The Siberian Democratization Playing Field: 1992–1995
Homage to Wayne Merry with thanks for noticing and trying.
The following is part of a long piece I wrote 20 years ago describing my experiences as a first teacher and then community development activist in Siberia. After the first few years much of my work was supported by the US government and other Western donors. Merry was not alone in his concerns about the US approach.
In the early days I was working exclusively with teachers and students from universities and schools. These two groups differed in their word associations for “America”. The students would say things like skyscrapers, roads, smiling people and Schwarzenegger. The teachers almost always had only one association with America, “democracy”. The experiences and knowledge base that influenced attitudes and behavior were radically different among the different age groups. The teacher’s image of America was informed by the Cold War. The students, who I refer to as the Gorbachev generation, gleaned their vision of America from movies, music and increasingly video games in those days and the Internet today.
The only attitude that teachers and students had in common was a total lack of interest in politics. One could even characterize it as aggressively not interested. It never occurred to me that I could be at a top university in a country that is in the midst of a political crisis and there is no mention of it around campus. The Congress was threatening to quit in April 92 and when I tried to discuss it with one of my classes a young woman spoke for everyone when she complained, “I am just so sick of politics, I don’t want to hear about problems.”
The Gorbachev generation, what was politics to them? From the age of 11 on it was Mom and Dad freaking out, the TV always on blaring the latest from Moscow and screaming fights with babyshka who hates Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the whole lot of em. Politics was the ultimate turn-off. It actually made perfect sense. Deputies pulling hair and tossing water at people on the floor of the Duma was a depressing reality that only made you more scared, and fear is a demotivator so it was best ignored.
Any attempt at discussing current events and I would see my students eyes glaze over as they tuned out. The only way I could get them to describe how they felt about this transition in detail was to ask them to write about it. Here are some of their responses:
Dima
Some people say that we can divide the world into three groups of countries: civilized, uncivilized and Russia. Our country has always been the most unpredictable and strange for the average foreigner. Frankly, for us too. Russians can talk about politics for a very long time very day (in the kitchen, in the office or anywhere else). They enjoy discussing their low level of life and criticizing the government but no one will really care until tanks crash through the walls of his house. Or, if those brave proletarians care about something, their actions become ridiculous or terrible, but never normal. That’s why we have this situation here. Our entire family gets les money per month than one of those “young businessmen” (certainly without higher education) spends during an ordinary weekend. By the way, my Dad is a scientist and my Mom is a doctor.
Ira
Perestroika…this term appeared nearly 7 years ago and from that moment almost every newspaper was overflowing with articles dealing with all this stuff. Russians are tired of it (who wants to read about things which you see and feel every day on your own skin), but foreigners are still interested in reading all the facts and well produced tales connected with this problem.
Time was running out and our country was literally shaking from all the events. The August coup was the origin of the complete impoverishment of the whole nation. I’d like to tell you one really impressive fact: During this summer (1992) the salary of the leading science researcher from the Institute of Thermophysics was nearly 900 rubles (per month). What could he buy? 4 kilograms of butter for 800 rubles or maybe 3 kilograms of good sour cream for 850 rubles? He couldn’t even buy 2.5 kilograms of Italian peaches (1 kilogram = 400 rubles) not to mention ½ liter Scottish Whiskey for 1,800 rubles! In comparison, in 1989, his salary was 445 rubles per month and he could buy nearly 148 kilograms of butter. We can only admire his devotion to research.
I’m afraid that my article will sound too sad, but I must mention that this situation really killed a lot of talented scientists who couldn’t stand these humiliating conditions. For example, one department of the Institute of Thermophysics buried 3 gifted scientists between the ages of 50–60 in three months. But, I would like to end this article cheerfully and say: Russians are Russians and we still hope that things will get better.
Tanya
It’s become common to speak about crisis and about the possibility of civil war in our country. But the politicians in Moscow seem to be more interested in the struggle for power and have forgotten about our economic situation. Perhaps perestroika and everything connected to it improved something in our international relations and some spheres but it only made the life of the people worse. You can see examples of this changing for the worse everywhere. Let’s take our transport problems.. Buses are overcrowded, but the most terrible thing is that they only go when they want. So, if you were so stupid that you didn’t buy a car during the happy stagnation period, you have to stand at the bus stop for hours. The cold water in our apartment very often appears at 5 o/clock in the morning, lasts for half an hour and then disappears again. And then there is the topic that you can speak about for hours without rest. That is prices of course. Two years ago we couldn’t even imagine that sour cream that cost 1 ruble would cost 800 rubles someday. I feel so sorry for little children. Most of them can’t eat chocolates, cakes, candies, they can’t see good children’s movies. They can only look at the windows of commercial shops and admire these wonderful looking goods that they’ll never get. Dear readers from abroad! It’s not true that war is going on here. If you come to our country you won’t see tanks on the streets but you’ll have the impression that they have just left.
