Two Nations
By Sergei Roy,
Editor, guardian-psj.ru

When Lenin came to Great Britain early in the twentieth century, he was so struck by the disparity between the living standards, life styles, and even speech of the privileged and the underprivileged that he is said to have muttered glumly, “Two nations.” As if he had had to travel all that far to observe such disparity; if anything, it was even harsher in his native land.

I was reminded of the Lenin dictum the other day as I listened to Mikhail Zadornov, arguably Russia’s most acerbic satirist these days, address Ukrainians: “Look, guys, whatever you may say, Russians and Ukrainians are one people ­ and our rulers are another.”

Indeed, the gap between the rulers and the ruled, the privileged and the underprivileged, whether in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, or any other post-Soviet country, is there and widening ­ so much so that it does not even need fine statistical analyses of the incomes of the top few and the bottom many. It is obvious to the naked eye and, perhaps even more so, to the naked ear.

What are the top strata talking and writing about? What are the so curiously called “pundits” concerned with, both in Russia and beyond? Just watch Johnson’s Russia List. The debate is dominated by such exciting issues as who is going to run Russia now that Putin is going out (sort of) and Medvedev is stepping in (sort of ­ in spades); will it be a diarchy or whatever the hell the opposite of diarchy might be; how much of the power blanket will Putin pull over to his side; will Medvedev usher in a new, more liberal era in Russia, or will the siloviki clan cramp his style, after all; and a great deal more in the same vein. Most of the debate has for its source nothing more substantial than the pundits’ observation of the expression of various VIP noses on TV screens and their own innate prejudices.

Oh, I nearly forgot. The whole talking and writing world was in tizzy over the rumor that Putin was secretly divorced and planning to marry the rhythmic gymnast whatshername in June, after Medvedev’s inauguration. “Half his age,” was the most oft-repeated phrase. One of the more febrile minds came up with the conspiracy theory that it was all a canard planted in the Moscow paper no one had previously heard of by the siloviki in their incessant war on the liberals.

What are most papers and talking heads on Russia’s TV screens full of ­ meaning the expression literally, not what the reader may be inclined to think? The past week, it was all about the Ninth Congress of the United Russia party and Putin’s acceptance of the leadership thereof, and how it will increase his political weight and give him greater political stature ­ as if he did not have enough, and to spare, of both.

Lastly, what has the president elect, now in constant limelight, been talking about? By now, everyone has learned his spiel by heart: innovation-based economy, nanotechnology, a revolution in the matter of housing ­ moving Russia’s population from cramped, crumbling or excruciatingly expensive urban apartments to suburban homes. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Additionally, he curries favor with the masses by blaming practically all of Russia’s ills on the bureaucracy ­ as if he hasn’t been a highly important cog in the bureaucratic wheel practically all his sentient life.

These are the things happening or rather being talked about in the Big World up there. Now, let’s shift, with a bit of a jerk perhaps, down to the Little World where we little Russians live. What are we talking about in our kitchens? Nanotechnology? Innovative economy? United Russia’s congress? Putin’s new political weight and stature? Diarchy? Preparations for the coming Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014? Forgive us if we merely blink at the sound of these sonorous phrases. Forgive us for feeling too bewildered by our daily life’s incongruities.

Nearly forgot again. There was some mild interest in the Putin-gymnast story, but it quickly fizzed out when a member of that paper’s staff had a Raskolnikov-type attack of remorse and told all, mostly in four-letter Russian ­ how the deadline for putting the paper to bed was drawing nearer and they still had nothing to put in a big blank spot on the front page and the booze in the newsroom was flowing freely until one of the more fertile, vodka-inspired minds came up with the Putin-gymnast wheeze. Sordid but highly predictable. Besides, it goes under the heading of circenses, while the masses here are more concerned with the panem department right now.

The price of bread and milk, to mention just two of the staples, is rising inexorably. We understand all about biofuel replacing more useful crops, say, in Brazil, but would someone please explain to us little Russians how is it that a country that possesses 52 percent of the entire world’s black-earth soil cannot produce enough grain to keep the bread prices stable? Why must we import meat from Poland ­ contaminated meat that was found to have been produced God knows where and palmed off on us by the enterprising Poles? Why must we import chicken legs from the U.S. while closing down our own poultry farms?

The list of these whys is endless, the most bewildering of them perhaps being, Why does Finance Minister Kudrin invest Russia’s oil billions in American loss-making, practically bankrupt real estate companies and in U.S. securities while the dollar is in freefall? Why not invest those billions in Russia’s agriculture and roads?

Ah, those roads… Russia’s hundred-year-old wisdom has it that its two greatest ills are fools and roads, duraki i dorogi. Put more accurately, fools in power and the state of the ruts that pass for roads hereabouts. The influx of Anglicisms into Russian since the fall of the Iron Curtain has changed “fools and roads” to “management and infrastructure.” Do we really need nanotechnology to do something about these two?

Moscow has several radio stations devoted almost entirely to traffic jams; from time to time the entire traffic just freezes ­ yet none of the most obvious measures to combat this ill are taken. Heavy-duty trucks and trailers fill the streets in the daytime; no special lanes for public transport are set apart; and, most gallingly, whenever some picayune politician or bureaucrat travels by car ­ and you may bet they never use the Metro ­ traffic policemen stop everything in sight to let them whiz by unhindered. What would Lenin have to say ­ two nations again?

Tell you what. In about 1994 or 1995 I wrote a similar piece for the Moscow Magazine, entitled “The Mercedes Class and the Metro People,” if memory serves. Since then we have been through a flourishing bandit capitalism, with the country ruled by The Family and an oligarchic camarilla intent on stealing everything in sight before turning the land into a series of western colonies; then the tide turned, the biggest thieves had their toes trodden on and were replaced by a more patriotically minded bunch, for which the Russian people heartily thank God ­ and Putin. But­ but ­

Here you can start reading from the top again, always bearing in mind that the ills I have mentioned above are a mere fraction of all the things that divide Russia’s society into extremely unequal, disparate parts. There’s also all-pervading corruption, abuse of power by anyone having power, from the nearest traffic cop and your housing management all the way up to governors, judges, deputies, and such. There’s all-pervading boozing that snuffs out each year twice as many lives as the Soviet Union lost in the ten years of the Afghan War. No innovative economy or nanotechnology will help beat these “enemies of the people,” if you will pardon the expression.

Sadly, our president elect seems to be encapsulated in that Big World where fine-sounding words like “innovation-based economy” and “nanotechnology” hold the promise of working miracles and building a brave new world practically overnight. This has been tried before, you know, with beautiful words about eliminating exploitation of man by man and building a society based on equality and absolute justice for all, to wit, communism. We know, don’t we, where that enticing verbiage has led to.

There is just one solution for the quandary we are all in right now ­ for the people inhabiting the Big World to take into account our myriad little worlds, and somehow make an effort to bring them closer together and perhaps even intersect, not run along parallel lines that Prof. Lobachevsky tells us intersect only somewhere in infinity. For starters, they might whisper to the traffic cops not to stop all traffic to free the roads for their limos; maybe spend a quiet hour or two or three in a traffic jam; something might get done about these last, then.

That would be a real innovation ­ and no need to throw away billions of rubles on nanotechnology to achieve it.