As a result of this, I have my own theory about the deaths on Kutuzovsky: the theory of the Elite Road. This is the official name for the highways that go from the Kremlin to the West of Moscow, including Rublyov Highway, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Novy Arbat Street. The traffic police divisions which serve there are also described thus: the Elite Division of the Elite Battalion on the Elite Highway. I don’t know whether the personnel also have special titles – ‘Elite Major’ or ‘Elite Colonel’ – but they certainly have an air about them of fulfilling a special role for the state. In reality, this is the most important road in the country, and it is there not for the convenience of the public, but so that the country’s leaders can have a safe passage from the pine trees of Barvikha (just outside Moscow and chosen by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s), to the centres of power: the White House (seat of the Russian government); Okhotny Ryad (the State Duma); Old Square (the Presidential Administration); and the Kremlin. This is why you won’t find any lorries on this road; there are no traffic lights, nor are there police ambushes with speed traps. And that’s also why there’s a central lane down the middle of the road reserved for the leaders’ cars, but no central reservation – the main reason behind the head-on collisions and deaths.
The central lane on Kutuzovsky Prospekt is one of the main symbols and institutions of Russian power in the Moscow ‘vanity fair’. This is where you measure your worth; it all depends on your elite number plate and your elite pass. Specially chosen traffic police are there not so much to keep an eye on road safety as to ensure that the hierarchy of the state can travel along their central lane. Ford Focus cars with number plates in the series eKX and xKX (the FSO and the Federal Security Service (FSB)) travel along this lane quietly and without fuss; important limousines glide past with the numbers aMP and aMM (senior policemen) and aMO (the Moscow Mayor’s Office); numbers from the ‘commercial’ series oOO and kKK zip by, carrying bankers with their guards in their Mercedes G-class four-by-fours; occasionally, a Mercedes with blacked-out windows will fly past, with the regional code 95 (for Chechnya). The inspector filters all traffic using the central lane with an eagle eye: he salutes the leadership, waves through those whose rank permits its use and stops any others daring to use the lane to check on their status and see whether they have had the audacity to break the traffic regulations.
The privileged lane illustrates the vertical of power, which has become a horizontal servility. It is the old Russian class society with its table of ranks spelled out in the letters of the elite number plates; it is Russian feudalism in all its glory.[7] It is just like in seventeenth-century Paris, when cavalcades of horsemen with torches charged around the streets accompanying noble carriages, knocking over traders’ barrows and pushing those on foot back against the walls – ‘Make way for the King!’. Since that time, France has experienced the Enlightenment, revolution, the execution of the monarch, the Napoleonic Code and five republics. The class system has been dismantled and the principle has been established of equality for all before the law; including when it comes to traffic. In Russia, however, the seventeenth century continues, as if there had never been the new times, or the right to life, property and justice; and the way in which you travel around is determined exclusively by your class standing and how close you are to the body of the sovereign.
When the leadership travels along Kutuzovsky it is not just the central lane that is closed off, but all traffic. The Prospekt freezes in a ninety-minute-long court ritual, and the cortège of dozens of cars screams past on the wrong side of the road under the silent gaze of the people sitting in the traffic jam: the patient bosses who are a rank lower; ambulances with their blue lights flashing; and the common people in their cars. Once in the summer I became fed up waiting in the left-hand lane, turned off my engine and got out of my car, stepping into the central lane. In the distance I could see a swarm of coloured flashing lights, and when the cortège drew close I fell to my knees and crossed myself with a sweeping gesture.[8] This earned me a couple of approving beeps on the horn and thumbs-up from some of my fellow sufferers. The reality is that Kutuzovsky Prospekt reveals the whole reality of the Middle Ages in which our oil monarchy lives; its hypocrisy, and its disdain for the law and for the ordinary people. Here horsepower multiplied by power and money allow any excesses; here the right of the powerful to break the law is taken to the extreme, sanctified by flashing lights and elite passes. And all of this is protected by a special police department.
But this permissiveness leaks into the lower orders of society; many of them start to travel at speeds of 100, 120, or 150 kilometres per hour, taking advantage of the width of the lanes, the perfectly smooth asphalt and the almost total absence of any speed control. And the offspring of the wealthy consider it their duty to go tearing along Kutuzovsky at night at speeds of more than 200 kilometres an hour, and bikers go at more than 250. What begins as the imposing procession along the central lane of the boss with the blue light flashing ends with nighttime races along this prestigious Prospekt and horrific traffic accidents.
At some time in the future, they will grass over the central lane along Kutuzovsky Prospekt and construct a central reservation. They will place a number of speed cameras along it, and it will be possible to travel past these shiny windows and impressive façades without fearing for one’s life. But that will happen in a different, parallel and more human Russia. Until then, the elite highway, which was built not for the people but for the powerful ones who live in their world, will continue to maim and to kill, turning power and oil into death in this ruthlessly accurate model of the Russian state.
AN ODE TO SHUVALOV’S DOGS
If Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. With his name, which makes him sound like a count, and his castle in Austria; with his London apartment on Whitehall in the former home of MI6, and his ancestral estate on the site of the dacha of the chief ideologue of the Soviet regime, Mikhail Suslov; with his million-dollar Rolls-Royce and his pair of Corgis (the same breed of dog as the Queen has!), which he whisks around the world in his private jet to take part in dog shows. He is a walking cargo-cult,[9] a distillation of the post-Soviet transit.
Sometimes it seems as if the Shuvalov project is some kind of PR provocation, a bomb underneath the existing authorities, a modern Russian Marie-Antoinette with her ‘Let them eat cake’ – a catalyst for the people’s wrath. In actual fact, of course, it is not like that at all. There will be no revolution; no heads will roll off the block; and instead of the people’s wrath there are humorous posts on the Internet. All the exposure of corruption by the opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, disappears into the quicksand of Russian society, which is both cynical and apathetic, respecting strength and power over the law and morality. Memes and cartoons about Shuvalov’s dogs are posted and shared by hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, while the rest of the country looks on with indifference, ruled by the inescapable saying among the people, ‘He does it because he can’.
7
In 1722, Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, which carefully delineated the standing of everyone in the military, government and court. ‘Feudalism’ in Russia effectively lasted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
9
A cargo cult is a belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society.