The only time during this period when students were buzzing about something going on in the world was the start of the first War in Chechenya, an event that many students supported, and the assassination of the popular TV host turned Broadcast Executive Vladmir Listev. In the 1993 elections only 793 out of 3145 students voted, in 1994 it was down to 10% of eligible students voters. I learned early on not to pass judgement. Still, one had to be concerned about where this was leading if the best and the brightest, while totally supportive of democratic and economic reforms, were also utterly disengaged from the process.
As I headed to Siberia in January 1992, on the train from Moscow to Novosibirsk I shared a coupe with Baba Masha. She was 60 and looked 80, had very few teeth left, whispered “Oh Gospodi, Oh Gospodi” (Oh Lord, Oh Lord) in her sleep and lived in what I would later find out is the most criminalized section of Novosibirsk. Her good for nothing son had just stolen her last valuable possession, the cow. Baba Masha told me there were only two things I needed to know to understand Russians, they are “terpelivwi” (patient) and “peredjit” (live through it). As the years went on her wisdom reaffirmed itself over and over as these traits proved to be both curse and blessing during the transition period. They were a liability in terms of trying to promote civics action but they also served as a real source of stability and calm through times of tremendous upheaval in every sphere of life.
The world as Russians knew it no longer existed and there were no fixed points for the future. Whether by nature or historical circumstance Russians are conservative people in the dictionary, “disliking or opposed to great or sudden change”, not the political sense of the word. They live in a country where change was not always for the better and never came peacefully. Nobody wanted to be a hero they just wanted a normal life with an apartment, adequate food and medical care and education for their children.
Unfortunately, patiently living through it is not the way you build a democratic society. Very quickly it can become totally irrelevant that you get to vote for your leaders if young people are not at all engaged in these processes and no one recognizes the importance of an active citizenry or experiences the desire for bottom-up leadership. Until these things happen, Russia’s democracy was going to be vulnerable to perversion.
Even with no background in transition, it was clear to me after only a few months of living in Siberia what the focus of American efforts ought to be. It also became obvious that promoting civil society was not high on the list of priorities in 1992 when Western support for transition in Russia kicked into full gear. Somewhere a decision was made that the economic aspects of this transition were more important to secure democracy than explaining things to the citizens and stimulating citizen involvement. Or, maybe there was an assumption in Washington that freedom was the only necessary condition for citizens to become active using Eastern Europe as an example and nobody checked to see if that made sense here.
However it happened, the results encouraged a post communist transition that fostered capitalist-democracy rather than democratic-capitalism. New York based writer and social commentator Fran Leibowitz described the dynamics succinctly in a July 1997 Vanity Fair interview. She was asked, “People believe that with the collapse of the Soviet Union worldwide Communism died a sorry death, and capitalism is clearly triumphant, do you agree?”. Leibowitz’s response,
“Not only triumphant but rampant. Not only rampant but annihilating. Annihilating in the sense that because of this victory the distinction between capitalism and democracy has been almost entirely eradicated. In the Soviet Union capitalism triumphed over Communism, in this country capitalism triumphed over democracy.”
This possibly unconscious transcendent promotion of capitalist virtues and values rather than democratic principles was evident even in programs not specifically targeted at the business sector. People learned the term “PR” and how to promote themselves before they learned how to develop effective, needs based projects. In fact, in 1992, most Siberians, who encountered democracy and capitalism in one undifferentiated wallop, had a completely fuzzy idea about where the effects of capitalism ended and democracy began. The end result is that many of the efforts of the last 10 years assumed the appearance of promoting less an economic or political system than a lifestyle with America as the premier brand name for that lifestyle.
There have been two primary pitches for this lifestyle. The first is the hard sell I learned about many years ago when I had a one-week job selling Time-Life books. You were not allowed to let a person hang up the phone until they were convinced that owning “The Sea and All Its Wonders” was essential to their well-being. This, I think characterizes the support for economic transition in Moscow in the early 90’s. I was reminded of the second when I read the rationale for a very expensive program bringing thousands of Russians to America for a couple of weeks. It sounded very much like the suggestive selling techniques I picked up during a stint working at a “Jack in the Box” fast food restaurant 25 years ago, “Would you like LARGE fries with that Coke?”.
It was supposed to be relatively simple: Western companies were moving in, the country was loaded with natural resources, had a highly educated population and the guy who stood on the tank won. No one, including me before I arrived, seriously considered what was happening to the lives of these people. The political issue settled it was now down to an economic transition with some inevitable collateral damage among the population.
Well, we now know that the collateral damage included the establishment of an Oligarchy as all social welfare indicators plummeted. While the deal- makers were scheming to defend the place in society they had stolen, 99% of the population were silently, frantically trying to find their place in this new society so they could provide for their family. A complicating factor was that, in terms of lifestyle, a lot of people were satisfied with the way things were during the Soviet Union.
