by Colin McMahon
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia—The last time we sat around Yuri Nemtsov's kitchen table in Nizhny Novgorod, a former Communist apparatchik had just been elected governor. The few local liberals still around were glummer than usual.
The last of the independents at the local television stations worried that if President Vladimir Putin could meddle at the national TV networks, their own governor could install his team at the regional stations.
University officials whispered about the rebirth of "civil defense" committees, like back when this industrial city was called Gorky and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov lived here in internal exile. The committees would answer to the same kind of men as before, the men with the bad haircuts, the brown leather jackets and the disdain for people like Sakharov and their ideas.
Businesspeople and investors fretted too. Were higher taxes in store? More regulations? State interference? The bureaucracy was bad enough with so-called reformers in charge, so what would the communists bring?
Not much, it turns out.
Nearly a year later, we again sit around Nemtsov's kitchen table.
Everyone we talk about still has a job, in some cases better than before. The economy plods along. There is a new metro stop in town. And Yuri is building a banya out at his dacha.
There has been no communist revanche, no march to the past. The worst that can be said is this:
"Did you notice how dirty the streets have become, the disrepair?" Yuri asks. Told that, yes, Nizhny Novgorod does seem to be taking a beating, Yuri almost brightens.
"See, I told you," Yuri says, turning to Olga, his wife. "Look at what is happening here!"
Yes, look at what is happening in Russia. But look hard, beyond the potholes breeding in Nizhny Novgorod and the gleaming construction rising in Moscow. The meaningful changes are not so obvious anymore.
Russia, it goes without saying, is a remarkably different place from what it was a decade ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's different from five years ago, when I took over as Moscow bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune.
Many of the physical changes are obvious and pleasant enough: More shops with more goods, more cafes with better coffee, sharper architecture, a classier dress code.
When I moved into my Moscow flat across from the Ukraine Hotel in the spring of 1997, Kutuzovsky Prospect was dismal. Mob-run kiosks selling counterfeit Georgian wine lined both sides. Drivers sped along the same paths where mothers strolled with their children and babushkas walked their dogs. Across the street, a smoke-filled bar with surly waitresses had just been bombed, the latest salvo in an ongoing war among criminal groups for turf, power and profits. Fashionable furniture stores and boutiques that never had any clients opened every day, presumably to launder those profits of those criminal groups.
It was an interesting time, as the Chinese curse goes. Russia's unpredictability made it an exciting place. But unpredictability is one thing for a foreigner able to get out should things get too exciting. It's no good for developing a just, prosperous and modern society.
Russia is still far from that. But progress is being made, as even that same strip of Kutuzovsky shows. Attractive planters have replaced kiosks. The paths have been blocked off to thru traffic, making the simple walk to the bus stop no longer a death-defying adventure.
A top-notch Italian restaurant has replaced the tired bar across the street. It's still smoky—this is Russia, after all -- but the take-out pizza is fresh and subtle. And the servers smile.
More important and more encouraging are the changes among people and institutions. Russians travel the world, start their own businesses, change careers. They dream big.
Democratic freedoms have taken root. People gather to protest, they criticize their leaders, they mark electoral ballots in private, they form independent groups to pressure the government on issues such as human rights or the environment. That these groups, the media and political opponents at all governmental levels fall under sometimes vicious attack from authorities is undeniable. But Russian society is free in fundamental and, let us hope, lasting ways.
Radical changes, meanwhile, are becoming fewer and farther between.
"Russian life has never been continuous," Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov once said, "but is a kind of series of outbursts followed by periods of doing nothing."
Russia is not quite doing nothing. Russia is just catching its breath.
Having crammed into a decade enough economic and political tumult to last a century, the Russian people are grateful to have in Vladimir Putin a leader they see as more predictable and more deliberate than the one he replaced, Boris Yeltsin.
There is irony in this. For beneath the surface and in less histrionic ways, Putin is trying to change Russia far more radically than Yeltsin ever tried.
At a place called Café Max in central Moscow, you still have to check your coat even if staying for only five minutes. The cashier is curt and grumpy. People cut in front of you in line. But other than that, this is not your papa's Russian bistro.
Café Max is an Internet café with scores of screens, beer served tableside by smiling young women and, most important, fast and reliable connections. The clientele is young, hip and curious about the world.
