A less extreme example of the drive to redress injustice was the Soviet Women’s Committee. In 1987, it was able to claim openly for the first time since 1930 that Soviet authorities discriminated against or ignored women. In industry, women were left to shift loads in excess of what was medically safe, and they were often forced to work in toxic conditions. By 1990, Leningrad’s ‘Reading for Women’ movement had started, and certain progressives began to question stereotypes.61 Yet life was not getting easier, but tougher. By the end of the 1980s, Soviet state retailers had run out of basics such as tea, coffee and soap. Aspirin and toilet paper were hard to come by and,62 at the beginning of 1990, the Leningrad city authorities issued ration cards for the first time since 1947. Among the first items to be rationed was meat. By the summer, alcohol and sugar were added, and then butter, eggs and flour in December. Violent crime was on the increase. Alcoholics and runaways lived in squats in damp basements. Glue-sniffing was the favoured cheap and easy high used by the young.63 Everywhere there were signs of breakdown. There were two philosophy graduates from Leningrad State University. She worked as janitor, he was a boiler stoker, and in their leisure time they enjoyed reading books. He reflected that with ‘perestroika everything came crashing down’. His ninety roubles a month became ten dollars, and the couple were forced to become street vendors, selling melting ice cream that they obtained from a factory because they had no fridge on their market stall. ‘The discovery of money,’ he commented, ‘hit us like an atom bomb.’64 In a documentary from that time, Third Class Carriage, someone is heard on the overnight train from Leningrad to Moscow saying, it’s hard to believe this country could put rockets into space.’65
The elderly chat during the time of upheavals. The sign painted on the wall reads ‘No Parking!’
The millennium of Russia was celebrated in 1988, and Gorbachev used the occasion to assert that Orthodox believers had a right to worship. The Orthodox religion had not been outlawed under communism, but it was barely tolerated, and many churches had been destroyed or converted into sports clubs or swimming pools. After 1988, monasteries were opened and services were even televised. The exultation of the huge congregation at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery was palpable. When the Metropolitan emerged from behind the iconostasis and came down into the congregation, there was a surge of worshippers, radiant with the spirit of miracle and wonder: God was among them.
The May Day parade of 1988 was notable for the snow falling in Palace Square as people – feeling the first flush of freedom – carried placards with slogans such as ‘Remember the victims of Stalin in Leningrad.’ Gorbachev was airing ideas that paved the way for a democratic future, and in the elections of the following year the Communist Party lost control. Still, people wondered what had happened to perestroika. They thought it a flash-in-the-pan, like Lenin’s NEP. Gorbachev had undermined the basic elements of communism – the one-party state, atheism, state economic monopoly and a centralised administration. The Soviet Union was fracturing, as regions such as the Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Byelarus declared their sovereignty. When Gorbachev refused to use force against the rebellious Soviet Bloc, the Soviet empire fell apart.66 By the spring of 1991, Leningraders – a doomed species – were facing two elections: one for the newly created post of president of their country, the other for a mayor. Scheduled for the same day, 12 June, there was also a referendum to determine whether or not their city should remain ‘Leningrad’ or become, once again, ‘St Petersburg’.
16
BROKEN WINDOW ONTO THE WEST
1991–2016
The referendum asked, ‘Do you want our city to return to its original name of St Petersburg?’ Would that hint at past glory? Or was the name Leningrad sufficient testimony to a great vision? The dismal march of a troubled twentieth century argued against that. It was the moment, perhaps, for its inhabitants to mark their dissatisfaction with the nightmaring of the socialist dream. But what about the spirit of Leningraders who had kept their city on the face of the earth? Behind closed doors, warmly gathered about tables scattered with scraped-together zakuski, the debates continued late into the night:
– The place is filthy. How can we call it Petersburg?
– If you knew how many fine dresses had—
– We need communism.
– We need food.
– We don’t need Yeltsin.
– Who needs another souse?
– It should stay Leningrad. The world knows Leningrad.
– When did anything ever change around here?
