We Are Building Capitalism! Moscow in Transition 1992-1997 by Robert Stephenson by Glagoslav Publications

WE ARE BUILDING CAPITALISM!

ROBERT STEPHENSON

WE ARE BUILDING CAPITALISM! MOSCOW IN TRANSITION 1992-1997

G L A G O S L AV

P U B L I C AT I O N S

WE AR E BUILDING CAPITALI S M ! by Robert Stephenson Photographs by Robert Stephenson Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor © 2019, Robert Stephenson © 2019, Glagoslav Publications Foreword © 2019, Vladimir Gel’man

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-912894-02-4 This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS FOREWORD BY VLADIMIR GEL’MAN ..................................................... 7 AUTHOR’S PREFACE .................................................................................... 13 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................ 14 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 17 2. THE SHADOW OF THE PAST .............................................................. 25 3. INFLATION, SPECULATION AND ACCUMULATION ..................... 39 4. REFORM AND RESISTANCE ................................................................ 69 5. RELIGIOUS RESURGENCE ................................................................... 81 6. OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW ............................. 93 7. REACHING FOR THE STARS ............................................................... 109 8. ATTRACTIONS AND DISTRACTIONS ............................................... 113 9. ON THE ROAD ....................................................................................... 151 10. THE VIEW FROM THE STREET ........................................................ 157 11. STRANGE SIGHTS ............................................................................... 195 12. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME ................................................. 207 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY ................................................................................ 210

The author with life-size cut-out figures of Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Pushkin Square, Moscow, 1992.

FOREWORD “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us”. The opening words of A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens’s great novel about the period of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, offer perhaps the most accurate description of an epoch-shattering change in world history—a time not only of sweeping changes, great expectations and great disillusionments, but also of a high degree of uncertainty in the lives of countries, societies and individuals. Over a very brief period, such changes fundamentally alter the direction of development, cause the collapse of familiar social hierarchies and redraw points of reference that had accumulated over many decades. On a historical scale, such events are rare indeed—in most cases ordinary people never encounter such vast changes in such a brief span of time. The French Revolution described in Dickens’s novel has become a classic example of an epochal change, laying the foundations of a chain of transformations which, over the course of many decades, led France to its contemporary political and social organization. But Dickens’s words seem even more appropriate for describing the changes Russia experienced during the final years of the 20th century. It is these changes that Robert Stephenson has captured in the photographs within this book as their eye witness and—in his balanced, informative and entertaining text—as their chronicler. During the 1990s, Russia experienced a triple transition. In place of the former singleparty Communist regime came a pluralistic political system with democratic elements. W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

During the 1990s, Russia experienced a triple transition. In place of the former single-party Communist regime came a pluralistic political system with democratic elements. In place of the rapidly-collapsed planned economy came spontaneous market capitalism. In place of a single hierarchical empire centred around the Kremlin in Moscow, which had been home to the highest government institutions, came a wave of decentralisation, resulting in the appearance of new independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union. In terms of their scale and swiftness, these transformations can be compared both to the French Revolution described by Dickens and to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which determined Russia’s and the Soviet Union's trajectory of development for many decades to come. But unlike “classic” revolutions, which are characterised by mass mobilisation and broad political violence, the changes in Russia in the 1990s were not so brutal. The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 happened relatively peacefully, without civil war (as had been the case in the former Yugoslavia in the same decade). The political conflicts of the Russian elites—the August 1991 putsch and the dissolution of the parliament in SeptemberOctober 1993—had their casualties, but the scale of the hostilities was limited compared to the great revolutions of the past; the epochal change in late twentieth-century Russia was much less tragic. However, behind the comparatively peaceful nature of the Russian transformations stood vast shifts both on the macro level—with significant changes to foreign and domestic policy, the economy, the social sphere, education, science and culture—and on the micro level in the daily lives of individuals, families and communities. These shifts are vividly captured by Robert Stephenson’s photographs, with his focus not only on major political events— the rallies, the protests and the referendum (although a fair amount of space is dedicated to these features as well)—but also on the manifestations of the societal change in many details of Moscow life, from the rapidly changing patterns of consumption to the outward appearance of Moscow and its inhabitants. 8

