Russia Watch / Quiet Flow the Dons
Bernstein, Jonas
Quiet Flow the Dons by Jonas Bernstein S t. Petersburg seemed even more decayed than in December, when I was last there. As the train approached the city, the landscape was post-nuclear—sprawling,...
...Kenneth S. Lynn, the author of Hemingway, is currently at work on a book on the life and times of Chartie Chaplin...
...Which leaves discrepancies a la Zaire...
...Progressive, as a means of signalling his disgusted conclusion that the Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, was no better than President Coolidge...
...At the same time, he regarded his own life as a tissue of failures, and he kept a careful record of his disappointments...
...Instead, he cast his straw ballot for the Communist in the race, William Z. Foster...
...investment in Russia last year amounted to $1 billion, a mere third of the amount U.S...
...No other American writer, not even the later Mark Twain, passed more caustic judgments on the land of his birth than Macdonald habitually did...
...Such money, undoubtedly, was westward-bound...
...Maybe it was still too early in the morning, or perhaps they were just among the thousands of bankrupt state enterprises, victims of the "payments crisis"—theoretically in operation, but whose employees are on leave...
...Everything is quiet and peaceful for them: they have a lot of money and there are no criminals hanging around...
...171 A t a Partisan Review party for Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, the guest of honor asked Dwight Macdonald what life was like in New York...
...In the poll of undergraduate opinion on the Yale campus regarding the presidential election of 1924, the young Macdonald could have backed the third-party ticket headed by Robert M. La Follette, the revered Wisconsin 1 A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald...
...For like many other alienated New York intellectuals, Macdonald was caught up at the moment in visions of revolution in America...
...Nightmare...
...What was decisive for his assessment of the future of the steel industry was not the halfhearted job of fact-gathering he did in his field trip, but his prior absorption of the Englishman John Strachey's Marxist analysis, in The Coming Struggle for Power (1935), of the contradictions and inevitable decline of capitalism...
...So these people have their employees in government,in the KGB, in police headquarters...
...from Greenwich Village to Wellfleet, the sound of his screech-owl voice and nervous giggle rose above the din of a thousand cocktail parties...
...Kvantrishvili, who was assassinated earlier in the month, had been one of Moscow's top mafia bosses...
...That is why nobody really wants to fight criminals...
...Basic Books, 590 pages, $30...
...Along Petersburg's aging Communist-built roads, the sinkholes seemed more formidable even than Moscow's, in which drivers have drowned...
...Yet while his sympathy for the workers who lived in them knew no bounds, he restricted his soundings out of their political temper to the radical activists in their midst...
...Ask me how...
...I think the so-called 'second faces' in the Communist Party made perestroika to convert their power into money...
...companies have invested in Hungary...
...The burial followed a lavish ceremony attended by prominent Russian entertainers and politicians...
...It was a ghastly affair...
...That kind of mayhem is growing rapidly, leaving those charged with cleaning up the mess rather cynical about Russia's "transition...
...Organized criminals control all the businesses...
...The experience of Colombia and Italy would suggest otherwise...
...The factories were idle...
...Nobody wants to fight it," said Smirnov, laying out conspiratorial but compelling reasons why...
...Or the Muscovites now walking around with buttons reading: "Want to lose weight...
...Take the booming private real-estate market: Smirnov described how some Petersburg companies pay 5 percent of each commission to a service which "makes the apartment comfortable for the people who are moving in...
...Smirnov and other crime-watchers see a worm at the heart of even the most rosy developments in post-Communist Russia...
...At least a third of the rubles converted into dollars on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange last year had been embezzled...
...Petersburg police, rolled his eyes when I mentioned the government's efforts to fight crime...
...My landlady's husband died recently, after a horrifying kitchen accident in which he accidentally set himself on fire...
...Parlor radicalism, however, did not keep him from opting upon graduation for a business career...
...Later, following a pro-forma eulogy by a crematorium functionary, Tanya watched as her companion of fifty years was placed in a cheap wooden box and carried on a conveyor belt through two black doors, to the accompaniment of piped-in organ music...
...We have here in St...
...Petersburg had doubled since the previous year, and quadrupled since 1990...
...At that price, however, all she could afford was a cremation...
...Or the 54 The American Spectator June 1994 Dwight Stuff by Kenneth S. Lynn young girls with orthodontia...
