فصل 13

CHAPTER 13

POOR FOLK

There in some smoky corner which, through poverty, passes for a dwelling place, a workman wakes from his sleep. All night he has been dreaming of a pair of boots.… —FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Poor Folk, 1845

When I first came to Russia in 1985, I rode through Moscow on a tour bus packed with a gaggle of British socialists. They were spindly fellow travelers who wore orthopedic shoes and plastic raincoats that folded away into envelopes “no bigger than the palm of your hand.” They felt like complaining about the rotten breakfast—cold kasha, bad coffee, surly waiters—but they knew they should not.

We settled into our seats, and with a noxious wheeze, the bus headed north for the monastery at Zagorsk. The tour guide, who spoke English with the clutzy formality of a movie spy working undercover, chirped on about the “utterly ideal” marriage of atheism and freedom of religion in the Soviet Union. “It is epitome of social and spiritual,” she said obscurely, but with a smile. The passengers had neither the strength nor the inclination to press her. They all wiped little circles in their misted windows and watched Moscow go to work on a dun-colored morning. Somewhere along the Avenue of Peace, we stopped at a red light. Through the gloom, I noticed a woman in a brown tattered coat begging in a doorway. She was hunched over and kept her gaze on the sidewalk so no one would see her face. She thrust her hand into the foot traffic. There were, I could see, a few 5-kopeck coins in her palm, though judging by the way everyone streamed by her, she probably had put them there herself, as a hint. A woman in the row behind me on the bus raised her hand and asked the guide what was going on. “Unlike in London,” the woman said, “doesn’t the state care for the poor?” “This is quite unusual,” said the guide without looking out the window longer than she had to. “It is quite likely, in fact, that precisely the woman you see is a foreigner. Or gypsy.” Enough said. The guide was rattled and we were all a bit embarrassed for her. We rode the rest of the way to the center of Russian holiness in silence.

Those were the last days of illusion in the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, the regime floated on an immense sea of oil profits. At the height of the world energy crisis and its aftermath, the state plundered its vast oil reserves in Siberia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, giving Moscow the cash it needed to fund the vast military-industrial complex. The rest of the economy was a wreck and ran on principles of magic and graft, but so long as world crude prices remained high, it hardly mattered to the Kremlin. There was still enough wealth to fill the stores with four kinds of cheese, cheap boots in wintertime, and 3-ruble vodka.

But by the time Gorbachev took power in March 1985, the oil boom had vanished. The economy of illusion was dead. The Soviet Union entered the era of high tech with none of its own and could not hope to compete. It could barely hope to survive. The state of affairs was best summarized in the chestnut “The Soviet Union makes the finest microcomputers! They are the biggest in the whole world!” Although the West was slow to notice, its great enemy of the cold war was dangerous and broke. “Upper Volta with missiles,” as the Daily Telegraph’s Xan Smiley put it.

At first it was hard to make any sense of the poverty, to quantify it. In 1988, there were still far more articles in the press about Stalin’s mental health than about homelessness, infant mortality, or malnutrition. It was as though the press were in vague agreement with Edmund Wilson’s observations of Moscow a half-century ago: “One gradually comes to realize that, though the people’s clothes are dreary, there is little, if any destitution; though there are no swell parts of the city, there are no degraded parts either. There are no shocking sights on the streets; no down-and-outers, no horrible diseases, no old people picking in garbage pails. I was never able to find anything like a slum or any quarter that even seemed dirty.” But decrepitude was everywhere now. Every sign of poverty that Wilson could not, or would not, see was now general and could not be overlooked. You wandered into poverty at every corner, in every city and village.

On a winter afternoon, I drifted away from a small street demonstration outside the offices of Moscow News and into a run-down cafeteria on Gorky Street. I was cold and hungry, and so I bought a bowl of watery borshch and sat down at one of the communal tables.

“You want a spoon with that?”

The woman next to me was smiling, her mouth filled with steel teeth. She gave me her spoon, a flimsy thing, and filthy, too, but a spoon. She said her name was Yelena and that for the past eight years she’d been living in train stations and airports. In summer she slept in some of the more obscure parks on the perimeter of Moscow. “Sometimes I get five rubles a day scrubbing the floors on the train after they pull in to Moscow,” she said. “Right now I’m broke, and everything I have is what you see—the coat and the clothes I’m wearing.” Yelena said that some of her friends had been thrown out of their apartments by husbands and boyfriends and they had nowhere to go. She wrote letters appealing for help to the Communist Party at every level and never got a response.

