Russians

3 Poverty

Poverty is no vice.

—Old Russian saying

Visiting Russia for the first time seemed like a homecoming long delayed by the Soviet refusal to grant any of my family a visa. What struck me most on arriving in Moscow on a hot June day in 1991 was how shoddily constructed the prefabricated housing was. Eager to learn about the land whose language I spoke but about which I otherwise knew very little, I found myself trying to disguise my revulsion at the way its people were forced to live.

I would spend the summer in a residential area of the city’s northwest, where acres and acres of nearly identical apartment complexes looked like slums built with carelessness and disregard for architectural integrity, not to mention aesthetic sensibility, even when brand-new. The concrete blocks hulked along a stretch of overgrown weeds that passed for a park and included several abandoned building sites—locals had stolen the bricks for use at their dachas, I was informed, because none were available for sale—and a padlocked “palace of culture” with an empty theater and library. Networks of dirt paths through uncut grass connected the buildings to pockmarked asphalt sidewalks.

Like many Moscow buildings, the one that would be my temporary residence had a facade of unattractively colored panels glued together with a white substance that had dripped down from the joints, an assault to the senses that seemed to signify contempt for its occupants. Inside, the bare concrete entryway was filthy and the shuddering little elevator smelled of body odor and the dried, tobacco-soaked spit that dotted the floor. Although I’d been prepared to see widespread deprivation, I was astonished to learn I’d arrived at a desired address in an elite neighborhood to which lucky residents had flocked from the polluted center.

The shock didn’t last long. Regardless of the size of their bank accounts, almost everyone in the Soviet Union lived in conditions that people in developed countries would consider impoverished. The apartment I occupied was small but cozy. The minuscule bathroom had only one faucet for the sink and bathtub—the tap swung from one to the other—and there would be no hot water for the month of August, supposedly for annual maintenance. But the apartment’s interior, like many I saw that summer, had been decorated with care, albeit with garish velour furniture. The building’s residents, mostly middle-class and middle-aged, spent much of their time grumbling about queues: store shelves were often empty. On my first trip to a local supermarket, I saw people waiting in line for as long as four hours for slices of beef that appeared blackened from rot. Thanks to a severe shortage of tobacco in addition to almost everything else, vendors at outdoor food markets sold glass jars filled with nearly spent cigarette butts.

It seemed logical to think that a little free trade would transform life for people whose days seemed to revolve around scrounging for food and goods that I’d always taken for granted. However, Western optimism that Russia would quickly rebound when restrictions were lifted after the collapse of communism sounded naive even then. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are no such lines at supermarket chains where everything is available—if you can afford it. Some of Moscow’s huge new stores are in shopping centers near suburban apartment complexes that knock up against old villages that had lain beyond the capital’s sprawl until very recently. The new buildings have something in common with the plans for share-everything communities drawn by idealists during the early Soviet years. The fancy stores, gyms, kindergartens and other amenities and services of the new, capitalist versions make them islands of security where residents enjoy at least partial insulation from the dangers and uncertainties of inner Moscow.

Drive beyond the capital’s expansive limits, however, and you encounter a very different country, only slightly changed from the Soviet Union I saw in 1991. A smattering of officials, businesspeople and Mafia members ensure that rural Russia has some of Moscow’s trappings: garish brick mansions, Toyota Land Cruisers with dark tinted windows and new restaurants. But poverty is endemic, beginning abruptly where Moscow ends, although the boundary keeps changing as the city’s outskirts push ever outward, riding roughshod over old wooden settlements. Beyond them, decent roads give way to uneven asphalt riddled with gaping potholes that often degenerates to barely passable dirt roads in impoverished villages. Even some sections of the highway to St. Petersburg, the main road linking the country’s two largest cities, still have only two lanes, which sometimes pass rows of traditional rural cottages. Tourists admiring the ornate latticework of those little structures, ubiquitous from the Baltic Sea thousands of miles east into Siberia, may be visited by fairy-tale images of princes, peasants and firebirds. The reality is less magical. Many houses have no indoor plumbing and most toilets are in outhouses.

Taking account of the pervasiveness of poverty is important for understanding Russia because its specter hangs over even those not directly affected. Today’s dilapidation is evidence of the latest stage in Russia’s long history of widespread, often overwhelming destitution in the countryside, where many peasants—who made up 80 percent of the population as recently as the early twentieth century—have barely been able to eke out a living from the fields for as long as anyone can remember. Under the tsars, much of the land was owned by rich absentees who cared little about their peasants, most of whom remained serfs until 1861. Soviet industrialization, launched in the 1930s with the aim of making the USSR into a great military power, further hindered the development of agriculture. All investment for new factories was squeezed from miserably oppressed farmers already suffering the crippling effects of forced collectivization. It may therefore seem surprising that contemporary rural Russia is sometimes even more depressed than it was under the last decades of Soviet rule, and that many people are poorer than they’d been as collective farmers.

The village of Priamukhino, a scattering of houses half lost in forests and fields some ninety minutes northwest of Moscow, is no exception. The settlement would easily go unnoticed except for its church. Standing at the top of a rise reached by a narrow road, the stately yellow neoclassical structure, like many of the country’s rural churches, completes a picture that is as sad as it is beautiful, as if it has survived from a nineteenth-century novel. The melancholy—partly prompted by the church’s peeling paint, grounds full of weeds and the short-lived foliage of willowy, white birches—seems to have something to do with the resignation that summer’s respite is short, nature is powerful and life is hard.

Not all is well in Priamukhino, if it ever has been. The church was saved from collapse in the 1990s by an energetic young priest named Andrei Nikolaev, a relative newcomer who became a local fixture. One freezing night in 2006, local firefighters called to Father Andrei’s house arrived to find it enveloped in flames. Inside they found the remains of five people. The priest had burned to death together with his wife and three young daughters in an apparent act of arson that shocked nearby residents. “Notwithstanding Christian forgiveness,” said the regional governor upon taking personal charge of the investigation, “such crimes are never forgiven.”

In contemporary Russia, however, such crimes are also rarely solved. And because Father Andrei’s killing, if that’s what it was, followed several suspected murders of other rural clergy members, it appeared to reflect a growing malaise in the Russian countryside. I wanted to find out the extent to which that was true.

Father Andrei’s suspected murder echoed history. In the mid-nineteenth century, a wave of arson swept through Russia at a time when radical anarchist and revolutionary movements sought to undermine the tsars’ rule. Priamukhino happened to play a role in those movements as the ancestral family seat of Mikhail Bakunin, a nineteenth-century aristocrat who became a founder of anarchism, which critics blamed for spreading terrorism. Nevertheless, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky were among the literary celebrities who visited Bakunin’s sprawling estate, which surrendered to serious decay under Soviet rule. After 1991, would-be scholars and hippie types joined the self-described anarchists who camped on the estate grounds to sing, debate, or simply hang out.