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The period of the 1990s has, rightly or wrongly, been given the dubious title of likhie in Russia’s political slang (this Russian word could be very loosely translated into English as “roaring”). The most well-known source on Russian language use, Vladimir Dal, in his Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language dating back to the mid19th century, described likhoi as a “double-meaning word”, simultaneously defining it as “valiant, grasping, lively, alert… courageous and resolute” and “angry, spiteful, vindictive, evil”. In the context of the Russian experience of the 1990s, both interpretations seem reasonable. It is in the 1990s that many of the trends and processes that have defined Russia’s form in the early 21st century have their roots. This is true for the authoritarian drift of the political regime; the highly corrupt crony capitalism; and the deep nostalgia for many features of the Soviet era which has overcome many Russians who suﬀered through the sweeping transformations of the 1990s. The epochal change of the 1990s was accompanied by periods of high inflation and a sharp decrease in the quality of life for many Russians over the course of a deep transformational recession that lasted for nearly a whole decade. These processes provoked a strong emotional response and were accompanied by intense political conflict, although the scale of the mass protests was lower than many observers had anticipated. People now planned their lives months rather than decades ahead, and new opportunities oﬀered by market conditions often revealed themselves to be deceptive (like MMM, the Ponzi-like scam depicted in one of the photographs, which cost millions of Russians their savings). While some rose to become nouveaux riches (the so-called “New Russians”), many others found themselves falling into poverty. Income inequality increased drastically compared to the Soviet decades, when the regime worked to artificially suppress the processes involved. With the Russian state weakened by the Soviet collapse, law and order declined and crime levels grew. Amidst the historical shift, many old authorities and symbols quickly lost their power, the once-iconic figure of Vladimir Lenin being only one example.

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But at the same time, the rubble of the old order served as a foundation for new phenomena and processes which transformed the social landscape of 1990s Russia and the lives of its citizens, and which made any return to the Soviet past and life “Back in the USSR” impossible. First and foremost, market systems led to the end of the deficit of goods and services which had for so long been a fundamental fact of life for most Soviet citizens. The bananas so vividly depicted in one of the photographs in this book were now plentiful on shop shelves, where only a decade earlier they had been the object of long queues. The previous restrictions on religious freedoms were replaced by a boom in Orthodox worship and a variety of other faiths and denominations, down to the exotic Hare Krishna Temple. These changes were symbolised by the restoration of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had been demonstratively demolished in the 1930s (with its site used to build a lido, demolished in its turn in the early 1990s, but not before being captured in one of Robert Stephenson’s images). The Iron Curtain, which had so long separated the Soviet Union from other countries, disappeared, freeing the way for intense material and cultural exchange on both sides of the Russian border. Today, it is difficult to believe that Gone With the Wind, the famous 1939 American film, remained virtually unknown in Russia until the 1990s and this book provides an opportunity to appreciate its Moscow advertising poster. A country which had spent decades largely isolated from the West opened itself up to a rapidly changing outside world with all its merits and flaws. These contradictory processes—the unravelling of the social fabric of the old Soviet world and the rise of new, post-Soviet, phenomena in the economy, social relationships and culture— took place simultaneously. Their manifestations are clearly visible in Robert Stephenson’s photographs, taken in the same Moscow streets, as the cover of the book shows with its image of a statue of Mayakovsky, the chief official poet of the Soviet era, standing alongside an advertisement for the multinational Philips corporation. The grass roots of new trade— from flea markets to sales of privatisation vouchers near the Moscow Central Post Office (which featured one of the resurgent stock markets)—coexisted with vast Soviet-era stores 10

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such as Voentorg. Advertisements for the formerly all-but-unknown Coca-Cola invaded the half-empty spaces of GUM, the central Soviet department store. Car dealerships never before seen in Moscow, selling the foreign Toyotas and Pontiacs, appeared in the pavilions of VDNKh, the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy constructed in the 1930s to serve as a symbolic showcase of the successes of Soviet science and technology, and once one of Moscow’s main attractions. The cars of the new era occasionally found themselves in front of the author’s camera lens together with old Volgas and Ladas, which were falling apart before his very eyes as they traversed half-empty Moscow streets. Meanwhile, new cultural sites (including Tsereteli’s gigantic monument to Peter the Great) coexisted with the old, including statues of Soviet leaders and museums and parks closed for long-term restoration work. The new life of the post-Soviet age slowly but surely blazed itself a new trail in spite of the drawn-out recession.

