Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

At the moment Stankevich is veering toward the right-wing Russian Patriotic movement, which is perhaps foolish; he has a non-Russian last name and an extremely intellectual delivery, which will not go down well there. “He’s always been the dark horse,” one Moscow political columnist says to me. “It’s impossible to know exactly how much power he’s wielding behind the scenes.” Stankevich says, “There is not at this moment a single democratic thing in Russia. Nor can there be until the third wave comes in, and constitutional reform is enacted.” What does it mean for a top presidential adviser to the “democratic” president to speak in this way? “It’s time for the renewal of the political class,” Stankevich continues. The radicals who helped bring down Communism are no longer needed, he explains. “We’re in the most dreadful catch-twenty-two”—it’s comical to hear that phrase in a Kremlin office—“in which the country can function only when we have a new constitution which changes the role and definition of the Parliament; and such a constitution can be passed only by this Parliament, which it will destroy.” So what now? “Perhaps it will be necessary to proceed outside current laws. Could the leaders of the American Revolution have won by sticking to the laws of the colonies?”

If Golovin had in hand the heartening rhetoric of what is right, then Stankevich has the language of what is necessary. “How much,” I finally ask him, “can you change the course of events in Russia, and how much have they taken on a momentum of their own that no elected or appointed official can control?”

“Government in this country,” Stankevich says, “now and for the foreseeable future—it’s without power. All we have is influence. Our goal must be to recognize that, to stop pretending that we have absolute power and to use our influence soundly. And our goal must be to gain power again. We will accomplish that goal.”

In the middle of our conversation, the telephone rings. On a desk in the farthest corner of Stankevich’s office is a collection of a dozen telephones of different colors and designs, each connected to a different line. Stankevich walks across the room to answer one of the phones and speaks in his same voice of calm authority for about five minutes. Step by step, he instructs someone—I think it is a relative—on how to fix his car. Again, he has that lulling tone in his voice. Try this. If it doesn’t work, try that. It is the day before a national referendum on Yeltsin’s presidency, and Stankevich is not—as are some others in the Kremlin—hysterical. His manner says clearly that what will happen at the polling stations in sixteen hours cannot injure him.

The most important new skill these younger men and women have is adaptability: they figure out how to get for themselves what they want faster and better than anyone else. What they do not have is any framework in which to place themselves or their own successes; nor do they have a clear sense of the responsibilities their success may carry. The Soviet Union was dominated by the rhetoric of ideology, until finally ideology itself lost its meaning. When you discuss democracy with the empowered members of the younger generation, they seem to understand it as a euphemism for capitalism, and capitalism they take to be a system in which everyone grabs for himself whatever will be most useful to him. Fifteen years ago, many of these people might have been battling against an establishment that they would have seen as evil. “Those heroic days are over,” Artyom Troitsky says to me rather bitterly. “I wouldn’t be living heroically if I were part of today’s younger generation.”