When I visited Father Andrei’s house several weeks after the catastrophe, children’s toys and bits of furniture were visible among the charred remains. The house had stood on the side of a muddy lane along with some twenty similarly weather-beaten wooden structures. It was an eerie sight: most of the houses were abandoned. At the moment, the only sign of life, apart from barking dogs, cawing crows and the occasional distant rumbling of lone cars, was the sound of a rake. It belonged to Nikolai Gavrilov, who was clearing slush from the tiny front yard of a house several plots down from Father Andrei’s, one of only three still inhabited on the street.

Although it was unclear where the scrappy grass of Gavrilov’s property ended and the communal road of muck began, he was doing a meticulous job. Wearing surplus military trousers tucked into high felt boots, the sixty-four-year-old appeared prematurely aged. His skin was battered, his eyes squinty and his large nose crooked. European visitors to nineteenth-century Russia sometimes observed that peasants often expressed an innate hospitality, even sweetness, to visitors, despite being very hard-pressed. That’s rarely true now. Looking up from his work as if his dearest wish were to avoid the trouble outsiders often brought, Gavrilov initially refused to answer questions about his age or anything else, including his neighbor Father Andrei.

“Everything’s fine here!” he barked in apparent defiance of his surroundings. “Just like everywhere else.”

Had life changed during the past decade?

“No!”

Had a lot of people left? Most of the houses seemed empty.

“People come and go as they please; is there anything wrong with that?”

Some time later, Gavrilov admitted feeling sorry for Father Andrei’s dead children but said he’d never spoken to the priest himself. The other neighbors I saw among the few who remained also refused to speculate about the cause of the fire. But some complained that the national media had seized on a theory that village drunks killed Father Andrei in anger at his refusal to give them money for drink. A domestic dispute was far more likely, they said.

Nazira Babaeva discounted that theory. She lived a short drive from the village church in a Soviet brick apartment house made more forlorn than usual because it stands alone amid open fields. Mounting a filthy concrete stairway to Babaeva’s floor, I entered her clean but shabby apartment with its worn, brown-colored furniture. A handsome woman who worked in the local post office, she told me that Father Andrei’s death broke her heart. Tears formed in her eyes when she said, “Batyushka”—an archaic word for “father,” commonly used for priests—“did great things here.” Chief among them, she said, was providing villagers with counsel and help and advising them about the power of prayer. Before he came in the 1990s, she continued, “I didn’t know who I was, even whether I was christened.”

Babaeva raced to Father Andrei’s house when she heard about the fire on the freezing night in December of 2006. “It smelled of burning flesh, but I hoped the family had gotten out and the smell was of their cats.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s very bad for us now.” Remembering Father Andrei, she mentioned an operation her young daughter was scheduled to have on a day she wasn’t permitted to leave work. “He was the only one I could ask for help, and he took her, he didn’t abandon us.”

“They all got on well,” she said of the priest and his wife. “Mother and father loved their children, and I never heard a sharp word from anyone.” She also discounted the theory that drunks wanted to steal the church’s icons. “They’re drunk, but kind. Everyone loved Father Andrei. I think it was…” She broke off, choked with tears, then resumed in a clear voice. “Only God almighty knows what happened.”

Priamukhino lies in the region of Tver, whose capital is the medieval city of the same name on the upper Volga River. More important than Moscow in early Russian history, it was called Kalinin under Soviet rule. Tver’s residents like to cite Nikolai Gogol’s famous quip about Russia’s two great misfortunes: fools and bad roads. In the 1990s, one of the region’s representatives in parliament tried to reverse Tver’s disintegration by rebuilding the roads. Sergei Yushenkov was a well-liked former Red Army officer who had taught Marxism-Leninism at a Moscow military academy before giving key support to Boris Yeltsin during the coup attempt in 1991. He became a liberal icon, crusading against corruption and in favor of individual rights, often on television. But the lawmaker died when a gunman shot him outside his Moscow apartment in 2003 in one of Russia’s many unsolved high-profile murders, and his region’s roads remain in terrible shape.

As for fools, residents say people smart enough to leave did so long ago, after the region’s main employers, obsolete Soviet-era factories, had closed along with its collective farms, part of a dramatic series of changes that transformed Russian society. Elena Orlova, the head of the surrounding Kuvshinovo district, said its population dropped from twenty thousand to sixteen thousand in a few years. “Nothing is being produced here,” the earnest, middle-aged administrator lamented. “People have lost their connection to the land, and it’s frightening. There’s nothing to keep the young here anymore.”

Kuvshinovo is named after Yulia Kuvshinovo, who founded a local paper factory that employed three thousand workers at the turn of the twentieth century. Under Soviet rule, the factory doubled as a social welfare system, building schools, a theater, a hospital and a sports complex. Now its seven hundred employees work and live amid a rotting infrastructure it no longer supports. Orlova warned me not to try to equate life in provincial towns with the big city because the two are “completely different.” Kuvshinovo’s transformation mirrored changes throughout Russia, where the GDP fell 34 percent between 1991 and 1995—a larger contraction than in the United States during the Great Depression—while wages plummeted along with employment. Crime, including murders, doubled.¹

Some of the direst conditions can be found in a number of Russia’s four hundred so-called monocities, whose residents largely depend on single industries. Their plight exploded on national television soon after the global financial crisis of 2008 during mass protests in a small town near St. Petersburg called Pikalevo, where the closing of a factory belonging to one of the richest oligarchs, metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, disrupted the lives of nearly everyone. After the local utility cut hot water and heating, residents blocked a highway, demanding that Putin intervene. He swooped in by helicopter to be filmed calling the plant owners “cockroaches” and forcing a chastened Deripaska to restart the factory. Elsewhere, protesters braved the blows of riot police at small, isolated rallies in the far-eastern city of Vladivostok, the exclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, and other regions to less effect. Although the government said it would help more than three hundred monocities diversify their economies, there’s very little evidence of anything having been done there.

The poverty and despair are contributing to a national population crisis that a tiny increase in birthrates in 2009—thanks partly to financial bonuses for baby-producing parents—hasn’t resolved. Reluctance to conceive children whose lives would be difficult and possibly short is a major cause. Another is the high mortality rate sustained by poor diet, persistent smoking, rampant alcoholism and crippling disease. After seven decades of enormous Soviet sacrifices in pursuit of a better life, three times more Russians now die of heart-related illnesses than do Americans or Europeans. The life expectancy of the average Russian male in 2012—when the population declined for the twentieth year in a row—was sixty-four years, up from fifty-nine a few years earlier but still fully a dozen fewer than for an American. In that respect, the country ranks 166th in the world, one peg above Gambia.