...was in town to do a story about crime...
...Alexander Smirnov, the 23-year-old producer of "Criminal Dossier," a "Cops"-like TV show sponsored by the St...
...ness" disputes...
...It began at the morgue, where her husband's longtime friends raised toasts while employees continued about their work, running from office to office and barging through the gathered mourners...
...Criminalized or not, the new wealth has spread...
...To this chimerical prophecy he shortly added another...
...On April 14, meanwhile, the body of Otari Kvantrishvili was lowered into the ground in an oak casket with a silver Russian Orthodox cross...
...But the day-long pace of his drinking was not the life pattern of a happy man...
...While roughly half the cases were booze-fueled family or personal feuds, the other half involved "busiJonas Bernstein, a contributor to The American Spectator, is a writer living in Moscow...
...At one point, they asked Tanya to wrap things up, as there were at least three other funeral parties lined up outside, waiting to use the room...
...If Beauvoir knew his essays, his answer could not have surprised her...
...She—thanks to donations from a hard-currency lodger and her husband's former colleagues—was able to scrape together $500 for a funeral...
...B ut do crime and corruption necessarily preclude economic growth, rising standards of living, and the formation of a middle class...
...Hired as a writer on fellow Yaleman Henry Luce's Fortune, he projected an ambitious series of articles on the steel industry, into which he intended to insinuate his contempt for the industry's top managers as beefy predators whose policies were as uncreative as they were irresponsiblei On a preparatory field trip to the Pittsburgh area in the fall of 1935, he was shocked by the squalor of company towns...
...You can see it in the people walking their exotic dogs in the park across my street (formerly Ulitsa Salvador Allende) and buying Pedigree Pal at a local kiosk...
...Last year, an estimated $15 billion left the country...
...Permanent leave...
...As Michael Wreszin makes clear in his intelligent and well-researched biography of Macdonald,' it particularly bothered him that he had never had the self-discipline to produce a major book...
...Petersburg a bank established by Communists, KGB, and police officials of the seventies...
...As the train approached the city, the landscape was post-nuclear—sprawling, decrepit factories separated by large, vacant snow-covered fields spotted with chemical cesspools...
...And in Russia—or Moscow, at any rate—gangsters are not the only nouveaux riches cruising around in foreign-make cars...
...I asked police officials and journalists about a think-tank study released last winter that claimed 70 percent of all privatized businesses in Russia make payoffs to racketeers, often amounting to more than half of a business's profits...
...Similar crimes are occurring in Moscow: police there are investigating hundreds of cases of people who have disappeared under circumstances involving the privatization of their apartments...
...They control the KGB, the KGB controls organized criminals...
...While the average life expectancy for Russian men dropped to 59 last year, sales of TV sets rose by 34 percent, radios by 45 percent, and refrigerators by 60 percent...
...Tom Girdler of Republic Steel and his fellow magnates were historically doomed, Macdonald was sure...
...In reality, he said, this means paying a criminal to clear the flat of its previous tenants...
...Kashmar," my cabbie said, as he skirted something that looked like a scale model of the Black Sea...
...Like "living in a concentration camp," he responded bitterly...
...A headlong reading of Lawrence Dennis's The Coming 56 The American Spectator June 1994...
...At Macy's, he quickly learned that he didn't have a practical mind and lacked an aptitude for command...
...Private U.S...
...Petersburg's main cemetery was having its own payments crisis: unburied bodies, apparently dropped off by relatives who could not afford the funeral costs, were beginning to pile up...
...In 1993, murder and grievous bodily harm in St...
...According to the interior ministry, smuggling of Russia's natural resources, from timber to uranium, was up 50 percent in 1993, and "better organized than ever...
...Unfortunately, the accumulation of wealth here is following not the Italian but the Zairean model...
...Following media reports of birds picking at limbs hanging out of boxes, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak ordered these unclaimed corpses buried, firing some administrators in the process...
...Helped along by twenty drinks a day (bourbon and martinis, mostly), the essayist was famous in the circles he traveled in for his exuberance...
...The mayor could then return to the more congenial business of fighting for his political life...
...But if you are a young worker, teacher or engineer, not a party official, and you try to start a business, criminals will come and say: 'You have to pay...
...They all assured me the figure was higher in Petersburg...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
