Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When I returned to Russia two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the country was changing dramatically with the sudden explosion of personal freedom and new wealth. I was in my late twenties, and found my contemporaries of particular interest because they were capable of accommodating the new order. Old Soviets’ sensibilities were mostly fixed in the poisonous system that had formed them; these young people seemed—even more than most young people—to be defining what was to come. Vladimir Putin has since taken Russia in another direction. I read today with particular sorrow the assertion by experts that broader gay rights were nearly an inevitability, an optimistic position that has now been roundly disappointed. But these character sketches speak to the Yeltsin years, when cynicism and autonomy were committed bedfellows.

Traveling in Russia recently as a writer, I came quickly to feel like a spy—not an American foreign agent, but a spy for each emerging social class to the others. Members of the Russian mafia—the organized-crime circle—are fascinated to hear that intellectuals believe the criminal class exerts social influence. The intelligentsia are obsessed with the greed of the new rich businessmen, whom they blame for the end of idealism. A return to the Orthodox Church has left homosexuals worried about repressive neoconservatism; nightclub owners are pondering whether artists who flourished underground can survive in the new daylight. Politicians wonder whether power will devolve to these chaotic elements. Across all these strata, the changes are most evident among members of the younger generation.

Overall, their outlook is harsh indeed. According to an article in the mainstream newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in April, “Young Russian malcontents are considering suicide every second.” One-third want to leave the country. Since 1989, the birthrate has dropped 30 percent, as discouraged young people choose not to have children.

Even so, some young Russians who fall outside these depressing statistics are plunging ahead with often-decadent abandon to find freedom, wealth, and power, defying both the timidity and the idealism of the older generation. They have broken up into hundreds of different tusovki, a colloquial word that mixes the ideas of “clique,” “scene,” and “social circle.” In this world, the Wild West mentality of nineteenth-century America mixes with a decadence reminiscent of Berlin between the wars. Only someone from the outside can move easily from group to group, reporting to one what is happening in another. It’s a shame that Russians can’t do this more easily, because the essential truths about the new Russia lie not in the behavior or beliefs of any one group, but in the very diversity of visions, opinions, and goals now rising from the wreckage of Communism.

Raves, Parties, and Nightclubs

We are going to a rave, Kristall II, at the big St. Petersburg ice-skating rink. Beforehand, we visit Viktor Frolov, debonair man-about-town, who is loosely connected to the party’s organizers. Among those present are a pop singer, a few artists, some models, a film actress, and others without clearly defined jobs. The women are all attractive and wearing Western-type makeup and retro-chic clothes. The men have leather jackets. Frolov is an eminently courteous host. Everyone must have several drinks and get high before we go: hashish, now available only for hard currency, is expensive, but whereas it used to be difficult to procure, it is today always available to anyone with money. Some take magic mushrooms, easily found in the woods around Petersburg. Some do cocaine to prepare for the long night. Earlier this year, customs officers seized a shipment of the drug that had arrived in Petersburg disguised as detergent. Television news showed officials confiscating this cargo; three days later, every dealer had it in bulk.

At around 2:00 a.m. we drive to the rink. About twenty-five hundred people are there. There is live music by a visiting Dutch band and relentless, recorded techno music, and an elaborate laser show. Half of the rink has been boarded over to make a dance floor. On the other half, people are skating. In the grandstands, people smoke more hash or pass out on the seats. From the bar in the corner, people buy big cups of vodka. We are on the wrong side of the Neva, and at night the drawbridges go up; we will not be able to get home until they go down again at 6:00 a.m. Everyone agrees that raves are no longer “in”—no trend can last more than a year—but members of every fashionable tusovka have nonetheless come this evening. “The craze is over,” explains Georgi Guryanov, a painter. “But there’s nothing else to do.”