While the Kremlin says it considers the country’s shrinking population one of its most serious problems, officials have done almost nothing to tackle poverty, one of its main causes. According to the government’s own reports, seventeen million people, more than 12 percent of the population, live below the poverty line, which it sets at monthly earnings of less than $220. But critics say those numbers are misleading in the way Kremlin figures usually are, and not only because the minimum assortment of consumer goods the government deems necessary for survival would leave people ravenous if they tried to hold down a job paying that amount. Although incomes rose several times during last decade’s oil boom, inflation grew as fast or faster, especially the price of staple goods. That erased the gains in many people’s incomes, while average monthly pensions rose to only roughly $300 and the gap between rich and poor yawned ever wider. One recent study showed that while the richest Russians doubled their wealth in the last two decades, two-thirds of the population are no better off than they were in 1991, and the poor only half as well off than they were then.² All in all, the World Bank has calculated that roughly a quarter of the population is “highly vulnerable to poverty,” with more hovering just above the poverty line.³

Standing off a deeply potholed road, the maternity clinic nearest Priamukhino looked little different than it did a century ago. Charmingly quaint as its two-story wooden facade may appear, the floorboards and peeling paint inside inspired little confidence even before I noticed the ancient look of the medical instruments. But the director proudly announced that her clinic continues to host several births a year despite the fall of the national birthrate to a third of its level in the 1980s, the last decade of Soviet rule. The numbers remain worryingly low, partly because infant mortality is very high.

A short drive away, the minuscule village of Lopatino, its slumping cottages lining another muddy dirt road through wooded hills, had sunk to being almost moribund, even tinged with apocalypse. All but two of the houses were empty during my visit. Tree branches had broken through the windows of some of the abandoned structures, several of which had gaping holes in their roofs. Tatyana Yevseeva lived alone in one of the occupied houses. Small but hardy-looking in her old housecoat and black shawl, the elderly woman’s sparkling eyes and warmth of spirit belied her struggle to survive. Like her few neighbors who remained in the region, she lived mostly on what she grew, preserved and raised, including potatoes and pigs. To help plant and harvest the vegetables, her five children visited periodically from Estonia and Ukraine as well as elsewhere in Russia.

Yevseeva insisted I stay for tea she could hardly have afforded to share. Unlike many of the region’s elderly, she was neither dejected nor angry. On the contrary, she displayed a cheeky wit in the singsong lilt she gave to a dialect that had survived nearly a century of communist conformism. “We live not badly; I can’t complain, dear.” Ne khudo, her archaic term for “not badly,” sounded almost poetic. But when she stopped chuckling and turned serious, it was to say, “It’s just that everyone has left, there’s nowhere to go for a chat and of course it gets very lonely. But what can you do?”

Yevseeva’s heartbreaking poverty and isolation was stark proof that life for many used to be at least materially richer under the USSR. She was born and lived her entire life in Lopatino, where the local administration employed her as a “work brigade” leader. Now eighty years old and plagued by eye problems, she had to walk half a day, mostly uphill, to a neighboring village to buy medicine. The town authorities helped by supplying wood for cooking and heating to supplement the logs she bought from local woodcutters. “The biggest problem is that young people steal my wood,” she said with a sigh.

Several incongruous magazine photographs of teenage pop stars were pinned to the stained orange wallpaper of her tiny house. Although an outhouse served as her toilet, Yevseeva was fortunate to have running water in her kitchen. That might boost the price of her house to several hundred dollars if she succeeded in selling it, but she said she’d be left with nothing if she did. “There’s no money to fix anything but how could I leave my home? I built and built it, mostly with my own hands. And when my time comes I’ll die here, lying on the stove”—the tiled source of heat and comfort. “What’s wrong with that?” she said with a smile.

Despite its crisis, the Tver region could have been thriving. Its land is arable and its climate temperate, at least relative to most of Russia. More important, it’s close to Moscow, the nexus of a highly centralized economy that’s the source of up to 80 percent of the GDP, according to some estimates. Tver would almost certainly prosper in other circumstances, under a different kind of government with different priorities.

Dramatic upheaval almost decimated the tsarist economy’s agrarian foundation in the early twentieth century, when communist policies forced the rapid industrialization and urbanization that transformed Soviet society. My great-grandmother Polina Stepanova was among the uprooted, driven partly by famine from a two-story house in her native Volga River city of Kazan during the tumultuous early 1920s, when poverty was nearly universal. The former seat of a powerful khanate of Turkic Tatars—one of the successors to the Mongol Empire that ruled over what became European Russia from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries—Kazan was racked by the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. It wiped out the landed gentry and battered the small bourgeoisie to which my ancestors belonged, having pulled themselves out of serfdom barely two generations earlier.

Leaving behind her husband—a school inspector whose grain-merchant father was the family patriarch—Polina took her two daughters, my grandmother Serafima and her sister Kaleria, to the fertile southern Krasnodar region. There they eventually moved into a large room in a communal apartment with Polina’s second husband, an accountant like her. A meek, intelligent child, Serafima was nine when the Revolution took place. Never taking to her new home or her alcoholic, bullying stepfather, she was lucky to be enrolled in medical school. On graduating, she was assigned to a tuberculosis ward in a former palace thirty miles outside Moscow, where rural villages would soon become suburbs. Serafima began specializing in radiology.

Her broad face gave her a distinguished if not quite beautiful appearance. Generous and forgiving by all accounts, she was a saintly figure whose turbulent childhood reinforced her highly cautious nature and susceptibility to bouts of despair. Working under the socialized healthcare system suited her, and she soon earned a reputation for being expert at reading very poor-quality X-rays to determine whether patients had contracted tuberculosis. Soon after arriving, Serafima fell in love with a student at an aviation research center, an institution of great Soviet pride, in the neighboring town of Zhukovsky.

A gifted draftsman, Georgy Leimer—nicknamed Zhora—was handsome, with thick, fair hair, a pointed nose and a furrowed brow that added to his serious demeanor. His German surname came from his grandfather, a Bavarian beer brewer who had settled in Russia in 1855, one of the so-called Volga Germans recruited under Alexander II to help modernize the country. Although Georgy’s surname was the only thing about him that was remotely German, it was a liability during those murderous years. In the early 1930s, Stalin launched the first expulsions of Communist Party members, known as purges, and the authorities began filling the Gulag in earnest. The randomness of victims’ selection and guilt by association helped spread fear. And the worst was still ahead.

Still, Serafima adopted Zhora’s name when they married. After he joined the nearby Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute as an aircraft designer working under the legendary flight pioneer Andrei Tupolev—whose group would create the famous planes bearing his name—the young couple moved into a two-room apartment in a simple clapboard house, along with Zhora’s mother and, soon after, a baby daughter.

Disaster struck in 1936, when little Natasha died of meningitis at the age of four. Although she had no proof, Serafima blamed herself for infecting her beloved daughter with bacteria from her tuberculosis dispensary. Stricken with guilt, she was unable to sleep until Zhora prevailed upon her to travel to the Crimean Black Sea shore, where she was treated at a sanatorium—treatment she could afford, thanks to her medical union. Zhora’s letters to her included tender admonishments to stop crying, intimate little jokes and insistence that the past couldn’t be changed.

A year later, on a freezing night in November 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, a knock sounded at their door. The NKVD secret police, predecessor to the KGB, had accused Tupolev of plotting to organize a Russian Fascist party, an obviously, even ridiculously, fabricated charge. His protégés and subordinates were also being targeted, including Zhora, who was arrested that night. Like countless other wives and mothers of the millions who disappeared, Serafima joined long lines of desperate women who were queuing in vain at prisons and NKVD buildings for information about their loved ones. After more than a year waiting outside the Leningrad prison where her son Lev Gumilev was held, Anna Akhmatova described their despair in her poem “Requiem.”

