moreover, creating a democracy itself exacts costs and is often accompanied by violence, disorder, and a period of uncertainty, even chaos. It would thus be unfair to blame every current Russian malady on the economic travails of its transition to markets. Nonetheless, markets have proved themselves incapable in Russia of producing social adjustments to compensate for the hurtful public consequences of private market choices. This means the democratic outlook is much less promising than it might be. Skeptics who have witnessed the virtues of patience in forging democratic constitutions and understand the relationship between public authority and evolving liberty may wonder whether China will not succeed in realizing a genuinely democratic civil society before Russia does.

Certainly there is little to suggest that the abrupt transformation of Russia from a command economy into a radical market economy is itself doing much to nurture democracy. Civic attitudes corrupted by crime, complacency, and despair yield to what anthropologist David Lempert has suggested may be the emergence of a “cargo cult” mentality in the new Russia with “natives” looking over the ocean for exotic and godlike foreigners to bring them the magic spoils of Western markets and American pop culture.
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Lempert’s metaphor is extreme, perhaps even insulting, but the reemergence in Russia not just of organized religion but of what he describes as faith healers, television hypnotists, UFO cults, and media-driven political extremism in which the West is blamed for every old and new Russian sin suggests a deadly fatalism. One Russian sociologist has warned: “There are more completely passive people in this country than in the rest of the world put together. If they aren’t planning to kill themselves, it’s because they’re too passive to bother.”
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The sordid state of Russian society is not then just a matter of nationalist complaints or dispossessed apparatchik resentment, and the views of a Zhirinovsky or a conservative mystic Slavophile like
Solzhenitsyn need not be taken as benchmarks. When Aleksandr G. Nevzorov, a thirty-six-year-old television personality from liberal St. Petersburg, cries, “Reform has meant nothing but bandits, beggars and blood, nothing to the pensioner living next to shops selling your imported food!” and is elected as a nationalist to the new parliament (in 1994), his remarks can perhaps be written off as election hyperbole and right-wing propaganda—though we may be a little surprised to see such hyperbole rewarded in the most bourgeois and pro-Western district in Russia.
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But even exiled dissidents friendly neither to the Soviet regime nor to radical nationalist critics of the present regime are anxious. Here is Nikolai Petradov, a radical economist under Gorbachev, who complained recently: “We need reform with a human face. If reforms stay as cruel to people as they have been, Zhirinovsky will waltz into the Kremlin.”
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Or listen to Edward Limonov, a dissenter in Paris known for his cosmopolitan views, who returned to Russia in 1992 to oppose Yeltsin:

This looks like Jihad by default. Limonov worries that as “69 years of party dictatorship has discredited communism,” so “Yeltsin has discredited Western democracy. Democracy must not be allowed to violate people.” When cosmopolitans begin to believe democracy is the demon, and when Yeltsin’s own new postreform Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin insists “the period of market romanticism is over … the mechanical transfer of Western economic methods to Russian soil has done more harm than good,” capitalism has exacted a very high price.
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Perhaps that is why even Boris Yeltsin has asserted that “Russia is simply not suited for [capitalism]. Russia is a unique country. It will not be socialist or capitalist.”
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The story, however, is not over, and the question is not whether Russia will be socialist or capitalist but whether it will be democratic. So dismal have Russian fortunes become, that some supposedly sympathetic observers are suggesting that the de facto sovereignty of crime over government and market be made de jure! Michael Scammell, professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, scolds us for being “squeamish” about “the decline or collapse of publishing houses, journals, theater and artists clubs and the impoverishment of academic institutions, as state subsidies are reduced or withdrawn,” for such institutions were overbloated in Soviet times. We should not shrink from what after all is only an echo of the “rough and tumble of America a century ago,” with a “new class of businessmen, entrepreneurs and adventurers answerable to no authority but themselves” running the show for the benefit of all. To Scammell, “the existence of a mafia is an unmistakable barometer of the degree of democratization of a given society When the mafia goes, so will Russia’s new found freedom.”
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In a similar vein, Nikolai Zlobin has argued that criminals of the higher sort in Russia along “with corrupt officials who are genuinely interested in evolution towards democracy and a free market economy …” with whom they are in league, cannot be said to be “interested in haphazard plundering of their country. Rather, they want to create an organized system from which they can control events and thus be in a strong position in the long run.” Zlobin concludes that since “in many ways control in Russia has already shifted to the new criminal network, which has replaced the old communist structure” and since “after a transition … they would presumably have less and less need for violent tactics and more investment in controlling anarchy,” one might as well make a virtue of necessity and let the mafia rule.
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There is no need to choose between the mafia and democracy or the mafia and the free market: the mafia
is
the free market. The mafia
is
democracy.
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