A friend of Yelena’s, a homeless man named Leonid, joined us. “I’ve written Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Gromyko, everyone,” he said. “I want my right to work and live guaranteed by the Constitution of the Soviet Union.” Yelena nodded. “You know,” she said, “there are thousands like us in this country. Thousands.” “To tell you the truth, I probably make more money out here collecting empty bottles for twenty kopecks apiece than I would on a construction job in town,” said Vitya Karsokos, who made his living searching garbage dumps. “My biggest problem is I have to sleep in the train station or out in a dump in a box somewhere. I’d get a job in town if I could, but good luck.” For years, while state television was still broadcasting documentaries about the street people of New York as an advertisement against capitalism, the Moscow police tried in vain to keep their own homeless out of sight. But as the number of homeless grew, their efforts collapsed. Moscow bomzhi—the acronym for “without definite place of residence”—slept in cemeteries, railway stations, construction sites, and basements. A favorite spot was the empty top floor of Moscow high rises with their ventilation pipes and heating ducts. There were drunks, abandoned children, the mentally ill—people who had fallen into the bureaucratic abyss and no longer had any right to a place on the apartment waiting list. Bomzhi sometimes worked, sometimes for money, sometimes for a bottle of vodka. You’d see them afternoons helping the local liquor store unload the vodka delivery truck. They’d collect empty bottles in the park and on garbage heaps and cash them in for change. At airports and train stations, bomzhi helped the drivers hustle fares and then took a small cut. In Moscow they might hold a place for you in line at a store; in Central Asia they’d take on migrant work at harvest time in the cotton fields.

At the Kazan Station in Moscow a wanderer named Alik said he’d talk my ear off if I’d only buy him a bottle. I suggested we go to a store and join the vodka line. When he stopped laughing, he said, “Just give me thirty rubles.” He snatched the bills from my hand and set off down the sidewalk. We walked ten feet before Alik found what he was looking for. A ghostly woman in a ratty coat reached into her pocket and the silent exchange was done. Alik quickened his pace and we headed toward a place marked CAFÉ. Three feet inside the door, he screwed off the bottle cap and downed the entire liter bottle in a few magnificent swigs. “Usually, in the morning, I like some potatoes,” he said and then stormed out the door, singing.

Alik was a sawed-off man with a two-week beard. He kept a change of clothes stuffed in a ventilation duct at the station. He said he refused to work collecting empties. “Too humiliating. What am I, a dog?” he said. “I’ll tell you what I do. When I need money, I take it. Like, one minute you’ve got your rubles, then you don’t!” For his adventures in pickpocketing, Alik had spent the better part of twenty years in prison camps and exile. Whenever he was released, he returned to “the station life.” He had no residence permit—“In Moscow, I’m no one”—and hospitals and drunk tanks couldn’t bear him for long. He didn’t make it easy. He was a nasty drunk. Sometimes he went three or four days without eating—“just ‘cause I can’t stomach it.” He was irritable, manic. In a moment, he would turn sentimental, an autodidact who recited the poems of Pushkin and sang the songs of the great bard Vladimir Vysotsky, screaming them all in your face as if they were a curse.

“My father and mother worked morning till night just to support us kids,” Alik said, sitting in a deserted courtyard. “My brother was killed in Hungary in ‘56. He was nineteen. Sometimes I think if he had survived I might not have started the way I did. I ran away when I was sixteen or seventeen, went off to Kazakhstan. I was going hungry, and so I lifted my first purse. That’s how my prison career started. I got five years in the Tashkent camp for teenagers. I’ve been all over the prison zone ever since. You sit in a rank cell and get twenty minutes’ exercise a day and you’re hungry, lying there on the cold concrete. I started getting sick that way. We bomzhi stay in these places twenty-four hours a day and we’re always worried we’re gonna get clubbed by the cops, day and night. We have nowhere to go. I’m telling you this on behalf of the Soviet homeless, who are punished for their destinies. No rights, no residence permit, no nothing. It’s tough when you get out of jail. It’s like you’re a third-class citizen and nobody needs your life.” At times, Alik stopped talking and began humming and singing a Vysotsky song about a man going off to jail and never seeing his beloved again. Then he’d break it off and stare out into space and take another swig on a new bottle.

“So how do I break this cycle? I just don’t know. One of my buddies comes up to me the other day, yesterday maybe, and says he’ll smash my face if I don’t stop drinking, and I said, ‘You son of a bitch, I can’t stop. I can’t.’ I worked some in Uzbekistan, but it didn’t last. Never got along with the bosses. Worked on an oil rig once, too. I’ve never worked a single day in Moscow. For me, three hundred rubles a month and a flat, and I’d make it all right. But I don’t have it. So where should I go? You tell me.” To describe the Soviet Union in terms of overwhelming national poverty was, by 1989, no longer the work of fire-breathing ideologues from abroad. Even the news organs of the Communist Party took up the survey of the wreckage of everyday life. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Party’s youth newspaper, blamed the Soviet system, pointing out that before the 1917 revolution, Russia ranked seventh in the world in per capita consumption and was now seventy-seventh—“just after South Africa but ahead of Romania.” “If we compare the quality of life in the developed countries with our own,” the paper said, “we have to admit that from the viewpoint of civilized, developed society the overwhelming majority of the population of our country lives below the poverty line.” The people themselves began to make the connection between the grimness of their circumstances and the failure of the Communist Party leadership. In the streets, “the mafia” became the muttered explanation for every shortage and inequity, and only foreigners made the mistake of thinking the term referred exclusively to the hustlers at the bottom of the criminal structure.

