The Russia Conundrum

I could have protested. There were dissidents at the time, and human rights advocates who pointed out the injustices of our society, but they didn’t make much of an impression on us. The state controlled all the sources of information and there was no internet back then. In those years, a person needed to come to the decision to protest from his or her own independent thinking, from his or her own sources of information. If you didn’t have that spontaneous personal conviction, it was hard to comprehend what the dissidents were saying. Most people – including me – had got used to the world we grew up in and we tended to accept the reality to which we were accustomed.

I was a good student. I was getting good marks and encouragement from the system, so I suppose that made me think twice about opposing it. I specialised in chemistry and I earned a place at the Moscow Mendeleev Chemical Technology Institute, which was a good place to study. I graduated with honours in 1986, a crucial time in Russian history. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in charge of the Soviet Communist Party for just over a year and he was beginning to shake up things that hadn’t been shaken for a long, long time.

My first jobs from the age of 15, while I was still a student, were as a street cleaner, then as a carpenter and finally on the overnight shift in a Moscow bakery. But I also took on another post. In 1986, I became the deputy secretary for organisational affairs of the Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League – the Komsomol – at the Chemical Technology Institute. Why? Well, first of all because it allowed me to enrol at the All-Union Correspondence Law Faculty. But, to be truthful, it was also an important credential for people like me who were looking to move up in the world. The Komsomol youth movement was an integral part of Soviet society; it gave a seal of approval to the young men and women who joined it, and it brought them into contact with important people who wielded influence in different areas.

My duties were mainly organising Komsomol meetings and collecting subscriptions, but it meant I was in the best place to maximise my future job prospects, something that remained the case when Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms kicked in. Gorbachev figured out that the Soviet centralised command economy, with the state taking all the economic decisions and telling people what to do and how to work, had sucked the energy and enthusiasm out of the country. People had no incentive to work hard; there was no initiative or innovation, because those things were not encouraged or rewarded. We used to say, not altogether jokingly, ‘We pretend to work and the state pretends to pay us.’ Gorbachev decided it was no good and the only way to get things moving was to allow a little bit – really just a little bit – of private enterprise.

At first, it was only work such as driving a taxi, cutting people’s hair, baking bread or running a café. You could own a private business and were allowed to make a profit, but for appearances’ sake, the companies were officially called cooperatives and they had to be run as a communal enterprise, without shareholders and with a strictly limited number of people involved. Gorbachev’s halfway-house approach was like trying to be ‘just a little bit pregnant’, but once the profit motive was accepted, I knew he would have to go all the way. So I decided to get in on the ground floor. A few friends and I used our Komsomol connections to open a café, where we served some very basic food and drink. It wasn’t much, but it gave us an insight into what it was like to work hard and make money. And if perestroika took off, we knew we’d be able to grow and grow.

I met my first wife while we were students and we were married by the time I was 20. But I had another, secret love: like many of my contemporaries, I loved Western pop music – Boney M, ABBA and, most of all, the fabulous Annie Lennox!

Western music was frowned on in Soviet Russia. The old men in the Kremlin said it was a CIA plot to weaken the moral fibre of our youth and infect us with capitalist values. Well, it certainly worked! Like all young people, being told that something was forbidden made us doubly determined to get it. We set up a (short-lived) disco in our school; my classmates pestered Western tourists for LPs or had them mailed by circuitous routes, then we copied them using whatever means we could concoct. The appearance of recordable cassettes in the 1980s sent the black market into overdrive. A young fellow named Artyom Troitsky, who organised covert discos at Moscow Uni, was said to be able to get you pretty much anything you wanted.