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It would be wrong to interpret the photographs in Robert Stephenson’s book solely as illustrations for a textbook on the political and social history of 1990s Russia. This book has its own protagonist: Moscow. The city, in which the author spent some significant years of his life, is portrayed not only with knowledge and understanding of the details of its daily life and a writer’s attention to them, but also with a great deal of aﬀection for the Russian capital and the Muscovites whose images readers will encounter on these pages. The Moscow that he discovered and captured in the early 1990s is no more; the monstrous hotels and nondescript shops depicted in the book have vanished into the past, while the scale model of the capital’s new financial hub, Moscow City, has been made into reality. The financial boom of the 2000s changed all of Russia, in part compensating for the “roaring nineties”, but its most striking influence was on Moscow. The city became virtually unrecognisable, and the Moscow of today—or at least its centre, as portrayed in many of the book’s photographs—bears little resemblance to what the author observed during the epochal change of the early 1990s. The Moscow of the late 2010s is, by world standards, a wealthy bourgeois city, one which has become part of global consumer society. It contains fewer and fewer reminders of the transformations that took place in the city and the country over a quarter century ago. Nevertheless, they were a critical experience for both, and that is why W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

comprehension of the epoch-making change of the 1990s is key to a proper understanding of Russia today. Robert Stephensonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographs contribute an essential visual dimension to this understanding, which is particularly necessary for those who experience the world of today only through the prism of the Internet and social networks. Those who explore this book will not only join the author and his protagonist on a journey to Moscow as it was at the end of the 20th century, but will also be able to appreciate how much has changed in Russia over the last couple of decades, and contemplate what changes still await. But no matter how much Moscow and Russia as a whole might change in the foreseeable future, we can hardly expect to experience another seismic shift comparable to that which engulfed the country in the early 1990s. This fact allows us to hope that the changes to come will transform Russia for the better. Vladimir Gelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;man, Professor of Politics, European University at St Petersburg and the University of Helsinki.

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AUTHOR’S PREFACE On a cold Sheffield morning in February 1992 I was sitting in my office as head of the IT strategy team for the UK government’s Employment Service when my director, Jim, sauntered in, ever-present coffee in hand, and casually asked, “Do you want to go to Russia?”. My only previous experience of the country had been an Intourist holiday to the USSR in 1985, but it had obviously left a lasting impression as I heard myself answer, “Yes. Why?” (in that order). Within a few weeks I found myself, re-designated as a “technical expert”, on a plane to Moscow to meet my new Russian Federal Employment Service counterpart and begin a journey that was planned to last a month and ended up lasting five years. In that time my travels took me to Chelyabinsk in the Urals, Vladivostok in the Far East, Tomsk in Siberia, St Petersburg and Smolensk in the north-west, Ryazan and Rostov-on-Don in the south and Saratov on the Volga. But the city that became my home, and which—through curiosity and fascination, and with the encouragement of new friends and family—I grew to know better than anywhere I have lived, before or since, was Moscow. While living and working in the city from 1992 to 1997 (and even getting married there in 1995) I witnessed and experienced at close quarters the impact on people’s daily lives of the turbulent transition from communism to capitalism. Endlessly fascinated by the changes happening around me, I made a point of walking daily around the streets of the capital, camera always in hand, and gradually built my own archive of photographs recording how the city, and life within it, was being transformed. At the time I neither planned nor imagined what use might come of these images. But looking back through W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

them a quarter of a century later they already portray a diﬀerent epoch, like a telescopic snapshot of a new planet forming. As an eyewitness I set out in this book to share my own photographic narrative of what was happening in the city in that diﬃcult but exciting time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of many people over the last 25 years. I am deeply grateful to all the colleagues and new friends I met in Moscow who supported and encouraged my passion for investigating and recording their home city. Special mentions go to Molly (now Baroness) Meacher for creating the opportunity; to Masha Rusyaeva and the late Ivan Ivanovich Gladky, with whom I worked closely for most of the period and from whom I learned so much; and to Rafek Hairetdinov, without whose driving skills and fine company I would never have reached many of the places shown here. More recently I would like to thank Mark Wilkinson and Janina Struk for their advice and encouragement, and Glagoslav Publications—especially Ksenia Papazova—for their support and faith in the project. Last, but never least, I would like to thank, and dedicate the book to, my wife Svetlana and son Alexei for sharing the whole experience from start to finish; their unstinting patience, enthusiasm and support; and for the use of their own considerable talents in bringing the book to life.