For a while the Kremlin ministries set the poverty line at 78 rubles a month—a level fit for dogs. But no one, not even the government itself, took the official poverty line seriously. Most officials and scholars in Moscow and in the West argued that the figure should be doubled. Even then, about 131 million out of 285 million Soviet citizens would have been registered as poor. “For decades we were striving to translate into life the idea of universal equality,” economist Anatoly Deryabin wrote in the official journal Molodoi Kommunist. “So what have we achieved after all these years? Only 2.3 percent of all Soviet families can be called wealthy, and about 0.7 of these have earned that income lawfully.… About 11.2 percent can be called middle-class or well-to-do. The rest, 86.5 percent, are simply poor. What we have is equality in poverty.” Poverty in the Soviet Union did not look like poverty in Somalia or Sudan; it did not necessarily mean bloated bellies and famine, but rather a common condition of need. The self-deception and isolation of the Soviet Union had been so complete for so long that poverty felt normal. Even so, almost no one, save the government elite, could ignore the widespread misery. “Even the ‘millionaire’ farm chairmen don’t have hot water out here,” a cotton farmer told me in the Turkmenian countryside. Or as Joseph Brodsky writes, “Money has nothing to do with it, since in a totalitarian state income brackets are of no great variety—in other words, every person is as poor as the next.” Miners in the northern region of Vorkuta did not have enough soap to wash the coal dust from their faces; mothers on the far eastern island of Sakhalin gave birth in rented rooms for lack of a maternity hospital there; Byelorussian villagers scavenged scrap metal and pig fat to pay for shoes. A few early published figures began to give some sense of the scope of the problem: the average Soviet had to work ten times longer than the average American to buy a pound of meat; the riggers in Tyumen, a Siberian oil region with greater resources than Kuwait, lived in shacks and shabby trailers despite winter temperatures of forty degrees below zero; even Party officials estimated that there were between 1.5 and 3 million homeless, more than a million unemployed in Uzbekistan alone, and a national infant mortality rate 250 percent higher than in most Western countries, about the same level as Panama.

There was also the sheer crumminess of the things that you could find: the plastic shoes, the sulfurous mineral water, the collapsible apartment buildings. The decrepitude of ordinary life irritated the soul and skin. Towels scratched after one washing, milk soured in a day, cars collapsed upon purchase. The leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously. All of it kept people in a constant state of frustration and misery.

Glasnost meant admitting to all this, too. Sometimes the admission came in the shape of an earnest article in the paper, sometimes with a certain flair, a Russian irony that deflated Soviet pomposity. The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, a kind of vast Stalinist Epcot Center near the Moscow television tower, had for years put on displays of Soviet triumphs in the sciences, engineering, and space in huge neo-Hellenic halls. Vera Mukhina’s gigantic statue Worker and the Collective Farm Girl (jutting breasts and biceps, bulging eyes) presided at the entrance, providing citizens with the sense that they were now part of a socially and genetically engineered breed of muscular proletarians. But with glasnost, the directors grew humble and put up an astonishingly frank display: “The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods.” At the exhibit, a long line of Soviets solemnly shuffled past a dazzling display of stunning underachievement: putrid lettuce, ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside. All the items had been purchased in neighborhood stores. “It was time to inject a little reality into the scene here,” one of the guides told me. The exhibit was unsparing, a vicious redefinition of socialist realism. In the clothing section, red arrows pointed to uneven sleeves, faded colors, cracked soles. One piece of jewelry was labeled, simply, “hideous,” and no one argued.

“Let me tell you a little secret,” a transport worker, Aleksandr Klebko, said as we filed past the display of rotten fruit. “This isn’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. Most stores have less than this. Or nothing at all.” ASHKHABAD

Stalinism was still lethal a quarter century after Stalin was dead. In the mud-brick hovels on the outskirts of Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, children were the first casualties of poverty. Every year, thousands of infants throughout the republic and the rest of Soviet Central Asia died within twelve months of birth. Countless others suffered more slowly, weakened by the heat and infected water, the pesticides from the cotton fields, a diet built on bread and tea and soup. “I consider myself fairly lucky. I’ve given birth five times, and only one child died,” said Elshe Abayeva, a woman of thirty-one who looked twenty years older. Some of her children played on a hillock of mud and garbage as she cut grass with a blunt scythe. Farther up the road, Abayeva’s neighbors, the Karadiyevs, were not so lucky. “Five children are alive and three died—two at birth and one after a month,” the father said. “In Turkmenia, it’s like this all the time. Worse in the villages.” Inside the Abayevs’ two-room hut, the bare bulbs were furred with dust, flies buzzed around the children’s faces. The children were filthy, their clothes in tatters. Only heavy stones kept the tin roof from blowing off the outhouse and the rusted chicken coop. Aba Abayev, Elshe’s husband, earned 170 rubles a month as a video technician for state television—less than 6 rubles a day to support a family of six. The Abayevs had been waiting since 1975 to be assigned an apartment in the city. “When that child was born, it was a cold winter morning,” Aba Abayev said. “No one has phones here, and there are no hospitals or doctors around. I ran two or three kilometers to the pay phone and called. It looked like the baby was dying—or was dead already, maybe—and it took the doctors more than an hour to get here. By then the child was dead. This is the way our lives go out here. I have no hope, to be honest. And for my children, I don’t think things will change, unless they get worse somehow.” In Turkmenistan, the official infant mortality rate in 1989 was 54.2 infants per 1,000 births, ten times higher than in most West European countries and more than two and a half times that of Washington, D.C., the city with the highest rate in the United States. Turkmenistan was about on a level with Cameroon. In especially poor regions, such as Tashauz in the north, the rate soared to 111 deaths in every 1,000 births. Many experts in Moscow and the West said that even these statistics understated the problem. The Central Asian republics, they said, regularly underreported their infant mortality rates by as much as 60 percent.

