Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

His eyes narrow. “You know, you seem like a very nice guy, and I know about your project here, and if some guys want to talk to you, that’s up to them. But I think you should be careful. I would really hate for something unpleasant to happen to you.” He smiles meaningfully.

I have recently heard talk of a Latvian journalist who was researching a story on the mafia when he disappeared; he turned up dead in an alley with seven bullets through his body. This image has not been comforting.

“Now I have a question for you. And I hope you know the right answer.” The boss lowers his voice conspiratorially. “I have a problem with which someone from the West should be able to help me.” I am overcome with dread; this is how one gets sucked into crime. “I have terrible trouble with dandruff,” he says, “and I wanted to know whether Head and Shoulders shampoo from America really works or whether you can send me something else from your country?”

Shortly before I leave Moscow, I have dinner with him. He has decided that I am okay in the wake of my shampoo tips. We discuss politics, restaurants, fashion. “You’ve had a good trip here?” he asks. I have. “You have some problems with people in Moscow?”

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

“You know,” he says with a big smile, “a hit man in our country costs just twenty dollars. I can arrange this for you if you want.”

I assure him that I do not need such services.

“Well”—he gives me his card—“here are my numbers. If you have problems in America, you can also call me. A hit man for New York is twenty dollars, plus airfare, plus one night hotel fee.”

The Politics of Change?

The rigidly hierarchical Communist system meant that important positions in Soviet politics could be occupied only by people of advanced years. Younger politicians, whatever their ambitions, operated in the meek language of the bureaucracy, avoiding transgressions, exercising what little power they had in terms dictated by their superiors.

The idea that members of the younger generation can hold meaningful positions in Russian politics is still novel. “Even the strong democrats who say they want change,” says Romuald Krylov, thirty, chief of the department of art and culture for the central district of Moscow, “are uneasy seeing me in a senior bureaucratic position. They would prefer to find a sixty-year-old man with no interest in art and culture. It’s what they’re used to.”

That is a hundred times more the convention in national government. Yegor Gaidar’s brief tenure as prime minister demonstrated to the people of Russia that new policies might come from young people. Gaidar’s politics were deliberately shocking; the younger generation in Russian politics show tremendous variety in their language and their policies, but they seem to be tired of the idea of utopia. In the West, younger politicians talk of radicalism while older ones are conciliatory; in Russia it is quite the reverse. What is both comical and disturbing, however, is that this move toward moderation seems to come not from a spirit of cooperation, but from a general understanding that the rhetoric of compromise will be the best line to power.

It is impossible to pinpoint the individuals who will be in power in three years’ time, but it is possible to look at the character of this generation as a whole, to try to understand what kind of younger people have chosen to enter the political fray, and how, and why. Perhaps twenty-five men under age forty are helping to define the younger voice in Russian politics, and several hundred others follow in their footsteps. The range of their sentiments and abilities can perhaps be grasped by looking closely at three: Andrei L. Golovin, people’s deputy and chairman of the Faction Smena–New Politics; Aleksandr A. Kiselev, president of the executive committee of the Russian Movement for Democratic Reform; and Sergei B. Stankevich, counselor to the president of Russia on political affairs.

Andrei Golovin holds to what he calls a centrist line. Russian politics tends to function in extremist terms, and I am intrigued by the idea of a centrist party. “Those who call themselves democrats,” he says, “are radicals, left-wing radicals. Your government supports them because you think that if you don’t, the right will take over. But we are really closer to you and to your national interests than are those radicals. When Clinton was elected, I assumed he would see this and understand it; it’s so disappointing to us that he continues the paranoiac foreign policies of President Bush. Doesn’t he see that Russian, American, and international interests all lie with the center, with something mediated and controlled? The danger does not come from the red or the blue, but from the fact of extremes locked in battle.”