Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  Sasha and I looked up the Web site. The author looked a bluff sea captain, with a handlebar mustache. Whoever he was, he was certainly a canny operator: the books had sold ten million copies, been translated into twenty languages, and inspired some two hundred eco-settlements. Sasha got in touch with the friend who told him about the one nearby: perhaps he could introduce us to someone there? I’ll do better than that, the friend replied: “I’ll introduce her to Anastasia herself.”

  We were well out of Moscow when Ira veered off the country road and pulled up at a tiny, raspberry-pink chapel with a gleaming dome. The chapel had been built, or rebuilt, at the site of the holy spring attached to St. David’s Monastery. The old chapel had been destroyed by the Soviets. However, all through that period people kept coming, traveling long distances to visit the holy site.

  Today the place was teeming with people. Two wooden huts had been built over the broad stream flowing from the spring. Outside both stood long queues, one of men, one of women, among them young brides in white dresses who would once have been posing in front of a Soviet war memorial. When our turn came, Ira and I entered the darkened hut and stripped off, together with women young and old, before immersing ourselves in the icy pool of sacred water.

  On the outskirts of Serpukhov, we drew up at a low building bearing a sign that read Ecological Restoration Services. The field behind was sown, rather messily, with flowers and vegetables, studded with greenhouses and odd buildings. While Ira parked, four women appeared, one from each building, as if in a ballet by Pina Bausch. Of different ages, all beautiful, they walked toward us with their backs straight and their heads high.

  At the bottom of the field Sasha’s friend Alexander Vygovsky was wrestling to heave a tall concrete fencepost into place with the help of a tractor. In his fifties, he was deep-chested, with a grizzled beard and sardonic glint in his eye. “So you’ve met the harem?” he said with a grin. There was nothing remotely harem-like about the four women, who were scrutinizing me with an astringent air. The first to join Vygovsky was the group’s lawyer, a woman with long fair hair and sad green eyes. Her daughter was now the group’s garden designer. The other two, dark-haired, amused, were the plantswomen. They ran a consultancy which dealt with everything concerned with landownership, from the byzantine legal difficulties of acquiring it, to the design and planting of gardens.

  “It’s not quite what we came out here to do—” one of the women began before Vygovsky interrupted: “Russia’s facing a disaster. We’ve got one billion 709 million hectares of land, but right through the Soviet years we were plowing up virgin land at a rate of ten million hectares a year. There’s only 140 million of virgin forest left. Now most of that land’s been abandoned, since the collective farms collapsed. People imagine it just reverts to its natural state. But it doesn’t. It becomes a wasteland. It has to be reclaimed. That’s what we’re doing.”

  Vygovsky came out here with grand plans. He and his communards were going to buy a huge tract of land, cleanse it of chemicals, and farm it organically. Then the local authorities started putting obstacles in their way. It emerged that though the land was notionally for sale, it had been acquired by shadowy interests, along with most of the land worth working around here. They only managed to get their hands on this small field because, as it was littered with derelict outhouses, nobody wanted it. The green-eyed lawyer sighed: “How I loathe Russia. I wish I could leave and never come back.”

  “Come on, let’s go for a swim,” Vygovsky suggested after a pause. “Then I’ll introduce you to Anastasia.” As he drove the jeep along dust tracks between wide fields he pointed out tarpaulins along the side of the field, under which whole central Asian families were sheltering. After the fall of communism, when the collective farms collapsed and their workforce left for the city, Korean businessmen somehow got their hands on this land, and they now employed these migrants to work the fields for them.

  Back at the commune the gates were opened by a stolid woman with a blonde plait and a thin man with a mouth like a letter box. “Susan—let me introduce you. This is Anastasia,” Vygovsky said solemnly. “Go ahead—ask her what you like.” The woman blushed scarlet. I looked at the deadpan Vygovsky and laughed.