I learned how faces fall,

How fear looks out from lowered eyes,

How suffering inscribes cruel pages

Of marks like cuneiforms on cheeks,

How curls of dark and ash-blond hair

Suddenly turn silver,

The smile fades on submissive lips,

And fear trembles inside a hollow laugh.

I pray not for myself alone

But all who stood there with me

In bitter cold and July heat

Under a blind red wall.⁴

Pregnant with her second child, Serafima suffered a miscarriage.

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, she and the rest of her clinic’s staff were relocated to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where some of the worst of the war’s wounded were being evacuated for treatment. Provided accommodation in a tiny wooden shack barely kept warm by a small cast-iron stove during a bitterly cold winter, she worked long hours in a military hospital. Having lost hope of ever seeing Zhora again, she caught the eye of a dashing surgeon, a Tatar from a distinguished family of doctors and intellectuals who happened to be from Serafima’s home city of Kazan. The Revolution had scattered Mutakhar Khuzikhanov’s family, and he, the eldest—a highly skilled doctor who published in Soviet medical journals—had settled in the North Caucasus city of Nalchik, where he married an ethnic Russian woman and started a family.

Desperate for another child despite her straitened circumstances, Serafima gave birth in February 1943 to a daughter after a romance with Mutakhar. Keeping little Tatyana alive was another struggle. To warm the baby on the coldest nights, Serafima stayed up so she could keep turning her to face the stove. No doubt stress was responsible for Serafima’s failure to be able to nurse her. With no baby formula available, she was lucky to find a temporary wet nurse. Often poorly nourished and sick, Tatyana cried constantly, but she survived.

As war made already dire living conditions worse, Stalin reversed the few gains society can be said to have achieved under Soviet rule. Despite the turmoil of its early years, communism did help to level previously vast inequalities. Country estates were taken over by peasants, housing in cities was allocated to the poor and salaries were made more equitable. Under Stalin, however, inequality rose, and housing remained especially scarce.⁵ After the war, Serafima returned to Moscow, where she had no job and nowhere to live. Mother and daughter were forced to stay with various friends and relatives in a succession of communal apartments already crammed to capacity. They spent six months sleeping on the floor of a room belonging to a cousin of Serafima’s named Olga Kiva. Two-year-old Tatyana cried and shouted for days, keeping everyone up many nights “as if in anger,” Olga told me. Serafima and Tatyana later moved into a tiny basement room with the wife of Zhora’s only brother, Anatoly, who had also been arrested, and the couple’s daughter.

Serafima eventually found work at a tuberculosis dispensary in an old neighborhood of central Moscow. Given a room measuring all of eighty-six square feet, she felt very lucky. A former nursery in a once elegant apartment building with thick walls and large windows, the room was cozy and sunlit, and it overlooked the street. It was the first home Tatyana now remembers. My mother’s first real memory of herself is of screaming there at the top of her lungs and not knowing why.

In his 1897 short story “Peasants,” Chekhov—whose first career was as a doctor who often treated patients too poor to afford medical care—introduces a character who describes the effects of widespread destitution. Conditions were most deplorable in the countryside, where people lived “worse than cattle… they were coarse, dishonest, dirty, and drunken; they did not live at peace with one another but quarreled continually, because they feared, suspected, and despised each other.”⁶

A century later, for many people, outright poverty was just a short jump from communist deprivation after the Soviet collapse in 1991 removed what little remained of a social safety net. Among the many millions left to fend for themselves was the family of my second cousin Ulugbek Khojaev. His grandfather, the brother of my mother’s surgeon father Mutakhar, settled in Uzbekistan after their family fled Kazan. Although he soon disappeared without a trace after marrying an Uzbek woman, his enterprising son Taufik rose from construction worker to become the Soviet republic’s transportation minister. “I was no dissident,” the gregarious, down-to-earth former bigwig told me in the late 1990s at his house in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, where he owned an electronics factory and cargo planes that hauled goods from Dubai. “But I could have risen to the very top if I’d kept my mouth shut.”

I first met Taufik’s son Ulugbek at a party in a cramped Moscow apartment in 1991, when he was in his thirties. Tall, handsome and smiling, he greeted me with the effusive generosity typical in Central Asia, asking about every one of my family members in an easy manner that made it seem as if he’d known me from childhood. Ulugbek’s warmth—more than the usual importance that people from his part of the world impart to relations that wouldn’t be considered particularly close in the West—reflected his extraordinary self-assuredness. An A student in Tashkent, he had moved in Moscow in 1979 to study engineering at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, considered Russia’s best.

He married an outgoing young woman named Natalia soon after graduating and by the time their first son, Sasha, was born in 1990, he was well on his way to a respectable academic career, teaching mechanical engineering while writing a doctoral dissertation on stress analysis in metals. Meanwhile, it was clear to them the Soviet economy was imploding. Natalia’s job with the Communist Party youth organization, the Komsomol, granted her weekly visits to a special store that sold products unavailable elsewhere: caviar, cheese, even olive oil. But children’s supplies were almost unobtainable anywhere. After lunch during the week, she would take time off work to scour the neighborhood shops for lines worth joining. Since diapers didn’t exist, Natalia used the largest women’s menstrual pads she could find. The most pressing problem, however, was baby formula, which was especially scarce because it was in great demand even by otherwise uninterested shoppers who snapped it up to barter for other products.

No Soviet-made baby formula was available, and imports were strictly rationed. But Ulugbek’s volunteering to help unload trucks of it when they arrived at a local store at night earned him a double ration of four cans, which would last a day and a half. Because of the constant struggle, Natasha began supplementing the baby’s diet with food and juice.

When Sasha’s first birthday arrived, Natalia and Ulugbek could spare only a single American dollar to spend on a present. They took it to an Irish hard-currency supermarket, one of Moscow’s first Western shops, where they bought an exotic fruit: bananas. Matters would only get worse. Prices were liberalized the following year—released from Soviet controls that had kept them very low—and inflation skyrocketed. “You could get by before because prices were low even if there was nothing to buy, and maybe you got lucky or you had friends or ties and could buy things on the black market,” Ulugbek later recalled. “Now salaries suddenly became worthless.” His amounted to six dollars a month. Unable to feed his family, he left academia, relying on his father’s connections to help find a job in business.

Ulugbek’s postcommunist transition was successful: he eventually went on to work for General Electric and other Western companies. Nevertheless, he sent Sasha to live and study in Germany (he and his younger brother Timur speak fluent English and German) because Russia is far from the kind of place he envisioned it would become when he could afford to buy only two apples a week. “Back then it was hard, but we didn’t feel ruined,” he says. “We weren’t starving because we were doing all sorts of things to get by. We were never completely broke, and in many ways it was a happy time.”

Thanks to his dark, non-Slavic complexion, xenophobic police often make a point of stopping Ulugbek on the street to demand his passport, sometimes even ordering him or his driver to head to a local police station for a formal check. Before Putin came to power in 2000, he says, “no one believed Russia would return to authoritarianism. Absolutely no one could have envisioned there would be a quiet counterrevolution, that tough limits on newspapers and television would return, that corruption would become far worse.” In these times, he adds, the old optimism is gone.

