Zhirinovsky takes over
- Thread starter tom
- Start date
tom said:
With out changing Zhirinovsky personality no, he couldn't rise to power. He is just too many contradictions and crazy accusations and flippant statements for him to be taken seriously by most people for any great length of time. He’s anti-Semitic, but he is also half Jewish, he hates the West, but then he says he loves it. He wants to violently retake former Soviet and Imperial Russian land (including Alaska) and purge or Rustify the local populations on a scale not seen since Stalin, but he is originally from Kazakhstan. He is given to over-the-top-statements, like saying the Russian Army will one day wash its boots in the Indian Ocean or demanding 12 million dollars from Turkey (1 million for each day he spent in a Turkish prison) and 1 Million from Germany (1 Million for each of member of his family killed in WW2).
If he did come to power want he would do would be really be any ones guess. Drive the economy to ground, probable. Create a Police State, yes. Rebuild the country’s Army, as least on paper, yes. Ally with any country/organization that opposes the West no matter how twisted their ideology, maybe. Kick the Jews and Muslims out, maybe through pogroms, don’t know. What ever it is, I wouldn’t want to leave in Russia.
On another note I’m writing a short AH biography about a fictional Russian who is kind of Hitler/Zhirinovsky hybrid.
Brilliantlight
Banned
Nosb said:
When I read the Alaska thing before I thought the Russian Pacific fleet would have a short and interesting life if it ever attempted it.
Brilliantlight
Banned
SurfNTurfStraha said:a life marked by a second sun setting on moscow
Maybe not, after all wiping out the Russina Pacific Fleet (Which the USN could do with little effort) would likely eliminate Zhirinovsky in a military coup as the Russian military would not look kindly on someone who got one of their fleets blown up (more if the Russians are stupid enough to send more, the USN could always wipe the Russian surface fleet out with little effort and you can't land troops via submarines. Particularly when many of them are sunk as well). Nuking Moscow would be asking the Russians to nuke New York or Washington DC in retaliation. Since a Russian invasion can be stopped easily before it gets very far even without nukes I think that the US wouldn't use it in that circumstance.
Brilliantlight
Banned
SurfNTurfStraha said:
True, or a lot of airstrikes with F14s and F15s and torpedos from subs and missles and guns from surface ships. Russia never had the naval capacity to win a naval war with the US. Not by a long shot.
With 'Mad Vlad' Zhinrinovsky in control, Russia would've become involved in civil wars in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and other areas of the FSU in militarily supporting ethnic Russians against local non-Slav indigenous ppls, which would've undoubtedly resulted in large-scale ethnic cleansing. IMHO the 1997 flick AIRFORCE 1 portrayed such a hypothetical scenario significantly, in having an ethnonationalist Russia committing systematic atrocities in Kazakhstan.
Well, here is a little newswire, that I poseted earlier in the Alternate Worlds Travel Guides website. Hopefully it will grab people's attention:
Why We Fight
©1999 by Jose Ricardo G. Bondoc
MOSCOW, Russsia - On this, the third month of the last year of the millenium, the world hopes and prays, as it faces its gravest crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Troops are currently being seen lining up along the Trinity Gate blocking Novy Arbat. At the other end of the Novy Arbat, at the bend of the Moskva River, at the Russian White House anti-aircraft batteries have been established, patrolling the Moscow skies. At the Manezhanaya Plaschad, tanks are lines up in preparation to defend the city at a moment's notice.
It is hard to imagine that it was only 6 years ago, in September 1993, that then President Yeltsin called for elections to solidify his power base. It was then, that a maverick politician by the name of Vladmir Zhirinovsky, feeding on the fears and insecurities of the Russian people came to power. Almost immediately, the world found itself at the brink of another Cold War. Proclaiming to Russian people, "A just war is better than an unjust peace (10/1993)". World leaders scrambled to once assess the situation at hand. Sending troops into the Russian province of Abkhazia (12/1993), Zhirinovsky claimed to restore order and unity to a fallen nation. Yet in the process, international investors wary that along with democratic reforms, ecomic reforms would end up on the chopping block, the Russian ruble collapsed (2/1994). With the bombing of the capital of Sukhimi (2/1994) and reports of ethnic cleansing(3/1994), international support for the regime began to collapse.
Almost immediately though Zhirinovsky was able to scapegoat a new group. With the deaths of Parliament member Andrei Aizderdzis (4/1994) and Sergei Skorochkin (5/1994), Zhirinovsky called for the destruction of "terrorist elements " within Chechnya (6/1994). In protest, President Clinton cut off all foreign aid to Russia (10/1994).
Yet the war in Chechya would not go well for Zhirinovsky. Even with the bombing of the capital of Grozny (3/1995), fighting spread to the neighboring province of Ingushetia (7/1995). Like the Hydra, each military action seemed to create new ones. When Chechen leader, General Dzhokar Dudayev was finally captured by Russian troops (7/1995) and a public trial was arranged two months later,a whole new can of worms was opened. While the trial was being broadcast, news reports of ethnic cleansing in Chechnya came out breaking what little international credibility it had left(10/1995). Furthermore Russian casualty rates began to mount to levels, seen formerly in Afghanistan. As such, the Russian All-Workers General Strike was organized in Moscow, only to be broken up in a bloody crackdown, and the government seizure of the TV Center in Ostankino (11/1995), effectively ending freedom of press in the region.
Reports coming in later tell of fighting spreading into Dagestan as Chechen "lone Wolf" units seized control of Kizlyar (2/1996) and assainated Russian puppet, Aslan Khadjiev (1/1997), while official reports painted a brighter picture, told of the installation of Aslanbek Khaddjiev and Doku Zavgayev as the "true and legitimate heirs" of the government of Chechnya (2/1996). Meanwhile Zhirinovsky came to pursue the now infamous policy of "Russkoye Voskresnie" (Russian Ressurection) (4/1996). Many thought this was a hollow ploy at propaganda until September, when President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus announced reunification with the Russian Empire. This would be followed up with the assasination of President Eduard Shevradnadze in Tblisi, Georgia (2/1998) and the subsequent "police actions taken thereof (4/1998) Furthermore, with the defection of Col. Aleksandr Nikitin, the world was soon shocked to learn that Russia had armed Iraq with nuclear weapons (2/1997). With its nuclear test in June, Saddan Hussein became increasingly bolder in its actions,causing alarm and concern in its neighbors (e.g. Iran's nuclear weapons test in 8/1997).This culminated in the bombing of Abril, within the UN no-fly zone, wherein, Hussein proclaimed that he would no longer respect the no-fly zone or the provisions of the UN Charter (8/1997) and the deployment of Russian troops to Iraq (1/1998).
To quell unrest in the capital, the regime has once again reestablished pogroms (8/1998), much to the delight of Party members. Party leader Viktor Illukin has been quoted as saying,"Finally, Mother Rodina is free of Zionist control.". While General Albert Markashev has publicly stated, "the yids were responsible for this sorry mess, now we shall see what happens." The Duma has been suspended (10/1998) and the streets are patrolled by druzhniki, citizen vigilante groups, suspected of the murders of oppostion leaders such as Galina Starovoitova (11/1998). With the establishment of UN sanctions against Russia (10/1997) and tensions mounting in the Persian Gulf. U.S. and Russian troops now find themselves at the barrel of each others guns. Will, this end in a nuclear holocaust, only time and prayer can tell for now.
Why We Fight
©1999 by Jose Ricardo G. Bondoc
MOSCOW, Russsia - On this, the third month of the last year of the millenium, the world hopes and prays, as it faces its gravest crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Troops are currently being seen lining up along the Trinity Gate blocking Novy Arbat. At the other end of the Novy Arbat, at the bend of the Moskva River, at the Russian White House anti-aircraft batteries have been established, patrolling the Moscow skies. At the Manezhanaya Plaschad, tanks are lines up in preparation to defend the city at a moment's notice.
It is hard to imagine that it was only 6 years ago, in September 1993, that then President Yeltsin called for elections to solidify his power base. It was then, that a maverick politician by the name of Vladmir Zhirinovsky, feeding on the fears and insecurities of the Russian people came to power. Almost immediately, the world found itself at the brink of another Cold War. Proclaiming to Russian people, "A just war is better than an unjust peace (10/1993)". World leaders scrambled to once assess the situation at hand. Sending troops into the Russian province of Abkhazia (12/1993), Zhirinovsky claimed to restore order and unity to a fallen nation. Yet in the process, international investors wary that along with democratic reforms, ecomic reforms would end up on the chopping block, the Russian ruble collapsed (2/1994). With the bombing of the capital of Sukhimi (2/1994) and reports of ethnic cleansing(3/1994), international support for the regime began to collapse.
Almost immediately though Zhirinovsky was able to scapegoat a new group. With the deaths of Parliament member Andrei Aizderdzis (4/1994) and Sergei Skorochkin (5/1994), Zhirinovsky called for the destruction of "terrorist elements " within Chechnya (6/1994). In protest, President Clinton cut off all foreign aid to Russia (10/1994).
Yet the war in Chechya would not go well for Zhirinovsky. Even with the bombing of the capital of Grozny (3/1995), fighting spread to the neighboring province of Ingushetia (7/1995). Like the Hydra, each military action seemed to create new ones. When Chechen leader, General Dzhokar Dudayev was finally captured by Russian troops (7/1995) and a public trial was arranged two months later,a whole new can of worms was opened. While the trial was being broadcast, news reports of ethnic cleansing in Chechnya came out breaking what little international credibility it had left(10/1995). Furthermore Russian casualty rates began to mount to levels, seen formerly in Afghanistan. As such, the Russian All-Workers General Strike was organized in Moscow, only to be broken up in a bloody crackdown, and the government seizure of the TV Center in Ostankino (11/1995), effectively ending freedom of press in the region.
Reports coming in later tell of fighting spreading into Dagestan as Chechen "lone Wolf" units seized control of Kizlyar (2/1996) and assainated Russian puppet, Aslan Khadjiev (1/1997), while official reports painted a brighter picture, told of the installation of Aslanbek Khaddjiev and Doku Zavgayev as the "true and legitimate heirs" of the government of Chechnya (2/1996). Meanwhile Zhirinovsky came to pursue the now infamous policy of "Russkoye Voskresnie" (Russian Ressurection) (4/1996). Many thought this was a hollow ploy at propaganda until September, when President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus announced reunification with the Russian Empire. This would be followed up with the assasination of President Eduard Shevradnadze in Tblisi, Georgia (2/1998) and the subsequent "police actions taken thereof (4/1998) Furthermore, with the defection of Col. Aleksandr Nikitin, the world was soon shocked to learn that Russia had armed Iraq with nuclear weapons (2/1997). With its nuclear test in June, Saddan Hussein became increasingly bolder in its actions,causing alarm and concern in its neighbors (e.g. Iran's nuclear weapons test in 8/1997).This culminated in the bombing of Abril, within the UN no-fly zone, wherein, Hussein proclaimed that he would no longer respect the no-fly zone or the provisions of the UN Charter (8/1997) and the deployment of Russian troops to Iraq (1/1998).
