A Farewell to Shock Therapy

I will never forget the first two days of 1992. Boy, was it an adventurous time! By late in the previous December, I had realized that the fly-by-night private Russian news agency I had joined a year previous would not lead me and my family to prosperity: the agency’s management and strategic concept was wrong from the get-go, and hanging on would only take my journalistic career to where the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine had led the USSR that same month—down the drain. My savings had been wiped out in early 1991 by the first financial “reform” overseen by Valentin Pavlov (who later in 1991 allied himself with the August Coup plotters), and the promised price hikes of January 2, 1992 loomed darkly.

So I went fishing for something else. Some of my former TASS colleagues had joined the Associated Press or other respected news agencies, so the order of the day was to link up with a foreign media outlet.

Since I write in French better than in English, I distributed my resume “to whom it may concern” at various French media outlets. Just before New Year’s, a French correspondent for Le Sud-Ouest called me from Moscow’s Sofitel hotel, asking if I might like to come by to discuss the “services” I offered on my resume. The Frenchman looked lost in frosty, post-Soviet Moscow; he was clearly happy to have found someone who spoke his native language and who could help him come up with sensational reportage about the first weeks of independent Russia. We hit it off right away, yet we still had to agree on the daily fee his paper would pay me. Greenbacks were already circulating freely in Mother Russia, and given hyperinflation and the looming “shock therapy,” I was not going to settle for any rubles.

The journalist said he wanted to hire me for a week, then shyly asked “Quels sont vos tarrifs?” (“What are your fees?”) Never much of a haggler, I didn’t know the answer to this question myself. But I did know I had a wife and two kids waiting at home, so I took a deep breath and intimated that, to the best of my knowledge (bluff), whenever CNN hires freelancers here, they pay them $150 a day. A bit offended by the fact that I had mentioned the “Ricains” (perjorative French slang for “Americans”), he said “OK, OK, I know that CNN is big, but we are not CNN, so all I can pay you is $100 a day.”

I almost fell out of my chair. That was more per day than my entire ruble monthly salary. But the show had to go on, so I continued to pose as a savvy haggler, agreeing halfheartedly to this “otherwise negligent sum, if only because it comes from a Frenchman, who I sympathize with.”

Recounting our next five days together would take at least 20 pages. All I can say in this space is that this particular French journalist got his money’s worth, including an interview with Gorbachev spokesman Andrei Grachev in his home, where he told how his former boss was unceremoniously ousted from the Kremlin.

Still, there are two episodes I have to relate. First, on January 1, 1992, I promised to show my new friend something special, so he could get a feeling of how Russians celebrate New Year’s and its aftermath. I suggested a journey into the countryside where, without any invitation, we knocked on the door of our molochnitsa (milkwoman) Zoya’s izba, near my family’s dacha. Everyone in Zoya’s household was still sleeping (hardly a surprise at 10 AM on January 1), yet, unperturbed by our arrogance, they staged a red carpet reception. The foreign journalist had somehow expected to find starving Russians in the countryside, yet he was treated to the contents of Zoya’s cavernous pogreb  (cellar), from homegrown marinated tomatoes and pickles to fresh veal, goose pate, cottage cheese  and, of course, homemade cranberry nalivka. I earned kudos from the Frenchman and saw my first $100 note (yes, he did pay me in the dreaded Ricains’ currency).

The next day was what the French journalist called “la flambee des prix”—“the price hike.” As we visited the stores on the Novy Arbat to see how people felt about new skyrocketing prices, I felt like I was in a Kafka novel. The Novoarbatsky  gastronom was selling hitherto unseen products,  including many kinds of sausages, caviar, salmon and even French cheese! But the reason they could now do this is because prices had been freed—even on basic goods like milk and butter. And the prices for these “known goods” were quite scary.  Even prohibitive.

“Des prix fous!” (“Crazy prices”), I said out loud to my French client. Then, from behind us, in the language of Voltaire, I heard “Eh, oui” (“Oh, yes”). I turned and, much to my surprise, stared into the wizened face of an old pensioner who I recognized with some difficulty as my former French teacher from the institute. I smiled at her as she recognized me, then tried my best to vanish in the crowd. I was uneasy. “How would she survive?!” I wondered.  “How would we all survive?!” I tried not to think about it. By week’s end, I had earned my first $500 from the French journalist. Soon he sent me another French colleague, and a bit later I was offered a job with a Canadian journalist, which led to a newsletter called Russian Business Report, through which I finally became involved with Russian Life.

Seen from today’s heights, how did it feel back then, ten years ago, when Yegor Gaidar set prices free? I hope someday to free up some time to write a book about the stormy decade that ensued. But for now, to make a long story short, I quote Mikhail Butov (see page 33): “Those times are gone and I don’t regret their passing.”