More than that, although many ordinary people no longer struggle just to survive, much of Russia’s outward prosperity is deceptive. “Half my friends eat porridge in order to be seen driving into town in their Volkswagens or BMWs,” Natalia says. “That’s the Russian mentality. People want to show off so much that several generations will live crammed into one or two rooms or refuse to see a doctor when they’re sick in order to flash the newest iPhones.” For the many more who still struggle to survive, the ongoing spread of poverty today is very much part and parcel of the new oil-rich Russia, kept in place despite the authorities’ populist promises by the exploitative nature of the country’s rule.

The most obvious cause of current Russian poverty is the breakdown of Soviet-era infrastructure. Starting in the 1920s, labor camp prisoners hacked out settlements across the inhospitable expanses of Siberia and the country’s far north to exploit the oil, metals and other natural resources found there. The expansion built on the tsarist campaign to conquer the vast territory, which had taken place with great speed because very few indigenous people lived there to stand in the way. Over the next half century, economic planners encouraged hundreds of thousands more to relocate there, and the government lavished huge sums on inefficient schemes to transplant people to regions where no “normal” economy would have beckoned them. Without Communist political control, the physical difficulties have made many Siberian communities unsustainable today. If the region of Tver would be thriving in other circumstances, that can’t be said of the vast, far-flung stretches of territory that constitute most of Russia: land barely fit, or totally unfit, for human habitation.

That was more than clear to me during my visit to the Arctic city of Novoi Urengoi, in the western Siberian region of Yamal Nenets, where I’d flown to see the area that holds some of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. The city’s concrete-slab buildings—painted in garishly bright colors in an attempt to offset the psychological burden of months of darkness, isolation and subzero temperatures—rise from endless stretches of drab tundra covering the gas fields. It’s a company town where the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, is king and gloves are a good idea even when I visited in relatively balmy August.

While other Siberian settlements are shrinking toward expiration as their residents move south, the local Gazprom subsidiary was busy constructing new buildings and roads to its far-flung gas deposits and production units. Relatively high wages, good benefits and long vacations draw workers willing to brave nine-month winters, when temperatures often hover around minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. But those not employed by the gas company are less lucky. After years of subsidies carried over from the Soviet era, when company and state were virtually indistinguishable, Gazprom’s Urengoigazprom subsidiary recently carried out a “restructuring,” its euphemism for transferring the city’s power utility and housing services to municipal authorities. City officials claimed the transfer was barely noticeable to residents, but those I talked to said that hundreds of workers were laid off and a large percentage of the city’s population is barely able to afford the price increases.

A grizzled-looking welder named Pavel Gavrilyuk interrupted a stroll with his grandson in the city’s barren main square to speak to me. Barely surviving by doing piecework after being laid off, he was an illustration of the true human cost of Russia’s gas bonanza. “Pensions are less than two hundred dollars a month—what can you buy with that?” he said. “Anyway, what’s the point of living in the north? But who needs you back home where you came from so long ago?”

One would be forgiven for being a little surprised to hear such pessimism in a city founded a mere thirty years ago to tap newly discovered energy reserves. Many arrived on temporary assignments that paid more than they earned back home, then stayed and raised families. Now a large number have been left to fend for themselves in precarious living conditions after the state lost interest in supporting them. Their presence constitutes one of the Soviet Union’s largest economic legacies. Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, an expert in Russian economic inefficiencies, believes twelve to fifteen million people live in Siberia and Russia’s far-eastern regions who probably wouldn’t be there if not for government inducements. “You can restructure a factory,” he told me from Washington. “You can bring in new management, retrain people and produce new products that are hopefully better designed for the market. But historically and everywhere, it’s extremely difficult to downsize large cities.”

Gaddy reckons that as much as 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product goes to supporting residents of extreme, isolated areas, to which food and other consumer products must be delivered by plane because roads and railways don’t exist or are too dangerous to use in winter. But Novoi Urengoi’s officials, wary of saying anything that might be interpreted as critical of the government, assured me there’s nothing wrong with the way things are now handled. In the new glass-fronted building that houses Gazprom’s local subsidiary, deputy director Valery Marinin praised his company for taking the first steps toward revamping the old Soviet economic model. “Gazprom used to be involved in everything from gas production to farming. But companies must narrow their focus to what they’re supposed to be doing in order to be profitable. We produce gas, and the city should see to its own municipal services.”

However, there’s been no indication so far that the kind of restructuring Gazprom has undertaken is making municipal operations more efficient. If the city is in charge of building the roads and maintaining housing with tax revenues, Gaddy said, there will be “pots of money at the disposal of local politicians” who “of course” will want to use it to line their own pockets.

Locals complained that state-controlled Gazprom does what it wants by claiming to be a private company. Svetlana Kozlova, a retired worker who was selling gloves and woven goods in a small stall in the center of town, was embittered by the company’s practice of barring most residents from using the new roads it built from Novoi Urengoi to its gas fields’ production facilities because they’re supposedly private property. Some of the new asphalt was laid on old roads that are the only means of reaching faraway towns and settlements. “You’re nobody if you don’t work for Gazprom,” she said. While the company is making officials rich as it helps make Russia an energy superpower, average citizens must bear the burden of the Soviet past. “Housing is scarce, rents are high and many of us are barely scraping by,” Kozlova added. “People lived their whole lives in the north, built this place up, endured hardship, developed illnesses and are left with nothing.”

Russian poverty is hardly unique to far-flung locations or even outside the capital. Although Moscow is by far the country’s wealthiest area, with plenty of funds to maintain gas pipelines, electricity plants and roads, a visit to most parts of the city will reveal poor living conditions everywhere. Amid newly renovated apartments with their gleaming double-glazed windows are many that haven’t seen a lick of paint since Soviet days. They are likely to be inhabited by the elderly, some of whom can be seen on streets and in underpasses—hunched over, sometimes kneeling, holding out their hands and keeping eyes peeled for police. Most cross themselves profusely when a passerby deposits some coins.

Among them is Evgenia Pavlova, a seventy-six-year-old pensioner I found sitting in a corner on a row of crowded steps one chilly October morning. The former schoolteacher, who earned a pension roughly equivalent to thirty dollars a month, said scraping together enough money for food and medicine was tough. She pinned whatever hopes she had on Putin. “It’s difficult for him alone to cope,” she said. “We need ten Putins. He’s trying to do something, but I don’t know if he’ll succeed.”

Her words reflect popular opinion in the regions, evidence that despite the wave of protest against him from the urban middle class, Putin has been largely successful in painting himself as a protector of common people whose main platform in the 2012 election was a promise to boost social spending. Although most increases went to the military, Putin pledged to spend tens of billions of dollars on hiking wages for healthcare professionals, schoolteachers and university professors in addition to increasing child support, student stipends and buying more housing for war veterans during the course of his six-year term. Economists warned that the spending would seriously strain the government’s budget, while other promises, such as curbing alcoholism, were too general to even approximate their cost.