Children fell sick for many reasons, but mainly they suffered from the effect of the cotton “monoculture,” the obsession with a cotton crop at all costs. Working in the cotton fields, the children often drank from irrigation sources poisoned with pesticides and toxic minerals. In the regions near the Aral Sea, which had been ruined and drained through a mad scheme to irrigate the cotton fields by diverting the rivers that flow into the sea, the poisons in the drinking water were so intense that children were taking them in through their mothers’ breast milk. Even seeing a doctor proved dangerous at times. In the first year of their lives, Turkmenian children were given an average of two hundred to four hundred injections, compared to three to five for American children. It was nothing systematic. The doctors threw everything they had at the children. Within a few years the effect of the vaccines was close to zero.

Everything that went wrong with the Soviet system over the decades—the centralization of authority, the vacuum of responsibility and incentive, the triumph of ideology over sense, the dominance of the Party and its police—was magnified in Central Asia. The system was known as “feudal socialism,” a Soviet-Asiatic hierarchy led by Communist Party bosses and collective-farm chairmen.

At the Institute of Health Care for Mothers and Children in Ashkhabad, the head pediatrician, Yuri Kirichenko, treated dozens of patients every day. Outside Kirichenko’s door, Turkmenian women, many of them pregnant, paced the hall and waited hours for treatment for themselves and their children. Some of the pregnant women were in their late forties and had already had a dozen or more children. Because of the tribal legacy, there was a high rate of marriages among close cousins and other relatives. Many Turkmenian men refused birth control, and women frequently gave birth twice in one year, believing that more children would bring greater wealth—“more hands, more rubles.” The state, of course, encouraged the high birth rate, figuring that could only mean a boon for the cotton crop.

Kirichenko said he was a Communist Party member of twenty-five years’ standing, but he was thinking about quitting after reading about what the Party hierarchy had done to the region. “We had always been brought up to believe that our system was the best, that our lives were the best, and now we find just the opposite,” he said. “This is not Africa—children are not starving to death in the same blatant way—but there is no way to hide it anymore: we are poor and we are suffering. Of course, we need to educate people on birth control and all the rest. But as a Party member—and it hurts me to say this—the truth is that poverty here is tied to politics. Ninety percent of the blame lies with the system, the bureaucracy, the command system, the centralization of control. There is no escaping that.” In Ashkhabad, government and health officials did all they could to convince me that their horrifying infant mortality rate was “temporary” and had nothing to do with politics. They were furious that I had come to write about the problem at all. I asked local officials for permission to visit several of the collective farms west of Ashkhabad. They refused most of my requests on the grounds that they were too close to the Iranian border. Finally, I was granted permission to visit Bakharden, which was also close to the border, but, evidently, not so close that I would be tempted to make a run for Teheran.

The Mir Collective Farm was a pathetic sight. A mother and her dirt-caked, vacant-eyed daughter stood by the gate. A ragged dog slept curled in the road, flies buzzing around its sores. The “office of administration” was a shed with a few ancient desks, a half-empty bookshelf, and a portrait of Lenin framed in gold. At a small hut nearby, I struck up a conversation with a young woman named Aino Balliyeva. She was twenty years old and unmarried. She picked cotton in the fields and said she knew there were dangers in the work, that she was undoubtedly taking in pesticides and defoliants that would one day hurt her children. “But what can I do about it?” she asked. “I want to have children, because that is life. And as for the rest, I just don’t know what to do.” As if on cue, a police car, lights flashing, pulled up. Two uniformed police told me and my friend—a Russian photographer, Edik Gladkov—that we were in a “restricted area” and that we should “come along.” At the police station, we were interrogated by a couple of officers and then by a blond Russian official who was clearly KGB. Like a fool, I told the KGB officer that if he called the officials in Ashkhabad he would find out that I had their permission to go to Bakharden. He called, and, of course, the very same official said no such permission had been granted and, in fact, he could not recall our ever having met. Edik pointed to one of the wall posters: under a portrait of Lenin, it read, “Socialism—is control.” After a few hours, we rode back to Ashkhabad, this time with a police escort.

