had provided cafeterias, kindergartens and sports facilities, and trade unions had organized holidays for their members. A whole way of making existence bearable was put in jeopardy.
Most people took shelter in the systems of mutual support that had helped them survive in the Soviet decades. Families and friends stuck together as they had always done. Cliental groups remained intact. The alternative was for individuals to take their chances on their own; but there was much risk so long as economic opportunities were outrageously unequal in society and political and judicial bias was flagrantly in favour of the rich and mighty. Limitations on freedom remained in Russian reality.
No greater limitation existed on life in general than conditions of employment. Wages fell far below the rocketing rate of inflation. Few Russian citizens could buy the imports of Western industrial products or even the bananas or oranges that had suddenly appeared in the kiosks. Workers in the factories and mines were lucky if they were paid at the end of the month. Teachers, doctors and often even civil servants suffered the same. Pensioners were treated abysmally. Privatization of state enterprises was accomplished by the issuance of vouchers for shares to all adults; but the vouchers lost value in the inflationary times. Directors tended to do much better than the other employees because of their inside knowledge. Some of the sting was removed from popular resentment by laws granting apartments to residents as private property; but building blocks fell into disrepair for want of continued finance by local authorities. Life remained hard for most people for bigger part of the decade and they coped by the well-worn methods of eking out a diet of bread and sausages, bartering their possessions and hoping that conditions would eventually improve. De-communization exhausted society.
Bit by bit, though, the situation eased somewhat. Staple foods in the shops increased in attractiveness and variety. Beer and vodka remained cheap; and breweries, distilleries and bakeries were among the most dynamic sectors of the consumer-oriented economic sectors. Basic clothes became more attuned to the aspirations of fashion.
Resistance to the general trends was therefore very weak. The labour movement, which had begun to arrest itself under Gorbachev, fizzled out after 1991. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions called for a general strike in October 1998 with uninspiring results.17 Across the economy the advantage remained on the side of the employers. Not every segment of Russian business went along with the policy of privatization. Notable opponents were the collective farm directors, who obstructed the government’s desire to break up the kolkhozes into small, privately owned farms. By the mid-1990s the number of such farms had stabilized at only a quarter of million.18 Most kolkhozes simply redesigned themselves as agricultural cooperatives with the same director in charge and the same workforce under him. The point was that very few rural inhabitants welcomed the chance to go it alone: credit facilities were poor and the supply of the necessary equipment and fuel was unreliable. Yet if the countryside with its demoralized and ageing population was predictably conservative in outlook, the towns too disappointed those radical reformers who had believed that the abolition of the Soviet political structures would induce mass support for rapid change.
Russians made the best of a bad situation, as they always had done. Their energies were given mainly to their domestic conditions. They practised their DIY skills. They gardened (and produced food for their own tables). They took up hobbies, bought pets and watched TV. Western popular culture — rock music, sport and pornography — flooded into the country.
This caused affront to the established cultural elite, but younger writers relished the change and wrote incisive commentaries on the blending of the old and the new in Russian society. The satirical novels of Victor Pelevin caused a stir; and the poignant ballads of Boris Grebenshchikov and his rock group Akvarium searched for meaning in Russian history from its origins to the present day.19 Two of Grebenshchikov’s stanzas ran as follows:20
The words reprise Soviet motifs of redness and the sickle. The old tsarist measure of length — the verst — is introduced. A still more ancient figure like the mythic Sirin (who was half-woman, half-bird) appears. The style brings together Soviet balladeering and the songs of Bob Dylan. The concern with Russian national themes was also favoured by novelists; and the film director Alexander Sokurov’s
Russians for two centuries had been accustomed to accepting moral guidance from their artists. Few young artists or poets felt comfortable about such a public role. The removal of the Soviet political and ideological lid decompressed the cultural order in Russia. Ideas of extreme diversity and experimentalism became the norm. Post-modernism flourished.
The intelligentsia in any case was losing its leverage on public opinion. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn ceased to be taken seriously. Returning from America in 1994, he was given a weekly show on TV; but his humourless sermons on the need to restore Orthodox Christian values were unpopular and he was taken off air. Writers in general found it hard to touch the hearts of their public. Meanwhile the national press was beset by problems with paper supply and with distribution facilities. Billionaires who bought newspapers seldom wanted columnists who subjected the new capitalism to a thorough critique. Intellectuals themselves were baffled by the nature of the changes since 1991. Many sought to make what they could out of the marketplace; they were ceasing to act as the conscience of the nation. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed expanded congregations in comparison with earlier years when persecution had been intense. But secularism proved to be a tenacious phenomenon and the clergy’s refusal to renew liturgy or doctrines restricted the possibility of appealing to people who had no prior knowledge of Christianity. Scientists and other scholars too lost prominence in public life as the struggle to earn their daily bread acquired precedence over involvement in politics. The Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow retained its old prestige but without the former impact.
The government sought to fill the media with its vision of Russia. The attack on communism continued but patriotism was more increasingly emphasized. Electoral disappointments indicated that a gap had widened between official policies and popular expectations. Chernomyrdin was no man of ideas and had no inkling about how to regain the trust of Russians. His remedy in July 1996 was to announce a competition, with a $1,000 prize (which was more than two years’ wages for an office worker at the time), to answer the question: ‘What is Russia?’ The search was on for a fresh definition of ‘the Russian idea’. Hundreds of diverse entries appeared in the governmental newspaper. If Chernomyrdin was baffled before posing the question, he was just as confused when he read the attempted answers. The winner, philologist Guri Sudakov, offered bland words about Motherland and spirituality.22 Meanwhile Russians elsewhere went on disputing the whole topic with their usual gusto and there was never any prospect of a broad consensus.
The pluralism in culture high and low testified to the vivacity of Russian society below the carapace fixed upon it by the political and economic authorities. This vivacity had existed before Gorbachev’s