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WE ARE BUILDING CAPITALISM!

GraďŹ&#x192;ti on a fence near the White House, 1992.

1. INTRODUCTION In the early 1990s, after seventy-five years on the road to communism, Russia changed direction and began—just as fervently, and as always in its own unique form—to build capitalism. There is no consensus in Russia about these years. Some feel a strong sense of nostalgia for a period when so much seemed possible, especially for those who were young, ambitious and quick to adapt to new realities. Others remember it with horror as a time when all of life’s certainties disappeared and an often modest but stable Soviet existence was suddenly replaced by the spectre of poverty, rising crime and violence. In the five years I lived and worked in the city, Muscovites experienced almost daily change in every aspect of life. It was a time of extremes. At the beginning, removal of price controls, privatisation of state assets and the arrival of new political freedoms, opened the floodgates to a tide of new goods, services, faiths, political parties and independent media sources. But all this came at a cost and was not, as rapidly became clear, to the benefit of all. People survived on diminished state salaries, often juggling several jobs, or trying to make ends meet by trading in outdoor markets or selling their possessions in the streets. Their previous status suddenly meant nothing. Even the most educated and professionally qualified members of society could find themselves forced by harsh economic reality to supplement their incomes by cleaning houses, babysitting, turning their cars into unoﬃcial taxis or working as painters and decorators. In the streets, underpasses, Metro and railway stations beggars and homeless people rapidly became a common sight. Apartment block entrances went dark and telephone lines went down as people were driven by need to steal light bulbs and copper wiring. W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

Many now found themselves experiencing a volatile existence with no trust in the national currency. After hyperinflation had wiped out the value of savings and wages, the ruble became toxic and valyuta (hard, i.e. exchangeable, currency, primarily US dollars and deutschmarks and preferably in cash) became the new medium of monetary exchange. Where previously gaining access to goods and services had been the main preoccupation, now achieving the means to purchase them became the most pressing concern. The queues moved from the shops to the banks, commercial kiosks (many displaying a one dollar note to indicate readiness to buy and sell dollars) and soon to the new currency exchanges that opened on every street. As the ruble’s value floated and fluctuated wildly, shops took to pricing—and sometimes accepting payment for—consumer goods in valyuta and setting their own exchange rates until, at the request of the central bank, a law was passed in March 1993 prohibiting the use of foreign currency for domestic transactions and introducing in its place the uslovnaya yedinitsa (the “conventional currency unit”, or uye for short). In reality it was the dollar by another name. In addition to inflation, another threat to those holding rubles in cash was the possibility that some notes might be withdrawn from circulation and rendered unusable at a moment’s notice. On one such occasion in 1993 I found that the notes I had just bought in a local exchange bureau on Saturday morning were due to be withdrawn as legal tender by Monday. The bureau had seen me coming. Travelling across the city I found drivers were already refusing to accept the notes as payment for a ride, and exchanges were reducing the rates to buy them back for dollars. People rushed frantically from shop to shop to use their notes to buy whatever they could, and the shelves soon emptied. Fortunately, we found a solution as my girlfriend was decorating and we managed to spend all my remaining cash that afternoon on wallpaper, which was still miraculously available to buy with the old notes. 18

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In a reversal of previously prevailing orthodoxy, the sin of speculation was replaced by the virtue of accumulation. As the slogans, monuments and symbols of the old ideology were torn down and taken away, they were quickly replaced by billboards and advertisements proclaiming the wonders of capitalist consumerism. At the top end of the scale, the privatisation programme was exploited by a privileged few for their enrichment and membership of a new and exclusive economic class—the so-called oligarchs. In an unregulated market, others made their fortunes by whatever means possible, legitimate or otherwise. These included starting small businesses, trading, renting property, speculation on the new stock market, etc., or, in the case of criminal gangs, offering kryshy (“roofs”, protection). “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” was the creed of these “New Russians”, in their infamous red blazers and gold chains, who competed with each other to buy the most expensive items and boast of their cost. The nascent middle class joined them in conspicuous consumption. Apartments were gutted as the unique style of the evroremont (“European renovation”) took hold. This, often random, mix of ostentatious, flamboyant and outrageously priced European furnishing, much of it designed for mansions and now implemented in small flats, took hold. To service the demand, foreign labels and franchise outlets appeared in upmarket hotels and in the state department stores GUM and TsUM in the centre of the city, while new opulent arcades were opened in nearby Nikolskaya Street and Petrovsky Passage. As previously tight overseas travel restrictions were lifted, many people made their first work and holiday trips abroad. New travel companies were soon set up to meet this increasing demand and more local staff were employed by embassy visa sections as the queues lengthened. Some popular destinations, including Cyprus and Turkey, relaxed their visa regulations to encourage their new visitors. Previously popular domestic products were rejected in favour of the new and exciting fare now provided by kiosks, shops, bars and restaurants. Mars and Snickers for a time replaced homemade chocolate in people’s affections, while sushi bars and pizzerias appeared W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