To quell unrest in the capital, the regime has once again reestablished pogroms (8/1998), much to the delight of Party members. Party leader Viktor Illukin has been quoted as saying,"Finally, Mother Rodina is free of Zionist control.". While General Albert Markashev has publicly stated, "the yids were responsible for this sorry mess, now we shall see what happens." The Duma has been suspended (10/1998) and the streets are patrolled by druzhniki, citizen vigilante groups, suspected of the murders of oppostion leaders such as Galina Starovoitova (11/1998). With the establishment of UN sanctions against Russia (10/1997) and tensions mounting in the Persian Gulf. U.S. and Russian troops now find themselves at the barrel of each others guns. Will, this end in a nuclear holocaust, only time and prayer can tell for now.
The New York Times Magazine
'The great russia will live again'
june 19, 1994
SAY WHAT YOU WILL about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, but the man knows
how to throw a party. For his 48th birthday, "probably the last
before I return this nation to its historic greatness," as he put
it that night, Russia's most compelling--and notorious--
politician invited everybody from President Boris Yeltsin to a
czarist honor guard in full battle dress to celebrate with him
at Moscow's grandly decaying Budapest Restaurant.
President Yeltsin declined to attend. But the czarists were
out in force, and so were a pride of sleek blondes who called
themselves the Zhirinovsky Girls. Hundreds of shady "businessmen"
clutching bottles of "Zhirinovsky-brand" vodka wandered happily
among the eye-high stacks of blini, occasionally bumping into a
Serbian diplomat, a retired Russian Army general or an acne-scarred
skinhead with fresh jail tattoos on his fingers.
Outside, Petrovsky Street looked like the parking lot at any
good Connecticut country club: Cadillacs, Mercedeses and Lincoln
Town Cars all clogged the narrow alley, along with the gaudiest
symbol of the Slavic jet set-- the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Special
Russian Army forces patrolled the area, virtually closing traffic
on one of the city's main arteries and making the Bolshoi Theater,
the Metropol Hotel, even Red Square and the Kremlin practically
inaccessible. "It is a sign of respect," said Grigory Serbrenikov,
Zhirinovsky's glib, energetic press secretary, when asked why the
Government felt the need to send paratroopers to a birthday party.
"He is the most popular man in Russia. Even this Government has
to respect that."
The police assembled on the nearby streets gave a slightly
different reason for their presence. "These guys are dangerous
drunks," said one trooper, who wore a camouflage flak jacket
with night-vision goggles tucked into his breast pocket. "You
don't want to be around when this party is over."
But inside, it was all smiles and Champagne. Vladimir Volfovich
Zhirinovsky, recently appointed by his colleagues in Russia's
extravagantly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party to a 10-year term
as "dictator," kissed every woman who walked by, posed for
hundreds of pictures like a longshot liberal in the snows of New
Hampshire, stood on the worn parquet floor next to his wife for
more than an hour and received some unusual presents for a
birthday boy: a high-powered Russian Army assault rifle (which
he aimed gleefully at the few journalists present); a 15-gallon
bottle of vodka bearing his profile (in the trademark wool cap
he claimed was stolen from him by European Parliament deputies
in France) and a large oil painting of Russian tanks strafing
a shore dotted with palm trees-- a not-so-subtle reference to
his imperialistic promise that Russian soldiers would one day
"wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean."
Opera singers, comedians, native folk dancers and blatant
whores all made the scene. Russia's most famous hypnotist and
faith healer, Anatoly Kashpirovsky-- whose television appearances
still weaken the knees of tens of thousands of elderly women--
turned up to say that someday the anniversary of Zhirinovsky's
birth would be celebrated with the same joy as Lenin's once was.
"He is the brightest, cleanest, most courageous man we have,"
said the wiry Kashpirovsky, himself a member of Parliament who
only months ago had bitterly split from Zhirinovsky's party
and denounced its leader. "He is the only man who can lead
this country out of the darkness and into the light."
Under hooded eyebrows dripping with sweat, Zhirinovsky
took it all in like the amiable president of a local Rotary Club.
Conservatively dressed in a hunter-green double-breasted jacket,
with rep tie and black slacks, he stood quietly under a wooden
crown with the word "Rossiya" painted in gold leaf. For once
he fought back his natural scowl and spoke softly. "I love this
country," he said when it came time to cut the cake. "I love it
more than anything on earth. When I am done, it will be great
again. I promise you all that. The great Russia will live again."
CAN RUSSIA-- REELING FROM THE loss of empire, impoverished,
desperate and tumbling rapidly into the deepest reaches of the
third world, ever be "great" again?
Can a man who has promised to reclaim Finland and Alaska,
and warned the Germans and Japanese that he would "destroy"
them with his "atomic pistol" if they got out of line,
become its President?
How can a nation that has been tortured ceaselessly by dictators
and murderers throughout this century reject democracy yet again
and embrace the leadership of a racist tyrant who promises to
establish special courts for summary executions of criminals and
kill 100,000 of them as soon as he comes to power? Is there something
fundamental in the Russian soul that invites barbarism and recoils
from peace?
Are people here so bitter about the dismal state of their
lives that they would prefer to hear simple falsehoods about the
past than hard truths about the future?
Or are Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and his many strident and
nationalistic competitors for power, simply bad jokes, posturing
buffoons who will fade away as the economy blossoms?
"Zhirinovsky must be seen as a symbol of something
very real, very powerful," says Yegor Gaidar, a man who ought
to know. "We have already seen what it means to ignore this
threat."
As perhaps the most reform-minded politician in Russia,
a close ally of President Yeltsin and the head of Russia's Choice,
the most visibly pro-Western bloc in last December's parliamentary
elections, Gaidar and his slate were humiliated when Zhirinovsky
drew nearly 25 percent of the vote-- more than anyone else, and
far more than anyone in the West ever thought possible.
Like most of the country's leaders, Gaidar is well aware
that if the economy darkens further, nationalists like Zhirinovsky,
joined by a loose grouping of Communists (led by their slick party
boss Gennadi Zyuganov, who has appeared on "Larry King Live"
and has promised to "to unite the entire opposition-- left,
right and center") could provide an unbeatable alternative
to the way things are. Even the former Vice President Aleksandr
Rutskoi, the renegade whom Yeltsin had to blast out of office
with tanks last October, hasn't been shy about stating his intention
to assume the Presidency.
Fresh from five months at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, released
along with hundreds of thugs, bandits and extremist politicians
who make Zhirinovsky look like a 12-term Congressman from
Indianapolis, Rutskoi has an appeal based almost wholly on the
fact that he is President Yeltsin's enemy. For it has come to
this in Russia: these days a politician can't go wrong by denouncing
the man who brought democracy to the Soviet Union and then saved
it once again when armed despots tried to take it back.
"People are scared," says Gaidar, who admitted he ran a terrible
campaign, delivering long, droning speeches about inflation, and was
among the many liberals jettisoned from the Yeltsin Administration
in the aftermath of the crushing defeat. "I really don't blame them.
Whether Zhirinovsky ends up leading them or it is somebody else,
the danger of radical nationalism in this country is absolute. Our
only hope is to get the economy working fast."
For the average citizen, however, that is a hope built on
the thinnest of reeds. Many of them have never been poorer, not
even under Communism. A public that only three years ago viewed
the West as the Land of Oz has come decidedly to believe that
foreigners have too much influence here. Industrial production
has fallen 25 percent in each of the last two quarters compared
with the previous year-- a drop far greater than anything America
experienced during the Great Depression. Where the vast majority
once yearned for a market economy, most of the population now
would be thrilled to see it wither away. Two-thirds of the people
polled by the Russian Academy of Sciences last month agreed that
"privatization is legalized theft," and that it was undertaken "for the
benefit of criminals." Burning desires for freedom have rapidly given
way to urgent calls for law and order, for real jobs at decent wages,
for putting things back together again.
It won't be easy. Russians are humiliated by their failures,
angry at the West for showing so clearly what they can't have
and eager to do something about it. Three years ago, Moscow residents
were throwing rose petals in the path of Americans. Now they have
taken to painting "Yankee Go Home" on the no-parking signs outside the
bleak, forbidding American Embassy and screaming that the national
obsession with Snickers bars is some kind of American plot.
"It is natural to feel bitter about America now because America is
being shoved down our throat at all times," says Igor Shafarevich, the
well-known right-wing intellectual and mathematician whose four-year-old
book, "Russophobia," is considered a sacred text of aggressive nationalism.
"If you look at television today, only American products are advertised there.
Ice cream, gum, toothbrushes, whatever. All is American. If in an ad you
need to portray something as attractive, they speak English. Air time on
our Russian television is all bought by Western preachers-- Baptists, for
instance-- while the Russian Orthodox Church does not have this opportunity.
Naturally, people resent it because it reminds them how desperately
unhappy they are."
NOT EVERYONE IN RUSSIA IS miserable, of course. These are
heady times for the mob, for the new bankers who operate out of
seedy apartments and earn millions of dollars each month. A horrible
hybrid has emerged: the crassness of capitalism has been grafted
onto the fierce Russian soul. For those crafty enough to have
a part in the fire sale of an enormous country, where literally
everything-- from the buildings that stand on the earth to the
precious metals buried within it-- has its price, times couldn't
be better. For the lucky few who operate on the high side of the
dollar apartheid, life in the new Russia is grand: cellular phones,
Maine lobsters, Versace clothing, four-story dachas with heated
pools; $1,000-a-night hookers, illegal drugs of any kind. They're
all here now.
But the chasm between rich and poor grows wider every day.
Last year, there were more Mercedeses sold in Moscow than in any
other European city-- most of them for cash. In a city where the
average industrial wage is slightly higher than $70 a month, you
can rent a car at good hotels for $50 an hour-- with a four-hour
minimum. Moscow may have already outstripped Las Vegas, Monte
Carlo and Hong Kong to become the casino capital of the world.
There is one on almost every street, and, fortunately for the
high rollers who are everywhere, new clubs open every day. Some
currency-exchange bureaus now even refuse to accept bills smaller
than $100-- but that's no problem because hundreds are ubiquitous.
At the end of every working day, men brandishing automatic weapons
form human tunnels outside the entrances of major banks-- the
better to guarantee their huge take will make it safely to storage
in central vaults.
For the vast, silent majority, though, the new Russia is
a grim place. Last year, agricultural production plummeted to
a 30-year low-- and the Government has already conceded that this
year will be worse. With its stone-age factories producing almost
nothing of use, the former superpower has lapsed into a coma.
In a single year, the price of a decent meal has risen by a factor
of 10. Ravaged by inflation that has turned fistfuls of rubles
into worthless tissue, the meager life savings of millions have
vanished. Faith healers and vodka factories are working overtime.
The most stolid people on earth-- who have lost tens of millions
of their brothers and sisters to war, terror and genocide-- are
sick of waiting for tomorrow.
Fear has taken control of the country: fear of poverty,
of crime and, above all, fear of the future. Women feel they can
no longer walk the streets alone at night. Police officers, unable--
and often unwilling-- to respond to the crushing swell of violence
that has taken hold in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large
cities, now suggest that people carry guns. That probably wouldn't
have helped Andrei Aizderdzis, the 35-year-old publishing entrepreneur
and member of Parliament who was blown away on his doorstep early
last month-- almost certainly by criminals outraged that he had
printed the names of Mafia gang members in a provincial newspaper.