On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected president. Anatoly Sobchak was elected Mayor of Leningrad . . . or St Petersburg? By a vote of 54.9 per cent to 35.5 per cent, Sobchak found himself mayor of the newly renamed St Petersburg. It was a signal moment, like the blank fired from the Aurora in October 1917. And – as with 1917 – things went from bad to worse.1
Many felt it was too soon to go back. Others suggested returning to St Petersburg via Petrograd. Mayor Sobchak cited the Patriarch of Russia, who suggested that Leningrad had been an ‘ideological construct imposed upon the name of St Peter in whose honour the city was named’. Upbeat, the mayor insisted on his city’s renewed importance. After the loss of the Baltic countries, St Petersburg was Russia’s ‘door to Europe’.
On 7 November 1991, the official day chosen for the renaming, flames burned from the Rostral Columns on Vasilevsky Island and Mayor Sobchak spoke in Palace Square, requesting a minute’s silence for all the Leningraders who fell in the siege. Grand Duke Vladimir, heir to the Romanov throne, flew from Europe for the ceremony. Thereafter, the old communist holiday of 1 May was replaced by ‘City Day’, commemorating the founding of St Petersburg in May 1703.2
Yet again, a new vision gave way to immediate disappointment. The planned economy was in ruins, industrial output fell,3 the government printed money and a mighty empire was breaking up. Meanwhile, people had voted ‘St Petersburg’ and now had to set about remaking a city that lived up to that talismanic name. Peter the Great had designed his city to showcase the most worthy and progressive aspects of European Enlightenment. Newly renamed St Petersburg imported cut-throat capitalism and extortion. It was like 1918 all over again, with desperate people out on the streets selling what little they had. A plague of desperation plastered the walls around the Haymarket with small ads. There were five million scared, pale faces in the metro; and hustlers and druggies living out on the street or working the hotels. The Hotel Moskva, opposite the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, was a cat-house and casino. Gamblers lay sprawled on sofas in the lobby, while prostitutes prowled the long, bare corridors, trawling for valuable foreign trade. Prostitution was one sector of the economy that was flourishing. With employment precarious and wages tumbling, it was regarded in some quarters as a ‘prestigious occupation’, providing access to foreign currency and exceptional opportunities for clothes and travel. A 1989 Soviet film, Intergirl, treated the subject of a Leningrad nurse unable to survive on her wages, who turns to prostitution and secures the opportunity of escaping to Sweden by marrying a client. Apart from revealing the blunt facts of late-Soviet life, Pyotr Todorovsky’s film – which topped the Russian ratings in the year of its release – also provided a close-up of the drabness of Leningrad.4
Lucky Strike vs. the hammer and sickle – St Petersburg of the early 1990s.
The mafia were in control of the markets. On the opposite side of the Neva from the Smolny there was heavy drug-dealing. Pulkovo Airport was gang-controlled, and suitcases were frequently opened or stolen. Apartment blocks near the centre had dope-scented staircases, where unemployed teenagers sprawled smoking. Living conditions were still basic, with dangling bare bulbs or, at best, Fifties-style lampshades. The bathroom shower and the sink – where you had to hit the pipes to encourage the arrival of the ferric water – were often in a curtained-off area of the kitchen. There seemed to be no way forward, and understandably – as they had lived as communists all their lives – many comrades felt
an agonising sense of defeat. As George Smiley says of the Russians in John Le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim, ‘The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of his present and scared stiff of his future.’5 As Galina, a character in Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage, puts it, ‘You can see how Russia is now. Now the bad times are over, the worse times come.’6
The year 1992 began with a catastrophe – deregulation of the markets, which turned many people into paupers overnight. For most, deprivation and shortage were much worse than they had been under communism. Half a century had passed since the cruel first winter of the Nazi siege and life was, yet again, grim. By March, the rouble stood at 125 to the US dollar. A teacher earned 500 roubles a month – £2.30 – the cost of the ingredients for a celebration meal of meat, smetana, potatoes, oranges and flowers.7 A pensioner on 342 roubles just wouldn’t celebrate. Fake was available: ‘foreign’ perfume, ‘Danish’ beer made in Greece and well past its sell-by date. By September, the Russian deficit stood at 716 billion roubles and inflation was high. By the end of the following month the rouble stood at 627 to the pound: enough to buy a loaf of bread, a couple of pounds of potatoes, a kilo of butter and a litre of milk for eight days, and that was that. Figures also showed that unprecedented unemployment was beginning to grip Russia, with more than 900,000 people registered as out of work on 1 October and another two million on part-time work or temporary leave.