In Krasnoyarsk I met a scientific worker/amateur alpinist in his early 30’s who described it this way “Life was good before. You didn’t have to work that hard, you didn’t get paid much but it was enough and you could take a lot of vacations.” I never met anyone who said their life was more stable or their situation was improved because of the transition. That didn’t make most people anti-reform. My estimate was that around 2/3’s of the people appreciated the new freedoms. Certainly, the number and characteristics of demonstrators on May 1 never changed.
The problem was no one had any idea it was going to be so sudden, unpredictable and cruel. Nobody knew what to do, it was a country with no grown-ups. One big family and the parents have left leaving no instructions beyond “it’s time to move on, don’t do anything we taught you to do” and precious little money. That’s what it felt like, no one you could turn to for wisdom or a false sense of security.
There were some people who aimed for Dad status and they tended to be conservative. Government officials were no better off than the general public. All the systems and criteria that were operable before no longer made any sense and no one knew what to replace them with. In February 1993 Ruslan Khasbulatov spent a moment of his 15 minutes of fame in Akademgorodok delivering a speech at the House of Scientists. I was told later that preparations for the welcome by local government officials consisted primarily of discussing whether they should stuff goods in the stores and do repairs as they used to do when someone of that status came, or if this was no longer appropriate? Should things look good or bad? They left things as they were but it didn’t matter anyway.
Reports from various Academy of Science bigwigs were given prior to the low-key speech by the embalmed looking Khasbulatov. The Head of medicine reported that “everything is awful”, Head of agriculture, “everything is awful”, Head of the Buryat Division, “everything is awful”, and a sharp, impressive looking guy from Tomsk, “everything is awful”.
Valentin Koptug, the President of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences and an unapologetic socialist true believer, was the only one deviating from the theme with a proposal to create a Siberian scientific “techno-polis”. I was told that in fact he was spending most of his energy trying to put in place a spy system that would monitor the institutes who were all busy trying to attract commercial research deals to survive and find a way to continue to pay their workers.
Even if they had any idea what to do on the Oblast level, they were too busy with political intrigues to devote much time to developing and implementing desperately needed programs. Yeltsin had found a way to kick out the Communist Novosibirsk Governor and replace him with a more “liberal” guy. The Communist went on to become a banker until he made a comeback when the “liberal” guy was democratically voted out of office. The “liberal” guy went on to become a banker, the Communist achieved nothing and was challenged in the next election by the “liberal”, the “democratic” Mayor of Novosibirsk and a Vice Minister of Economics for the Russian Federation who was the first farmer in Novosibirsk to privatize his land in the early 90s . The “liberal” and the Communist lost and both went back to banking. In a runoff between the other two the Mayor won by a tiny margin and the Minister returned to Moscow.
During my first year the exchange rate went from 95r to 720 rubles a dollar. There was more food in the stores than my first visit in 1990 but it was getting harder to afford with butter rising from 8 to 140r, sugar from 2 to 50r, sausage from 1r to 180r and candy from 10r to 140r. There was often Pepsi in the stores but to buy a Pepsi you have to return a Pepsi bottle so that even those who may have the 2r 66k to get one were faced with the problem of how to break into the “Pepsi cycle”.
No one was going to starve because of the famous Russian gardening tradition. Anyone who didn’t already have a plot of land got one. Institutes distributed land to scientists so they could feed their families and sell what was left over to support their laboratories. A small number of enterprising mothers, determined to outsmart the rising price of poultry, bought chickens and kept them in the bathroom or kitchen. Some lucky chickens living on the first floor were set out to graze everyday. A bright young student did not think her mother was enterprising but insane “2 rooms, mom and dad, my sister her husband and their baby and now these damned chickens clucking all night in the kitchen”.
In terms of the acquisition of goods, stores were not where the action was. There were a bunch of “guys” as in “I know a guy who has x for x rubles”, “We’re having a party on Friday I am going to talk to the guys and see if we can get some beer.” Guys were in charge of everything, including the service sector. “I know a guy who is going to America and can bring your summer clothes back”. Everything depended on the information or skills possessed by those around you. If they couldn’t get it or fix it, they were your connection to “the guys”. You in turn do the same. Social capital in its purest sense, in Russian it was called “blat”.
This became very important once I rented my own apartment. The first week I got trapped when the lock jammed from the inside. After numerous other attempts to get the door open with minimal damage there was no alternative left but to hatchet our way out. Putting the door back together was a job for a “guy”. I discovered that since I worked at the University I had access to “guy central” and one of them rebuilt the door over the course of a week for a bottle of vodka.