The following week, possibly emboldened by the tragedy, another
member of Parliament, Sergei Skorochkin, pulled out a Kalashnikov
and killed a gun-toting Georgian racketeer, who he says was demanding
protection money from him.
"We will stop this all," Zhirinovsky howled at a rally last month,
to a crowd of 1,000. "I know you're sick of it. You're frightened, you're
angry. They call me an extremist. That's O.K. If that's what we need
to prevent vandals from stealing our country, then let us be extreme."
It was the biggest applause line of the day. (Though his suggestion
that President Yeltsin and his entire administration retire to their dachas
where they could "stuff themselves with Snickers bars" came a close second.)
Early this year, the Government released a report concluding
that at least 70 percent of private enterprises were being forced
to pay tribute to gangsters. Newspapers called the estimate laughably
low. The rich promise of perestroika and glasnost has turned into
the reality of a society governed by the Mafia, official corruption
and despair.
"Everything that happens here is happening against the
backdrop of a dying, collapsing society," says Aleksandr Prokhanov,
editor of the right-wing newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) and a sort of
unofficial propaganda minister of the opposition. "The economy is
dying, social links are breaking apart. At some point soon society
will become ungovernable. Earlier the Soviet Union threatened the
West with nuclear weapons. It was the possible source of World War
III. But now its something different--one-sixth of the globe has
become a breeding ground for the deadliest Mafia in the world.
Compared with Russia, Colombia is a grain of sand."
He is not alone in thinking this way. Declaring that
organized crime in Russia presented "a grave threat" to the safety
of the United States, and that he feared the Russian Mafia has
"already attained or will soon attain the capacity to steal
nuclear weapons," the F.B.I. Director, Louis Freeh, announced
last month that the bureau would soon open its first Moscow office.
Russian politicians and law-enforcement officials expressed gratitude
and relief. Crime, particularly the organized groups that control
almost every aspect of commercial life from newspaper kiosks to
international banking, has made the desire for a strong, incorruptible
nationalism-- not free markets or better health care or even jobs--
the driving force in Russian politics today. Even the resurgent
Russian Orthodox Church, which was continually brutalized and
humiliated under Communism, is led in part by hard-liners who
seek to provide a powerful nationalist identity for the new Russian
state.
While never publicly acknowledging it, President Yeltsin
has moved continuously to the right, hoping to placate the
nationalist fervor. His single election triumph-- a new Constitution
that grants nearly absolute powers to the President-- passed only
because Zhirinovsky supported it and told his voters to follow
suit. By the end of January, Yeltsin had dumped every reform-minded
liberal in his Government, including Gaidar, Boris Fyodorov, his
aggressive young Finance Minister, and many of their colleagues.
From his woozy stance as an uncritical supporter of the West,
Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev has moved furthest to the right
of anyone in the Yeltsin Government, recently writing that "Russia
is predestined to be a great power." His pronouncements on
Serbia, NATO and the West sometimes seem as if they were written
by Zhirinovksy himself.
Suddenly, the West is the all-purpose villain. Not long
ago, there were only reformers here; now there are only patriots--
men who wish to return the country to what they perceive to be
its Slavic glory. There are essentially two historical ways of
looking at life in Russia: things are horrible now, let's go back
to the past; and things are horrible now, what can we find to
wipe away the present? It is a dangerous mentality, but one that
has nearly eternal roots in the national psyche. Remorse, anger
and frustration are all deeply imbedded in the Russian character.
The naive notion that a brief period of shock therapy would turn
Russia into a second United States has given way to a far more
brittle reality: Russia never has been-- and never will be-- a
Western country.
"Liberals, deniers, skeptics as well as preachers of social
ideas, they all-- the majority of them at least-- have suddenly
turned out to be ardent Russian patriots," wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky
in his often wildly nationalistic "Diary of a Writer." The book,
published as a serial between 1873 and 1881, helped make him famous.
Its popularity rivaled Dickens's at his height-- readers couldn't
wait for each new issue to be released. With its blind anti-Semitism,
its acute insights into the social hungers of the Russian people and
its overbearing belief that the idea of Russia is the only idea, the
book could have been written last fall-- as a campaign treatise for
Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
"This is what I think," Dostoyevsky wrote, in one of the many
passages that presage Russia's current, troubling choices:
"Is there not revealed something in the protesting Russian soul,
to which European culture in its many manifestations has always,
ever since Peter, been hateful? I do think so."
Today the move inward rivals anything envisioned by Russia's
greatest, and most nationalistic, writer. Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin, the competent, frank statist who almost single-handedly
runs the country's economy, made his views clear this winter by
announcing bluntly that "the period of market romanticism
is over." Not long after, he issued a decree calling a halt
to competition in the all-important alcohol industry and turning
it back into a state-run monopoly. "The Government of reforms
is dead," declared the newspaper Izvestia.
THE REAL QUESTION SEEMS to be, what will come next?
Presidential elections are not scheduled until 1996-- although
Yeltsin could call them this year if he chose-- but already nearly
a dozen mainly fringe characters, including Nazi commandos like
Aleksandr Barkashov, and Viktor Anpilov, the Communist Workers
Party leader, have declared their intention to replace him. Last
year, Anpilov led crowds that clashed bitterly with police in
the streets, and was imprisoned for it. But these days, he has
taken to wearing blue polyester suits and carrying Samsonite briefcases
around town while talking serenely about "the loving motherland."
The increasingly remote and detested Yeltsin acknowledged
in his recently published memoirs that "Russia is not immune
to fascism." Bending to the openly anti-American atmosphere
in Parliament and throughout the country, he theatrically questioned
whether Russia would be ready to let American soldiers (200 troops
and a couple of dozen trucks) enter its sovereign turf this summer--
and late last month he finally called them off. Few ideas seem
more odious to those who yearn for a stronger national identity
than the United States-sponsored plan for joint military exercises
on Russian soil. These days, when Yeltsin delivers one of his
rare speeches, it is not usually about market reform or the lessons
of democracy, but about crime, corruption and the overriding need
for law and order to return.
"These are the conditions for extremism," said Gaidar glumly,
reviewing the events of the eight months that began when Yeltsin
sent the army to storm the Parliament and lock up its leaders.
"You have a stagnating economy. You have real poverty. You
have enormous increases in inequality. You have rising expectations.
You have a general sense of disorder and you have shocking crime
everywhere you look. I think this is an ideal platform for the
enemies of democracy."
Not long after making those comments, Gaidar went further--
drawing a dark parallel between Zhirinovsky and Hitler. "During the
election campaign last year, I said that Zhirinovsky reminded me of
Hitler in 1929," he wrote in a long commentary in Izvestia.
"Unfortunately, I was mistaken. Zhirinovsky with his 25 percent
of the votes has already surpassed Hitler in 1929 and has achieved
the result that the Nazis got in the Reichstag elections of 1930.
"The person whom I write about today," he continued,
"is the most popular fascist leader in Russia. This means
that he is the biggest threat to my motherland and my people."
Coming from the soft-spoken Gaidar-- the apostle of the
shock-therapy approach to Russian economic reform-- words like
this land with a jolt. A liberal who believes completely in the
magic of the marketplace, he is one of his country's most eloquent
optimists.
There aren't many left though. Hundreds of thousands of
people go to work each day, sign in and get drunk. Bad vodka,
at about $1 a bottle, is still cheap enough for almost anybody
to afford. Although it makes no economic sense, the Government
continues to hand out tax breaks to factories based largely on
the number of people they employ. The bigger the enterprise the
lower the taxes. So from the giant fish plants that line the waterfront
of Murmansk, to the oil fields of Siberia, to the colossal automotive
factories in the capital, like Zil and Moskvich, workers have
little to do most days but drink and worry-- the beer halls around
factories and in neighborhoods where industrial employees live
are doing a bang-up business.
"I voted for Boris Yeltsin," said Yuri Vysonov, a 55-year-old
laborer from Yeltsin's home turf, Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains.
"I worked for him 30 years ago when he ran a factory. But I've given
up. He has issued a hundred edicts and not one has changed a thing.
I thought he was a Democrat and then he bombed the Parliament. I
never thought it could get worse than it was. But I was wrong. Give
me something different. I don't know what and I don't know who. But
there has got to be something out there better than what we have now."
SERGEI IS A TOWHEADED 8-year-old, a charming fourth-grader who
chain-smokes Marlboros and earns more than 1.5 million rubles
a month (nearly $1,000) robbing trains in a town called Zabaikalsk
on the Chinese border, near Mongolia. The way he describes his
job, he's an apprentice really-- a clever little tipster who tells
older thieves what merchandise they can find in the boxcars constantly
inching their way across the wide open country.
The telegenic youngster is the unwitting star of a searching
new movie, "The Criminal Revolution," by the well-known director
Stanislav Govorukhin. His two other recent films, "We Can't Live
This Way" and "The Russia We Lost," portrayed a country in steady
decline: first under Communism and then under Yeltsin. He also
made a popular documentary about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
arranged one of the first welcome events for Solzhenitsyn's return
to Moscow. The arrival of Russia's most famous living writer,
after a 20-year exile, has already added intensity to the nation's
search for a new nationalism. Within a day of landing in Magadan--
the Siberian center of the Gulags--he had already begun to breathe
fire. Solzhenitsyn denounced Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika,
called Gaidar's reforms "brainless" and said that Zhirinovsky was
a "caricature of a Russian patriot." He said it was time to stop
worrying about the West and develop the soul of Russia.
Govorukhin agreed. His new documentary, a guided tour of
the rape of Russia, is the most graphic of his films. From frank,
on-camera interviews with Mafia racketeers to detailed descriptions
of how to make shovels and axes out of rare metals like platinum
and titanium-- in order to smuggle the loot out of the country--
the new film is Exhibit A in Govorukhin's holy war against the
wholesaling of a nation.
The director, a dandy who smokes Dunhills with ivory tips,
is a sort of cinematic Paul Revere-- beaming from town to town
his warning of the death of a culture invaded by beasts from across
the ocean. A member of Parliament, he is the most forceful and
eloquent spokesman for a generation of cynics who argue that Russian
attempts at democracy have done little but pave the way for the
coming of fascism.
"Today an unthinkable order has taken shape in this
country," Govorukhin said recently, a couple of days before
the first showing of his film in Moscow. "It has become disadvantageous
to work and absolutely safe to steal. Show me at least one person
who would labor honestly and live well in this country. There
is no such person. In this country, he who lives well either steals,
works for foreigners or is at the Government's corrupt feeding
trough."
His message may be a bit hyperbolic-- he is a moody Cassandra
in Italian loafers and British woolens-- but it never falls on
indifferent ears. During an interview in his office-- a flashy
hideaway not far from the Russian White House, where he can sip
espresso, lament the past and plot the future with an increasingly
influential group dedicated to bringing down the Government--
Govorukhin insists that the country is starved for talent, particularly
the most ruthless type.
