Kitabı oku: «Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall», sayfa 2

TWO

IT WAS EARLY ON A CRISP Saturday morning in the short Russian fall, and something was not right. The mayor had sensed it. He was sure of it, in fact. Tiles crack. They break. They splinter. Linoleum, he calculated, would last. The mayor sat in the center of the head table in a prefabricated construction office built of American aluminum siding and Finnish plywood in the heart of Moscow. He stirred slowly in his chair, staring straight ahead, as if seeing something far beyond the realm of all the eyes gathered here and fixed upon his tonsured square head.

All along the tables that spread out to the mayor’s left and right big men sat stiffly. Early that morning they had stuffed themselves into dark suits. Now they wore faces of worry. The mayor folded his large, knuckly hands before him like a tent. The assembled understood: He was ready. Water was poured and cigarettes were stubbed out as the chatter subsided. The subject at hand – and the venue of this debate – was an important site, a new rehabilitation center for the city’s veterans wounded on the battlefields of Chechnya. Russia’s second campaign to defeat the Chechen fighters had entered its second year. The mayor was eager to show his compassion for the boys maimed in their service to the Motherland. The rehab center, an aide tugged me aside to whisper, was “especially close to the mayor’s heart.”

Yuri Luzhkov stood no more than five feet five inches, but he made his presence known. His outsize head was made even larger by the absence of hair and his large, piercing blue eyes. The mayor may have the build, and sartorial sense, of a head-banging enforcer in a James Cagney film, but he spoke softly and slowly. It was as if he had learned to rely on a lilting, unexpected cadence to disarm his interlocutors and draw them in. On this morning he sported a dark blue windbreaker and, even indoors, his trademark workman’s leather cap. He was more than ready, once his minions came to order, to hold court.

It did not take much. The mayor called upon the engineers, and one by one they stood, with a slight bow, as Russian schoolchildren have recited their lessons for centuries, to report the status of their work. “The plan will be completed ahead of schedule,” one boasted. “At least ten days ahead of schedule,” he quickly added.

“We have all the permits in order,” assured another.

“The windows have all arrived and been fitted,” said a third.

Then came the debate. A structural engineer, a man too far into his fifties to be so nervous in this setting, confessed, “We aren’t sure, just yet, quite how to proceed with the tiles or the linoleum for the flooring surface.” A whisper rippled through the construction trailer. “We checked with the engineers from the building institutes, and they have tested the tiles,” he hastened to add. “The tiles will last in terms of the pressure per square meter, and the longevity equivalency tests seem to have confirmed their preliminary findings. But the linoleum still has not been ruled out. We were” – and here, a long pause–“waiting to consult with you.”

The mayor sat still, taking in the parade of reports. In a corner of the room, I noticed a luminary of his inner circle, Shamil Tarpishchev, once Boris Yeltsin’s tennis coach, who fell from favor in a scandal involving the National Sports Foundation. Luzhkov, then Yeltsin’s bitter rival, had sheltered Tarpishchev, taking him under his wing as his adviser on sport. All the same, allegations of underworld associations continued to dog Tarpishchev but the truth of the matter remained unknown.¹

Once the last of the speakers resumed his seat, the mayor gathered in his large hands and, massaging his knuckles, launched a barrage of questions. How much would the tiles cost to cover the requisite area? How much would the linoleum cost? Would there be wheelchairs? How many? Had both surfaces been tested for these wheelchairs? He demanded statistics. Numbers were proffered. He asked for samples. Samples were produced. He wondered, Was the factory Russian? Or foreign? On it went. To his every question the mayor received a prompt answer.

And so it came to pass that Yuri Luzhkov, who on this chilly day could rightly claim a place among the most powerful men in all Russia, spent nearly an hour probing the virtues of linoleum versus tile. To the untrained eye, it was an inordinately detailed discussion of construction material. But to anyone who lived in the Russian capital in the final years of the twentieth century, it was a pageant of power intended to impress. For in a moment, once the mayor announced his decision – linoleum won out – the voice vote was unanimous. “Da, da, da,” rang out the chorus.

LUZHKOV HAS BEEN CALLED many things. A populist and an opportunist, Russia’s fattest oligarch, and a true khozyain, an autocratic boss in the patrimonial mold of the tsarist days of old.² Many of the sobriquets rang true. But one thing about Luzhkov always stood out: the need to make his mark. In the great Soviet tradition, Luzhkov was a builder. He had worked for decades in the Soviet chemical industry before taking over the Moscow city government in the early 1990s. Reelected in 1996 with more than 90 percent of the vote, Luzhkov would serve on into the new century. Muscovites adored him. As the decade after the Soviet fall closed, Yeltsin’s political and physical prowess faded ignobly away, Putin rose, and Luzhkov was stymied in his desire to rule Russia. But the mayor had succeeded in remaking his city, “the city of Moscow, the capital of our Motherland,” as he liked to call it, in his image.

