The Moscow Spectator / A Land of Individualists
Bernstein, Jonas
stood in front of the Intourist Hotel near Red Square, waiting for Olga. She was down from St. Petersburg for the day to pick up her visa for Britain, which she visits once a year. With her hard...
...Most of these transactions are under the table: twenty times more hard currency is illegally traded than legally...
...I try not to deal with them...
...Inflation is a very quick way to concentrate money in the proper hands...
...Such episodes are becoming normal in the Wild East, which is why many of its best and brightest want to get out...
...And, perhaps most of all, the uncertainty...
...And they have the tradition of the blood feud...
...Political, social, economic...
...And he still relishes discussing theoretical math with his former colleagues...
...These days Yuri only occasionally manages to drop by the Steklov Mathematical Institute, his putative place of employment...
...But life is getting more and more difficult...
...She's not like the pensioners who think it was better under Brezhnev...
...The Chechens are Muslims, for whom family ties are all-important, and who view all outsiders as potential enemies...
...But what about the pernicious, eroding effect of inflation on society...
...The Westerners have one question: 'How, and by whom, will my investments be guaranteed?' My company finds ways to guarantee investments, since the authorities here can't be trusted...
...The business world now operates according to strict rules—laws, if you will...
...So anything goes, I suggested...
...As for tbe tax police: sure, they will have a lot of competent professionals, and certainly they will catch some people...
...He shrugged off the threat of Communist revanchism...
...Masha says that some of the things she wrote during glasnost displeased the KGB, and is convinced she's still under threat...
...But these are completely separate from the state's rules: business and government are mutually exclusive systems...
...Natasha, a physicist...
...The mathematician-turned-businessman still looks more like an egghead, eschewing the Armani suit and portable cellular phone that are standard gear for Moscow's entrepreneurs...
...The security services are exactly the same people today," she said...
...I'll kill him,' and showed me a gun...
...I was in Finland recently—Helsinki," Yuri was telling me over a cup of coffee at Moscow News's bar...
...Without doubt, this document was spawned in the Third Circle of Regulatory Hell...
...the bleak daily landscape (sidewalks lined with people trying to resell pathetic trifles bought in state stores, destitute babushkas continually crossing themselves as they beg for rubles...
...With her hard currency salaries at two joint ventures, Olga can be called part of the "nouveau riche" (a class which, according to a recent national survey published in Moscow News, 13 percent of the respondents "proposed jailing...
...I found his self-assurance and optimism a bit disturbing...
...Six o'clock came and went, and no Olga...
...In our discussion, Yuri evinced absolutely no interest in the Sturm and Drang "at the top," as the Russians refer to their political leadership...
...Nobody's going to pay it, at least not what they owe...
...We have a national shock, a national stress, and I don't want to live under it...
...People who understand how to manage money can get it...
...Even people in this country understand that these things are immoral...
...The list of those who've had enough goes on and on...
...He "has relations" with Western businessmen who want to invest in Russia's oil industry, he explained...
...Petersburg not long ago expressed alarm over the sharp rise in infectious diseases there...
...And many others dreaming of Paris or Zurich or London or Miami or Tel Aviv...
...it was too long to be published in one issue...
...I'm ashamed to say I didn't even turn on the TV," he said referring to the Yeltsin v. Khasbulatov return bout at the recent Extraordinary Congress of People's Deputies...
...6 6can't let my teen-age daughter / out of the house at night anymore," Masha told me on the metro on the way home from "Jazzland," one of the few entertainment spots in Moscow not frequented by mafiosi...
...Eventually he decided he could do just as well as the CEOs for whom he was translating...
...Mashawho, as a magazine editor, has a prestige job with a low (ruble) salary—is trying to emigrate to Western Europe...
...Aren't I a good friend...
...No, Yuri answered: those in his circle, at least, draw the line at drugs and weapons trafficking...
...Maybe this time I'll stay in England," Olga had told me on the phone the previous day, in a weary voice...
...Moments later—by this time I was frantic—she emerged from the pedestrian underpass, waving (and dressed to kill, as usual...