"Stalin was a tyrant," he said. "A criminal. But a very talented
man, a true statesman. Look at what an enormous and powerful country
he managed to build on the misery and blood of the people."
And Zhirinovsky? What of him?
"He is super-talented," Govorukhin replies instantly."Super." In fact,
Govorukhin insists that he would ban the Liberal Democratic Party from
the next elections if it were up to him, because Zhirinovsky is such
a great orator, and so "scary," that any race in which he runs would
be unfair. "Of course, his is a talent from the ranks of Stalin and
Lenin," Govorukhin continues, clearly ambivalent about his own feelings.
"He will make of this country-- oh what can I say?-- Russia will
once again be a great power."
A great power again. It is the central rallying cry of all
who despair of the present and look for another way. It is the
prayer that unites centrists like Nikolai Travkin, Communists
like Zyuganov, extremists like Zhirinovsky and open fascists
like Barkashov, who spends his free time staging military maneuvers
on the outskirts of Moscow, peddles Nazi literature in the corridors
of the Parliament and recently told the weekly newspaper Argumenty
i Fakty that he had a simple plan for "washing the disgrace
away from Russia: Everything for the nation, nothing against the
nation. The nation is above all. We will do everything to implement
our views."
It is a frightening thought in a country of 150 million
lost souls-- made far worse because he is hardly the only one
who voices it. From Sergei Shakrai, the former close Yeltsin ally,
to Travkin, recently named to the cabinet in yet another step
to the right, from Andrei Kozyrev to Aleksandr Rutskoi, the call
to renewed national dignity-- often at the expense of whatever
is not "Russian"-- has become a sort of spiritual glue.
"All national patriotic forces must join together," Zyuganov,
the leader of the Communist Party, said recently. "People
always ask me what, as a Communist, I am for. I am for a Russia
that is great and indivisible. I am for the Russian people individually
and together. In the United States, you can support Russia's Choice
all you like. Forever if you like. But it won't bring them to
power. They will disappear. And Russia will emerge again."
Rutskoi, the Afghan-war hero who briefly became the Jefferson
Davis of Russia before Yeltsin had him locked away, says essentially
the same thing. "We must unite in a single people's movement,"
he told 10,000 protesters on the May 9 anniversary of the victory
over Germany, a solemn day in a nation where the siege of Leningrad
is mentioned constantly-- even 50 years later-- on the television
news. It was Rutskoi's first major public address since Oct. 3,
when he called on hostile anti-Yeltsin crowds outside the White
House to storm the Mayor's office and the television center Ostankino,
setting off two days of violence that ended with more than 150
dead and a nation shaking with rage. "We must replace the
regime of swindlers," he told the cheering Victory Day crowd.
"We must take our country back.
No one can argue that Russia today is without free speech.
On May Day, a smiling man selling magazines in front of Moscow's
last great Lenin statue, across the street from the Octoberskaya
Metro, acted as if he were hustling hot dogs at Yankee Stadium.
"Get your first authentic Russian Nazi magazine here,"
he called amiably. "I've got it at a great price.
"Hey, are you Jewish?" he asked a potential buyer as a small
crowd gathered, his voice gaining speed and intensity. "Are you
American, or Jewish, or what?"
It is easy to see nuts like the magazine dealer as sad sacks
clinging to a lost way of life in a world that has passed them by--
or hopeless fools searching for new ashes in the old ashes. Just
as it is easy to see Vladimir Zhirinovsky as a clown. In the West,
the popular conclusion is so simple: Zhirinovsky and these others are
idiots. The Russians will settle down eventually. Just give them
some time to sort things out.
Maybe reason will prevail. Time may be all that Russia needs
to complete its difficult journey toward economic and political
reform. After all, almost nothing could be more complicated than
taking the world's most cumbersome and dictatorial command economy
and turning it into a free market. Yet there is a scenario for
success that is based on individual entrepreneurs' starting small
businesses, which, if they grow and prosper, will help bring the
nation along with them.
Despite dire predictions that Russia was about to plunge
into anarchy or civil war-- that hunger would be widespread and
violence even more pervasive than it is-- the worst has not yet
come to pass. Inflation, while unacceptably high at nearly 10
percent, is far lower than it was a year ago. Russia has enormous
natural resources, and if the mammoth industrial dinosaurs that
make nothing worth buying are allowed finally to die-- a big if
in a country petrified by the possibility of high unemployment--
the economy could begin to focus on manufacturing products somebody
might want. At the end of May, Yeltsin finally sent a signal that
he understood how desperately the economy needed to catch fire.
He issued a series of decrees-- reducing taxes on businesses,
cutting export quotas, promising aid to companies with foreign
investment-- all aimed at rescuing the economy and, in the process,
himself.
If free enterprise has met with ambivalence elsewhere in
Russia, it is certainly booming in the Duma Building, where any
legislator can walk out of his office after writing an anti-American
speech and buy a canister of Chicken Flavored Ultra Slim-Fast
in the store on the first floor. Or some instant noodles or panty
hose. Or books. There are always books for sale in the halls of
the new Congress at the lunchtime break: Mickey Spillane thrillers,
badly translated into Russian, primers on accounting, on computers,
on car repair and even modern-art catalogues. And at a folding
table in the center of the hall most days, you can buy any of
Zhirinovsky's speeches, his autobiography "The Last
Thrust for the South," which does more to illustrate the
lonely-man school of history than almost anything published in
Russian since Peter the Great died. You can also purchase copies
of his newspaper, The Liberal, and his magazine, The Falcon.
Next to that are stacks of Goebbels's diaries and "Mein Kampf,"
in striking black-and-white covers, both recently translated into
new Russian editions and priced quite reasonably.
"Buy them," the salesman, Viktor Antilovich, suggested
one day. "You might learn something."
About what? he was asked. What did Hitler, who wiped out
20 million Russians, not to mention six million Jews-- and loathed
them all-- have to teach?
"He understood the need for a motherland," came the reply.
"He knew that a nation needs a heritage."
For Russians who see their heritage slipping away-- more
than 25 million of them became instant ethnic minorities in new
countries when the Soviet Union died-- it is a compelling theme.
The Soviet state was the place where most Russians-- ethnically
at least-- felt at home. When the British and French empires faded
away, those countries withdrew to their clearly defined national
borders. A Frenchman could always feel at home in France.
The situation in Russia today is far more complicated. You
don't have to be a Nazi to feel anger when a cousin or uncle who
has lived his whole life in Estonia can't get a job because he
is Russian, when his children can't study Russian in school anymore
or play with their neighbors who aren't Russian. For a people
used to the idea of greatness-- even if it was never a reality--
and to an empire stretching from the Bay of Pigs to Ho Chi Minh
City, the notion that Russians now have to apply for a visa to
visit Latvia, or fight for scarce jobs with refugees from Uzbekistan,
or wait in line for apartments with immigrants from Azerbaijan
is nearly impossible to take.
It was just that perilous loss of heritage that Govorukhin
was discussing at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, one of the
tonier spots in Moscow, where a couple of drinks cost $25, a Filofax
is $200 and an Apple Newton computer goes for $1,000.
"We have become slaves to money," he said, speaking in
the Tolstoy Room of the hotel after showing his film to a group
of Russian journalists. "We work for the Chinese as laborers
or we work as thieves and mobsters. We have no values anymore--
no clear place in the world."
On the Sony television monitor behind him, a series of bleak
images flickered by as he spoke: trucks full of Russian goods
and valuable equipment flooding into China-- and coming back without
a thing. Villages were shown. On the Russian side of the border,
all were in decay, sliding into anarchy. The Chinese towns only
a few miles away were gleaming and modern, filled with new buildings,
fine roads and fancy parks-- all constructed with Russian granite.
"We have become lackeys to Germany, to the West, especially
to the U.S.," Govorukhin concluded, assuring himself that
the largely sympathetic audience of journalists got the chilling
message. "We have to start doing it for ourselves again."
As he finished his speech, the doors to the Tolstoy Room
swung open onto the corridors of the hotel. An enormous party
had begun down the hall in the hotel's grand ballroom. Women in
long black dresses and men in dinner wear congregated under an
archway of red, white and blue balloons, then passed by a two-story
inflatable polar bear doll, 6-foot stacks of plastic Sprite, Coke
and Fanta bottles and finally a 10-foot circular Russian language
version of the Coca-Cola slogan Vsegda Coca-Cola (Always Coca-Cola).
It was Cokefest 94. The first Russian Coca Cola bottling
plant had opened on the outskirts of Moscow, and it seemed like
the entire city of Atlanta had flown in for the party.
"It's a big day for us and a big day for Russia," said a local
employee of the company. "Everyone in town is going to be here."
Not everyone. Stanislav Govorukhin took one look around,
lit another cigarette and fled in horror.
There are at least two words that every Westerner who cares
about Russia ought to know: rodina and dusha-- motherland and
the soul. When Russians talk about the dusha, they are not just
talking about the soul, though; they are talking about the soul
on fire.
And when they talk about the motherland, they might as well
be talking about Lake Baikal. Few places stir the spirits of ordinary
Russians like the vast, crystalline beauty of the world's deepest,
clearest and oldest lake. By comparison, Lake Superior, with less
than half the water, is a puddle.
Statistics, breathtaking as they are, can only tell a little
about Baikal: it is 395 miles long and 30 miles wide; it holds
a fifth of the world's fresh water. In the dead of the Siberian
winter, its ice grows more than three feet thick, and almost 2,000
types of life are to be found there-- fish, crabs, plants, flowers--
that can be found nowhere else on earth.
But statistics don't explain the impact of the blue waters,
and the necklace of white mountains that ring them, on the senses.
The scale, the textures, the contrast to the drab Siberian cities
not far away are all remarkable. Far more than a body of water,
though, Baikal is an idea-- like Wordsworth's Lake District or
Melville's whale. Lake Baikal is as big as it is, according to
an old Russian proverb, because it contains a piece of every Slavic
soul.
"The entire Russian ecology movement was founded on
these shores," says Vladimir Fialkov, a geographer and director
of the Baikal Museum in Listvyanka, speaking about the strong
connection between the movement and Russian nationalism. "The
whole idea of Russia as a nation, Russia apart from the Soviet
Union, originated here. The idea that bureaucrats in Moscow were
deciding what to do with a lake that has been here for millions
of years. It was too much for the people to bear."
More than 3,000 miles from Moscow, Siberia is Russia's heartland,
a place of endless resources and even more misery. People here
are independent, wild. They didn't want to belong to a Soviet
Union that tried to turn their barren wonderland into an industrial
showcase. And they don't want to hear what Moscow has to tell
them now. In the age-old war between Slavophiles and Westernizers--
between Russians who believe that the West is evil, that in the
land lies the answer and that the Russian soul harbors a special
spirit that cannot be contaminated by material things or money,
and those who dream of commerce, progress, a modern nation-- Baikal
is the Slavic home court.
Not surprisingly, there isn't much support for Yeltsin or
his reforms here. Like many regions of the country, Irkutsk oblast,
which includes Baikal, has increasingly decided to go its own
way. Despite the Communist-era street signs in Irkutsk (and the
huge banner nobody could miss on the way to the airport: For Lenin,
Live Work Fight), people here would rather live and work for themselves.
