Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Others do believe. In Moscow, I spend an afternoon with Masha Ovchinnikova, an artist in her late twenties whose work has great religious meaning. “The church is my life,” she says. “The only important thing. Pre-glasnost, you had to suffer to belong to the church; only true believers came. Now people are joining in huge numbers. A few are really inspired with faith, but most come because they mistake the philosophy of the church for ideology. They expected ideology as children, knew it from their parents. But they come without understanding, hoping only to be given absolute diktats. It is the tragedy of our church. These people have confused doctrine with totalitarianism.” Such people have also been the first to be won by the tides of American evangelists who have been sweeping across Russia lately, running large, vulgar advertisements, promising answers to the questions of a sick society.

The Orthodox Church excluded itself from Russian politics and life during the Communist period. “I was baptized at nineteen,” Ovchinnikova explains. “I had always seen myself as outside of my society: it was a kind of autism. The people within the church had never adapted themselves to social interaction. The new people who have come to the church are mostly those with no economic satisfaction or pleasure in their private lives. They come to the church because the church does not value these things, without understanding what the church does value.”

Some church members make their religion a cornerstone of right-wing nationalism. “The church must not involve itself in worldly questions,” says Ovchinnikova. “It is not a political body.” The church encourages the Russian habit of passivity. “A good life is a gift from God,” says Ovchinnikova. “It is folly to reach for this yourself.” The church has also bred intolerance and bigotry. “You will not be saved,” Ovchinnikova says to me pityingly, “because you are not part of our church.”

The Young Businessmen

The New Capitalists, the young businessmen, bankers, and stockbrokers, are visible everywhere. You see them in suits and ties, with their hair neatly cut, looking respectable but nonbureaucratic. It is a new look in Moscow. Few of these yuppies are involved in production, which is still state-dominated and tangled in bureaucracy. “We only trade and invest,” says Yaroslav Pachugin, twenty-five, an expert financial adviser at the private, profit-oriented Foundation for the Privatization of State Industry Through International Investment, “moving what already exists from one set of hands to another.”

He adds, “I earn much more than my parents. That embarrasses me; they are both accomplished professional people. But members of that generation cannot now learn what is necessary to function in capitalist terms. The basic structures of capitalism are no problem for us. We’ve all caught on about that.” He pauses. “What we still don’t understand, of course, is democracy.” I talk to Igor Gerasimov, who, at twenty-four, is general director of the Inkomtrust, a division of the vast Inkombank. He is responsible for the investment of private funds, which he places in real estate and foreign currency. “I usually get money to invest for between one and three months,” he says. “No one trusts the economy enough to let go of their money for longer. So investment in industry and construction is impossible. Also, our inflation is paralyzing.

“What I am doing is important. I have a moral duty to continue as a businessman, to help Russia to grow. I could not now choose another way. Of course, I do this also for myself; I’d like a nice apartment, a dacha, a car, maybe even a Lincoln Town Car. But the more I take for myself, the more I help Russia.”

Russia’s Rich Are Different

While these businessmen make up a yuppie class, others form a financial aristocracy, the dollar millionaires, the nouveaux riches. At one end of a continuum lie the pure businesses; toward the middle, businesses dominated by the mafia; farther up, mafia activity based on business; and at the far end, pure mafia activity. Many of the very rich are at the mafia end of the spectrum, but not all of them. To succeed at the honest end of the spectrum takes an ability to deal with mafia threats, however, since they cannot be avoided.