"I look at the Russian news sites, the football scores in Europe, travel sites," said Alexei, a 21-year-old marketing student. "But mostly I come to chat."
Like hundreds of thousands of Russians, Alexei has an account with ICQ.com, a multilingual chat service that can connect him to millions of other Internet gabbers across Russia and across the world.
The first time I heard about ICQ was in a little hotel business center in Murmansk in August 2000. The young woman staffing the desk acknowledged that, much of her time at work, she was on-line herself chatting with people from all parts of Russia.
I was in Murmansk to cover the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine. We battled with Russian navy officials to get any information that could explain the incident and the fate of the 118 sailors who ultimately died aboard the vessel. Russia's navy and government officials were blaming the tragedy on a NATO submarine that had somehow slipped away after colliding with the Kursk.
None of us believed the NATO tale then. None of us believed it over the next year and a half even as navy officials stuck to their guns amid an official investigation of the Kursk's sinking.
Then, finally, something unexpected and encouraging happened: Russia came clean. Russia's top law enforcement official went on national television and said that Russia had no one but itself to blame. There was no conspiracy, just laziness and sloppiness and other sins that are the more constant and more real dangers.
Such openness is not the rule in Russia, nor will it be for a long time. Putin shows no inclination to transfer any of the lessons from Kursk to Chechnya or other sensitive topics. The Russian army continues to provide conflicting numbers on casualties in Chechnya; independent monitors contend that the real death toll may be twice the 3,500 soldiers and police that the government acknowledges losing.
But the Kursk report shows that Russia is moving the right way, even at the highest levels, even on the most sensitive of topics. Much information that would have been difficult to track down just a few years ago is now posted on the Internet, flattering or not.
The Internet explosion in Russia coincided with my time there. The first times I traveled in provincial Russia I was often forced to hard-wire my computer into the phone jacks at the local Intourist hotel or wait in line at the creaky telegraph offices that are familiar to anyone who lived or traveled in the old Soviet Union.
Now most hotels, even in the Far North or the Far East, have Internet access or phone lines that allow direct dial-up. Internet cafes or Internet programs through local institutes and universities are spreading.
Though Internet use is not as prevalent in Russia as in North America or Europe, the Web is shrinking the giant nation as it shrinks the whole world. The Internet connects people in the Ural Mountains region and Siberia with European Russia and with Europe itself. Per capita Internet use, in fact, is higher in Siberia than in the rest of the nation.
Part of this is due to Siberia's size. Part of it is because nearly all of the mass media in Siberia are controlled at some level by the government.
"This is a huge territory," said Andrei Mantsyvoda, who runs the Internet center at Irkutsk State University. "The Irkutsk region is two times the size of France. You have to find a way to integrate the communities, to build new social organizations.
"Airplanes do not fly everywhere, and there are no roads in much of the region," said Mantsyvoda, whose projects are funded by local companies, the university and Western grants. "But the Internet we have for free. People in Siberia have the right to get information, and the only way is the Internet."
Even as the Internet makes Russia more a part of the world, however, Russians and their leaders are struggling to decide what role their giant nation should play.
Some cannot let go of the faded Russian and Soviet empires, much to the dismay of Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazaks and Ukrainians. Why just those? Moscow does not pay a whole lot of attention to Kyrgyzstan (too small) or Turkmenistan (too weird). The Baltic states don't pay too much attention to Russia, having run screaming into the open embrace of Scandinavia and Europe. The Belorussians and Moldovans say they want to be independent of Moscow but rarely act like it.
For those in Russia who insist that things should or can be like they were, the shape of geopolitics is a constant source of despair.
U.S. troops are stationed in three Central Asian nations--at least--and now are setting up camp in the Caucasus. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are probably headed to NATO. People in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea often speak better of Warsaw than they do of Moscow. Warsaw!
Neither Israel nor the Arab nations watch over their shoulder anymore for what Moscow is doing. Russia's role in trying to solve the Middle East conflict is limited to cheerleading. The notion-really, a fantasy-that Russia could join with China and India in some sort of Eastern axis to blunt American dominance has been discredited in both Beijing and New Delhi.
African and Latin American nations, meanwhile, have little to gain by allying with a nation that still cannot afford to pay its own workers much less hand out foreign aid.