I did meet a brave man in Turkmenia. His name was Mukhamed Velsapar, a young writer who had grown up in a family of eight children near the town of Mary, east of Ashkhabad. He said he never knew, until long after he was a young man and had seen the relative wealth of Moscow, that he had been raised in poverty. “And that is the mind-set of nearly all Turkmenians: ‘We have bread, we have tea, we have a roof, we are alive—therefore, we are not poor,’ ” he said one afternoon. “These people have no basis for comparison. There are seventy-three newspapers in the republic, and not one of them has any degree of freedom.” In 1989, Velsapar, along with a few hundred other writers, journalists, and workers in Ashkhabad, organized Ogzibirlik, a democratic advocacy group with two key aims: to bring glasnost to Turkmenistan and to encourage radical economic change to end what one member called “the cycle of poverty and the colonization of our resources.” Members of Ogzibirlik met with nationalist leaders in the Soviet Baltic republics for crash courses on developing a mass movement. The Ogzibirlik activists believed that the ruin of Central Asia had been the decades-old demand from economic planners in Moscow that the republics turn most of their farmland into cotton fields. The cotton monoculture, directed by Moscow planners and Central Asian overlords, brought the region everything from the tragic infant death rate to the drying up of the Aral Sea. The rulers of the Russian empire had never been as cruel. Ogzibirlik was seemingly powerless to challenge the Communist Party boss, Saparmurad Niyazov, and his well-organized apparatus. Velsapar said he was often interrogated by party officials. “They’ll just blatantly say they have been listening to my phone conversations and then make some wild accusation,” he said.

Velsapar did succeed, however, in stirring up the Party. His weapon was a short article in Moscow News. “It is hard to believe,” the piece began, “but the majority of Turkmenian children in our time are permanently undernourished.” The article was merely a summary of the infant mortality crisis, but for local authorities it was a humiliation. Not so much because it exposed the horrific details of infant mortality in the region—there had been other such articles in local papers—but because it appeared outside Turkmenistan in a paper read by the liberal intelligentsia and Gorbachev himself.

“It was a libel on all of us!” Geral Kurbanova, vice president of the republic’s Children’s Fund, shouted at me. “No one goes hungry here. The Turkmenian people love to eat! And poor? Oh, they have lots of money, cars—two cars sometimes. They could buy proper food if they wanted, but instead they buy carpets and expensive dresses.” Comrade Kurbanova was a Turkmenian version of those American demagogues who go on about welfare queens who buy Cadillacs with food stamps.

What intensified the furor over Velsapar’s article was the accompanying photograph of an emaciated two-year-old child named Guichgeldi Saitmuradov. The image was hellish, like something out of the worst African famines—hollow, desperate eyes, a skeleton barely alive. Several sources corroborated the boy’s fate: After repeated trips to a hospital near his parents’ collective farm in the Tashauz region, the child died in 1988. Before Guichgeldi’s death, however, Khummet Annayev, a physician and senior researcher at the Institute for the Health of Mothers and Children, made a research trip to the region. He reported dire shortages of meat, butter, chicken, and other foodstuffs over a ten-year period, abuse of pesticides and defoliants, miserable medical facilities. And when he saw Guichgeldi in a clinic, he asked someone to take the photograph that would eventually be published in Moscow News.

“An aberration,” said the republic’s deputy health minister, Dmitri Tessler, who pronounced Velsapar an “adventurer” and Annayev “out of his depth.” The republic’s newspapers never reprinted Velsapar’s article, but they did run countless denunciations triple its length.

After the Bakharden incident, the republic’s foreign ministry said I ought to see what a “typical” collective farm looked like. They sent me to a farm called Soviet Turkmenistan just outside Ashkhabad. The head of the farm looked like Burl Ives playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Broad-bellied and wearing a crisp suit and a panama hat, Muratberd Sopiyev was one of the most powerful men in the republic. He had been “elected” chairman of Soviet Turkmenistan thirty years running. “We have democracy here on the farm,” he told me. “Every so often I’ll tell the people they can nominate an alternative candidate, but they say, ‘Oh, no! Never! No need!’ and that’s that.” Sopiyev said the rate of infant mortality on his farm was “not so bad” as in the rest of the republic—“forty-five out of a thousand”—but that is still more than double that of Washington, D.C., Like the rest of the Turkmenian leadership, Sopiyev saw the “triumph of Communism” as the road out of poverty.

“We have to keep fulfilling, even overfulfilling, the five-year plans,” he said. “We don’t need private property. Not in this country. That will only bring exploitation. No one wants it. We know that in capitalist countries they have very, very poor people. We don’t have that. We provide free apartments, gas, education, medical care. We don’t need a multiparty system, either. We don’t need the chaos that would bring. We need the Communist Party, and we have to follow the Party line. That is the way to wealth.” With that, Sopiyev got into his car, and his driver took him to a ministry in Ashkhabad where the republic gets its instructions from Moscow.