“MOSCOW IS NOT RUSSIA.” It is the refrain of Westerners and Russians alike who have ventured into the Russian outback and returned to tell of its miseries. But what, then, is Moscow? In the years after the Soviet collapse, when so many of its denizens mistook license for liberty, the city grew infamous for the Babylon of its nightclubs and the upheaval of its unbridled free market. Yet it remains Russia’s heart, the grandest reflection, however warped, of its troubles and riches. With its wretched masses and gluttonous elite, Moscow is home to more than ten million, a population greater than that of many countries in Europe. Yet in its first post-Soviet decade no one so dominated the city as its boisterous mayor.

Lenin may have promised the Russian people a New Jerusalem, but Luzhkov set out to build it. In the mayor’s mind, the messianic destiny loomed large. For centuries Russians have harbored a vision of themselves as a chosen people and of Moscow as the Third Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, with its cult of martyrdom, is only partly to blame. There is also the bloodline: In 1472, when Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, wed the sole heiress to the throne of Byzantium, the niece of Constantine XI, Moscow claimed its right as the heir of Constantinople.

Zoë Paleologue took the name Sophia, and the Muscovites adopted the rituals and trappings of Byzantine power. Ivan III became the first Russian leader to call himself “tsar” – the Russified Caesar – and borrow the double-headed eagle as well.³ In Constantinople, the emblem made only rare appearances. In the land of the northern Slavs, however, the two-headed eagle was featured prominently. The Muscovites were eager to parade their imperial inheritance.⁴ It was only natural that Luzhkov set himself the task of restoring the symbols of the foundation myth. Yeltsin kept the red stars atop the Kremlin towers, but the mayor returned the gilded eagles to their perch. He also ordered that the Resurrection Gate, a fairy-tale entrance to Red Square of red and white brick, rise again. Stalin, eager to make room for the parade of missiles and tanks on Revolution Day, had leveled the seventeenth-century gateway. Once Yeltsin canceled the pageant, Luzhkov took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch. Like so many other pre-Bolshevik edifices, the gate was duplicated, exactly. Luzhkov now had a style, joked the head of the city’s Museum of Architecture: “Reconstructivism.”

The mayor liked the myth of the Third Rome. The Orthodox elder Filofei, a monk in Pskov in the late Middle Ages, was among the first to raise the notion. At some time in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century Filofei sent the grand prince in Moscow a stern warning: “Perceive, pious Tsar, how all the Christian realms have converged into yours alone. Two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be.”⁵ “… and a fourth there shall not be.” Moscow would be the third and last Rome, completing a holy trinity. Even Byzantium had not made such a claim. How could the mayor not rejoice in the imperial inheritance? The myth entitled Moscow to the glory not only of Constantine’s capital – with its shimmering churches of gold told of in medieval Russian chronicles – but also of Rome, and even Jerusalem as well. “We are the New Jerusalem,” Luzhkov would purr on occasion. And he was not kidding.

IN LUZHKOV’S MOSCOW the appreciation of masonry work became something of a civic duty. As buildings went up around the city, construction sites became tourist attractions. When elegant shopping malls and business centers sprouted between the Stalinist facades, they came complete with viewing platforms for the citizenry to witness the new world rising.

One frigid night as the new millennium neared, I stood alone taking in one of the mayor’s most beloved sites. On the naked northern bank of the Moscow River, in the bend where the water slowly begins to chum westward out of the city, Luzhkov had forced on his fellow citizens a twelve-billion-dollar construction project, the biggest in the former Soviet Union. He envisioned the Moscow Siti, so named after London’s financial district, blooming into a bustling center of finance and trade, the heart of the new metropolis as it carried the country into the new age. A glossy brochure described the future “city within a city” in less than fluent English:

Having studied the experience of the world-famous centers: Wall Street and Manhattan in New York, the City in Greater London, Shinjuku in Tokyo, and La Défence in Paris, we have done our best to avoid certain mistakes … Our “Moscow-City” will live a full-blooded life … there will be dwelling blocks of corporate and profit houses, hotels, cinema and concert halls, exhibition grounds, clubs, restaurants and a unique aquapark with a series of basins, water chutes, amusement facilities, restaurants and cafés … the central core will feature multilevel car parkings and a mini-metro line.

The project was a Luzhkov dream drafted on blueprints back in the rosy days when the image of Boris Yeltsin standing defiant on a tank still dominated Russia’s political memory and the country’s fledgling stock market impossibly topped the world’s emerging markets.

I liked inspecting Luzhkov’s Siti. I watched the masses of men, in the tradition of Peter the Great’s minions, digging the enormous foundation pit, their thirty-foot-tall dump trucks crawling through the mud roads. Reduced by the size of the pit, they resembled armies of ants. By the time I began strolling by, the project had become the biggest of Luzhkov’s white elephants. From the nearby glassed-in Wiener Hof, a cozy Austrian affair that boasts a dozen drafts and demure waitresses in petit lederhosen, the view of the site was spectacularly eerie. Or so I thought as I stood one night alone on the Hof’s ice-glazed balcony, surveying the black expanse. It was well past midnight in Moscow, on a Sunday in midwinter, but in the construction site that sprawled before me in all dimensions, the welding brigades were clamoring away, their torches giving form to walls and girders of iron in the darkness below. Inside the Hof a cackling trio of Argentines were splashing through their expense account’s final hours. Their female escorts, young locals with limited Spanish, were checking their watches. Below I could make out at least five Kamaz trucks, their broad backs loaded with brick, metal, and mud, groaning across the craters. Against the starless sky, a crooked line of cranes revealed the contours of one man’s dream. I could see how, in the frozen mud of this mess, it would be easy to lose one’s perspective.

