At Heathrow, because they had arrived from Vienna not Moscow, there was a small delay as officials sorted out the paperwork. Mila and Mervyn stood briefly on different sides of the barrier. But soon they were on their way, collecting their luggage, pushing their trolley through the arrivals hall along with the other travellers.
Mila and Mervyn had spent more than half a decade living for a future they only half-believed would ever arrive. Now they were finally reunited, it was time to face another challenge – the unheroic one of dealing with the present, and of living with each other as real human beings.
But that was all a beat in the future. Mervyn and Mila, my parents, had won their battle to be together, against the most formidable odds their times could range against them. This was their moment. The moment I imagine when I think of my parents at their best and boldest; two young people contra mundi, their love all-conquering, alone at last and together after all the efforts of the world to keep them apart.
14. Crisis
He is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away.
When I think of it now, hearing someone mention it on the radio or seeing the dateline in a paper, Moscow conjures a sense of wilderness, of the wreckage of expended energy. I left after the great bubble of the 1990s had imploded, and the hangover was at its deepest, the pendulum back at its midway low point between an infatuation with wild capitalism and what proved to be a deeper longing for authority and order.
The unruly but free Russia which Boris Yeltsin had created began to topple in the summer of 1998. I was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine by then, doing a very different job than the one I had done at the Moscow Times. Instead of searching the city for tales of the underworld, I was driven from Duma to Ministry in a blue Volvo, and wrote wise and excruciatingly polished articles about high politics.
In my new capacity I had a grandstand view of the unravelling of the old order. Nervousness was mounting in the impeccably carpeted corridors of the White House, the seat of Russia’s government. Deputy premier Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s leading reformer, insisted that everything would be fine and scribbled spidery graphs all over my notepad to prove his point. Tax chief Boris Fyodorov, the reformers’ heavyweight bruiser, gabbled about the irreversibility of Russia’s reforms with a manic energy. But in all the government offices I visited the smiles were rigid, the confidence forced. Everyone feared, deep down, that sometime, very soon, the whole rotten edifice would come crashing down. It was time for a reckoning after all the years of asset-stripping, embezzlement and theft which the country’s new masters had unleashed – and when it came, it would be cataclysmic.
The first signs that the end was near appeared in Moscow as miners from across the country set up a picket of the White House and invaded the Duma, pounding their helmets on the pavements of the capital and the marble banisters of the parliament. You could hear the hourly tattoo of dull drumming from inside the White House. It sounded like distant thunder beyond the tinted, Swiss-made windows.
In St Petersburg Yeltsin emerged from hospital to bury the remains of the last Tsar and his family, murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918. I sneaked into the Peter and Paul Cathedral with a group of Romanov mourners, admitted because I alone among the journalists present had thought to wear a black suit and tie. There was a moment of intense pathos as the undersized coffins containing the family’s bones were brought to the altar. Yeltsin, wooden and swaying slightly, intoned a speech which claimed that Russia had come to terms with its past. I had always been a fervent admirer of Yeltsin, but now he seemed a tragic figure, a tottering bear of a man lost in a maze of corruption and as bewildered as his people by the superhuman forces of capitalism that he had unleashed. The parallels between the mistakes that led Russia’s last monarch to his sordid death and the seismic tremors gathering under Yeltsin’s own regime were painfully clear.
Moscow’s nightlife took on a strange intensity. Like rattlesnakes who feel earthquakes brewing deep in the bowels of the earth, the party people were seized with frenzy. Wherever the doomed rich gathered, in Galereya, the Jazz Café, Titanic, you could catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, through the dry ice and the strobes, of a phantom hand writing on the wall – ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
Supernatural warnings of apocalypse came biblically, with a blight which wiped out much of Russia’s potato harvest and incessant August rains which flattened the wheat fields, spelling disaster for the huge numbers of Russians reduced to subsistence agriculture to survive while the government withheld their wages. A freak storm toppled the golden crosses from the domes of the Novodevichy Convent and broke the crenellations from the Kremlin wall. Lightning struck the Russian flag which flew from the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace. Even NTV television became an unwitting mouthpiece of the Armageddon, scheduling The Omen and its sequels on successive weekends. Russia’s babushkas, the country’s pathologically pessimistic watchers of signs and portents, clucked knowingly.
Then the deluge came with the ferocity of a natural disaster. After a panic meeting on the evening of 16 August 1998, the government devalued the ruble and defaulted on all Russia’s domestic and international debt repayments, destroying the stock market and wiping two-thirds off the value of the ruble in a single, disastrous week.
The new bourgeoisie, who before the crisis were planning their winter package holidays in Antalya, scuffled in crowds outside failing banks as they scrambled to recover their savings. All the old, savage reflexes of self-preservation surged back. Moscow housewives who thought that they could at least ‘live like people’ (as the Russian saying goes) scooped expensive macaroni off the shelves of Western supermarkets in a desperate bid to spend their fast-devaluing rubles. Their poorer counterparts emptied the city’s markets of siege-goods such as matches, flour, salt and rice.
The half-forgotten mental furniture of peasant nakhodchivost, or resourcefulness, was dusted down and thrown into the breach. Newspapers began publishing home economics tips with headlines like ‘Which foods can be stored for longest?’, advising readers not to stock up on frozen meat in case of power cuts. Harassed shop assistants at the Moscow branch of British Home Stores abandoned the price tags and added up the rapidly escalating ruble prices on calculators. The luxury boutiques in Moscow’s vulgarly opulent Manezh shopping mall looked like a museum of the old regime.
Within two months, the devastation was complete. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I felt that Moscow had become darker as the autumn of 1998 set in, physically darker, underlit, as though the flashy neon heart of the city was fading away. I called my landlady to say I was going to unilaterally halve the rent on my $1,500 a month apartment. She sighed in relief that I was not leaving, and thanked me.
I went to a lot of leaving parties thrown by my expatriate friends, who suddenly found their stock portfolios had evaporated and business models imploded. One was thrown at the Starlite Diner by a glamorous, silicone-chested Californian girl who had marketed Herbalife across the Russian provinces. She had hired a troupe of tragicomically inept Russian circus performers who danced on broken glass and pushed skewers through their cheeks for our entertainment. Someone played the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ and ‘Money’ by Abba on the jukebox.