SPASSKAYA

At the height of spring planting, Edik Gladkov and I visited the farm villages outside Vologda in northern Russia. At midday, with the sun high and the weather ideal, we drove past one field after another—all empty, all unplowed and unplanted. There were tractors and trucks leaning at crazy angles, stuck in the mud. We stopped at the gates of one of the biggest state farms in the Vologda region, the Prigorodni Sovkhoz, which allegedly grew vegetables and raised livestock.

The usual cheap irony greeted us at the entrance: a faded portrait of Lenin and a tattered banner—“We Shall Witness the Victory of Communist Labor.” We drove down the long road to the farm center, its headquarters, its store, and its three-story concrete barracks. Everything looked abandoned, the fields, the road. Where had everyone gone? Certainly not into the fields. In the store, the shelves were bare of everything except some canned eggplant and pickled tomatoes.

“Most people go on the buses and buy food in Vologda,” the counterman said. “Probably they’re off in the city now.” And where does the food in Vologda come from? Why weren’t there any vegetables in the store here?

The counterman rolled his eyes. He explained patiently, as if to idiots, the problems on the farm. The ministry still hadn’t delivered seed. Wages were low, so no one wanted to work. They couldn’t get spare parts for the machinery. And so on for a half hour. “So you see,” he said, “there is no point.” The farmers and their families who were not in Vologda standing in grocery lines were in their concrete apartments. They all had televisions and they were all watching the same game show.

One member of the farm who showed both anger and initiative was a young man named Yuri Kamarov. He said that of the hundreds of people on the farm, he was the only one who thought the idea of giving some land back to the peasants would come to anything good. Everyone on the farm had parents and grandparents who had been jailed, starved, or deported for their dreams of ownership and prosperity. “I guess I’m the only true believer here, the only one,” Kamarov said. He was twenty-seven and dreamed of raising livestock and vegetables on a plot that was now little more than a swatch of mud and rubble. Every day after work, Kamarov worked alone, building a house for his wife and daughter. The neighbors came by sometimes and laughed. Others made threatening remarks about destroying his project. Kamarov was suffering from that terrible envy born of years of serfdom under czars and general secretaries, an envy embodied in a classic Soviet joke: A farmer’s cow dies, but a great spirit grants him one wish. And what is the wish? “Let my neighbor’s cow drop dead, too,” he says. Kamarov persisted, nonetheless. He took out a 24,000-ruble loan, which meant, he said, “I’m up to my eyeballs in debt for the rest of my life. That’s the gamble. Let them laugh. Maybe they’re right, and nothing will ever change,” the true believer said, “but it’s time I started living a real life, a life like my grandfather had long before the disasters began.” The legacy of collectivization was everywhere in the Soviet Union. In the Vologda region alone, there were more than seven thousand “ruined” villages, ghost towns of collapsing houses and untended land that had once been working farms. For decades, the young had been abandoning the wasted villages in droves, searching for a decent wage in the textile and machine-tool plants of Vologda. Like others before them, their search for the industrial utopia turned out to be fruitless. They found only miserable work in textile plants and lived in vast dormitories.

Edik and I spent a few days at one of the villages near Vologda, a row of two dozen houses called Spasskaya. Behind an abandoned church, the cemetery was filling up. Every six months or so, a workman arrived from the city, borrowed a shovel, and dug a grave. No one had been born in Spasskaya in twenty-five years. A prosperous village before the Revolution, it was now little more than a few collapsed cabins, a graveyard, and wheel ruts in the mud.

Mariya Kuznetsova, a stooped old woman with fierce, squinting eyes, spent her days tending her chicken coop and gossiping with her neighbors along the rails of a rotten pine fence. There were seventeen people left in Spasskaya. Once there had been hundreds. At seventy-five, Mariya was among the youngest. “On winter days,” she said, “we check the other houses. If there’s no smoke coming out of one of the chimneys it usually means another one of us is dead.” Mariya Kuznetsova said she lived on a pension of less than 3 rubles a day. Not long ago, before new pension levels were adopted, retired farmers got a ruble a day. Kuznetsova’s meals were mainly bread, milk, macaroni, cabbage soup, potatoes, and salted fat. If she needed to see a doctor or go to the store, she had to walk two miles down a road of mud and stones to catch a bus that “comes when it comes.” During the winter, when temperatures hit thirty and forty degrees below zero and the snow piled up, she said, “we are prisoners.” “We listen to the radio and hear all that talk about ‘Land for the Peasants’ and private farming, but who’s going to do the work?” she said. “Who is going to save the countryside? One generation should hand down what it knows and what it has collected to the next. But all that is broken. Everyone has long since left for the cities. The collective farms are a disaster. There’s nothing left. It’s all lost.” One of Kuznetsova’s neighbors, Anatoly Zamokhov, leaned out the window of his cabin and cackled viciously. He spit at the sound of the word Moscow. “I’ll tell you about Moscow,” he said, taking an angry drag on a foul cigarette. “Before the Bolsheviks, my parents and their parents lived decently. They weren’t rich—not by any means, God knows—but they had food and a cow and a table to call their own. We were all supposed to be one big family after collectivization. But everyone was pitted against everyone else, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Now look at us, a big stinking ruin. Now everyone lives for himself. No one visits anyone on Easter. What a laugh, what a big goddamn laugh.” During collectivization, people in Spasskaya told me, police crammed countless peasants into a complex of labor camps that was just north of the village. The police ripped the crosses and icons out of the churches and used the transepts and basements as holding cells. In the Vologda region, 25,000 children died in the churches over a three-month period. In a matter of a few years, an entire fabric of social relations, of village life, was in shreds. The “masters of the land” were suddenly servants of the state, stripped of their religion, their traditions, and their will.