  It was a good joke, but it never quite got off the ground. Vygovsky was expecting me to be an American journalist, which in his book meant very naive. I would have to have been, for the young woman, a rather earnest Russian German, was comically miscast for the role of magical wood nymph. She did know a lot about the Anastasia settlement, though, as she and her husband had joined it. They were expelled for reasons which clearly had something do with Vygovsky.

  • • •

  “The whole thing’s a scam,” Vygovsky fulminated. “A ‘brand,’ a way of making money! Megre’s not the real author—he’s just a businessman. The FSB’s behind it. It couldn’t have happened without support high up—they actually tell their people to vote for Putin! They’ve made a fortune out of the books, and from selling those bits of cedar. Then there’s the cedar oil, so called—I’ve had it tested, it’s ordinary oil with a few drops of cedar added. And when they join the settlement they have to put a thousand dollars into the cause …”

  On and on he went. Originally he had been enthusiastic about the settlements, according to Sasha. So when had he changed his mind? And was what he was saying true? He was, as he was telling me in the jeep, something of a Scheherazade when it came to stories. In Soviet labor camp—to which he was consigned for starting an ecological movement—he had survived by telling stories: first he told his inmates every one he had ever read; then he started making them up …

  “They’re trying to provoke this sort of pioneer movement—to recolonize Russia! But the cretins who join up know nothing about the countryside. They sell their flats, buy these animals—they don’t even know how to look after them! Even those who do get their act together realize pretty soon that they haven’t got a chance of living off the land. Not off one hectare, which is the myth they’ve been sold! It’s just not possible! Ecological communes haven’t ever been able to get by without outside help—look at Vissarion’s lot, look at your Owenites, Susan—they’re all the same. And in the case of Anastasia’s, they’ll find that the land they’ve bought actually belongs to some absentee Chechen …”

  Vygovsky had worked himself up into a passion. It almost sounded as if the man were jealous. As his diatribe moved onward, outward, the dividing line between fact and fantasy vanished: the conspiracy was not limited to the Anastasia books; it was the whole corrupt corporate system that was bleeding Russia dry. The English started it, of course, when America was Britain’s colony. Now Blair was America’s puppy. Russia had been sold downriver—they bought Putin when he was working for the KGB in Germany. The Jews were behind it. The system was rotten from top to bottom. He had friends high up in the apparat—they knew what was going on, but the system was too strong for them.

  The four women were looking on with Buddhist detachment. It was impossible to tell what they made of this rant. “What’s going on is the destruction of the ethnos, the Russian people. Where are the Real Russians, the ones with conscience? They’ve been systematically destroyed—look at what they did to the Serbs! The Belorussians are the only ones who are still holding out—Lukashenko’s a hero! But if Jews like you had their way …” For lack of any available Jews, this jibe was addressed to the very Nordic Sasha.

  Finally, to puncture this engulfing conspiratorial ectoplasm, Sasha interrupted: “Tell them what Max is doing,” he said to me. My son was building community radio stations in Africa, Latin America, and Palestine, I told them. Vygorsky dismissed my son as an agent of the system, of course. That did it: he was quite entitled to his stale, paranoid opinions, I retorted. He could rant to his heart’s content, but not pronounce on the activities of a young man he knew nothing about, one who did more than produce hot air like Vygovsky …

  “Oh dear, now I’ve offended the English woman.” Vygovs
ky was contrite. “I was only joking.”

  • • •

  Back in Moscow, reading Vygovsky’s essays, I felt more sympathetic to him. They were all about the importance of restoring the “dead” tracts of Russia’s countryside. Vygovsky was knowledgeable, a serious ecologist, but the essays made ponderous reading, bristling with footnotes and statistics. However, this scholarship did not quite conceal the fact that the underlying ideas were strikingly similar to many of those in the best-selling Anastasia books.