When demonstrators in Moscow briefly set up a tent camp following Putin’s May 2012 inauguration to call for fair elections and an end to authoritarian repression, some observers compared their effort to America’s Occupy Wall Street movement. As a perceptive sociologist named Boris Kagarlitsky observed, however, Occupy was nationwide in scope, operating under clear slogans everyone understood and many Americans supported. By contrast, “the Moscow protests have taken place against a backdrop of largely silent regions,” he said.

That wasn’t because most Russians like official policy or are afraid of speaking out. “Their silence has more to do with the fact that the protesters in Moscow do not reflect their particular interests and needs.”⁷ Putin understood that decades of Soviet cradle-to-grave care have conditioned Russians to expect the state to provide pensions, education and subsidized utilities, while Russia’s constitution still guarantees free medical care for everyone. No matter that the state’s support is often little more than theoretical. According to the World Health Organization, the quality of Russian health care ranks 130th in the world—down from twenty-second in the 1970s.

Russians aren’t oblivious to the situation. Almost 60 percent of respondents to a recent survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency were dissatisfied with their medical care. People I’ve asked about it say the country is divided into two groups: a lucky few who can afford good care in private clinics and the vast majority, who have been left with almost no safety net and sometimes have no choice but to bribe doctors. But the Levada Center’s Marina Krassilnikova told me that despite overwhelming unhappiness with the situation, most remain wedded to the idea of socialized medicine. That includes wealthy Russians who prefer to have the option of paying more for services if they want to. “People just aren’t ready to give up the right to free medical care under any circumstances,” Krassilnikova explained, “even though they know they can’t exercise it.”

The situation is even worse in St. Petersburg than Moscow. Although the glorious architecture of Russia’s “second city” is one of the wonders of the world, much of it is in terrible condition, even steps from the central thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. Few foreign tourists ogling the restored facades suspect that many people live in crumbling apartments behind them, where dank interiors are also dark because burned-out lightbulbs are often not replaced.

The devastation of World War II, when up to a million residents trapped by the Nazi blockade during the siege of Leningrad died of cold and hunger, is partly responsible for the housing shortage. Sixty-five years later, great baroque buildings remain cut up into warrens of communal apartments—shared quarters with dingy, dirty corridors and other “public spaces” where families’ use of the same bathrooms and kitchens can make life miserable. Such living conditions echo those depicted by Fyodor Dostoevsky almost a century and a half ago, when his gambling helped keep him in or near poverty. In his novel Poor Folk, a lowly clerk describes squeezing into alcoves behind curtains where the smell of rotting garbage soon appears to pass “because you take on the same bad smell yourself, and so do your clothes and hands and everything else…” Birds die in the air filled with smoke from cooking, and “there’s always old washing hanging on strings in the kitchen.”⁸

Families that shared all that—and sometimes their bedrooms—with several other families also involuntarily shared intimate details of their lives, unless they whispered and moved on tiptoe. That’s next to impossible when people are rushing to get to work in the morning and irritation at having to stand in line to use common bathrooms easily explodes into anger. Such scenes made much of domestic life tense during the Soviet years, and while there are far fewer communal apartments today, they still number more than a hundred thousand in St. Petersburg. The mayor recently complained that a project to phase them out might take another century to complete at its current rate.⁹

Aside from the specific character of Soviet-style communal living, the widespread nature of Russian poverty may not appear much different than in other countries where large swaths of the population are poor. But another difference—and another explanation for the great nostalgia for the communist past—is that until the Soviet collapse, many Russians were relatively well educated and presumably able, if not necessarily willing, to openly object to the massive inequities.

Why put up with unfair inequality in society? Because in spite of being downtrodden, many Russians believe, if largely unconsciously, that they have a stake in the current system. The corruption that ensnares almost everyone gives a critical mass of people reason to believe that they also benefit.

If the disintegration of Soviet-era infrastructure partly accounts for the rapid economic collapse of many regions, corruption helps explain why it continues getting worse. Perhaps nowhere is its role in deepening poverty starker than on Kamchatka, which is fascinating not only for its unique natural beauty but also for the corruption that has ensnared the poverty-stricken local population in a more visible way than in most other regions. One of the last great spawning grounds of Pacific wild salmon, the far-eastern peninsula is a place where hunger and fraud are feeding a culture of poaching that’s endangering the region’s entire ecosystem as well as some salmon species.

Deeply isolated in Soviet days, when it was a closed military zone with a strategic submarine port, Kamchatka can still be reached from the mainland only by a single highway or ferry. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, its decrepit capital, is a poster city for “forgotten by time.” Gray, water-stained buildings of crumbling concrete line lush hills that descend toward the Pacific Ocean. Besides the twenty-odd fishing trawlers that had been impounded for poaching when I visited and were moored a slight distance from shore, the once bustling port is crammed with rusting ships and scrap metal. The isolation and lack of infrastructure mean that apart from fishing, there’s almost no other way to earn a living.

Kamchatka’s human poverty seems heightened by its exquisite landscape. I’d traveled there to research a story about the potential for tourism in the region. The spectacularly verdant land of untamed rivers has twenty-nine active volcanoes, hot, spurting geysers, rare Steller’s sea eagles and the world’s densest concentration of brown bears. But any tourism that could help sustain at least some of the peninsula’s residents seems a very long way off in a region so poor I couldn’t help feeling depressed much of the time. Driving for several hours beneath snow-peaked mountains with two other journalists, I crossed the narrow peninsula from its eastern, Pacific coast toward the Sea of Okhotsk in the west. We encountered almost no one until we reached a crumbling village called Ust-Bolsheretsk, where fishermen in rusty trailers parked on the banks of the Bolshaya (“Big”) River were eating pieces of salted salmon on dark rye bread, washed down with vodka and tea.

Every year, millions of salmon fight their way up the Bolshaya and its sister rivers. When poachers deplete one species, they move on to another. One deeply weathered man in his fifties who wouldn’t give his last name said that everyone on Kamchatka poaches. “There’s no work here, only fish. Everyone feeds his family however he can, and that’s by catching fish. You go hungry if you don’t.”

The Sea of Okhotsk lies several miles south of Ust-Bolsheretsk, along a section of flat tundra that stinks of rotting fish. As murky waves lapped the volcanic sand on a barren beach on the day we were there, warmly dressed fishermen in rubber boats cast nets into the water. Officially they were catching halibut, but under their piles of fish, we glimpsed another species they’d hidden: wild sockeye salmon, out of season and illegal to catch.

Back in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, regional officials assured me that only 10 percent of the fish caught in and around Kamchatka is poached—and fishing department chief Alexander Krenge said the administration was dealing with the problem. But most Kamchatkans dispute the government’s figures, including businessman Valery Vorobiev, the frustrated head of Akros, one of the peninsula’s largest fishing companies. Standing on the bridge of one of his Norwegian-built fishing trawlers at dock, he said criminal gangs poach at least half the fish sold from Kamchatka. “That’s ruinous for salmon,” he said. “In Kamchatka alone, more than one hundred thousand tons are poached each year, and most only for their caviar. After the fish are slashed open, they’re thrown away.”