...And so boring...
...I'd go out of my mind...
...I think that people with one experience of totalitarianism are inoculated against it...
...There will be a lot of noise...
...Not to mention that they will immediately be corrupted—in this country, every source of control is a source of corruption, by nature...
...He's too busy making large amounts of money...
...Yuri displayed little horror...
...The inflation redistributes money, and therefore power, in a more natural way than did Communism...
...It is impossible to track all movements of money...
...in fact, she worries that, in reaction to the current chaos, a return to totalitarianism is imminent...
...He asked me to go to a bar with him...
...But on occasions that I must, I very carefully go over everything, telling them: 'Remember, guys: we agreed to A, B, and C, but not D.' Any misunderstanding can be very dangerous...
...Everything else is okay...
...In addition, a special tax police is being formed...
...Part Two, actually...
...uri also noted that the Russian y market is much less violent today than in 1987, when private business was first permitted and competition often involved shaking down—and burning down—cooperatives...
...Bigger ones need advertising, for instance, which attracts attention...
...A few years ago, Yuri was making extra money selling his English skills to visiting American businessmen...
...There are plans to set up a mega-computer bank to track hard currency profits...
...After an unsuccessful search around Red Square, I returned to the entrance of the Intourist...
...Olga had been in the hospital for three weeks in February with some kind of monster flu...
...But it's even worse, because now they're not under anyone's control...
...So," he said after a pause, "it's still a good idea to sleep with a gun by your bed...
...I told him I was waiting for my husband...
...This new paramilitary force, to be manned by former Interior, KGB, and military officers, has the right to "enter without hindrance premises occupied by natural persons and legal entities while performing its official duties" and, "in certain instances," to "plant" agents in businesses...
...Particularly since I had spent the day before at my job at Kommersant magazine proofreading the English translation of the Russian tax authorities' procedures for 'the country's new Value-Added Tax...
...There's much less shooting today...
...And it doesn't matter how big their computer for tracking hard currency transactions will be...
...VAT...
...I was waiting here and a young man came up to me, totally drunk," she explained...
...After listening to his tales of banditry forhalf an hour, Olga left him staggering near GUM, on the other side of Red Square...
...Yuri wears a simple suit and totes his contracts in one of those street vendor–bought plastic shoulder bags (made in Hong Kong, with a logo reading "Montana" or something of the sort) which ordinary Muscovites use to stash their sausage, vodka, and copies of Moskovsky Komsomolyets...
...I have all the things I want here, materially...
...A beautiful town, with lots of fat, prosperous Finns...
...Sometimes the guarantee is oil...
...In other words, the deflating ruble is expropriating the expropriators' expropriators...
...1 ndeed, since the advent of Victor Chernomyrdin as prime minister earlier this year, Big Brother has begun to squeeze the private sector...
...I'm tired...
...I asked Yuri...
...Today, his work involves "oil and money...
...Her worries are also political...
...I guess you could say it's my relaxation," he says...
...Yet there are those who wouldn't dream of leaving...
...Since you were due to show up any minute, I decided to take him for a walk...
...The 'exception to today's more peaceful business climate, he said, are the continuing problems between Russian and Chechen businessmen...
...Svetlana, an interpreter...
...After half an hour, I started to worry...
...In fact, he said, it is an ineluctable process which is actually performing a necessary function...
...So, what about all these things...
...and the growing army of drunken Lumpen of the kind described above...
...But the country is very large, and the tax police is very small...
...The most common way of avoiding being tracked is that money is simply credited to bank accounts outside the country...
...If you can make a fool of the tax inspector, by all means do so...
...Today, Russians are the world's biggest individualists...
...They all list the same reasons, in the same weary voice: the rampant inflation...
...It's impossible to be happy here...
...And this is being done by the good guys...
...sometimes it's gold...
...Volodya and Sasha, journalists...
...He said, 'No problem...
...People invent ways to put money in their pocket, and government invents ways to get it, because it's government...
...Indeed, the authorities in St...
...The smaller companies are the best off, because the smaller the company, the easier it can evade taxes...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