"I don't want to be a part of a criminal Russia,"
says Vasily Zelenyuk, a 34-year-old unemployed gold miner from
Irkutsk. Zelenyuk used to rake it in-- making up to 500,000 rubles
($350) a month. That was when he was working. The mines are not
producing much these days, but neither is the military factory
that makes fighter jets. Irkutsk Heavy Metals, the largest regional
employer, closed for the Victory Day celebration at the beginning
of May and, like many other major factories in the country, stayed
closed long after it ended. Once again, the big industrial success
story is the local vodka factory. People there are working overtime.
"I watch the television and I am sick of what I see,"
says Zelenyuk, who wears a holstered pistol on his left hip even
during recreational strolls on the shores of Baikal. "People
here are angry. I am. Russia was great and now we aren't. Now
we have to protect ourselves because nobody else will do it for
us. I want my job back. I want to be able to walk safely on the
streets. If somebody can promise me that, I'm for them."
SOMEBODY DOES PROMISE that-- and much more, too. Somebody
does promise national unity, and he stands to reap the rewards
of a profound wave of revulsion against the condescension and
arrogance of the West and, above all, the idea that the empire
can never be restored.
"I know you're sick of politicians," Vladimir Zhirinovksy
says on the stump. In performance, he is a strange Russian
mixture of George Wallace and Ross Perot. "I know you are tired
of the promises and the lies. Many of you didn't bother to vote.
Why would you? Well, I'm not going to make you wait 10 or 20
years to buy a decent chicken. You support me and you will get
results. They will be fast, they will be direct and they will
be yours."
It is an appeal, however simplistic, that is hard to resist.
Zhirinovsky may be short of answers to complicated questions.
(His basic foreign policy statement: "War is the natural state
of man. Either they get us or we get them.") But in front of
an audience, he is a genuine spellbinder. Few politicians
have his verbal chemistry, and fewer still are campaigning now,
two years before the next election. Zhirinovsky-- who was
not interviewed for this article because he charges journalists
$5,000 an hour for his time-- knows the power of the camera as
well as any Kennedy ever did.
To some critics, he is the Russian Hotspur-- a fiery flameout
who will soon be a historical footnote. To others, he doesn't
even matter. If he himself does not lead the pack into the next
election, they say, somebody with similar views will soon emerge
to replace him. Even on the right, few believe that Zhirinovsky
is the only person who can carry their message.
"Zhirinovsky is not the point," says the right-wing intellectual
Shafarevich. "He is simply a vehicle to express our anger. For
Russia right now the most important thing is to find a feeling
of national unity to overcome this crisis. Today the main factor
is a total decline of national sentiments. We must have a leader
who can unite Russia and Russians again. Zhirinovsky may
disappear, but these ideas will not."
He may well be right. Russians can recognize a fool when
they see one. But redemption and weakness, madness and folly all
play a central role in the Russian psyche and in its literature.
Dostoyevsky's novel "The Devils," for instance, is filled
with febrile revolutionaries, lunatics who perfectly embodied
the fanatic quality of the early Bolsheviks. One of the nation's
most celebrated literary heroes-- the delirious, brooding Raskolnikov
in "Crime and Punishment"-- is Russia's warped Hamlet,
a murderer riddled not by indecision but by action. Even now,
in the post-Soviet period, the grotesque is a dominant theme.
In short stories by young writers like Vladimir Sorokin, author
of the "The Queue," there is a deliberate twisting of
socialist realism into a modern literature of the perverse.
This reverence for the drunken fool, the loner, the maniac
carries over from fiction to life, and has clearly helped Zhirinovsky
gain popularity when earnest reformers with five-point plans have
slunk into the ooze. It is sometimes now forgotten how proud Russians
were when Nikita Khrushchev slammed that shoe on the table, or
that when Mikhail Gorbachev ran Russia, American diplomats quite
rightly considered the avatar of democracy, Boris Yeltsin, a drunken
lout and a hopeless bore. Russians know that Yeltsin drinks too
much, and they love him for it.
"I tend to think Zhirinovsky's a fool," says Yuri Pronin, a
political columnist for Pravda based in Irkutsk. "It is very hard for
us to take him seriously. But I have to admit that before the last
elections we went around town looking for his supporters and we
couldn't find one. We looked hard, too. He had no office here. He
had no party. No spokesman. But he won an overwhelming victory in
this area. It could only have been television, and everyone's disgust
with all other choices. It stunned me. It still stuns me."
It is a beautiful, sunny Saturday in May. As he does at
least once every month, Zhirinovsky is speaking at the
Sokolniki Metro stop in central Moscow, a grim stretch of bland
Brezhnev-era housing not far from where he lives. Hundreds of
his regular supporters are there, and many others stop as they
wander by, with children in hand. A curiosity, even to those who
are appalled by what he stands for, he and his heartfelt speech
are hard to ignore.
"You probably got some fresh fish on your way home today,
like always," he says as a bitter laugh rises from the crowd.
Fresh fish is not within the budget of the Sokolniki crowd.
"You just pick it up at the market every day with your eggs and
your cheese, don't you?
"But why not?" he continues. "You live in Russia. All around you
are the riches and the cars and the fancy homes and the imported
chocolates-- the Snickers bars...." People are clapping now
like congregants in a Baptist Church. "You can't even afford the
cheapest Russian candy." He drags out the word Russian for
about a minute. "One million wealthy and 150 million in chains.
That is what Boris has brought you.
"They tried to apply Marx to us and that failed," he says.
There is silence under the brilliant skies. "Now they are applying
Boris. How is that making you feel?"
You could have heard the screams in Warsaw.
"O.K. We have tried it their way," he says, once the shrieking
dies away. "Now try it mine. Give me a chance. That is all I ask.
Can I do it worse than they have? Can you honestly believe that I
would do it worse?"
© Copyright 1994, Michael Specter
'The great russia will live again'
june 19, 1994
SAY WHAT YOU WILL about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, but the man knows
how to throw a party. For his 48th birthday, "probably the last
before I return this nation to its historic greatness," as he put
it that night, Russia's most compelling--and notorious--
politician invited everybody from President Boris Yeltsin to a
czarist honor guard in full battle dress to celebrate with him
at Moscow's grandly decaying Budapest Restaurant.
President Yeltsin declined to attend. But the czarists were
out in force, and so were a pride of sleek blondes who called
themselves the Zhirinovsky Girls. Hundreds of shady "businessmen"
clutching bottles of "Zhirinovsky-brand" vodka wandered happily
among the eye-high stacks of blini, occasionally bumping into a
Serbian diplomat, a retired Russian Army general or an acne-scarred
skinhead with fresh jail tattoos on his fingers.
Outside, Petrovsky Street looked like the parking lot at any
good Connecticut country club: Cadillacs, Mercedeses and Lincoln
Town Cars all clogged the narrow alley, along with the gaudiest
symbol of the Slavic jet set-- the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Special
Russian Army forces patrolled the area, virtually closing traffic
on one of the city's main arteries and making the Bolshoi Theater,
the Metropol Hotel, even Red Square and the Kremlin practically
inaccessible. "It is a sign of respect," said Grigory Serbrenikov,
Zhirinovsky's glib, energetic press secretary, when asked why the
Government felt the need to send paratroopers to a birthday party.
"He is the most popular man in Russia. Even this Government has
to respect that."
The police assembled on the nearby streets gave a slightly
different reason for their presence. "These guys are dangerous
drunks," said one trooper, who wore a camouflage flak jacket
with night-vision goggles tucked into his breast pocket. "You
don't want to be around when this party is over."
But inside, it was all smiles and Champagne. Vladimir Volfovich
Zhirinovsky, recently appointed by his colleagues in Russia's
extravagantly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party to a 10-year term
as "dictator," kissed every woman who walked by, posed for
hundreds of pictures like a longshot liberal in the snows of New
Hampshire, stood on the worn parquet floor next to his wife for
more than an hour and received some unusual presents for a
birthday boy: a high-powered Russian Army assault rifle (which
he aimed gleefully at the few journalists present); a 15-gallon
bottle of vodka bearing his profile (in the trademark wool cap
he claimed was stolen from him by European Parliament deputies
in France) and a large oil painting of Russian tanks strafing
a shore dotted with palm trees-- a not-so-subtle reference to
his imperialistic promise that Russian soldiers would one day
"wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean."
Opera singers, comedians, native folk dancers and blatant
whores all made the scene. Russia's most famous hypnotist and
faith healer, Anatoly Kashpirovsky-- whose television appearances
still weaken the knees of tens of thousands of elderly women--
turned up to say that someday the anniversary of Zhirinovsky's
birth would be celebrated with the same joy as Lenin's once was.
"He is the brightest, cleanest, most courageous man we have,"
said the wiry Kashpirovsky, himself a member of Parliament who
only months ago had bitterly split from Zhirinovsky's party
and denounced its leader. "He is the only man who can lead
this country out of the darkness and into the light."
Under hooded eyebrows dripping with sweat, Zhirinovsky
took it all in like the amiable president of a local Rotary Club.
Conservatively dressed in a hunter-green double-breasted jacket,
with rep tie and black slacks, he stood quietly under a wooden
crown with the word "Rossiya" painted in gold leaf. For once
he fought back his natural scowl and spoke softly. "I love this
country," he said when it came time to cut the cake. "I love it
more than anything on earth. When I am done, it will be great
again. I promise you all that. The great Russia will live again."
CAN RUSSIA-- REELING FROM THE loss of empire, impoverished,
desperate and tumbling rapidly into the deepest reaches of the
third world, ever be "great" again?
Can a man who has promised to reclaim Finland and Alaska,
and warned the Germans and Japanese that he would "destroy"
them with his "atomic pistol" if they got out of line,
become its President?
How can a nation that has been tortured ceaselessly by dictators
and murderers throughout this century reject democracy yet again
and embrace the leadership of a racist tyrant who promises to
establish special courts for summary executions of criminals and
kill 100,000 of them as soon as he comes to power? Is there something
fundamental in the Russian soul that invites barbarism and recoils
from peace?
Are people here so bitter about the dismal state of their
lives that they would prefer to hear simple falsehoods about the
past than hard truths about the future?
Or are Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and his many strident and
nationalistic competitors for power, simply bad jokes, posturing
buffoons who will fade away as the economy blossoms?
"Zhirinovsky must be seen as a symbol of something
very real, very powerful," says Yegor Gaidar, a man who ought
to know. "We have already seen what it means to ignore this
threat."
As perhaps the most reform-minded politician in Russia,
a close ally of President Yeltsin and the head of Russia's Choice,
the most visibly pro-Western bloc in last December's parliamentary
elections, Gaidar and his slate were humiliated when Zhirinovsky
drew nearly 25 percent of the vote-- more than anyone else, and
far more than anyone in the West ever thought possible.
Like most of the country's leaders, Gaidar is well aware
that if the economy darkens further, nationalists like Zhirinovsky,
joined by a loose grouping of Communists (led by their slick party
boss Gennadi Zyuganov, who has appeared on "Larry King Live"
and has promised to "to unite the entire opposition-- left,
right and center") could provide an unbeatable alternative
to the way things are. Even the former Vice President Aleksandr
Rutskoi, the renegade whom Yeltsin had to blast out of office
with tanks last October, hasn't been shy about stating his intention
to assume the Presidency.