all over the city. Even foreign vodkas, such as “Absolut” from Sweden, challenged domestic brands. American cigarettes took over from Russian brands, with the big tobacco companies fighting for a share of this new market while their sales and reputations plummeted elsewhere in the world. In the department store “Detsky Mir” (Children’s World), Barbie, My Little Pony and LEGO were among the new “must have” toys, together with cheap Chinese Transformers. New domestic appliances and consumer goods from Western Europe and the Far East were snapped up. The assault of lengthy advertising breaks on the new commercial TV channels fuelled consumer demand. On the roads, Ladas, Volgas and Moskviches were now seen together with, and soon almost replaced by, Mercedes, Audis and BMWs (often in upmarket and 4-wheel drive models). Other more aﬀordable imports also arrived, many from the Far East (Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, etc.), and often with right-hand drive as second-hand imports from Japan made their way west to the streets of the capital. State defence companies, now deprived of government funding, were encouraged to convert from military production to new consumer goods. This was not an easy task. On a tip from a friend I bought a pair of loudspeakers from one such company, which had previously supplied electronic goods to the military. Technically they were a match for any high-end audio speakers, but despite a price tag of just $100 for the pair they were unable to find a market and compete with seductive foreign alternatives arriving from Europe, the US and Japan. Alongside the legitimate imports came the fakes and the pirate copies. In the same kiosk you could find two piles of what appeared to be identical packs of cigarettes but priced diﬀerently. On asking why those in one pile were cheaper, the response came, “Oni nashy” (“Those are ours”, i.e. produced in Russia). Badly dubbed pirate videos of new Hollywood films, and audio cassettes (and later CDs) of new albums were everywhere. Many counterfeit goods arrived from the Far East. Fake “Rolex” watches, “Chanel” perfume, etc. were all available from street sellers and kiosks for the price of a meal. 20

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While economic reform was driven at breakneck speed, propelled by the arrival of international financial institutions, investors and technical assistance experts whose skills had been honed during recent campaigns in other nearby countries in Eastern Europe and in the developing world, political and legal reform did not keep pace. After centuries under autocratic regimes, Russia had no supporting democratic tradition, model or institutions to fall back on or restore. President Yeltsin and his new government immediately found themselves in fierce conflict with a parliament dominated by political opponents of the new regime, most notably the Communist Party. The stand-oﬀ was finally resolved by violent means in October 1993 when shells were fired at the White House and the opposing deputies were arrested. Faced with its immediate consequences to their daily lives, many Muscovites resisted, and protested against, the change now happening to them. Dispossessed, destabilised and disorientated, they took their grievances onto the streets. Demonstrations and meetings around key buildings—including the Lenin Museum and the White House—became a regular sight. Popular protest became a common feature of public holidays, such as Victory Day and City Day, which were far from the sedate and highly orchestrated aﬀairs that they have since become. Public holidays themselves became a source of confusion. New Year’s Day and Victory Day (on 9 May) retained their significance, while other established holidays were retained but had their names changed—for example, “Celebration of the October Revolution Day” on 7 November became the “Day of Accord and Reconciliation”. In the Yeltsin years, as a sign of changing relationships with former enemies, military parades were no longer held on Red Square. New holidays were often announced and timetabled at short notice. These included the rather wordy “Day of the Adoption of the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Russian Federation”, introduced on 12 June 1992 and only later simplified to “Russia Day” in 2002. Traditional days for members of the armed W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

