Putin

In the street markets and flea markets treasures could be had for a song—amber necklaces, icons, rugs from Asia. You could buy Red Army uniforms from fur hats to high boots, medals for valor included. The currency was meaningless, life was meaningless, there was a whiff of Weimar in the air. Groups favoring black clothing and the hatred of Jews (and Masons) emerged quite naturally from that context of empty air and violent streets.

My reportage from the first post-Soviet winter of 1992 captures something of that time and place:

In Sophia, one of Moscow’s better restaurants, you can feast on black caviar, sturgeon, and beef Stroganoff with vodka and coffee galore, tip extravagantly and still get away for under a dollar. The waitress apologizes. For reasons she can’t begin to understand, there is no Russian vodka, only Smirnoff’s, from America. Her teeth are chattering. The heat has gone off in the restaurant. All the waitresses and customers are shivering, even those who are still wearing their fur hats. And so at least there is practically no shock when we leave the restaurant and see through the whirling snow the statue of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who blew out his brains in 1930, disappointed by love and revolution.

But for most that winter, shivering in a restaurant would have been an unimaginable luxury:

The schools now serve as distribution points for the food being funneled in from America. The pilferage rate is assumed to be high, though somewhat less than in other places. Schoolchildren are being issued milk and tinned meat—leftover rations from Operation Desert Storm, crumbs from the table of the conqueror. It is a gift that elicits both gratitude and a sense of humiliation among Russians. As parents they are glad that their children will have milk to drink, for milk is simply unavailable in Moscow. It might be because the farmers had to slaughter their cattle for lack of grain to feed them. Or there may be thousands upon thousands of gallons turning sour in idle freight trains somewhere. Nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows anything here.

Grateful as parents, they are mortified as Russians. They feel themselves part of a laughable failure—the idiotic dream of communism, which took tens of millions of lives and in return gave them two-hour bread lines in the icy cold.

Meanwhile, even at this early stage before the large state enterprises began to be auctioned for a song to insiders in sweetheart deals, there were still plenty of people fast on their feet who saw ways to make big money either from the falling value of the ruble—borrow cheap, repay even cheaper—or by buying up the vouchers that were issued in 1992 to every citizen in an effort to make Soviet serfs into shareholders. Factory managers and the party elite had already concocted schemes for gaining control over state property.

But a good percentage of the population simply couldn’t cope with the new reality. The environment had shifted radically and they could not adapt. People demonstrated in the streets with signs reading: “Put the redhead behind bars.” They meant Chubais.