Vorobiev estimated some salmon species have declined by half in recent years. Inland, locals say criminal groups organize brigades of fifteen to twenty men who are flown upriver by helicopter. Their poaching deprives Kamchatka’s bears of their natural prey, forcing them to raid human settlements for food.

Kamchatka’s leading environmental activist, Andrei Abikh, told me the peninsula’s industrial-scale poaching is possible only because officials charged with protecting fish are thoroughly corrupt. “The racket goes all the way to the top,” he said. “Everyone wants a cut. It’s gotten to the point where police, secret service and even judges are participating in poaching from our rivers.”

A fish vendor named Vadim Chernov went further. Standing behind a line of tables laden with whole fish and fish heads at a busy outdoor market in the town of Elizovo, near the capital, the young man with a kindly demeanor and tidy clothes was the only seller who risked speaking to me. He said 90 percent of salmon sold there is poached. “The industry could easily be cleaned up, but that would cut into the authorities’ profits from bribes and fines. Most of the local catch goes abroad, so locals are forced to poach, and we have no choice but to buy their catch from them, although it’s just not right.”

Environmentalists say plundering the region’s unique natural resources could cause the collapse not only of Kamchatka’s ecosystem but also the Pacific’s entire wild salmon population. Every Kamchatkan knows the danger but also understands that their region has descended too deep into crime for there to be any hope for change in the foreseeable future.

The poor are pawns in a political-economic system contrived to keep those in power powerful and rich. Although the stake most people have in the going scheme is tiny, it’s been enough to help isolate the majority of Russians from one another and keep them from acting in their common interests by joining forces against the country’s top-down corruption. Payoffs also undermine the police, judiciary and other institutions civil society must rely on to enforce the law. Unlike many corrupt countries where the strongest critics can still struggle to act honestly and call at least some officials to account, in Kamchatka as in most parts of Russia, there’s nowhere to turn.

Russian poverty is too pervasive to measure except by approximation. Even many Muscovites have only a sketchy impression of how bad things are in many rural communities. Ethnic minorities—of which there are hundreds in Russia, comprising some 20 percent of the population—often have it even worse. In the Nenets Autonomous region in Russia’s far north, a land above the Arctic Circle where the sandy soil is locked in permafrost, the indigenous Nenets people are under serious threat. When I visited the tiny settlement of Krasnoe, where hunting and fishing are the main economic activities, young people were leaving for towns and alcoholism was crippling many of those who remain.

Many Nenets men spend most of the year herding reindeer, their chief source of food, on the tundra. Piotr Vylka, who had retired two years earlier, passed his time building sleighs in the small wooden house where he lived. An avuncular type who complained of having too much time on his hands, Vylka sang a traditional song for me, the kind men sing for entertainment during the long months of lonely herding. The mournful guttural verses about a confrontation between a young girl and an old man who wants her jewelry end with her pushing him onto a bonfire.

Vylka said he’d helped herd up to six thousand reindeer in the north of the region, which, at the height of its nine-month winter, sees no daylight at all. Average temperatures hover around minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. During the brief summer, mosquito swarms can be savage enough to kill adult reindeer—or so said Vylka, adding that he nevertheless enjoyed life on the tundra and was bored at home.

Nenets people now comprise only about a tenth of the population of the Nenets Autonomous region. More than half its residents are Russian, most of whom work in the region’s oil industry and live in the nearby capital of Naryan-Mar, an old lumber port whose buildings are of wood, blackening Soviet concrete or corrugated metal. Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet authorities forced many nomadic Nenets to settle in villages as a way of asserting political control and introducing modernization. Some Nenets continued to herd reindeer for collective farms while their children lived in state-run boarding schools. A local historian named Yuri Kanev, a former director of one of those schools, described how seriously the programs disrupt the traditional Nenets way of life. “Children from the age of seven to about sixteen are cut off from their families to live in school for most of the year under the direction of strangers. Little good can come of that.”

The forced change helped drive many to idleness and alcoholism. Victor Yanzinov, a psychologist who treats alcohol and drug abuse in Naryan-Mar’s ramshackle hospital, said 5 percent of the region’s population is now reportedly under treatment for serious alcoholism—a fraction of those who need it, he added—and the situation for local Nenets is far worse. “Conditions are very bad in Nenets villages. Residents have gone crazy for drink and it’s putting the very existence of the Nenets under threat. Maybe the most frightening thing is that people don’t know the real situation. The statistics don’t begin to reflect the facts.”

The collapse of the USSR worsened the situation by ending Soviet subsidies. Young people began their migration to cities, where, as a young physician named Rais Ibragimov explained, unemployment and drugs awaited. “Not knowing how to function in an urban, industrial environment,” he said, “they just don’t mesh with the rhythm of city life and they’re oppressed by its social structure.” Both Ibragimov and Yanzinov bitterly criticized the authorities for doing virtually nothing to address the problems.

Back in the village of Krasnoe, Maria Vylka, the herder’s wife, insisted that life under the Soviet Union had been better and happier. “Things are worse now. Young people have started acting like bandits, even killing people; there was a murder right here! People were nicer before.”

Psychologist Yanzinov said that despite the prevalence of alcoholism and drug abuse, the government provides almost no funds for its treatment or research. His clinic had no computer, so he couldn’t maintain a database of medical conditions, for example—let alone connect to the Internet. Still, there’s little doubt about the relationship between poverty and Russia’s widespread epidemics, including tuberculosis, the frequency of which—in a country with one of the world’s highest number of billionaires—has more than doubled since 1991. In Russia’s gruesome prisons, the disease kills some five thousand people a year, and many of the hundred thousand prisoners released annually are infected. In the general population, tuberculosis kills more than twenty thousand people a year, compared to around five hundred in the United States, which has a population more than twice as large. World health experts have warned about a time bomb waiting to go off that could greatly damage many more countries than Russia alone.

The epidemic of HIV and AIDS, the largest in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is even more worrisome. Registered cases in 2012 numbered more than seven hundred thousand, up from fewer than half a million as recently as 2008, but no such figure can be trusted in a country that blamed the Pentagon for AIDS during the Cold War. Experts say the real rate is at least double the official number—and growing, thanks largely to the use of heroin, which is also rapidly spreading.

Although AIDS is the third leading cause of premature death—compared to the twenty-third in the United States—Moscow no longer accepts funding from the United Nations UNAIDS program or other international organizations because it sees itself as a donor country, not a recipient of help. However, the government doesn’t finance programs that had been until recently supported by foreign agencies.¹⁰ Insufficient funding for known cases of AIDS virtually guarantees that patients receive generally inferior treatment, and poor people get by far the worst from the badly fraying social services and healthcare system. The United Nations places Russia seventy-first in the world in human development, after Albania and just above Macedonia. (Norway is first; the United States thirteenth.)

Still, despite the turmoil wreaked in Krasnoe by sickness and substance abuse, life is relatively good compared to other tundra villages, many of which are barely self-sufficient. That’s largely because it is the only settlement connected to the region’s capital by a dirt road. And, a villager assured me, the fact that it sits on its own supply of natural gas, which residents use to heat their houses, makes it “almost paradise.”

