RUSSIA'96: A NORMAL LIFE

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Once again in Moscow after three years. First impression: the city looks better. I tell this to my Moscow friends. They are pleased. The Russians set great store by how foreigners view them. In their opinions they seek the answer to one of the most fundamental Russian questions, which recently was freshly formulated by the excellent Russian essayist Natalya Ivanovna: "Will Russia join 'the civilized world,' or will it continue along its separate path, which even today is deemed perilous by other nations?"

In the course of the past decade, the city has lived through three different epochs. First, that of perestroika and glasnost. At that time, in the second half of the 1980s, Moscow was transformed into a huge debating club, into a unique, peculiar Hyde Park. For the first time, there was freedom of speech. One could finally talk, express opinions. And one could write the truth. Dozens of newspapers and periodicals appeared; the print runs of even exclusively literary monthlies were in the millions. People bought these things, read them, collected them. Today in the cramped, cluttered apartments of intellectuals, against walls, on windowsills, on top of closets, lean stacks of dusty clippings and books from that era, like so much abandoned and sad-looking military debris in a field where a battle was once fought.

Then came the second period--the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism's first steps. People in the West are surprised that so many Russians don't like capitalism. But there is nothing extraordinary about this. The capitalism that came to Russia at the start of the 1990s looked different from the one constructed in Europe several centuries ago. The capitalism of Holland or Switzerland was laboriously created by the industrious and thrifty bourgeois of Rotterdam or Geneva, for whom perseverance, honesty and modesty were religious commandments, acts of faith.

But the advance guard of the capitalism that arrived in Moscow was armies of speculators, barons of the black market, gangs of drug dealers, armed, aggressive racketeers, brutal, ruthless, powerful mafias. People were terrified. It is not capitalism per se but the form in which it first appeared that supplied Communists with fresh followers. I remember walking around Moscow with my friend Syoma. The city was cold and dirty. One could easily break one's leg because the sidewalks, uncleared for months, were covered with mountains of ice. The squares and the streets near train and subway stations overflowed with vendors peddling rubbish, anything to make a living. In the clumsy stalls were bottles of whiskey, packs of chewing gum, piles of sunglasses. That is what the new regime offered the citizens of this great but impoverished city. Syoma, depressed and resigned, told me how twice he had tried to open a small shop and twice had to give up in the face of the mafia's demands, which he was unable to satisfy. He barely got away with his life! This dark and dangerous epoch came to an end in the fall of 1993 with the dramatic and bloody confrontation at the pinnacle of power between the President and the Parliament.