The Bolshevik contempt for the peasant was rooted in the works of Lenin, who called them myelki khozyaichiki—roughly, “little landlords.” Before the Revolution, Solzhenitsyn has estimated, the peasantry constituted more than 80 percent of the Slavic population. Today, many of those “little capitalists” not already in mass graves, urban bunkers, or dying villages live in the “inter-nats,” state-run homes for the aged.

Not far from Spasskaya, about a hundred villagers lived at the inter-nat in the town of Priluki, near an abandoned monastery. The place was run by a well-intentioned, kind woman named Zoya Matreyeva. She and her small staff did what they could to keep the place clean, care for the sick and dying, and arrange decent burials when the time came. She had lived in the area for many years and said that the old people yearn only for the village life before the ruin began. Soviet and Western historians have described the harsh conditions, drunkenness, and bigotry of the prerevolutionary villages in such stark terms that it seems impossible for anyone to be nostalgic for them. Impossible, that is, until the surviving villagers describe what came afterward, in the early 1930s.

“We even have a few old Communist Party members here, people who worked half their lives and more on the collective farms, but you won’t find one who believes in collectivization,” Matreyeva said. “They talk about the cows and chickens they had, how it was theirs and they cared about it. Then it was all stripped away.” The inter-nat dining room was a dim place of buckled linoleum, fluorescent light, and Lenin’s portrait. The old women, plump and toothless, peasant scarves tied around their heads, shuffled to their seats. The men ate in a separate room, and there were only a few of them—nearly all the men in the area were killed in World War II. Each place was set with a bowl of soup, a tin spoon, and two small pieces of brown bread. Zoya Matreyeva, for forty years a loyal employee of the state, had a point she wanted to prove.

“Grandmothers!” she said. “Maybe you can tell our visitor about what you remember about the old days. The old days before you were on the collective farms.” The old women stopped stirring the sour cream into their soup and looked up. “These gigantic state farms killed the villages and put nothing in their place,” said one, and then they all began to chime in.

“Six of the families from our village were dragged away and we never saw them again.” “In my village, there were one hundred and twenty houses. Now there are ten, and the only people who live there now are people who use the houses on weekends to get out of the city. They garden, they don’t farm.” “I had to spend my life feeding something called the state. Now at least the state feeds me.” “My grandchildren wouldn’t know what to do with a piece of land. Even my own children have a hard time telling the difference between a horse and a cow. Are these the new ‘masters of the land’?” “One generation is supposed to show the next how to live. One generation is supposed to build something so the next can carry on. That was all cut off. Destroyed. Do they think you can rebuild that in a day? In five years?” After a while, the old women quieted down. In a way they seemed happy for a moment to have a visitor ask a question or two, but as the memories rushed forth, the women grew sullen and tired, and they ate.

MAGNITOGORSK

At the height of the Depression, John Scott, a young socialist from Philadelphia, decided to quit his academic work and join in the creation of what The Nation was then calling “the world’s most gigantic social experiment.” Scott arrived in Moscow in 1932, desperate to find a future that worked. Stalin’s bureaucrats promptly sent Scott, and hundreds of other young American socialists, to one of the “hero projects” of the first five-year plan, to “Magnetic Mountain,” the steel town of Magnitogorsk in the Urals.

