Just as I cannot get used to the new Russian obsession with glamur, so I cannot quite get used to the country’s new relationship with money. It is not as if people did not have money while I was growing up. But it meant different things in a society ideologically opposed to capitalism, a society that waged what sociologist Alla Chirikova called ‘the seventy-year war against money’. Whether the top echelons were stuffing their cash in pillowcases or depositing them in secret Swiss bank accounts, the Party line was abundantly clear. In the Soviet cosmology money stood for an artificial and temporary form of economic and social relationship that was bound for extinction the closer we moved to a pure form of Communist society, to the great era of ‘from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs.’ This was ideological candy floss, of course (the ‘true believers’ were all but gone by the time I was born into the maligned era of ‘late socialism’), but it was not entirely at odds with the real world outside the Party assembly halls. Plumbers, fitters, carpenters, television repairmen or dental technicians could easily earn double their official wages ‘on the side’, to say nothing of shop assistants or retail managers who had access to rare commodities that everyone else wanted and, thus, could divide and conquer at their leisure. But for the countless employees of government-owned enterprises with fixed wages and ‘no additional sources of income’, money was not really the blood flowing in the veins of the economic system.
Yet just imagine for a moment that you were neither a Party operator nor a retail shark, just an ordinary person who happened to have a bit of dough. (Let us leave for a second the all-important question of where this money came from.) Say the roubles were protruding from your pocket and practically burning a hole in it. You were ready and willing to spend. In the West, nothing would prevent you from doing so, at least when we are talking about standard consumer goods (as opposed to, say, enriched uranium). But in an economy of undersupply, based around the idea of constant shortages, there flourished a whole world of endangered consumer species, from staples such as toilet paper and mayonnaise through more complex propositions such as winter coats or fashionable shoes to über-goods such as furniture or electronics. The presence of money was only a first step. Even if you won a lottery, you still had to go to the right place, knock on the right door, find the right person and say the right words. You still had to stand in queues. Yes, the queues. Contemporary writer Vladimir Sorokin defined the centrality of the now defunct queue culture in the USSR this way:
People stood in line for everything, for bread, sugar, nails, news of an arrested husband, tickets to Swan Lake, furniture, Komsomol vacation tours. In communal apartments people waited in line for the toilet. In overcrowded prisons people queued up for a turn to lie down and sleep. According to statistics, Soviet citizens spent a third of each day standing in lines.
And once made, the purchase itself was not the final step in the complex chain of consumption. More often than not, the purchased item still had to be altered, refashioned, readjusted, taken in or exchanged for some other precious item. Even when it came to paying bribes, that most normalised form of social exchange, consumer products and services were used much more frequently than worn-out notes in sealed envelopes. In other words, who you knew mattered more than how much money you had. The economy of my childhood and adolescence was best represented not by the traffic of money between consumers and goods and services, but by a complex web of contacts, exchanges, favours and black-market transactions. ‘In the society, where life was regulated not by monetary but specifically by status exchange,’ writes renowned philologist Revekkah Frumkina, ‘people with “non-convertiable” status – a university researcher or a librarian – had no choice but to scour the shops in search of the simplest things.’
Because both of my parents worked with their heads, as did most of their friends, money played a secondary role in our lives and, from what I am beginning to understand now, was a source of deep ambivalence. In families such as ours, talking about money – let alone about the open and active pursuit of wealth – was a clear-cut form of vulgarity. Doing something ‘for the money’ made sense as an inevitable sacrifice for the sake of survival or your family’s wellbeing, not as a conscious choice in the presence of other legitimate choices. ‘It’s just money,’ we said, meaning, Can we please talk about something that really matters now!
Things have changed profoundly since those (metaphorically) golden times. My family left before the 1990s, before the triumphant return of Money as the Universal Idea. We left before Moscow became the city with the largest number of billionaires in the world, and before politicians and social scientists began to speak about the Market not simply as the most ‘natural’ economic organisation of a democratic society, but as a universal language applicable for all spheres of social and cultural life. Philosopher Natalya Zarubina says that, with time, money in the new Russia (ergo, many other broken-off chunks of the Soviet empire) became uncoupled from the traditional Western view of the self-regulating market economy as the most universal and adequate form of social organisation and a guarantee of social stability. Money came to be seen, in the words of novelist Victor Pelevin, as ‘the substance from which the world is made’. Pelevin’s work has achieved a cult following in his native Russia; one of those writers who are routinely described as a ‘phenomenon’. Whatever you think of the man – and he is undoubtedly burdened with considerable literary gifts – the man understands the Zeitgeist. Zarubina echoes Pelevin. Today in Russia, she says, money is seen as a force of nature or as one of its elements – irrational, erupting, unstoppable, primal.
This refashioning and unleashing of Money as a force of nature have unfolded against a series of catastrophic economic crises of the 1990s that people today recall as a benchmark of survival. Economic reforms introduced by Yeltsin under the banner of ‘shock therapy’ were brutal. By mid-1993, as Susan Richards points out in her memoir Lost and Found in Russia, more than forty per cent of Russians were living in poverty, as opposed to a mere 1.5 per cent five years before. Inflation made the rouble completely worthless, prices continued to rise remorselessly, industry and commercial enterprises were collapsing. Rapid and comprehensive privatisation of State enterprises presented an irresistible opportunity for graft. Opportunistic bosses, in concert with senior Party officials, the criminal underclass and the newly emerging oligarchs, were able to take control of colossal sums of money and precious raw materials.
The newly installed owners and heads of various business structures, instead of reinvesting their first profits in their businesses as any business textbook would tell them to do, chose to dress their families in fur and diamonds, and send them vacationing on Greek islands. The workers went unpaid for months; the productivity and contracts evaporated with varying speeds, but the bosses did not care. They thought that this was capitalism and they were bona fide capitalist sharks. ‘Between 1991 and 2000,’ Richards notes, ‘it is reckoned that $1 billion was secreted out of Russia every month.’ Freedom, it seems, ‘had brought nothing but poverty, corruption, confiscatory privatisation and criminality’. It also brought the emergence of the deepest divisions within the society, a civic dissolution of sorts. As Richards, a British correspondent in Russia, saw it, the leaders of post-Soviet society, whether in the Kremlin or the stock exchange or the university, failed to establish the institutions of an open society. (To which many Russians, gazing cynically on the West’s own perfectly executed reverse-somersault-and-pike into the muddy waters of the post-Soviet democracy project might reply, ‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’)