The Oligarchs

When jeans arrived in the 1970s, Irina remembered how her generation went crazy. Clothes were important because as poor as they were, it was the only thing that differentiated them from each other. People would deny themselves food to buy something flashy or extravagant. They knew they could never afford to move to another apartment, but they could buy something to stand out in a crowd.

In the months before the final collapse, Yeltsin had begun to assemble a parallel regime that would take the radical economic measures Gorbachev had never made.

THE REVOLUTIONARIES were young men in their thirties, selfconfident, hopeful, untested in power, and confronted with a task far beyond their imagination or practical experience.

You couldn’t give loans, in a normal sense, with such hyperinflation,” he said. “We engaged in more speculative operations, that’s true. Otherwise you couldn’t survive. There was no real industrial production. So, who do you give loans to? They would go bankrupt the next day.

What did the bosses do? They made the statistics on life expectancy top secret. Demographers were told to work on “theoretical models” and were denied access to real data about the population.

Naishul discovered that even the official command economy operated on the principles of the shadow economy—the official world was rife with blat and svyazi.

The Stalin model of central planning, directed at heavy industry and militarization, helped the Soviet Union through World War II and later was expanded to support a massive Cold War military machine. Virtually all other components of the economy were secondary, especially consumers.

Lenin shrewdly played on the peasants’ hunger for land, but the Bolshevik revolution later proved a disastrous turn for the peasants.

They believed that the basic relationship between employer and worker, or between land, capital, and labor, never changes. They stand in a state of “equilibrium.”

The burden of Moscow slipped backward through the windows. It was true for all of them, the dachniki. They were escaping, running from the suffocating lives they led in the city to their own private reserves of fresh air.