The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

When Seryozha was in eighth grade, his father and a couple of friends decided to organize a home school for their children. Seryozha lost touch with children from School Number 57. He spent the next four years speaking only to members of his family and the other two teenagers at the home school. They did not become friends. He had no friends, or people, other than his grandfather, who understood him in this world.

for lyosha, economic reform began with soap. Lyosha's mother amassed scores of what was called "household soap"—hard, sharp- edged bars that looked like greenish-brown bricks. When none of the imported better-smelling and nicer-looking alternatives were available, the highly alkaline soap could be used to wash clothes, dishes, skin, and hair, and even to make a nasal rinse that was said to cure a cold. Teenagers said it killed acne. Some claimed it could burn off a wart. It probably killed everything in its path—to keep hair from falling lifelessly after washing with "household soap," one had to rinse it with vinegar. "Household soap" was the only thing Galina could get for her ration cards in 1991, so she stocked up. The bars formed a fifth wall in their bathroom.

The same year, Lyosha saw something he had never seen before: a chicken that consisted only of legs and thighs. Until then, "buying a chicken" meant bringing home a bluish rubbery-looking thing that Galina held over the flame of the gas stove to singe the copious remnants of feathers before cooking. Now she brought home leg quarters, each of them nearly as large as a whole chicken. She said that these were "Legs of Bush" and then explained that Bush was the name of the American president and he and Gorbachev had struck an agreement to send to Russia the dark-meat parts of chickens, which Americans happened to dislike. This was the story generally told about "Legs of Bush," and it was only slightly inaccurate. In 1990, Bush and Gorbachev finally signed a trade agreement that had languished for years. This allowed United States producers to sell to the Soviet Union grain and the dark-meat parts of chicken that Russians, indeed, prefer and American consumers disproportionately shunned. But the Soviet Union had no money to pay for the grain and the chicken quarters, so in December 1990 President Bush arranged for loans to the Soviet Union, and this ensured that the dark meat of

chickens, in Russia, bore his name for years after his presidency ended.⁷

"Legs of Bush" signaled the beginning of a better time. Before they appeared, there had come a point when preserved cabbage was the sole grocery item available in Solikamsk, and the lines to buy it stretched for blocks. After "Legs of Bush," other food items began to materialize, and Lyosha's mother could afford some of them. When Galina's school stopped paying its employees, she found a job at a different school. By this time, she had married Sergei, her boyfriend, and his salary tided them over. Sergei worked as a miner. Many miners did not get paid because, like teachers, they were employed by the state, and the state, in accordance with Gaidar's policies of monetary austerity, had no cash. Sergei's mine was privatized early, and this meant that he had a salary—as long as he could stay sober long enough to go to work.

It was the drinking families in Lyosha's building that seemed to hit the point of utter despair. Some were hunting stray dogs to eat them. The kids who used to sleep on Lyosha's landing were trying to make their own money. The two brothers, aged about five and six, were serving local teenage boys, who paid them a ruble, then ten rubles at a time, for performing oral sex on them. There was little you could buy with that.

The secret of plenty lay in private enterprise, this much was clear. When Galina's school ran out of cash, it simply stopped paying, but when his stepfather's mine ran low, it found ways to pay employees in kind. Sergei brought home odd-tasting Swedish candy—it must have been licorice—and metal cans containing tiny little sausages in brine. A friend of Galina's, a fellow history teacher, quit the school to go to work as manager at the Solikamsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which

was among the first Russian companies to be privatized.⁸ The company was one of the country's largest producers of newsprint during a newspaper renaissance. Its building was soon lavishly renovated for all to see. Galina's former colleague became a rich man. Every time Lyosha's family went to his house for dinner, they saw

food and things—pens, notebooks, dishes, and other objects Lyosha generally thought of as souvenirs—unlike any they saw elsewhere.