forces or professions (such as “Railway Workers’ Day”), were joined by new days reflecting the changing times, including Den’ Rabotnikov Reklamy (“Advertising Workers’ Day”) in 1995. Meanwhile, the newly independent mass media were having their heyday. Released from the shackles of censorship, and fuelled by resources from new sponsors and advertisers, television stations attracted huge audiences for glamorous foreign soap operas (Santa Barbara from the US, The Rich Also Cry from Mexico), and produced audacious and exciting news and opinion shows, new dramas, comedy and satire. These included the popular weekly NTV news show Itogi (“Summary”), hosted by Yevgeny Kisilev, which every Sunday evening reported freely on major issues, criticizing authorities and highlighting incompetence and corruption, and the biting Kukly (“Dolls”), based on the British 1980s programme Spitting Image and using grotesque puppets to parody leading political and entertainment figures. Print journalism flourished, with “democratic” publications such as Kommersant, Izvestiya and Novaya Gazeta sharing the newsstands with Pravda and new Russian versions of GQ, Playboy and Vogue. Culturally it was a time of energy, spontaneity and individualism, with glossy new magazines like Ptyuch and OM reflecting and promoting for the first time the latest styles, fashion and music of a rapidly expanding youth culture, whose tastes included clubbing, raves, skateboards and computer gaming. New authors also emerged to feed a population of readers always hungry for new works. Some, for example Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, were challenging and confrontational. Others catered to popular tastes, particularly Boris Akunin, whose detective novels featuring his hero Erast Fandorin became a literary phenomenon in the second part of the decade, and whose work could be seen in the hands of commuters on every Metro train and trolleybus. The city’s architecture was rapidly changing too. Under its energetic and ambitious new mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s always eclectic skyline saw a new generation of rooftops, 22

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spires and towers added to the existing mix. While exciting new projects sprung up all around the city, some historical buildings in attractive areas, or on now valuable commercial sites, found themselves under threat of demolition and replacement by new hotels, apartment blocks, shopping malls or, increasingly, churches. Many of the charming areas of old Moscow, including the few remaining streets of two-storey buildings left from the time predating the 1812 war with Napoleon, were lost forever. New and often controversial monuments, many by Luzhkov’s favourite sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, were erected on prominent sites. Outside the city, expensive monstrosities—the mansions of the New Russians—grew up alongside, and in some cases on top of, traditional dacha communities. Many impoverished dacha owners sold their land to members of the new plutocracy. Others who did not wish to do so might arrive to find their wooden summer home in ashes. These were also violent times. New private businesses became targets for racketeers and rivals, and street killings became a daily occurrence. It was not unusual to find a body prone in the street with passers-by hurrying past and the sound of sirens approaching. We experienced several such incidents close to home. On one occasion a businessman who lived in our building was in his car with his family when a gunman appeared. He ran from the car to draw their fire and was shot down. The body lay under our windows for several hours before being taken away. By the time Yeltsin stood for re-election in 1996 most of the optimism, passion and excitement of the first years of his presidency had already given way to cynicism and disillusion. In the following years his frequent absences through illness from the public eye (“working with documents”, as the newsrooms euphemistically reported), and growing economic problems leading to debt default and the ruble’s collapse in 1998, paved the way for the entrance of his successor Vladimir Putin at the dawn of the next decade. W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

The wreck of a trolleybus used a barricade by protesters against the 1991 coup and then installed as an exhibit outside the Museum of the Revolution on Tverskaya Street, 1992. This iconic symbol of civil resistance has since been removed.

2. THE SHADOW OF THE PAST The last days of the Soviet regime were played out in late 1991, with the attempted coup in August, and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December. While the plotters were soon defeated, the coup claimed the lives of three young defenders of the White House, the home of the Russian parliament. New exhibits were soon added to the standing exhibition at the Museum of the Revolution, including—in front of the building—the wreck of a trolleybus which had been overturned and used as a barricade by protesters. A new anniversary, the “Day of the Defence of the White House”, was first celebrated on 19 August 1992 in the form of a rock concert held on the steps of the building and attended by many of those who had formed a human shield around it a year earlier. In the aftermath of the events of August 1991, many statues and monuments of representatives of the communist regime were ripped from their moorings and unceremoniously dumped in the grounds of the Central House of Artists (TsDKh) opposite Gorky Park. I first visited them in April 1992 and found an odd collective. Prominent among them was the huge, dark menacing figure of Felix Dzerzhinsky (“Iron Felix”), first Head of the Cheka (The Committee for Combat of Counter-revolution and Sabotage—the forerunner of the KGB and today’s FSB), whose tall and imposing statue had dominated Lubyanka Square since 1958 and was one of the first symbols of the past to be torn from its plinth. His companions in the snow included a brown marble statue of Stalin, laid on its side with one foot detached; the seated figure of Mikhail Kalinin (the Soviet Union’s first head of state); the disembodied head of Nikita Khrushchev; and the striding Yakov Sverdlov, a Bolshevik leader and one of the plotters of the October revolution. United here in the W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