You know what happened next: lots of shock therapy, birth of the commodity exchanges (death of the commodity exchanges…), tens of millions of Russians thrust below the poverty level, the first currency exchange points, the first boutiques, liberalization of the economy, the sacking of Gaidar and the advent of tongue-tied Chernomyrdin, the October 1993 putsch, Yeltsin’s painful 1996 re-election, the MMM pyramid schemes, the first private banks, Western-style restaurants, a sudden boom in outbound tourism, the arrival of “kinder surprise” Kirienko, the financial collapse of 1998,  the revolving door premiers (Stepashin, Primakov, then Putin), the departure of Yeltsin, the election of Putin …

How does it feel now? In many respects much better. The chilly effect of spiraling inflation is gone. Fellow Russians, who for decades naively believed that someone at the top should guarantee them a loaf of bread and a roof over their head, have somehow learned to get by; they—we all—have adapted  to cruel new realities. The silver lining is that Russians no longer waste hours and hours in lines, they no longer have to be party members to travel abroad or rise to management positions.

To best grasp the new reality, simply consider how our humor has changed. Mikhail Zhvanetsky’s famous phrase “I urgently need to go to Paris” was a hilarious bit of black humor in the Soviet era. But no one laughs at this now; the reference point is gone. Likewise the many jokes about no sausages on store shelves. Today even the most expensive delicatessen sausage (highly sought after in the Soviet era) is now just a food product, not a joke. A new elite of Russian managers is being born, and at least 20% of them have studied or trained abroad. But of course that is far from all. The local food industry is booming, internet businesses are thriving, mobile phones are all over the place, VISA cards are popping up in Russian wallets like mushrooms after a rain.

A whole new generation has emerged in Russia since January 2, 1992. Russians 25 and under hardly know what a Politburo was for (then, of course, in the latter years, the Politburo had a hard time discerning this themselves). And, as Alexei Svistunov confessed in our interview with him (see page 26), the komsomol has suffered a similar fate. Svistunov’s 20-ish secretary recently asked him, without even a hint of humor: “What is ‘komsomol,’ Alexei Orestovich?  Is it a ‘ ZAO’  or an ‘OOO’” [ZAO = closed joint-stock society; OOO = association with limited liabilities].  I guess the komsomol (young communist league) was a mixture of both: a closed society with limited liabilities, but that’s a different story altogether.

And yet, despite the disappearance of the komsomol, in many respects, today things also feel worse. Readers have become immune to bloody news, with stories about contract killings appearing in every paper. There is a rising tide of ethnic conflict, a loss of spiritual values, the abundance of pulp fiction in book stores, unwatchable TV, flooded by cheap, domestically-made soap operas or voyeuristic programs like Za Steklom (“Behind the Glass”). Casinos, boutiques and nightclubs have replaced such once-popular pastimes as museum going, reading or taking a date to the Bolshoi.  But, most regrettably, there is the business-like programming in people-to-people relations, together with an evaporation of “soulfulness.”

So what? Do we belong “back in the USSR”? Toss aside the new liberties and the free-market, send Gaidar to the Gulag?

As a hickup of the era of the komsomol, let me quote our “general secretary” (a.k.a. Vladimir Putin): “He who has no regrets  about the disintegration of the Soviet Union has no heart. He who wants to recreate the Soviet Union has no brain.” There is no turning back the clock. Nor would we want to.

With that positive feeling in my heart, on the weekend of November 30, tired of talking and thinking of daily bread, my friends and I (now all 40-somethings) decided to revive a tradition of the Soviet intelligentsia: to not miss any major cultural event. We went together to an exhibition of the works of Claude Monet at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Much to our surprise, there was a long line at the museum. What is more, it was a new type of line. A lot of these new fans of impressionism looked like your average middle-class Russian. There were mobile phones in every second pocket, and most were clothed in decent dublyonkas or anoraks. And many showed they had enough rubles to buy a can of premixed gin and tonic or vodka-lemon to help fight off the -10o chill. Even though we were stuck in line for two-and-a-half hours (good thing we had all that practice 10 years ago!), I personally felt happy: people are lining up at museums again!

To celebrate such a comforting discovery (and do something about our freezing feet) we decided to take advantage of the new era of commercial prosperity and sent Sasha to the nearest kiosk to buy a 0.25 liter bottle of Armenian cognac and a piece of my favorite chocolate: “Inspiration: Russian Ballet.” Needless to say, 10 years ago, buying these things demanded considerably more than a five minute walk.

The cognac went “na urah,” as we say and the 200 meter-long line no longer seemed so daunting. And Monet’s  haystacks, lilacs and cathedrals of Rouen also went “na urah,” though I must admit that his “Parliament Building in the Haze,” looked a bit more hazy than it should have been. But maybe that was just the cognac …

So, looking back on the imposition of shock therapy from this decade long vantage point, I think maybe now is the time to send some kudos Gaidar’s way.

But pleeeease … no more shock therapy!

— Mikhail Ivanov