Guys were also the purveyors of news, “one of the guys says the dollar value will drop sharply to stabilize “. Even the government opted for the rumor mill when the news was going to be really bad. A friend stopped by late one night, waved a bunch of rubles in my face and said “this isn’t money, this is ‘old money’ as opposed to ‘new money’ according to the woman at the kiosk who refused to sell me a candy bar.” Thus, I became aware that Yeltsin was lopping off the zeros.
The only reliable unifying distraction was a daily South American soap opera, “The Rich Also Cry”. The world stopped to watch this show. The phenomenon extended beyond Russia. A Kyrgyz family I stayed with on Lake Issykyl huddled around the ancient, tiny black and white screen every day to watch as the beautiful and rich heroine Marianna coped with her endless problems. This comforted as much as distracted the masses. If water coolers had existed, the “Rich Also Cry” would have been the subject matter for all who gathered around. There was even talk of erecting a statue of Marianna in Novosibirsk, it was THAT important.
Punch drunk and frightened by all the changes people had gone into permanent crash position, steeled for the next hit. What they needed more than anything was information and massive counseling: stress, grief, loss, self-esteem, family, schools, factories, everyone and everywhere therapy. The first Easter I complained to an American friend that I missed hymns like “Were You There When they Crucified My Lord”. David’s response was Russians would never sing that hymn here, “People are too paranoid, it would be too scary, ‘No, I wasn’t, I was nowhere near the place, I didn’t even know the guy’”.
As I traveled around Siberia from 92–94, in addition to prices, the thing that people most wanted to know was my impression of Russia and how they live, how did it look to an American? Using a thousand different words their primary question always boiled down to “You’ve lived in a democracy, does it look hopeless to you?” This need to know, with an equal mixture of fear at knowing, was most clear to me at a talk I gave to retired gold mine workers at a sanitorium in a village in Chita Oblast (now Zabaykalsky). After each question was asked, such as the standard of living of pensioners in the US, there would be a pause, as if they were holding their breath, afraid to hear the answer. Like a second visit to the doctor after some tests have been done or stumbling across incontrovertible evidence that your 30-year marriage was a sham.
One of the few people who was interested in talking politics with me was an elderly former samidzdat dissident, Abram Ilyich Fet. He became my reality check guru for all things political. I trusted him because from our earliest meeting I learned he is genuinely committed to logical conclusions and unafraid when new information demonstrates a life-long truth has come unglued.
This happened when I mentioned that I believed women were capable of holding any position and he said that had never occurred to him. He asked me to leave, said he would think about it overnight and I could return the next day for further discussion. The next day Abram Ilyich, who was educated as a mathematician, said he decided if he could think of one woman who was as brilliant as any male mathematician my supposition must be correct. He thought of that woman and his life philosophy was altered.
During a visit on June 22, 992 Abram Ilyich explained why the press, political scientists, and sociologists in America were getting it wrong. “They are not studying the right thing so they can never understand how the thing works. The most important thing to know is that the government is mafia. THEY are the mafia”. Of course promoting a “red scare” or the potential for fascism was beneficial to everyone in power or grasping for it. For the Yeltsin crowd, it provided the classic heist diversion that allowed most of the countries prized assets be stolen.
Indeed, the mafia was an idée fixe among Western Russia watchers but they never made the connection with Yeltsin as Don Corleone. A November 1993 discussion with three World Bank economists visiting Novosibirsk revealed the paradigm the West was applying to comfort themselves that the situation was developing in a coherent, positive direction. They were cautiously optimistic. Of course, everything was chaotic but this could not be avoided.
We talked about the recent voucher distribution by Yeltsin that was officially intended to make every citizen an instant capitalist with shares in Russian enterprises. One of the economists didn’t see what the big deal was if a bunch of mafia creeps buy them all up. Then came the paradigm, “The early industrialists who built America were not nice guys.” He said the World Bank planned a big ad campaign but switched agencies and Yeltsin decided to move forward on October 1st anyway, but an educational campaign was coming. These guys were loaded with information and advice. Hold onto your dollars, the State Bank is pouring dollars in to keep the exchange rate under 400r a $. They were afraid if it breaks that point the sky’s the limit. If Gaidar loses it would skyrocket. It would be a couple of years before the perception of these not nice guy “industrialists” transformed them into “oligarchs”.
Abram Ilyich also inspired me not to be concerned about a rise in fascism . “Fascism requires that you believe in something deeply and no one here believes that strongly in anything.” He was right. In addition to responsibility missing from their understanding of the democracy equation, the big transition problem was nobody felt certain about anything. It was not uncommon for me in the course of a cab ride to turn my espoused communist driver into someone open to the possibility of democracy in Russia. Voids will be filled so this was and continues to be an extraordinary opportunity for America to help Russia understand how to create a democratic society that is responsive to the needs of all citizens by fostering grassroots civic involvement. Key to this would have been to approach it as supporting democratic-capitalism rather than capitalist-democracy but that isn’t what happened.