snow and splashed with paint, they made an odd collection of lost souls—a sort of “Politburo for the ages”. These figures were soon joined by many other relics of the Soviet regime. For a long time, they were scattered haphazardly around the territory outside the gallery with other works before eventually being organised into a permanent home on the site in what is now the Muzeon Park of Arts. The original statues are still there, now cleaned and reassembled (and, in Stalin’s case, reunited with his foot and restored to an upright position). Elsewhere in the city many statues, including the Lenin monument in Oktyabrskaya Square, remained in place, although even Vladimir Ilyich was not immune from attack, with several monuments showing signs of attempted destruction.

A G R I M R E MI N D E R In April 1993 Muscovites were given a sobering reminder of the past when workers digging a ditch in Kachalova Street, close to where I was then living on Gertsena Street, made a gruesome discovery. Buried beneath the pavement they found human bones, including the skulls of two children, buried in lime. The find was near to a mansion which now housed the Tunisian embassy but was once the home of Stalin’s feared head of secret police, Lavrenty Beria. The house was notorious as a place where young women were lured or taken by force for sex with the occupant before being murdered in the basement, their remains then hidden behind false walls and in newly concreted floors. Initial reports suggested that the new find was an old common cemetery, but the lack of clothes or belongings, the random location of the bones, their closeness to the surface and the presence of lime led authorities to believe the worst, and the victims were added to many others whose remains continued to be discovered in the house and garden during renovation. A temporary memorial was erected to mark and protect the spot.

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WO RKING UNDER THE GAZ E OF LENI N In my working life I also experienced a daily reminder of the past. The new Russian Federal Employment Service (FES), to which I was seconded, attracted technical assistance funding from around the world to help it to build an infrastructure and staff capacity to manage the new phenomenon of unemployment. With the money came the consultants and the small FES head office in the Basmanny district of Moscow was soon home to long- and short-term experts from Canada, Australia, US, UK, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere, all requiring desk space. The only practical solution was to house this international brigade, together with our equipment and staff, in makeshift cubicles in a large conference room. At the end of the room stood a stage, above which was mounted a large portrait of a familiar figure, under a banner reading “The name and deeds of V.I. Lenin will live forever”. The irony was not lost on the room’s occupants, who laboured daily to subvert its message. Like the many other such images of the former leader that had graced offices and public buildings across the city, the portrait and slogan were soon cast aside, to be replaced eventually by new symbols of Russian statehood. As an independent body, FES itself was relatively short lived. In the late 1990s it was evicted from its headquarters on 1st Basmanny Lane when the building was gifted to the nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). The service was eventually moved back under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, where its functions have been performed since 2004 by the Federal Service for Labour and Employment (Rostrud).

W E A R E B U I L D I N G C A P I TA L I S M !

Rock concert at the White House on 19 August 1992 to commemorate the first anniversary of the failed coup.

Fallen monuments: statues of leading Soviet figures removed from their sites in the city after the 1991 coup and deposited in the grounds of the Central House of Artists, April 1992.

Statue of Nikita Khrushchev, Central House of Artists, April 1992.

Statues of Khrushchev and Stalin, Central House of Artists, April 1992.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Robert Stephenson is a former UK senior civil servant with over thirty-five years of experience working in public administration, including twenty years in international development. He began his international career in Moscow in March 1992 and spent the next five years living and working in the city as a consultant to the new Federal Employment Service, and then leading a major UK-Russia joint funded programme of capacity building for Russian trainers in business and commercial skills. Stephenson went on to lead a UK government team, based in the National School of Government, dedicated to supporting civil service development and reform around the world. For the next 15 years he continued to work with Russian counterparts and led partnerships with civil service institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia. Since leaving the service he has concentrated on developing his lifelong passion for travel and photography and his first book, â&#x20AC;&#x153;We Are Building Capitalism! Moscow in Transition 1992-1997â&#x20AC;? - written from his personal experience and using his own photographs - provides a unique portrait of the city through the turbulent years that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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