Fresh from five months at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, released
along with hundreds of thugs, bandits and extremist politicians
who make Zhirinovsky look like a 12-term Congressman from
Indianapolis, Rutskoi has an appeal based almost wholly on the
fact that he is President Yeltsin's enemy. For it has come to
this in Russia: these days a politician can't go wrong by denouncing
the man who brought democracy to the Soviet Union and then saved
it once again when armed despots tried to take it back.
"People are scared," says Gaidar, who admitted he ran a terrible
campaign, delivering long, droning speeches about inflation, and was
among the many liberals jettisoned from the Yeltsin Administration
in the aftermath of the crushing defeat. "I really don't blame them.
Whether Zhirinovsky ends up leading them or it is somebody else,
the danger of radical nationalism in this country is absolute. Our
only hope is to get the economy working fast."
For the average citizen, however, that is a hope built on
the thinnest of reeds. Many of them have never been poorer, not
even under Communism. A public that only three years ago viewed
the West as the Land of Oz has come decidedly to believe that
foreigners have too much influence here. Industrial production
has fallen 25 percent in each of the last two quarters compared
with the previous year-- a drop far greater than anything America
experienced during the Great Depression. Where the vast majority
once yearned for a market economy, most of the population now
would be thrilled to see it wither away. Two-thirds of the people
polled by the Russian Academy of Sciences last month agreed that
"privatization is legalized theft," and that it was undertaken "for the
benefit of criminals." Burning desires for freedom have rapidly given
way to urgent calls for law and order, for real jobs at decent wages,
for putting things back together again.
It won't be easy. Russians are humiliated by their failures,
angry at the West for showing so clearly what they can't have
and eager to do something about it. Three years ago, Moscow residents
were throwing rose petals in the path of Americans. Now they have
taken to painting "Yankee Go Home" on the no-parking signs outside the
bleak, forbidding American Embassy and screaming that the national
obsession with Snickers bars is some kind of American plot.
"It is natural to feel bitter about America now because America is
being shoved down our throat at all times," says Igor Shafarevich, the
well-known right-wing intellectual and mathematician whose four-year-old
book, "Russophobia," is considered a sacred text of aggressive nationalism.
"If you look at television today, only American products are advertised there.
Ice cream, gum, toothbrushes, whatever. All is American. If in an ad you
need to portray something as attractive, they speak English. Air time on
our Russian television is all bought by Western preachers-- Baptists, for
instance-- while the Russian Orthodox Church does not have this opportunity.
Naturally, people resent it because it reminds them how desperately
unhappy they are."
NOT EVERYONE IN RUSSIA IS miserable, of course. These are
heady times for the mob, for the new bankers who operate out of
seedy apartments and earn millions of dollars each month. A horrible
hybrid has emerged: the crassness of capitalism has been grafted
onto the fierce Russian soul. For those crafty enough to have
a part in the fire sale of an enormous country, where literally
everything-- from the buildings that stand on the earth to the
precious metals buried within it-- has its price, times couldn't
be better. For the lucky few who operate on the high side of the
dollar apartheid, life in the new Russia is grand: cellular phones,
Maine lobsters, Versace clothing, four-story dachas with heated
pools; $1,000-a-night hookers, illegal drugs of any kind. They're
all here now.
But the chasm between rich and poor grows wider every day.
Last year, there were more Mercedeses sold in Moscow than in any
other European city-- most of them for cash. In a city where the
average industrial wage is slightly higher than $70 a month, you
can rent a car at good hotels for $50 an hour-- with a four-hour
minimum. Moscow may have already outstripped Las Vegas, Monte
Carlo and Hong Kong to become the casino capital of the world.
There is one on almost every street, and, fortunately for the
high rollers who are everywhere, new clubs open every day. Some
currency-exchange bureaus now even refuse to accept bills smaller
than $100-- but that's no problem because hundreds are ubiquitous.
At the end of every working day, men brandishing automatic weapons
form human tunnels outside the entrances of major banks-- the
better to guarantee their huge take will make it safely to storage
in central vaults.
For the vast, silent majority, though, the new Russia is
a grim place. Last year, agricultural production plummeted to
a 30-year low-- and the Government has already conceded that this
year will be worse. With its stone-age factories producing almost
nothing of use, the former superpower has lapsed into a coma.
In a single year, the price of a decent meal has risen by a factor
of 10. Ravaged by inflation that has turned fistfuls of rubles
into worthless tissue, the meager life savings of millions have
vanished. Faith healers and vodka factories are working overtime.
The most stolid people on earth-- who have lost tens of millions
of their brothers and sisters to war, terror and genocide-- are
sick of waiting for tomorrow.
Fear has taken control of the country: fear of poverty,
of crime and, above all, fear of the future. Women feel they can
no longer walk the streets alone at night. Police officers, unable--
and often unwilling-- to respond to the crushing swell of violence
that has taken hold in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large
cities, now suggest that people carry guns. That probably wouldn't
have helped Andrei Aizderdzis, the 35-year-old publishing entrepreneur
and member of Parliament who was blown away on his doorstep early
last month-- almost certainly by criminals outraged that he had
printed the names of Mafia gang members in a provincial newspaper.
The following week, possibly emboldened by the tragedy, another
member of Parliament, Sergei Skorochkin, pulled out a Kalashnikov
and killed a gun-toting Georgian racketeer, who he says was demanding
protection money from him.
"We will stop this all," Zhirinovsky howled at a rally last month,
to a crowd of 1,000. "I know you're sick of it. You're frightened, you're
angry. They call me an extremist. That's O.K. If that's what we need
to prevent vandals from stealing our country, then let us be extreme."
It was the biggest applause line of the day. (Though his suggestion
that President Yeltsin and his entire administration retire to their dachas
where they could "stuff themselves with Snickers bars" came a close second.)
Early this year, the Government released a report concluding
that at least 70 percent of private enterprises were being forced
to pay tribute to gangsters. Newspapers called the estimate laughably
low. The rich promise of perestroika and glasnost has turned into
the reality of a society governed by the Mafia, official corruption
and despair.
"Everything that happens here is happening against the
backdrop of a dying, collapsing society," says Aleksandr Prokhanov,
editor of the right-wing newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) and a sort of
unofficial propaganda minister of the opposition. "The economy is
dying, social links are breaking apart. At some point soon society
will become ungovernable. Earlier the Soviet Union threatened the
West with nuclear weapons. It was the possible source of World War
III. But now its something different--one-sixth of the globe has
become a breeding ground for the deadliest Mafia in the world.
Compared with Russia, Colombia is a grain of sand."
He is not alone in thinking this way. Declaring that
organized crime in Russia presented "a grave threat" to the safety
of the United States, and that he feared the Russian Mafia has
"already attained or will soon attain the capacity to steal
nuclear weapons," the F.B.I. Director, Louis Freeh, announced
last month that the bureau would soon open its first Moscow office.
Russian politicians and law-enforcement officials expressed gratitude
and relief. Crime, particularly the organized groups that control
almost every aspect of commercial life from newspaper kiosks to
international banking, has made the desire for a strong, incorruptible
nationalism-- not free markets or better health care or even jobs--
the driving force in Russian politics today. Even the resurgent
Russian Orthodox Church, which was continually brutalized and
humiliated under Communism, is led in part by hard-liners who
seek to provide a powerful nationalist identity for the new Russian
state.
While never publicly acknowledging it, President Yeltsin
has moved continuously to the right, hoping to placate the
nationalist fervor. His single election triumph-- a new Constitution
that grants nearly absolute powers to the President-- passed only
because Zhirinovsky supported it and told his voters to follow
suit. By the end of January, Yeltsin had dumped every reform-minded
liberal in his Government, including Gaidar, Boris Fyodorov, his
aggressive young Finance Minister, and many of their colleagues.
From his woozy stance as an uncritical supporter of the West,
Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev has moved furthest to the right
of anyone in the Yeltsin Government, recently writing that "Russia
is predestined to be a great power." His pronouncements on
Serbia, NATO and the West sometimes seem as if they were written
by Zhirinovksy himself.
Suddenly, the West is the all-purpose villain. Not long
ago, there were only reformers here; now there are only patriots--
men who wish to return the country to what they perceive to be
its Slavic glory. There are essentially two historical ways of
looking at life in Russia: things are horrible now, let's go back
to the past; and things are horrible now, what can we find to
wipe away the present? It is a dangerous mentality, but one that
has nearly eternal roots in the national psyche. Remorse, anger
and frustration are all deeply imbedded in the Russian character.
The naive notion that a brief period of shock therapy would turn
Russia into a second United States has given way to a far more
brittle reality: Russia never has been-- and never will be-- a
Western country.
"Liberals, deniers, skeptics as well as preachers of social
ideas, they all-- the majority of them at least-- have suddenly
turned out to be ardent Russian patriots," wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky
in his often wildly nationalistic "Diary of a Writer." The book,
published as a serial between 1873 and 1881, helped make him famous.
Its popularity rivaled Dickens's at his height-- readers couldn't
wait for each new issue to be released. With its blind anti-Semitism,
its acute insights into the social hungers of the Russian people and
its overbearing belief that the idea of Russia is the only idea, the
book could have been written last fall-- as a campaign treatise for
Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
"This is what I think," Dostoyevsky wrote, in one of the many
passages that presage Russia's current, troubling choices:
"Is there not revealed something in the protesting Russian soul,
to which European culture in its many manifestations has always,
ever since Peter, been hateful? I do think so."
Today the move inward rivals anything envisioned by Russia's
greatest, and most nationalistic, writer. Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin, the competent, frank statist who almost single-handedly
runs the country's economy, made his views clear this winter by
announcing bluntly that "the period of market romanticism
is over." Not long after, he issued a decree calling a halt
to competition in the all-important alcohol industry and turning
it back into a state-run monopoly. "The Government of reforms
is dead," declared the newspaper Izvestia.
THE REAL QUESTION SEEMS to be, what will come next?
Presidential elections are not scheduled until 1996-- although
Yeltsin could call them this year if he chose-- but already nearly
a dozen mainly fringe characters, including Nazi commandos like
Aleksandr Barkashov, and Viktor Anpilov, the Communist Workers
Party leader, have declared their intention to replace him. Last
year, Anpilov led crowds that clashed bitterly with police in
the streets, and was imprisoned for it. But these days, he has
taken to wearing blue polyester suits and carrying Samsonite briefcases
around town while talking serenely about "the loving motherland."
The increasingly remote and detested Yeltsin acknowledged
in his recently published memoirs that "Russia is not immune
to fascism." Bending to the openly anti-American atmosphere
in Parliament and throughout the country, he theatrically questioned
whether Russia would be ready to let American soldiers (200 troops
and a couple of dozen trucks) enter its sovereign turf this summer--
and late last month he finally called them off. Few ideas seem
more odious to those who yearn for a stronger national identity
than the United States-sponsored plan for joint military exercises
on Russian soil. These days, when Yeltsin delivers one of his
rare speeches, it is not usually about market reform or the lessons
of democracy, but about crime, corruption and the overriding need
for law and order to return.