Then, in the middle of August 1998, the Russian economy crashed. August, in Russian politics, has long been a fateful month, and the move to devalue the ruble had long been foreseen. But no one expected the market to fall so hard, so fast. Overnight the government defaulted on forty billion dollars in bonds. Within weeks the ruble lost more than two-thirds of its value. Expatriate bankers and brokers vaulted for the exits. But “the Crisis,” as the politicians and the bankers called the crash, was kind to Mia and me. In the spring we were able to move from our one-room apartment into a beautiful flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Moscow’s criminally high rents tumbled as thousands of business ex-pats rushed to flee the sinking ship. We bought a bed from an oil and gas analyst and a sofa from a Big Eight accountant. We moved from a gray concrete edifice built for the elite of the Communist Party to another formidable postwar apartment block, this one built to house the dutiful officers of the NKVD – Stalin’s secret police – and their families.

Russia’s race to the free market slowed to a crawl. Luzhkov, however, saw no need to revise his grand plans. As I walked along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to work each day, I checked in on the progress of his Siti. Across the street from our new place, and down a block, a high-rise thirty-four stories tall began to take shape. Luzhkov had promised it would be a vital tower in the new financial hub, a luxury hotel for foreign bankers and brokers. After the crash, construction on the tower slowed. Luzhkov’s aides quietly allowed that it would not, as planned, be a hotel, but an office building. They also got rid of the name. Once it had been dubbed The Reformer. Now they opted for something more neutral. Tower 2000, they rechristened it.

Luzhkov forged on in his drive to build the Siti. At the foot of the tower’s concrete skeleton, and spanning the frozen river, was a “pedestrian shopping bridge.” Inside, a mechanized walkway allowed Russians to glide along the glass corridor, as if between terminals at some anonymous airport. The walkway passed glitzy shops offering Murano vases, Finnish cell phones, and Milanese dresses for preteens. This was Luzhkov’s bridge to the twenty-first century, intended as a conveyance to the free market. One day, the mayor imagined, the bridge would carry visiting capitalists across the river to Russia’s Wall Street. German bankers, Japanese brokers, South African traders would float effortlessly to the gleaming financial colossus on the far bank of the river – globalization’s Slavic headquarters. Throughout the years of construction the vast pit of mud received six football fields of concrete and the multilevel shopping bridge filled with popular boutiques and restaurants. But to many the Siti remained a pipe dream.

On the shopping bridge’s lower floor – the sort of space where in an American mall Santa would sit in December or the balloon man in spring – a miniature Moscow sat on display. Centered beneath a domed ceiling of stained glass, the architectural model, some twelve feet wide, spun dizzyingly fast under a glass globe. In the sanitized mock-up of one of the most unforgiving cities in the world, Moscow’s endless rows of Stalinist facades stood up orderly, tidily divided by non-existent trimmed evergreens. The rotting factories were stripped of their belching smokestacks. The city’s byways, swept clean and paved smooth, were sprinkled with a few handsome trucks and new automobiles. The river, repeatedly diagnosed a cholera incubator, was a sparkling aquamarine. Upon it floated a barge and what appeared to be a cruise ship.

There were no people in the model city. Instead, the spotlights were fixed tight on a set of gleaming translucent skyscrapers that burst from the city’s heart. Lit from above and beneath, they towered above the gray mass. The centerpiece, a tower far taller than all the others – part Empire State, part TransAmerica, but quintessentially Luzhkovian – lured the eye. On a mural on the wall nearby the radiant towers were transposed over an image of the Kremlin lit up at night. The towers dwarfed the Kremlin.

The lineage of the mayor’s blueprint was Stalin’s Dvorets Sovietov, the Palace of Soviets. This earlier design was immensely complex, but Stalin’s aim had been simple: He wanted the world’s tallest building. The blueprint called for the palace to be higher than the Empire State Building, capped by a statue of Lenin bigger than the Statue of Liberty. In 1931 Stalin detonated the world’s largest Russian Orthodox Church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Dvorets Sovietov, however, was never built. Eventually a bog formed in the crater until Khrushchev filled it with a giant outdoor swimming hole for the proletariat. In 1991, Luzhkov, once an avowed atheist who found religion after his first election, set about to resurrect the cathedral. As a result of $330 million contributed by a legion of ignoble courtiers, Christ the Savior soon rose again.⁶ And so, with God well housed, the mayor had turned to building a home for the free market.

One morning I saw a young couple, noses pressed to the glass, standing transfixed by the cardboard city. Like so many of the pilgrims who came to see this model of Moscow, they were eager and hopeful witnesses to the birth of the new Siti. They tried to locate their apartment in the model city, but it spun too fast. They spent another moment, then moved on.

“Think it’ll ever be built?” the elfin girl, her long hair braided low below her waist, asked her companion.

“No,” he replied. “Of course not.”