  These were familiar from my visit to the guru of Cosmism, Professor Kaznacheev, he of the magical cylinder. The professor maintained that, for better or worse, living matter, the biosphere, was going through a crucial transition, becoming dominated by the noosphere, the layer of human thinking and belief that girdled the earth.

  No wonder Vygovsky was angry. As an ecologist, he believed that his contribution in this age of the noosphere was a vitally important one. But he was up against the blockbuster version of Cosmism, aimed at a mass audience. The Anastasia books told the story of a gigantic intergalactic battle between the forces of good and evil, one which was reaching its decisive climax. Anastasia initiates her businessman-lover into the wildest reading of man’s lost magical powers, from long-distance viewing to direct communication with the divine; from astral travel to man’s colonization of outer space … How could Vygovsky compete with that?

  THE TWO-PLANK BRIDGE

  Anna and I sat in the sparkling new premises of a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor in central Saratov, sipping cocktails from long-stemmed glasses. Outside, the gold stars on the chapel’s turquoise onion dome gleamed in the morning sun and the sound of ascending arpeggios reached us from the turreted conservatoire beyond.

  Last time we met I feared Anna was losing the battle against despair. But today she looked festive in a flowered summer frock, and her eyes sparkled with amused intelligence. I had often worried about her being lonely, but now I was celebrating her independence. For well over a decade the population had been shrinking at the rate of more than six hundred thousand a year, and Russia’s men were the core of the problem. They were dying of alcohol and drugs, committing suicide, crashing their cars, falling victim to the careless violence of a society which put as little value on the individual as ever. While Anna had to chronicle the effects of this in her journalism, at the end of the day she was free to go back home and write. Yes, she was writing poetry again.

  Anna’s career had also taken an unexpected leap forward: she was working for the Saratov edition of a racy, muckraking, and extremely successful national paper, The People’s Pravda. The pressure on her to sharpen up her journalistic style had done her good. She now earned three times as much as a senior surgeon, a museum curator, or a teacher.

  “Well, what do you make of Saratov?” she asked. I gulped my martini, playing for time. Saratov had defied my attempts to grow fond of it. Yes, the chapel outside had been restored; some bank had done up a Jungendstil building; a few new housing blocks had gone up, and a glass-fronted shopping mall. But the faces in the street looked miserable, and everything that was derelict two years ago was far more so now. The streets were pockmarked with holes, stinking hills of rubbish baked in the sun—the garbagemen, unpaid for a month, having gone on strike.

  “I’m sorry, Anna, but it’s worse than ever …”

  She sighed: “Yes—there really is something rotten about it! I can’t stand it. The business of living here, just living, is too hard. Everyone’s exhausted. I’d love to leave, to move up north, somewhere like Vologda.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “My parents. They’re old. Three hours on the bus from here.” She fell silent, before adding: “Putting up with things, learning not to notice, not to mind. That’s the life skill you need to develop here.”

  Over the next few days, leafing through back copies of the paper, I started to see what she meant. When Putin came to power, the budget per person in Saratov province was more or less on a par with the country as a whole. Five years later it was little more than half the national average, despite the fact that the country’s economy had been growing year on year. In neighboring provinces, investment had increased between two and forty times, but here in the province between four and five times less was being invested than a year ago. Official corruption had become so bad that the big taxpayers had decamped over regional borders. The province was a black hole for public money. The region’s ombudsman had received more complaints about this province than any other in Russia.

  What about Putin’s reforms, I asked Anna. “Reforms?” she snorted. “Nothing’s changed here—they’ve just got worse. Well, I can’t say nothing’s changed—they did force Ayatskov out in the end.” The fabulously corrupt official Anna vowed to unmask in her passionara days had gone on to become the province’s governor. As long as he remained in the job, he enjoyed immunity from the law. Even now, he seemed to have cut a deal which protected him and his closest allies from prosecution.

