A NORMAL LIFE

By RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI TRANSLATED BY KLARA GLOWCZEWSKA

Once again in Moscow after three years. First impression: the city looks better. I tell this to my Moscow friends. They are pleased. The Russians set great store by how foreigners view them. In their opinions they seek the answer to one of the most fundamental Russian questions, which recently was freshly formulated by the excellent Russian essayist Natalya Ivanovna: "Will Russia join 'the civilized world,' or will it continue along its separate path, which even today is deemed perilous by other nations?"

In the course of the past decade, the city has lived through three different epochs. First, that of perestroika and glasnost. At that time, in the second half of the 1980s, Moscow was transformed into a huge debating club, into a unique, peculiar Hyde Park. For the first time, there was freedom of speech. One could finally talk, express opinions. And one could write the truth. Dozens of newspapers and periodicals appeared; the print runs of even exclusively literary monthlies were in the millions. People bought these things, read them, collected them. Today in the cramped, cluttered apartments of intellectuals, against walls, on windowsills, on top of closets, lean stacks of dusty clippings and books from that era, like so much abandoned and sad-looking military debris in a field where a battle was once fought.

Then came the second period--the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism's first steps. People in the West are surprised that so many Russians don't like capitalism. But there is nothing extraordinary about this. The capitalism that came to Russia at the start of the 1990s looked different from the one constructed in Europe several centuries ago. The capitalism of Holland or Switzerland was laboriously created by the industrious and thrifty bourgeois of Rotterdam or Geneva, for whom perseverance, honesty and modesty were religious commandments, acts of faith.

But the advance guard of the capitalism that arrived in Moscow was armies of speculators, barons of the black market, gangs of drug dealers, armed, aggressive racketeers, brutal, ruthless, powerful mafias. People were terrified. It is not capitalism per se but the form in which it first appeared that supplied Communists with fresh followers. I remember walking around Moscow with my friend Syoma. The city was cold and dirty. One could easily break one's leg because the sidewalks, uncleared for months, were covered with mountains of ice. The squares and the streets near train and subway stations overflowed with vendors peddling rubbish, anything to make a living. In the clumsy stalls were bottles of whiskey, packs of chewing gum, piles of sunglasses. That is what the new regime offered the citizens of this great but impoverished city. Syoma, depressed and resigned, told me how twice he had tried to open a small shop and twice had to give up in the face of the mafia's demands, which he was unable to satisfy. He barely got away with his life! This dark and dangerous epoch came to an end in the fall of 1993 with the dramatic and bloody confrontation at the pinnacle of power between the President and the Parliament.

That event marks the beginning of the present epoch of slow, difficult and still shaky stabilization. Shaky, because Russia is waging a war in Chechnya, the Communists are still powerful, and the country's industrial production has fallen 50% in recent years. Yet at the same time, something has changed in Moscow. The city is better maintained. There are more streetlights. The mounds of garbage have disappeared. Gone too are the lines that constituted an inescapable and depressing feature of the urban landscape. Perhaps most striking is the restoration of pre-Soviet Moscow. Many palaces and town houses from that time survived, but in a state of total decrepitude, hopeless ruination. Now they are covered with scaffolding; there is reconstruction, mending, painting. The work is being done largely by foreign firms--Turkish, Italian, Ukrainian. ("The Ukrainians are foreign?" my friend protests. "It's they who view themselves as foreigners. We view them as our own!" Deep in their hearts, Russians--even the liberal and educated ones--are not reconciled to the loss of empire.)

So the appearance of buildings is changing. The passersby have also changed. Earlier, a large proportion of the people in Moscow's streets were inhabitants of the countryside who traveled to the capital to shop. The Soviet Union was a superpower where one could attempt to buy something in only one, perhaps two, cities, and primarily in Moscow. Millions thus scraped together the funds for a plane, train or bus ticket--anything, just to get to the capital and take up position in some endless line in the hope of securing either a pair of shoes or a shirt, a jacket or a coat. Everything was considered booty, treasure. Now all that is over--transportation is expensive, and one can buy locally the same things as in Moscow. The mirage of Moscow as a longed-for El Dorado has greatly dimmed in the eyes of the inhabitants of the distant countryside. But it has also dimmed in a much deeper and more important sense: Moscow is beginning to lose its exceptional, imperial place; the role of the countryside, of local authorities, of various districts, provinces and republics, is growing. I didn't have the time to go to Yakutsk or Omsk, but people from there told me how they are already governing themselves, how more and more matters are in their own hands. The greatest independence is being exhibited by eastern Siberia, a distant part of Russia cut off from Moscow, which is increasingly integrating itself into the economy and the culture of the Pacific Rim.

A different Moscow, a different Russia. Above all, different people--in their attitudes, in their ways of thinking. I very much wanted to see Moscow on May 1. That day's observances have always been an important event; their nature and scale were always a good barometer of the country's situation. In years past, preparations lasted a long time, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, paraded before Lenin's mausoleum in solemn formations.

I went out in the morning. The city was empty. People had already left the previous day for the weekend. Those whom I did encounter--whole families--were also in the process of leaving. I asked a police-man where the celebration, in which President Yeltsin was to participate, would take place. He thought for a moment, then answered hesitatingly that he wasn't certain: probably on Tverskaya Street.