Faced with obvious disintegration of the social fabric, the authorities in Moscow have issued appeals for radical change. In 2009, then-President Medvedev published a manifesto specifying the urgent need for everything from overhauling the country’s flagrantly corrupt legal system to reducing the number of its time zones from eleven to nine in order to make life more efficient in the sparsely populated far east. However, Kremlin policies supposedly designed to tackle some of the problems are actually making them worse. Tinkering with the time zones and scrapping daylight saving time in 2010 did the country far less harm than Putin’s decision five years earlier to abolish elections for the country’s regional governors in favor of Kremlin appointments. Although he partly restored direct voting in 2012, the inclusion of new restrictions made the concession virtually meaningless. With little oversight from the federal government and no need to answer to voters, local administrations have become mired in corruption and infighting and pay even less attention to their people’s well-being.

When I traveled through the country’s far east, it seemed clear to me that the massive distance from Moscow heightened people’s sense of abandonment by their government. Anton Chekhov encountered some of the same sentiments when he visited the region in 1890. The distance from Moscow, he said, meant people “are not afraid to talk aloud here.”

There’s no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to, so you can be as liberal as you like. The people for the most part are independent, self-reliant, and logical… An escaped convict can travel freely on the steamer to the ocean, without any fear of the captain giving him up. This is partly due to the absolute indifference to everything that is done in Russia. Everybody says: “What is it to do with me?”¹¹

Today, many Russians in the far-flung region have left to seek work elsewhere, and those who remain increasingly look to China for their survival.

Isolated from the rest of the country by the taiga—endless tracts of unsettled land covered by scrubby evergreens—the city of Blagoveshchensk offers insight into Russia’s relationship with China, its flourishing southern neighbor. It stands on the Amur River, which divides the two countries along a line the supposedly congenial Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China contested during bloody skirmishes in the 1960s. When relations began thawing twenty years later, consumer-starved Chinese flocked across the border to buy Soviet cars, farm machinery, pots and pans and anything else they could lay their hands on. Now the trade moves in the opposite direction. From Blagoveshchensk’s barren, litter-strewn riverbank, the Chinese city of Heihe, on the other side, is clearly visible in the form of skyscrapers and giant cranes that are helping construct ever more buildings. As the Chinese city grows, stagnation continues to depress Blagoveshchensk across the river, where the Chinese are helping sustain life.

In winter, trucks and buses cross the ice in both directions. In spring, when the ice begins melting, passengers board small, battered hovercraft that skim over the river and up the sandy banks, kicking up large dust clouds. I watched as people bent over plastic bags bulging with clothing and other goods crammed themselves onto the ferries, which left every few minutes from the Chinese side. Most of the passengers were Russians whom Chinese vendors pay to carry goods to Blagoveshchensk, where—as in other cities of Russia’s far east—they sell the goods at a bustling outdoor market.

In stark contrast to largely apathetic Russians, the Chinese who work in Blagoveshchensk do more than sell merchandise. Next to a market stall, a lanky cobbler named Yo Xiaoching, who was nailing new soles onto a pair of shoes, said it was far easier to find work in Blagoveshchensk than in China. The numbers explain why. While fewer than a million people occupy Russia’s vast Amur region, the Chinese region of Heilongjiang, across the river, is bursting at the seams with almost forty million people. And despite strict new Russian laws limiting the number of Chinese permitted to work in Blagoveshchensk, Yo said it was still attractive to go there because “there’s no work at all on the Chinese side.”

With racist hate crimes endemic in Russia and nationalists spreading fear of a swelling menace on Russia’s border, most Chinese in Blagoveshchensk keep to themselves, maintaining a determinedly low profile. Nevertheless, Blagoveshchensk residents tend to be less suspicious of them than they were during the years immediately following the Soviet collapse. A smartly dressed middle-aged clothes designer named Tatyana Sorokina said she actually felt more reliant on China than Moscow, thousands of miles west. “It’s just a fact of life,” she explained. “We depend on the Chinese for so many things; any development they accomplish here is also good for us.”

Dependence on China isn’t new. Residents told me they wouldn’t have weathered Russia’s steep economic decline in the 1990s without affordable Chinese products. Eighty-year-old Nikolai Alexandrovich said he survived mainly on Chinese potatoes during the worst years of Stalinism in the 1930s. “If it weren’t for the Chinese, we’d be walking around naked and hungry today because our authorities have only helped Russia’s far east decline. All they care about is battling each other for control and lining their pockets.”

In addition to clothes and electronics, most food sold in Blagoveshchensk comes from China. And in a city principally consisting of decaying log houses and prefabricated Soviet concrete hulks, the most prominent sign of the Chinese presence is new construction. The city’s only world-class accommodations are at the Asia Hotel. With its towering glass facade, the building is Blagoveshchensk’s tallest by far. He Wenyan, the CEO of the Chinese company that built it, drives a Bentley coupe said to be the only such car in the Amur region. In the hotel’s massive revolving restaurant on the top floor, He, a proud but soft-spoken man, argued that Blagoveshchensk would be far worse off without the Chinese. “We’re good for the Russians. We help sustain their market economy,” he said. But while locals tend to agree, political experts say that the Kremlin is in denial about the long-term threat to Russia’s far east.

Russia took Blagoveshchensk from the Chinese relatively recently, in 1856, as a voluble sociologist named German Zheliabovsky reminded me in his cramped first-floor office, predicting that China may again control the city sooner rather than later. Beijing has been buying Russian arms for a major military buildup, and Moscow, he said, doesn’t realize that Russia will eventually have to share some land with China to avoid conflict. “Our military alone won’t be able to hold the far east. Russian people will have to live here.” For that to happen, he added, after apologizing for stating the obvious, there will need to be jobs.

Back in the village of Priamukhino, my inquiries into what may have caused the deaths of Father Andrei and his family produced little more than vague theories. But they did help expose a dying way of life in towns and villages across the country, where residents can ordinarily rely only on themselves for basic necessities. A census in 2010 revealed that more than a third of Russia’s 153,000 villages—and nearly two-thirds in some regions—house fewer than ten residents.¹² The continuing mystery surrounding Father Andrei’s death reflected not so much a penchant for conspiracies in the countryside or evidence of the anarchy Russians have feared for centuries but the desperation of people struggling to subsist in a town where other considerations are secondary. Village head Alexander Volkov, who had no explanation for how the deaths happened, said tales of a population gone mad compounded the pain from the loss of an entire family. In the dilapidated wooden building that houses his office, he talked about the television crews that “swooped in here, filmed vodka bottles they themselves had brought, then broadcast that everyone here is a drunk and a vandal. Of course that hurt us.”

“The rich have the gold, the poor have the fun,” goes an old Russian saying much favored by Soviet propagandists. I saw the opposite in Tver. As its residents’ hopes for a better life steadily decline, one change stands out amid the caved-in roofs and broken windows: new summer dachas belonging to affluent residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, roughly three hours northwest by car, are going up here and there. Elderly survivors in the villages say they themselves will be gone within a decade or two, leaving their land to the moneyed newcomers.