#7
New York Times
December 15, 2001
Novelist Chronicles the Intrigues of the New Moguls
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

PEREDELKINO, Russia, Dec. 14 -- In the quiet snow of this old writers' community, Yuliya Latynina is at home working on her next novel. The window of her small second- story room opens out onto a birch grove and the house of Boris Pasternak, now a museum.

The rustic Russian idyll is marred only by the red brick castles encircled by high walls and security cameras just down the road. These brash newcomers to the neighborhood are the homes of the "new Russians," nouveaux riches who made it big in the decade of Wild East "bizness" that followed the fall of Communism.

Ms. Latynina, 35, reflexively shy but extremely well-connected in those business circles, says her highbrow writer neighbors were furious with the new "bandits" in town.

"But I know several of them," Ms. Latynina said, smiling. "They're not bandits at all. They're businessmen."

A journalist, she picked up her nuanced understanding of Russia's economic vernacular while traveling the country in the last six years, writing news articles about an economy in free fall.

Her candid accounts of the intrigues among business moguls have won her awards for best business journalism, and two television shows. But it is her five novels, her readers say, that reveal the most about the new Russia.

She prefers writing economic thrillers to news stories, saying that by wrapping fiction around facts and real people, she can tell the real story behind Russia's often misleading appearance.

That is why the business and political elite read her avidly, although many average Russians, far from the wealth and conspiracies she chronicles, do not. Her colleagues call her eccentric. Pundits call her astute. Her interview subjects call her extremely disloyal.

"She has a rare ability to see in real life what average people don't see," said Andrei Illarionov, economic advisor to President Vladimir V. Putin. "In time Russian business will act in absolutely civilized ways, and this slice of life will be lost. For certain epochs people read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. For this epoch people will read Latynina."

A former student of medieval Europe, the diminutive Ms. Latynina draws on her knowledge of history to explain modern-day Russia: a lawless land with a dilapidated central government controlled by feudal lords and their bandit armies.

Her Russia is lurid and brutal, a place where the local police receive their wages from business moguls, sex with the boss is obligatory for secretaries, and nuclear scientists subsist as hunters after months without salaries.

Everything — absolutely everything — is for sale.

In "Stag Hunting," her novel about the takeover of a Siberian metal plant in the mid-1990's, a devoutly Communist factory director is heard early on in a poignant lament about "bizness" in Russia.

"I don't know how it happens," says the character, Danil Fyodorovich Senchyakov, who is trying to save a defunct helicopter plant. "I don't steal, and my factory is paralyzed. You steal, and your factory is working. I want my factory to work."

That complaint, voiced to a rich young capitalist, captures the contradictions of post-Communist Russia. By Page 46, Mr. Senchyakov is on the payroll of his nemesis, the capitalist.

Like a textbook for newcomers to Russian business, "Stag Hunting" has footnotes with real-life examples and a useful appendix detailing how the fictitious factory launders its money to avoid tax inspectors and, when necessary, bribe politicians.

Some have even used it as an instruction manual.

Ms. Latynina, who cut her teeth as a novelist on four science fiction books, is a living contrast to the carousing, Mercedes-driving characters of her economic fiction.

Unlike many of her sources, she has not amassed a fortune, although her existence is comfortably middle class. She does not drink or smoke. She shuns fashionable gatherings and, in a world of huge egos, does not like to talk about herself.

Her mother is a well-known literary critic and her father a poet, and she lives with them in a rambling wooden house in this village just outside Moscow, where in Soviet times the government housed favored writers to sit and ruminate amid the birch trees and the snow.

In her news stories she holds Russia's business moguls, known as the oligarchs, accountable for stealing from the state and wreaking economic havoc.

Her books, several of which feature an amused intellectual woman watching the antics of men, tell a different story. She contradicts the common outsiders' view that government has led economic change here and argues that those venal businessmen have in fact driven it.

Her government officials are uniformly self-interested and a large drag on Russia's economy.

"Oligarchs are a much better force for liberal reforms than bureaucrats," she said.

Times are indeed changing. Business is adopting clearer rules, contract killings are harder to cover up, reputations are being established and valuable government-owned companies now are sold for market prices. Ms. Latynina says she will chronicle all this in her next novel, and credits straightforward logic for the shift.

"People who in the first stage devoured as much as they could now are taking care that no one devours what they have," she said. "Now we've reached a stage when they are saying, `We want honest rules of the game.' People are weighing the consequences of their actions. Those who did not are in graves with Mercedes symbols on their tombstones."