  A recent spate of arrests among top officials offered a spark of hope, however. Anna’s chronicles of official greed, in her capacity as the paper’s legal correspondent, were leavened by flashes of Gogolian farce. There was the city’s ex-mayor who buried diamonds and silver spoons in his garden; the ex-minister of roads, imprisoned on seventeen charges of stealing staggering sums from his budget. First he beat up a cellmate for smoking. Next, he complained that prison guards had shaved his head against his will and beaten him up. Then, after writing a formal complaint he proceeded to eat—yes, eat—his testimony. Now he was claiming that the incredible sums he stole were not for him, but for key members of Putin’s government, one of whom masterminded Putin’s presidential election …

  The present governor was an honest technocrat. But how could he turn this soup of corruption into a viable administration? Months after the arrests of those top officials, many of their jobs were still unfilled. As the province drifted, rudderless, some businessmen were feeling nostalgic for Ayatskov, who at least “made things happen.”

  Meanwhile corruption kept eating its way through businesses and bureaucracies, police stations, tax offices, colleges, and hospitals. I had come up against a tragic consequence of this among my own friends. When I arrived, I tried to track down the two sons of Vera Romanenko, my friend who had joined Vissarion’s community. After we had drawn a blank, Anna suddenly said: “Hey, Romanenko—that’s not a common name. Was one of them called Dmitry?”

  That was how I learned about the murder of Vera’s older son: a gifted goldsmith and painter, he was attacked one night by a gang of drunken law students, celebrating their final exams. “Law students?” Well, not real ones, she explained. They were thugs whose families bribed their way through college. It was common practice: while the straight students sat writing their exams under strict invigilation, next door a lecturer would be dictating answers to the corrupt group …

  “The corruption’s immeasurably worse than it was under communism. Then, people at least knew they were doing something wrong. Now they seem oblivious. I’ll give you an example: there’s a young detective who was sent to prison for taking an enormous bribe. I wrote the case up. When he came out he got a job as a journalist. Well, I was looking for a job, and this paper called Reporter offered me a place. “There’s someone on your staff who wouldn’t want me around,” I warned the editor. “Nonsense! He’d be delighted!” he replied. And it was true! He didn’t seem to have the faintest idea that he’d done anything wrong! That’s the trouble—we’ve lost our moral bearings.

  “How can you change things? I don’t know. I was born in our local hospital, deep in the country. My father carried me home proudly in his arms. He had to cross this river over a bridge which was only two planks wide. The river was in full spate. On the other side the two grandmothers stood watching, praying he wouldn’t fall in. Since then Khrushchev has come and gone. So have Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. Now we’ve got Putin. But when I
was back for my birthday this spring there it was—the same two-plank bridge. What kind of leader’s it going to take to broaden that bridge by just one plank, I found myself wondering!”

  ST. SERAFIM AND THE BOMB

  Anna now lived high up in a tower block on the summit of the “yellow hills” of Saratov’s Tatar name. It perched like a gull’s nest in a cliff. Factories and housing blocks stretched over the hillside opposite. But way below tall poplars swayed in the breeze. Swifts screeched softly as they swooped past the window.

  It was Sunday morning, and Anna had gone to church. “So you’ve made your peace with Orthodoxy, then?” I asked as she changed into a modest skirt. Last time we met she was agonizing between the Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. “Well, there are things I still hate about it,” she replied in her categorical way. “I wouldn’t suggest someone in real trouble turned to our Church—it’s incapable of helping anyone. They’d stand there, unable to understand a word, while the priest chanted in that weird monotone. The services are interminable. And I can’t bear all that standing either. That stuff about having to wear something on my head, about not wearing trousers … Huh!

  “But Catholicism—well … in the end I liked everything about it except what’s at the heart of it. I was so fond of the nuns and Father Michael—the way they were with one another, the way they lived their lives. It was just the concept of Christ I couldn’t take—this business about him being half man, half God …” She pulled a face. “I can’t explain it, though goodness knows I’ve read enough about it.”