Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Those who had become accustomed to the paternalism of the Soviet state – a secure job in a secure environment, free healthcare; in short a comprehensive safety net – now found themselves exposed. They were left only with feelings of unfairness and insecurity, feelings which still haunt them a quarter of a century later. Yet in some ways, these are the lucky ones. It has been estimated that 25 million people have died young since the collapse of communism. Some of them took their own lives – there were many macabre stories of entire families committing suicide together – while many others succumbed to illnesses, their bodies hollowed out by the strain of this new existence. Tuberculosis rates remained high at a time when it had almost been eradicated in the developed world, and countless men and women still struggle with chronic alcoholism. Even more serious for Russia’s demographics after 1991 was that the birth rate plummeted; only in recent years, and with considerable state encouragement, is it beginning to pick up again. The life expectancy of Russian males fell from sixty-four in 1990 to fifty-eight in 1994.

In 1993, I discovered that even my own health was in tatters. My heart was hammering so hard in my chest that I could not lie down on my back; I had problem with my kidneys and my liver; it seemed that nearly every part of my body refused to function normally. I was still only forty-four, so this deterioration terrified me. At the hospital, I found out that the condition of my heart meant that I could not complete even half the exercises a man of my age might be expected to.

I was friends with a doctor at one of the hospitals in St Petersburg. He sat me down and explained this was not only the result of the huge tensions that had washed through my body over the past months, but also of a discrepancy between my mentality and the conditions out there in the real world. You have to change your attitude to life, he told me; you have to start to enjoy it, and stop allowing a feeling of responsibility to overwhelm you. If you continue like this, you will have only two years left – three, at best. Their prescription was as follows: each day I was to drink a glass of red wine and to make sure it was from a good vintage; I was also supposed to try and have as much sex as I could get, what we in Russia would call ‘young hips without limit’. The first part of the advice was easy to follow, the second impossible for a man who had been born in Leningrad, not Sicily. I realised that I may have received the best education the Soviet Union could provide, and that I might be a highly trained intelligence officer used to danger and profound stress, but I was still made of flesh and blood, and that flesh and blood are ultimately vulnerable: they can only endure so much.

The citizens who had long been used to hypocrisy as a way of life – men like the old party bosses – simply changed their masks and embraced new opportunities to fatten their wallets. They did not suffer the same drastic changes to their existence as the regular people. More often than not they found ways of translating their influence and what was left of their principles into money. Those who had once upon a time fought hardest against vice opened the country’s first X-rated cinemas; those who had warned us to be suspicious of Western influence began exploring how they could sell public utilities to foreign companies. Some members of the top brass were widely believed to be directly involved in selling weapons to the Chechen separatists their own troops were fighting.

Criminality surged, particularly murder and rape, and the police seemed unable, or unwilling, to do anything to stop it. Rather like the Wild West, the problem was not that people ignored or despised the law; the problem was that there were no laws. It was an ugly time. St Petersburg saw a spate of murders of people connected to its port. Auditors, port captains, directors of companies – all victims of the bloody vendettas of other men. I saw gangs of boys fighting in the street, observed by gangsters who watched from a distance, searching for new recruits – and begged my own son not to join them.

Petty infractions like theft and vandalism became an almost unremarkable presence in our lives. Boys who had once wanted to be doctors or engineers now openly boasted of their ambitions to become bandits, seduced by the sense of strength and power that haloed the gangsters who seemed intent on turning St Petersburg into their own playground. The social dirt that had been suppressed for eighty years rose to the surface and quickly infiltrated every corner of civil society. There was a wave of small-scale criminality – once, my own car was stolen while my driver had disappeared for five minutes to find a screwdriver. Ordinary Russian citizens, the men and women who had worked so hard in confounding, chaotic circumstances to try and keep their families alive, became completely disillusioned. Perhaps, in a world where one now often saw girls driven to standing on roadsides, hoping to be picked up by truck drivers, the old morals no longer existed.

Before 1991, it was the political system headed by the Communist Party and its repressive apparatus that had circumscribed the Russian people’s freedom; now, it was a miserable compound of poverty and fear. If you cannot support your family or walk the streets safely, then your liberty has been stolen from you. Sometimes it was hard to believe that another, safer, city, a place where Westerners had marvelled at the way in which women could cross the city unmolested after dark, had once existed.

But some people thrived in this environment in which there were no longer any boundaries or restrictions. They rushed hungrily into new lives in which they started new enterprises – selling jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts – and looked forward to making their fortune. Thousands of businesses were started in the years and months that followed the end of communism; most failed, and yet a few survived and became successful. (The old-style bureaucrats who were clinging on to what status and power they had were as keen to make money as the younger generation who had made millions from buying state assets, but in most cases they were nowhere near as good at doing so.) It was a time when everyone was looking with big eyes for any opportunity to help support their families, a time when people could no longer afford to turn their noses up at prospects they might once have disdained.

Huge numbers of well-educated, well-trained men left their poorly paid police jobs to take up lucrative roles at security companies. There was no precedent for this in Russia, and it soon set off a dangerous spiral: the collapse of the state led to lawlessness, which in turn created a need for greater security, which could not be provided by a diminished police force whose impoverished officers had left to set up private security companies, a depletion that exacerbated the lawlessness. Inevitably, these shady, often semi-official, operations found that their work led them into contact with criminal organisations. While some businessmen chose to protect their operations by employing men who had previously worked in law enforcement, others looked to former criminals to play the same role. This contact could either lead to confrontation (which was usually accompanied by blood on the streets) or compromise (which would have been inconceivable to them in their previous careers). It all contributed to an insidious weakening of the rule of law. Business disputes were not settled in court; instead, this new breed of entrepreneurs sent their own private armies out to finish their arguments. The complex written and, even more importantly, unwritten rules that had previously governed society had been demolished, replaced by a single crude principle: when you come to me to ask for something, bring me something in return.