A light rain was falling. A small crowd--perhaps several thousand--had gathered in front of the city council building. The atmosphere was one of a picnic. No one noticed that at a certain moment Yeltsin appeared. He read a charge to the labor unions that they make sure that people receive their wages on time. Workers don't get their wages for months on end--it is the bane of their existence. Some of the assembled listened, others bought ice cream, Coca-Cola. Yeltsin danced a Cossack dance with a girl from some folk ensemble and, drenched to the bone--for by then the rain was coming down harder--withdrew to the city council building. The crowd had dispersed even earlier. All that remained on the square were several policemen and some Coca-Cola vendors. So I went nearby, to the statue of Marx, where the Communists were to stage their demonstration.

The Communists decided to show their muscle. The loudspeaker (of terrible quality) installed on the shaky, old-fashioned truck leading their procession hoarsely croaked the Internationale at deafening volume: "The earth shall rise on new foundations..." When the column appeared in Red Square, hundreds of photojournalists and dozens of TV crews, which had arrived there from all over the world, moved into action. One could instantly predict who these people--all in a sweat, moved by their mission, as well as by the once-in-a-lifetime quality of what they were witnessing--would pounce upon. It is an old woman, who opens her mouth to show us she has only one tooth left, and it's rotten at that. The old woman is holding a portrait of Stalin (sometimes it's Lenin) in her hand and loudly demands the impossible: she get her youth back. Besides an old woman (sometimes she is accompanied by two or more other old women), a favorite object for the media is an old veteran, unshaven, thin, in a torn, drooping uniform. He is also wielding a little portrait of Stalin (sometimes it's Lenin), he too demands a return to his youth, and one can also meet him in the company of two or more other old veterans.

These pictures, when they make the rounds in the press, enable readers the world over to form a distinctly skewed impression of what a Communist is: a Communist is an old man (or old woman) who carries on his (or her) chest a likeness of Stalin (sometimes it's Lenin) and who is not in the habit of going to the dentist.

Not much else happened. Zyuganov spoke, but one couldn't hear him. He was followed by Victor Anpilov, the hard-line Communist leader of the Working Russia movement who called for something--bloodshed, I believe. But these tricks everyone here knows by heart. The boring and banal affair was only given some color by Zhirinovsky, who, sporting a red coat that brought to mind the uniforms of the personal guard of Czar Nicholas I, arrived with his entourage, pushed aside the Communists and delivered an extremely pugnacious but totally incoherent speech.

In the afternoon, I went to the Arbat. The Arbat is a street in old Moscow, a traditional point for rendezvous and promenades. One can get a beer here, buy a souvenir or order--this is very popular--a portrait of oneself in color pencil from one of the dozens of street artists. There were many people about, especially the young. I noticed that in one spot the pedestrian flow was slowing down, stopping, gathering into a crowd. I approached. Four gentlemen were pacing up and down the sidewalk--Lenin, Hitler, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Naturally these were impersonators, but so well matched and made up that for a moment the apparition gave passersby the illusion they had stepped into the realm of history and world politics. For $5, one could have one's picture taken with the personality of choice. All this took place in laughter, merriment and serenity. People most wanted to be photographed with Lenin who, even without this gig, had plenty to keep him busy. He is often booked by nightclubs to pose with scantily dressed women.

This presence of Lenin, Hitler, Gorbachev and Yeltsin amid the crowds in the street, the fact that one could take any one of them by the arm and have a picture taken, had a peculiar, symbolic meaning. It was an attempt, common in many folk cultures, to tame some dangerous, supernatural force (such were history and politics for the Russians) so that, once tamed, that force could be given a more natural, humane form, could be pulled down from an unreachable pedestal, transformed into a figure with ordinary human characteristics--for only then would the ordinary man in the street be able to influence it.

In the deluge of information about the daily life of this country, one thing is lost: a tremendous social revolution is taking place in Russia; a still weak and contradictory yet nevertheless "normal" society is coming into being here, a society of people with "normal" expectations and aspirations; this country is ruled by a new elite (or a new class), composed of varying groups with varying interests yet with a common desire to maintain stability.

When I was leaving for Moscow, a Warsaw friend urged me to find out about the new concept of Russia, to ask Russians what they regard this concept to be. But I found no volunteers for such a discussion. Conversations revolved around making money, buying a new car, getting a better apartment. This gold-rush atmosphere, the sudden potential for everything, this interpretation of freedom to mean simply the chance to acquire goods, is a source of great divisiveness. For the table at which Russian capitalism is banqueting is still small; there aren't many places around it, but everyone wants to pull up a chair. And it is over the right to take part in the feast that the battle is being waged.

On my last day, I spoke with a Russian writer whom I like to read and listen to, Alexander Kabakov. "One has to be optimistic," he said, "but cautiously so. It is easy to influence Russian society. It readily listens to voices that aren't advantageous to it. Look at the year 1917."

Buried in the stormy, dramatic and changeable fate of this country lies a riddle that has long fascinated even Russians. One of those Russians, the writer Nikolai Gogol, exclaimed, "Russia, where are you rushing to? Give me an answer."

But to this question, although it was posed as long ago as 1842, there is still, in point of fact, no answer.

--Translated by Klara Glowczewska

The author's latest book, Imperium, recounts his travels in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.