Prices were swinging wild. The cost of a toilet roll – wise to keep one with you at all times – was fifteen roubles. That was the price of a comfortable seat for an orchestral concert beneath the eight magnificent chandeliers of the sensibly sized Philharmonic Hall. Both were a steal beside the price of one orange: 350 roubles, an enormous sum, given pensions and salaries. I was told, but still find it hard to believe, that three scoops of Häagen-Dazs ice cream cost as much as an Aeroflot flight from Petersburg to Vladivostok. In Passazh a pair of badly made, plain cotton panties cost 185 roubles – nearly one-third of the monthly earnings of a scientist. Tampons were plentiful there, but the price was prohibitive. The cost of electrical goods like Western stereos and VCRs was exorbitant. Only those with access to foreign currency – people working in the tourist industry, wheeler-dealer import-export syndicates – were able to afford such things or offer serious help to their kin.
Moving offices to the Smolny, Anatoly Sobchak was mayor from 1991 to 1996 and presided over the city in an authoritarian manner. He appointed ex-KGB officers to important posts such as the directorship of the Vaganova Ballet School, simply because, he claimed, ‘they were experienced in administration’. The day-to-day running of the city at a time of mounting violence and corruption was in the hands of two deputies: Sobchak’s successor, Vladimir Yakovlev, and ex-KGB officer and future President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
In the early 1990s, a friend wrote to me describing ‘a pervasive cynicism. We have been exploited and lied to. We don’t need any politicians.’ The young needed ‘dollars and . . . a Western standard of living’ and began to look for little subterfuges in order to make a buck. Some would rise early to secure a place near the front of a shopping queue. Hours later they would sell their place and take the money to buy some vodka and obliterate the day.8 Vodka offered rescue through death, before a worse fate intervened. Post-millennium statistics reveal that the average Russian male consumption was a bottle a day. Others had grander and bloodier schemes to get rich. Fraud was part of the warp and weft of Russian life. Stealing from the state existed before Prince Menshikov made it such an art. Under communism, dishonesty and fraud had intensified, and bribe-taking, asset-stripping and embezzlement were to become the staples of Russia’s post-Soviet establishment. In the raw, post-communist world the easiest way to thrive was to lie to the taxman, buy mafia ‘protection’, bribe the local bureaucrats and pay workers late – if at all. Since May 1988 authorised ‘cooperatives’ had bought just about anything and everything from the state at knock-down prices, then sold them on at the market rate. They split the difference with the official who had facilitated the scam. When a twenty-eight-year-old banker was asked how to make money in Russia, he replied, ‘You kill somebody, you steal, you bribe.’9
Privatisation of industry was under way by 1992 and millions of workers found that conditions changed for the worse. Between 1992 and 1994, a staggering 70 per cent of state assets, including natural resources, were sold.10 Many of the party elite, along with regional administrators and directors, kept hold of power by the appropriation of goods and resources. Some had even begun to transfer Soviet property to themselves before privatisation became widespread. New companies were helped by sympathetic local authorities, as interests converged. In 1992, the first deputy of the Executive Committee of St Petersburg was head of the governing body of the tourism company, Nord. He was therefore in a position to provide his firm with two buildings on the Nevsky Prospekt, charging just 174,000 roubles each, at a time when a single apartment in the same area would sell for more than a million.11 There were anomalies in city finances, as fraudulent accounting lined the pockets of officials. In fact the system continued to work through blat, as officials in high places aided – for a cut – the setting-up of enterprises. By the early 2000S the baksheesh required to mobilise a sizeable building project stood at about $1 million. The state, at first weak, just became compliant.12
As wealth shifted into private hands, fortune was flaunted on the streets of Moscow where its Disneyfying mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, was adding glitz and sparkle. Mellow St Petersburg tended to hide its wealth behind the genteel shabbiness of interminable decay or in the woods of its islands, where the new elite built extravagant, eclectic post-modern dachas with a little dash of neo-Gothic here and a little bit of stil moderne there. Strikingly, just fifty kilometres beyond such luxury dwellings, with their state-of-the-art Western mod cons – say, in a little village on the road to Novgorod – peasant women could still be seen carrying a milkmaid’s yoke to transport buckets of water. Between the nouveau riche, the urban poor and the villagers beyond, Russia was living in dramatically different ages.