"These are the conditions for extremism," said Gaidar glumly,
reviewing the events of the eight months that began when Yeltsin
sent the army to storm the Parliament and lock up its leaders.
"You have a stagnating economy. You have real poverty. You
have enormous increases in inequality. You have rising expectations.
You have a general sense of disorder and you have shocking crime
everywhere you look. I think this is an ideal platform for the
enemies of democracy."
Not long after making those comments, Gaidar went further--
drawing a dark parallel between Zhirinovsky and Hitler. "During the
election campaign last year, I said that Zhirinovsky reminded me of
Hitler in 1929," he wrote in a long commentary in Izvestia.
"Unfortunately, I was mistaken. Zhirinovsky with his 25 percent
of the votes has already surpassed Hitler in 1929 and has achieved
the result that the Nazis got in the Reichstag elections of 1930.
"The person whom I write about today," he continued,
"is the most popular fascist leader in Russia. This means
that he is the biggest threat to my motherland and my people."
Coming from the soft-spoken Gaidar-- the apostle of the
shock-therapy approach to Russian economic reform-- words like
this land with a jolt. A liberal who believes completely in the
magic of the marketplace, he is one of his country's most eloquent
optimists.
There aren't many left though. Hundreds of thousands of
people go to work each day, sign in and get drunk. Bad vodka,
at about $1 a bottle, is still cheap enough for almost anybody
to afford. Although it makes no economic sense, the Government
continues to hand out tax breaks to factories based largely on
the number of people they employ. The bigger the enterprise the
lower the taxes. So from the giant fish plants that line the waterfront
of Murmansk, to the oil fields of Siberia, to the colossal automotive
factories in the capital, like Zil and Moskvich, workers have
little to do most days but drink and worry-- the beer halls around
factories and in neighborhoods where industrial employees live
are doing a bang-up business.
"I voted for Boris Yeltsin," said Yuri Vysonov, a 55-year-old
laborer from Yeltsin's home turf, Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains.
"I worked for him 30 years ago when he ran a factory. But I've given
up. He has issued a hundred edicts and not one has changed a thing.
I thought he was a Democrat and then he bombed the Parliament. I
never thought it could get worse than it was. But I was wrong. Give
me something different. I don't know what and I don't know who. But
there has got to be something out there better than what we have now."
SERGEI IS A TOWHEADED 8-year-old, a charming fourth-grader who
chain-smokes Marlboros and earns more than 1.5 million rubles
a month (nearly $1,000) robbing trains in a town called Zabaikalsk
on the Chinese border, near Mongolia. The way he describes his
job, he's an apprentice really-- a clever little tipster who tells
older thieves what merchandise they can find in the boxcars constantly
inching their way across the wide open country.
The telegenic youngster is the unwitting star of a searching
new movie, "The Criminal Revolution," by the well-known director
Stanislav Govorukhin. His two other recent films, "We Can't Live
This Way" and "The Russia We Lost," portrayed a country in steady
decline: first under Communism and then under Yeltsin. He also
made a popular documentary about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
arranged one of the first welcome events for Solzhenitsyn's return
to Moscow. The arrival of Russia's most famous living writer,
after a 20-year exile, has already added intensity to the nation's
search for a new nationalism. Within a day of landing in Magadan--
the Siberian center of the Gulags--he had already begun to breathe
fire. Solzhenitsyn denounced Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika,
called Gaidar's reforms "brainless" and said that Zhirinovsky was
a "caricature of a Russian patriot." He said it was time to stop
worrying about the West and develop the soul of Russia.
Govorukhin agreed. His new documentary, a guided tour of
the rape of Russia, is the most graphic of his films. From frank,
on-camera interviews with Mafia racketeers to detailed descriptions
of how to make shovels and axes out of rare metals like platinum
and titanium-- in order to smuggle the loot out of the country--
the new film is Exhibit A in Govorukhin's holy war against the
wholesaling of a nation.
The director, a dandy who smokes Dunhills with ivory tips,
is a sort of cinematic Paul Revere-- beaming from town to town
his warning of the death of a culture invaded by beasts from across
the ocean. A member of Parliament, he is the most forceful and
eloquent spokesman for a generation of cynics who argue that Russian
attempts at democracy have done little but pave the way for the
coming of fascism.
"Today an unthinkable order has taken shape in this
country," Govorukhin said recently, a couple of days before
the first showing of his film in Moscow. "It has become disadvantageous
to work and absolutely safe to steal. Show me at least one person
who would labor honestly and live well in this country. There
is no such person. In this country, he who lives well either steals,
works for foreigners or is at the Government's corrupt feeding
trough."
His message may be a bit hyperbolic-- he is a moody Cassandra
in Italian loafers and British woolens-- but it never falls on
indifferent ears. During an interview in his office-- a flashy
hideaway not far from the Russian White House, where he can sip
espresso, lament the past and plot the future with an increasingly
influential group dedicated to bringing down the Government--
Govorukhin insists that the country is starved for talent, particularly
the most ruthless type.
"Stalin was a tyrant," he said. "A criminal. But a very talented
man, a true statesman. Look at what an enormous and powerful country
he managed to build on the misery and blood of the people."
And Zhirinovsky? What of him?
"He is super-talented," Govorukhin replies instantly."Super." In fact,
Govorukhin insists that he would ban the Liberal Democratic Party from
the next elections if it were up to him, because Zhirinovsky is such
a great orator, and so "scary," that any race in which he runs would
be unfair. "Of course, his is a talent from the ranks of Stalin and
Lenin," Govorukhin continues, clearly ambivalent about his own feelings.
"He will make of this country-- oh what can I say?-- Russia will
once again be a great power."
A great power again. It is the central rallying cry of all
who despair of the present and look for another way. It is the
prayer that unites centrists like Nikolai Travkin, Communists
like Zyuganov, extremists like Zhirinovsky and open fascists
like Barkashov, who spends his free time staging military maneuvers
on the outskirts of Moscow, peddles Nazi literature in the corridors
of the Parliament and recently told the weekly newspaper Argumenty
i Fakty that he had a simple plan for "washing the disgrace
away from Russia: Everything for the nation, nothing against the
nation. The nation is above all. We will do everything to implement
our views."
It is a frightening thought in a country of 150 million
lost souls-- made far worse because he is hardly the only one
who voices it. From Sergei Shakrai, the former close Yeltsin ally,
to Travkin, recently named to the cabinet in yet another step
to the right, from Andrei Kozyrev to Aleksandr Rutskoi, the call
to renewed national dignity-- often at the expense of whatever
is not "Russian"-- has become a sort of spiritual glue.
"All national patriotic forces must join together," Zyuganov,
the leader of the Communist Party, said recently. "People
always ask me what, as a Communist, I am for. I am for a Russia
that is great and indivisible. I am for the Russian people individually
and together. In the United States, you can support Russia's Choice
all you like. Forever if you like. But it won't bring them to
power. They will disappear. And Russia will emerge again."
Rutskoi, the Afghan-war hero who briefly became the Jefferson
Davis of Russia before Yeltsin had him locked away, says essentially
the same thing. "We must unite in a single people's movement,"
he told 10,000 protesters on the May 9 anniversary of the victory
over Germany, a solemn day in a nation where the siege of Leningrad
is mentioned constantly-- even 50 years later-- on the television
news. It was Rutskoi's first major public address since Oct. 3,
when he called on hostile anti-Yeltsin crowds outside the White
House to storm the Mayor's office and the television center Ostankino,
setting off two days of violence that ended with more than 150
dead and a nation shaking with rage. "We must replace the
regime of swindlers," he told the cheering Victory Day crowd.
"We must take our country back.
No one can argue that Russia today is without free speech.
On May Day, a smiling man selling magazines in front of Moscow's
last great Lenin statue, across the street from the Octoberskaya
Metro, acted as if he were hustling hot dogs at Yankee Stadium.
"Get your first authentic Russian Nazi magazine here,"
he called amiably. "I've got it at a great price.
"Hey, are you Jewish?" he asked a potential buyer as a small
crowd gathered, his voice gaining speed and intensity. "Are you
American, or Jewish, or what?"
It is easy to see nuts like the magazine dealer as sad sacks
clinging to a lost way of life in a world that has passed them by--
or hopeless fools searching for new ashes in the old ashes. Just
as it is easy to see Vladimir Zhirinovsky as a clown. In the West,
the popular conclusion is so simple: Zhirinovsky and these others are
idiots. The Russians will settle down eventually. Just give them
some time to sort things out.
Maybe reason will prevail. Time may be all that Russia needs
to complete its difficult journey toward economic and political
reform. After all, almost nothing could be more complicated than
taking the world's most cumbersome and dictatorial command economy
and turning it into a free market. Yet there is a scenario for
success that is based on individual entrepreneurs' starting small
businesses, which, if they grow and prosper, will help bring the
nation along with them.
Despite dire predictions that Russia was about to plunge
into anarchy or civil war-- that hunger would be widespread and
violence even more pervasive than it is-- the worst has not yet
come to pass. Inflation, while unacceptably high at nearly 10
percent, is far lower than it was a year ago. Russia has enormous
natural resources, and if the mammoth industrial dinosaurs that
make nothing worth buying are allowed finally to die-- a big if
in a country petrified by the possibility of high unemployment--
the economy could begin to focus on manufacturing products somebody
might want. At the end of May, Yeltsin finally sent a signal that
he understood how desperately the economy needed to catch fire.
He issued a series of decrees-- reducing taxes on businesses,
cutting export quotas, promising aid to companies with foreign
investment-- all aimed at rescuing the economy and, in the process,
himself.
If free enterprise has met with ambivalence elsewhere in
Russia, it is certainly booming in the Duma Building, where any
legislator can walk out of his office after writing an anti-American
speech and buy a canister of Chicken Flavored Ultra Slim-Fast
in the store on the first floor. Or some instant noodles or panty
hose. Or books. There are always books for sale in the halls of
the new Congress at the lunchtime break: Mickey Spillane thrillers,
badly translated into Russian, primers on accounting, on computers,
on car repair and even modern-art catalogues. And at a folding
table in the center of the hall most days, you can buy any of
Zhirinovsky's speeches, his autobiography "The Last
Thrust for the South," which does more to illustrate the
lonely-man school of history than almost anything published in
Russian since Peter the Great died. You can also purchase copies
of his newspaper, The Liberal, and his magazine, The Falcon.
Next to that are stacks of Goebbels's diaries and "Mein Kampf,"
in striking black-and-white covers, both recently translated into
new Russian editions and priced quite reasonably.
"Buy them," the salesman, Viktor Antilovich, suggested
one day. "You might learn something."
About what? he was asked. What did Hitler, who wiped out
20 million Russians, not to mention six million Jews-- and loathed
them all-- have to teach?
"He understood the need for a motherland," came the reply.
"He knew that a nation needs a heritage."
For Russians who see their heritage slipping away-- more
than 25 million of them became instant ethnic minorities in new
countries when the Soviet Union died-- it is a compelling theme.