In Magnitogorsk, Scott discovered a city that was one massive construction site: workers pulling eighteen-hour shifts, families living in tents and ramshackle barracks. The vast majority of the Soviet workers at Magnitogorsk had come not out of any ideological commitment to the “shining future” of socialism, but because they were forced to. Many of them had been peasant farmers, forced off their private plots during the collectivization campaign. Scott saw priests in their cassocks digging coal with picks and wheelbarrows, workers killed by falling girders. But in his memoir of working at Magnitogorsk between 1932 and 1938, Behind the Urals, Scott noenetheless remembered a “city full of vitality and life.… Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival.” Magnitogorsk became a legend of the war. Because it produced the steel for half of the tanks and one third of the artillery used to defeat the Nazis, people began referring to the mills as “Hitler’s grave.” But Magnitogorsk never stopped running on a wartime mentality. The ultimate bosses, the ministers in Moscow, measured success in sheer quantity. Never mind that other countries were beginning to produce modern steel alloys that brought the weight of a refrigerator down to a hundred pounds, not four hundred; never mind that pollution got so bad that the clouds of poison above the city decreased sunlight 40 percent. But the Lenin Steel Works, the biggest mill in the world, kept churning on in ignorant isolation. And always the command was “More steel!” “Magnitogorsk is a classic Stalinist city,” Aleksei Tuplin, a correspondent for the local paper, the Magnitogorsk Worker, told me. “We built an autonomous company town here that pushed away every cultural, economic, and political development in the civilized world. We existed, and still do exist, for the sake of a machine that doesn’t even work.” When Premier Aleksei Kosygin proposed a massive retooling project in the 1960s that would have put an end to Magnitogorsk’s antiquated open-hearth mills in favor of more efficient conversion techniques used elsewhere in the world since the 1950s, Brezhnev and the rest of the leadership pronounced the project too expensive. “All they ever wanted was more steel,” Dmitri Galkin, the plant director during the Brezhnev era, told me. “That’s all they ever cared about.” I stayed a week in Magnitogorsk as a guest of the city coroner, Oleg Yefremov. Oleg was in his early forties, and he had a smoker’s cough that plagued him without end. He did not smoke. He suffered, as did most of the citizens of Magnitogorsk, from the habit of breathing.

“I should quit inhaling,” he said.

We woke early and drove to the top of a hill to get a sense of the biggest company town I’d ever seen. The Lenin Steel Works stretched seven miles along the left bank of Factory Lake. The plant was in full operation day and night, grinding out sixteen million tons of steel every year. The smokestacks never stopped pumping poison, a sickly mix of yellow, gray, green, and bluish smoke that shifted in color, depending on the light. According to a report by the local environmental protection committee, the city’s industries dumped one million tons of pollution annually. “There’s four hundred and thirty thousand of us, so that means more than two tons for everybody,” said Yuri Zaplatkin, the committee’s chairman. Satellite pictures show that the mills have produced a zone of ruined air and soil 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. In winter, the snow was crusted black; in summer, the grass grew in sad, brownish tufts.

Oleg said that at one time or another in their lives, 90 percent of the children of Magnitogorsk suffered from pollution-related illnesses: chronic bronchitis, asthma, allergies, even cancers. The local environmental protection committee reported that birth defects in Magnitogorsk doubled between 1980 and 1990. At the city morgue, Oleg surveyed the morning’s corpses. A worker with collapsed lungs. A little girl dead from asthma, a weakened heart, or both.

Oleg lived on the “good side” of Magnitogorsk; the bad side being downwind from the plant, the “left bank.” One of the worst neighborhoods in the city was one of the oldest, Hardware Square. The air there was especially foul and gassy; you could taste the dust on your tongue. In room after room in one of the barracks, old women stared blankly out windows, children were as filthy as any street kid in the barrios of Lima. At eight o’clock in the morning at the health clinic on Hardware Square, groups of a dozen children got ultraviolet treatments and drank their daily “oxygen cocktails,” a viscous soup of fruit juice, herbs, and sugar infused with pure oxygen. Older patients came in just to take a few pulls from an oxygen tank.

Down the road at the steelworks’ own pulmonary ward, one of the doctors, Natalya Popkova, said that she had seen thousands of workers and their children who came in for a few days suffering from “what the plant provides us.” “The patients, all of them, become permanently angry at the mills,” she said. “They know why they are sick, but what choice do they have? Where can they go?” The apparatchiks who ran the mill and the city were masterful in the way they headed off any potential political conflicts with the work force. The mill owned everything in town, from the sewer system to the streetcars; the mill directors had an iron grip on food supplies and distribution of the goods they earned in barter deals with the West. When companies from West Germany or Japan offered televisions, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners in exchange for scrap metal, the bosses used the goods to bribe the workers. “We are a poor people,” said Viktor Seroshtanov, a judge in the municipal court. “If you throw us a little piece of meat, a VCR, something, we’ll be happy. In a way, the foreign companies that do business with the mill are contributing to a kind of colonial system.” When the Communist Party organization in the mill sensed there might be a strike coming in 1989, they tipped off the factory bosses, who quickly sold barrels of cheap beer to the workers. When the threat of strikes disappeared, so did the beer. “What am I supposed to do about it?” a mill worker named Viktor Oyupov told me. “Should I rebel and not eat? Then what?” The trap seemed inescapable, as inescapable as the system itself. For all the excitement in the big cities over glasnost and the new parliament, the great majority of the people in the Soviet Union felt trapped, cogs in a system that not only oppressed them, but also failed to provide a decent, minimal standard of living. “Our workers are soldiers, shock troops who serve a machine,” said Oleg Valinsky, a liberal member of the Magnitogorsk city council. “They wear the shoes the factory gives them. They kill themselves working and they go home. All the spirit is drained out of them. We created a city of robots.”