This Putin seems to understand better than most anyone in his military or foreign policy elite. Facing such geopolitical developments, Yeltsin would have responded with bombast and bluster. It would have been futile: No matter how much Yeltsin shook his fist and slurred his declarations of Russia's greatness, the United States, Europe and the rest of the world pretty much went ahead and did what they planned. But Yeltsin's fiery denunciations of American hegemony, which Putin has all but abandoned, fueled tensions between Russia and the West and gave cover to some of the more conservative hawks in the military and foreign policy circles.
Putin plays it real. He may not like what the United States is doing. Not many nations do, after all. But he understands that Russia and other countries have only so much influence over Washington and so few ways to stop the United States. Putin grimaced but acquiesced to America's military deployment in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. When Georgia announced that U.S. troops would deploy to help train Georgian anti-terrorist forces, official Moscow erupted in fury. Putin waited a day or two and then said, basically, So what. Properly chastened, the generals and diplomats put their daggers away and skulked off.
Putin grasps that Russia's size and military strength (particularly the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal) guarantee it a place at the world's table for years to come. But he also understands that to make that place meaningful, Russia must improve its relatively tiny economy. The Cold War model of zero-sum games and potential armed conflict with the West is outdated, no matter how depressing his generals may find that.
"No one is going to war with us in the modern world," Putin said in his state of the nation address in April. "No one wants this, and no one needs this. But no one is really waiting for us either, no one will help us specially. We have to fight for our place under the economic sun."
To spur competitiveness, Putin has pushed through legislation to improve the tax system, allow the buying and selling of land and bring the criminal code into the 21st Century. Some of these initiatives are showing results, in small ways. But Russia's sprawling bureaucracy remains more interested in extorting and subjugating individuals and enterprises than in protecting or professionally regulating them. And until that changes, Putin's dream of turning Russia into a country that can compete economically with the West will remain distant.
Vyacheslav Nikonov, an analyst who heads the Politika Fund in Moscow, said that he was struck by Putin's modernity as the president addressed Russia's governors, legislators and top bureaucrats.
"I got the impression, as I looked at Putin and the people in the room, that Putin was in the 21st Century, but most of those in the room were still in the 20th Century," Nikonov said. "It is no secret that our political elite continues to pay tribute to such fetishes of the 20th Century as the strengthening of state regulation, support of enterprises, protectionism, anti-Western and great-power feelings, etc., etc."
So not everything has changed over the last half-decade. Old Communists still march outside the Russian White House, demanding that the nation jail the dodgy business tycoons, or take over the banks, or stand up to NATO, or raise pensions, or do something! Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov delivers the same sermons and prescriptions that were outdated when I first heard him in early 1997. It's nice, in a way, a bit of continuity, a reminder that the more things change . . . .
That the communists and nationalists have been pushed aside politically makes this all easier to look upon with detachment.
When I arrived in Moscow the Russian people were justifiably livid about not getting paid their wages, about losing their jobs because factory directors had raped their companies, about unchecked violence by criminal gangs and about the collapse of the social services that had made the Soviet Union livable. Street protests were frequent and potent. But the communists and the nationalists either failed to harness the anger and energy of a people betrayed or chose to sell out those same people for a place at the Kremlin's expansive buffet of power, money and perks.
Since the ruble crashed in August 1998 and Russia's economy tanked, Russia has rebounded. Provincial towns remain much worse off than Moscow or St. Petersburg, and some villages in the countryside are becoming ghost towns, haunted by hardy but bitter pensioners who have nowhere else to go. Wage arrears remain, as do energy and food shortages in some far-flung regions. But overall the government has caught up to paying most of its teachers, doctors, miners and soldiers. New schools and medical clinics are being built. Pensions have gone up, albeit so has inflation. That the Communist Party remains popular among a third of the Russian people-still the nation's most popular party-in no way reflects the lack of real power that Zyuganov and his followers wield.
Putin is the new tsar, a less imperious and impetuous one than Yeltsin, but a tsar nonetheless. Putin is backed by a non-ideological party that was created explicitly to support him and has no governing principles except to support him. The former KGB operative has so far defied hopes, fears and expectations. Putin has cowed the mass media and surrounded himself with others who came up through the Soviet security services, but he has hardly declared war on democracy. Nor has he tried to recreate the Soviet Union--politically, militarily, diplomatically or geographically.
With no credible challengers on the horizon and efforts underway to make his next (expected) term seven years instead of four, Putin seems destined to be around for a long time.
Is that good or bad? Let that question be revisited in another five years.