Cold-blooded initiative and chutzpah, backed by persuasive firepower, developed business during the 1990s. Rival gangs vied for control and blocked the evolution of a fair yet competitive free market. Oligarchs sprung from Soviet caricatures of cutthroat capitalists. Backed by security services that behaved more like private armies, few of them had any sense of responsibility towards their country, and pillaged state assets, paid no tax and left Russia’s economy devastated.13 With hucksterism everywhere, nationalism and even fascism began to seem like attractive alternatives. As the 1990s dragged on, there was a further increase in gang warfare in St Petersburg, with drug-trafficking and, at the higher end of the scale, arms-dealing. The city took on the atmosphere of Prohibition Chicago. Leningraders who worked for aspiring entrepreneurs – people ‘in business’ – carried guns.
Early 1990s desperation. Walls plastered with small-ads.
A good insight into how business was conducted at the time is afforded by Alexei Balabanov’s powerful 1997 film, Brat,14 in which a Chechen gangster gets out of jail and muscles in on the protection racket in St Petersburg markets. The hit-man employed to take care of the Chechen is visited by his brother, Danila, a disarming young man who – more often than not – uses might for what he believes to be right. A child of his times, Danila doesn’t like Jews or the insolent Armenian fare-dodgers on Petersburg trams. His passion is Russian pop, played by the instrumentally inventive new-wave Nautilius Pompilius band, Grebenshchikov, Shevchuk and Konstantin Kinchev’s band Alisa, whose hard-rock protest became, in the late 1990s, increasingly nationalist. Danila listens obsessively to his Discman, which he keeps strapped around his belly. Blasted to pieces by an assassin, it – significantly – softens the blow of the bullet. Brat presents St Petersburg as a squalid city spattered with blood and mud. The shells of crippled cars litter the streets. Paint bubbles like skin disease on the interiors of public b
uildings. The depot on Vasilevsky Island is a graveyard for ailing trams, from what was once the largest network in the world. Shortly after Danila arrives from the country, an elderly German, sleeping rough in a cemetery, tells him that ‘The city is a frightening force . . . it sucks you in.’ It also spits out the unwanted. At the end of the film, when things get too hot and he has made a pile, Danila hitch-hikes to Moscow – with his gun.
Fast forward six years to Progulka, released in 2.003 ~ the year St Petersburg put on its Sunday best for its 300th-birthday celebrations. The film finds the protagonists strolling in a sunny, bright world, able to enjoy the city without fear of intimidation. Yet the irresponsibility – or is it infantility? – of the central character spikes her apparent easy-going freshness with edginess and deceptiveness.
As the youngsters stroll down the Nevsky and around the city, there is much evidence of preparatory restoration for the tercentennial. The city ‘Potempkinised’ for its very special birthday, ignoring the ‘inner spaces’ – those Petersburg courtyards that were fetid from the time of Nekrasov and Dostoevsky. Behind the increasingly primped façades, the old grime persisted. In public buildings, utility installations that would be shielded from visitors in the West remained ‘on show’. In the Kunstkammer, in a corridor between well-ordered exhibition spaces and displays, wires, pipes and badly painted walls all hinted at a vulnerability, a hazardous reality. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, apartment blocks suffered. The ‘staircase elder’, who was responsible for cleanliness and order, no longer existed and residents took to pasting complaints about cleanliness and hygiene on tenement walls.
St. Petersburg Page 45
