The worst class of elite
Raymond Asquith
DARKNESS AT DAWN: THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN CRIMINAL STATE by David Satter Yale, £22.50, pp. 314, ISBN 0300098928 The thesis for which this book submits evidence is that in the 10 years following the collapse of the Soviet state Russia has been taken over by a criminal business elite, its economic assets violently expropriated and its people so hammered and demoralised as to be eliminated from the machinery of political participation. It is written by a former Moscow correspondent of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and on first appearances looks like another in the 'I saw it happen' series. The chapters begin in a deliberately arm-tugging style CA light wind lifted the cellophane wrappers in front of the Kuznetsky Most metro station ...'), and the subject matter has been well worked over by the world's press. In fact this is a humane and articulate attempt to record the consciousness of ordinary Russians waking up to an unrecognisable historical reality for which they were wholly unprepared: the monsters they thought were nightmares had come to life.
Satter is concerned with the sheer mercilessness of the 'new Russian' caste and the criminalising effects on society of their instruments of coercion. He selects for illustration some notorious events from 1992 to the present day: the Kursk submarine disaster, several banking and realestate scams, the Yukos takeover of oil assets and the murder of the mayor of Nefteyugansk — the last a story repeated again and again in the 'privatisation' process. There are chapters on the regions, including Vladivostok (Nazdratenko's years of intimidation), Tolyatti/Sarnara (the criminal takeover of the Avtovaz car factory), and Krasnoyarsk (the Chernoy brothers of the foreign-registered TransWorld Group versus the equally unspeakable Bykov). He describes the rise of the Solntsevo gang, its control of much of Moscow's economy and immunity from international prosecution thanks to highlevel police subornment. He is personally convinced that the September 1999 apartment block bombings in Ryazan, Moscow
and elsewhere were the work of the Russian security services, not Chechen terrorists, and were designed to galvanise public support for a new war against Chechnya which in turn made Putin's election possible and preserved intact the positions of Yeltsin's oligarchs. Whether or not this is true or provable, Satter is not a conspiracy theorist: his research is balanced and his tone too thoughtful. Some may think he oversimplifies the history of the 'reform' process and the likelihood that a regulatory framework of commercial/ financial legislation could have been as quickly created as he assumes; but there's no doubting that the absence of such law, enforceable laws of contract in particular, is the precondition for criminal economic activity at a high political level and its percolation downwards, Satter is also dismissive of the argument (how often has one heard it?) that just as the Americans had their Rockefellers and Vanderbilts who eventually became respectable, the Russians must go through a comparably predatory stage of capitalism. In fact whatever the former did, they put their profits and cash to work again in the US economy: the first generation new Russians simply asset-stripped and took the money offshore. And the American courts were largely independent of the racketeers: Satter covers the extent of police corruption in the post-Soviet region, but omits to mention the judiciary. 'As much entrepreneurs as lawyers' is how one senior Ukrainian described his judges to me last year. His proposed solution was to engage in their place 1,000 British and Swedish judges, on increased salaries.
Satter's underlying theme is that the cost of all this to the Russian people cannot be measured by economic output statistics or asset managers' valuations: the breakdown in health, rising mortality and failing birth rates, spiritual exhaustion, mounting suicides or plain disappearances (the majority of the 20,000 Muscovites forced out of their apartment freeholds in the period 1992-97 are now presumed murdered) — these are signs of a society's desperation in the face of a state apparatus that simply disregards the value of human life. Unconcern for the individual's fate has been Russia's enduring curse, and Satter argues that following the collapse of Soviet ideology the individual has now to be sacrificed not to the state but to the exclusivity of private ownership for the few, with no legal or moral structures to mitigate the functioning of that system for its sole benefit. He is best at illustrating the microcosmic human tragedies that have resulted from what he calls the `criminalisation of consciousness': the admiring attitude towards explicit criminality and the notion that law is a flexible standard, its application to be determined according to economic and political status. There is not a chapter here that does not tell of some inhumanity or degradation. Though there are touches of grim humour — a spoof newspaper advertisement offering the services of an 'inexpensive killer' attracted an extraordinary response, including a woman who wanted to eliminate a neighbour who kept flooding her flat — there is barely a cheerful note in the book. Nonetheless it makes compelling reading: because it is constructed as a narrative of case histories and personal stories one is always in touch with some poignant, often harrowing facet of individual psychology or spiritual crisis.
The final, short chapter argues that Russia faces the possibility of dictatorship, economic collapse and depopulation. It's a skimpy argument that doesn't do the rest of the book much credit. One can recognise the dispiriting antecedents without subscribing to this forecast. To judge from some already observable indications (e.g. serious Russian capital is now returning from abroad and being put to work in the country; a new generation of real professionals, real companies is starting to shoulder aside the asset-strippers), the turmoil of Russian civil and spiritual life will find an equilibrium, given time and in the Russians' own manner. That apart, this is a mainly credible and in some ways understated record of rapacity against 'human honour and honesty' — and if the author doesn't suggest much hope at the moment for the latter, he has done good service in the witness box.
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