The Soviet state was the place where most Russians-- ethnically
at least-- felt at home. When the British and French empires faded
away, those countries withdrew to their clearly defined national
borders. A Frenchman could always feel at home in France.
The situation in Russia today is far more complicated. You
don't have to be a Nazi to feel anger when a cousin or uncle who
has lived his whole life in Estonia can't get a job because he
is Russian, when his children can't study Russian in school anymore
or play with their neighbors who aren't Russian. For a people
used to the idea of greatness-- even if it was never a reality--
and to an empire stretching from the Bay of Pigs to Ho Chi Minh
City, the notion that Russians now have to apply for a visa to
visit Latvia, or fight for scarce jobs with refugees from Uzbekistan,
or wait in line for apartments with immigrants from Azerbaijan
is nearly impossible to take.
It was just that perilous loss of heritage that Govorukhin
was discussing at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, one of the
tonier spots in Moscow, where a couple of drinks cost $25, a Filofax
is $200 and an Apple Newton computer goes for $1,000.
"We have become slaves to money," he said, speaking in
the Tolstoy Room of the hotel after showing his film to a group
of Russian journalists. "We work for the Chinese as laborers
or we work as thieves and mobsters. We have no values anymore--
no clear place in the world."
On the Sony television monitor behind him, a series of bleak
images flickered by as he spoke: trucks full of Russian goods
and valuable equipment flooding into China-- and coming back without
a thing. Villages were shown. On the Russian side of the border,
all were in decay, sliding into anarchy. The Chinese towns only
a few miles away were gleaming and modern, filled with new buildings,
fine roads and fancy parks-- all constructed with Russian granite.
"We have become lackeys to Germany, to the West, especially
to the U.S.," Govorukhin concluded, assuring himself that
the largely sympathetic audience of journalists got the chilling
message. "We have to start doing it for ourselves again."
As he finished his speech, the doors to the Tolstoy Room
swung open onto the corridors of the hotel. An enormous party
had begun down the hall in the hotel's grand ballroom. Women in
long black dresses and men in dinner wear congregated under an
archway of red, white and blue balloons, then passed by a two-story
inflatable polar bear doll, 6-foot stacks of plastic Sprite, Coke
and Fanta bottles and finally a 10-foot circular Russian language
version of the Coca-Cola slogan Vsegda Coca-Cola (Always Coca-Cola).
It was Cokefest 94. The first Russian Coca Cola bottling
plant had opened on the outskirts of Moscow, and it seemed like
the entire city of Atlanta had flown in for the party.
"It's a big day for us and a big day for Russia," said a local
employee of the company. "Everyone in town is going to be here."
Not everyone. Stanislav Govorukhin took one look around,
lit another cigarette and fled in horror.
There are at least two words that every Westerner who cares
about Russia ought to know: rodina and dusha-- motherland and
the soul. When Russians talk about the dusha, they are not just
talking about the soul, though; they are talking about the soul
on fire.
And when they talk about the motherland, they might as well
be talking about Lake Baikal. Few places stir the spirits of ordinary
Russians like the vast, crystalline beauty of the world's deepest,
clearest and oldest lake. By comparison, Lake Superior, with less
than half the water, is a puddle.
Statistics, breathtaking as they are, can only tell a little
about Baikal: it is 395 miles long and 30 miles wide; it holds
a fifth of the world's fresh water. In the dead of the Siberian
winter, its ice grows more than three feet thick, and almost 2,000
types of life are to be found there-- fish, crabs, plants, flowers--
that can be found nowhere else on earth.
But statistics don't explain the impact of the blue waters,
and the necklace of white mountains that ring them, on the senses.
The scale, the textures, the contrast to the drab Siberian cities
not far away are all remarkable. Far more than a body of water,
though, Baikal is an idea-- like Wordsworth's Lake District or
Melville's whale. Lake Baikal is as big as it is, according to
an old Russian proverb, because it contains a piece of every Slavic
soul.
"The entire Russian ecology movement was founded on
these shores," says Vladimir Fialkov, a geographer and director
of the Baikal Museum in Listvyanka, speaking about the strong
connection between the movement and Russian nationalism. "The
whole idea of Russia as a nation, Russia apart from the Soviet
Union, originated here. The idea that bureaucrats in Moscow were
deciding what to do with a lake that has been here for millions
of years. It was too much for the people to bear."
More than 3,000 miles from Moscow, Siberia is Russia's heartland,
a place of endless resources and even more misery. People here
are independent, wild. They didn't want to belong to a Soviet
Union that tried to turn their barren wonderland into an industrial
showcase. And they don't want to hear what Moscow has to tell
them now. In the age-old war between Slavophiles and Westernizers--
between Russians who believe that the West is evil, that in the
land lies the answer and that the Russian soul harbors a special
spirit that cannot be contaminated by material things or money,
and those who dream of commerce, progress, a modern nation-- Baikal
is the Slavic home court.
Not surprisingly, there isn't much support for Yeltsin or
his reforms here. Like many regions of the country, Irkutsk oblast,
which includes Baikal, has increasingly decided to go its own
way. Despite the Communist-era street signs in Irkutsk (and the
huge banner nobody could miss on the way to the airport: For Lenin,
Live Work Fight), people here would rather live and work for themselves.
"I don't want to be a part of a criminal Russia,"
says Vasily Zelenyuk, a 34-year-old unemployed gold miner from
Irkutsk. Zelenyuk used to rake it in-- making up to 500,000 rubles
($350) a month. That was when he was working. The mines are not
producing much these days, but neither is the military factory
that makes fighter jets. Irkutsk Heavy Metals, the largest regional
employer, closed for the Victory Day celebration at the beginning
of May and, like many other major factories in the country, stayed
closed long after it ended. Once again, the big industrial success
story is the local vodka factory. People there are working overtime.
"I watch the television and I am sick of what I see,"
says Zelenyuk, who wears a holstered pistol on his left hip even
during recreational strolls on the shores of Baikal. "People
here are angry. I am. Russia was great and now we aren't. Now
we have to protect ourselves because nobody else will do it for
us. I want my job back. I want to be able to walk safely on the
streets. If somebody can promise me that, I'm for them."
SOMEBODY DOES PROMISE that-- and much more, too. Somebody
does promise national unity, and he stands to reap the rewards
of a profound wave of revulsion against the condescension and
arrogance of the West and, above all, the idea that the empire
can never be restored.
"I know you're sick of politicians," Vladimir Zhirinovksy
says on the stump. In performance, he is a strange Russian
mixture of George Wallace and Ross Perot. "I know you are tired
of the promises and the lies. Many of you didn't bother to vote.
Why would you? Well, I'm not going to make you wait 10 or 20
years to buy a decent chicken. You support me and you will get
results. They will be fast, they will be direct and they will
be yours."
It is an appeal, however simplistic, that is hard to resist.
Zhirinovsky may be short of answers to complicated questions.
(His basic foreign policy statement: "War is the natural state
of man. Either they get us or we get them.") But in front of
an audience, he is a genuine spellbinder. Few politicians
have his verbal chemistry, and fewer still are campaigning now,
two years before the next election. Zhirinovsky-- who was
not interviewed for this article because he charges journalists
$5,000 an hour for his time-- knows the power of the camera as
well as any Kennedy ever did.
To some critics, he is the Russian Hotspur-- a fiery flameout
who will soon be a historical footnote. To others, he doesn't
even matter. If he himself does not lead the pack into the next
election, they say, somebody with similar views will soon emerge
to replace him. Even on the right, few believe that Zhirinovsky
is the only person who can carry their message.
"Zhirinovsky is not the point," says the right-wing intellectual
Shafarevich. "He is simply a vehicle to express our anger. For
Russia right now the most important thing is to find a feeling
of national unity to overcome this crisis. Today the main factor
is a total decline of national sentiments. We must have a leader
who can unite Russia and Russians again. Zhirinovsky may
disappear, but these ideas will not."
He may well be right. Russians can recognize a fool when
they see one. But redemption and weakness, madness and folly all
play a central role in the Russian psyche and in its literature.
Dostoyevsky's novel "The Devils," for instance, is filled
with febrile revolutionaries, lunatics who perfectly embodied
the fanatic quality of the early Bolsheviks. One of the nation's
most celebrated literary heroes-- the delirious, brooding Raskolnikov
in "Crime and Punishment"-- is Russia's warped Hamlet,
a murderer riddled not by indecision but by action. Even now,
in the post-Soviet period, the grotesque is a dominant theme.
In short stories by young writers like Vladimir Sorokin, author
of the "The Queue," there is a deliberate twisting of
socialist realism into a modern literature of the perverse.
This reverence for the drunken fool, the loner, the maniac
carries over from fiction to life, and has clearly helped Zhirinovsky
gain popularity when earnest reformers with five-point plans have
slunk into the ooze. It is sometimes now forgotten how proud Russians
were when Nikita Khrushchev slammed that shoe on the table, or
that when Mikhail Gorbachev ran Russia, American diplomats quite
rightly considered the avatar of democracy, Boris Yeltsin, a drunken
lout and a hopeless bore. Russians know that Yeltsin drinks too
much, and they love him for it.
"I tend to think Zhirinovsky's a fool," says Yuri Pronin, a
political columnist for Pravda based in Irkutsk. "It is very hard for
us to take him seriously. But I have to admit that before the last
elections we went around town looking for his supporters and we
couldn't find one. We looked hard, too. He had no office here. He
had no party. No spokesman. But he won an overwhelming victory in
this area. It could only have been television, and everyone's disgust
with all other choices. It stunned me. It still stuns me."
It is a beautiful, sunny Saturday in May. As he does at
least once every month, Zhirinovsky is speaking at the
Sokolniki Metro stop in central Moscow, a grim stretch of bland
Brezhnev-era housing not far from where he lives. Hundreds of
his regular supporters are there, and many others stop as they
wander by, with children in hand. A curiosity, even to those who
are appalled by what he stands for, he and his heartfelt speech
are hard to ignore.
"You probably got some fresh fish on your way home today,
like always," he says as a bitter laugh rises from the crowd.
Fresh fish is not within the budget of the Sokolniki crowd.
"You just pick it up at the market every day with your eggs and
your cheese, don't you?
"But why not?" he continues. "You live in Russia. All around you
are the riches and the cars and the fancy homes and the imported
chocolates-- the Snickers bars...." People are clapping now
like congregants in a Baptist Church. "You can't even afford the
cheapest Russian candy." He drags out the word Russian for
about a minute. "One million wealthy and 150 million in chains.
That is what Boris has brought you.
"They tried to apply Marx to us and that failed," he says.
There is silence under the brilliant skies. "Now they are applying
Boris. How is that making you feel?"
You could have heard the screams in Warsaw.
"O.K. We have tried it their way," he says, once the shrieking
dies away. "Now try it mine. Give me a chance. That is all I ask.
Can I do it worse than they have? Can you honestly believe that I
would do it worse?"
© Copyright 1994, Michael Specter
Kuralyov said:
Well, the Russians are supporting Saddam Hussein in the ATL. In OTL, Vladimir Zhirinovsky openly called for military aid to Saddam Hussein, drawing upon fears of an American empire.