Russians

7 Indolence and Inefficiency

There is nothing petty about the Russian mind when it comes to the gap between the scale of conception and the amount of achievement.

—William Gerhardie, essayist (1895–1977)

Since the dark days of communism, when many Moscow streets were unlit and the city as a whole was all but somnolent after dark, the capital has become known for having joined the ranks of cities that never sleep. Traffic jams persist, pedestrians clog its neon-lit sidewalks and shops and restaurants on every block bustle with customers. During the day, metro trains that arrive more frequently than every two minutes throughout the rush hours are packed to capacity. The frenetic, work-intensive appearance of things doesn’t mean that activities are conducted efficiently, however. Nor should Moscow’s resemblance to other major cities be taken as an indication that it functions as they do.

Consider the crumbling ZiL truck factory, a collection of hangar-like assembly plants that sprawls across acres of prime Moscow real estate on the banks of a canal off the Moscow River. The location is a legacy of the old practice, tsarist as well as Soviet, of building factories in the center of cities with little regard for aesthetics or urban planning, let alone residents’ comfort. Founded in 1916, the complex cranked out more than two hundred thousand vehicles during its Soviet heyday, when ZiL was a pride and joy. The company also produced refrigerators and bullet-proofed limousines for Stalin. Today, ZiL trucks that look like they came straight out of the 1960s still roar from one end of the country to the other, their drivers bouncing and straining to steer the unwieldy vehicles without the aid of power steering or modern suspension systems. The Communist Party seemed to believe that only large trucks were necessary, even for hauling the smallest loads, and after the Soviet Union collapsed, ZiL continued building hundreds of thousands of obsolete hulks no one wanted.

Now the plant stands mostly idle, producing a mere thousand sorely outdated vehicles a year. It is kept alive mostly by orders from the city government, which took control of the premises in the 1990s, and a joint venture there that assembles Renault truck engines from imported parts. While many ZiL buildings are rented out to other companies, massive World War II–era machinery still stamps steel parts in one remote corner of the factory. When I spoke to several workers operating the equipment there on a frigid winter day, they were unwilling to talk for more than a few minutes for fear of being overheard. I had better luck outside the administration building, where a handful of brave workers held a meek demonstration to protest their pitiful wages, a bold move for state employees in Putin’s Russia. One of the protesters was a stout, bleached-blond woman with short hair named Anna Fyodorova, who had worked at ZiL for thirty years and made the equivalent of three hundred dollars a month. That was her salary on paper. In fact, she said, she hadn’t been paid since the previous summer, a situation for which she blamed company management.

“They take the money that’s supposed to go to our wages,” she said, “while they profit from renting out the factory premises. Capitalism is for our bosses, not for us honest workers because only those who steal get ahead.” Fyodorova fondly recalled life in the Soviet Union, in particular ZiL’s cradle-to-grave social support network, which included a hospital, stadiums, concert halls and children’s summer camps. “ZiL used to be its own state,” she said. “It owned everything, and everything used to be simple and easy.”

Russia’s recovery from the 1998 economic downturn promised to help reverse the industrial decline. The government’s decision to devalue the ruble made Russian products cheaper, enabling new companies such as Wimm-Bill-Dann, which sold juice in Western-style packaging, to more easily compete with the flood of imports Russians craved. Then a surge in oil prices fed a consumer binge by buoying incomes. The GDP finally exceeded its 1991 level in 2004.

But the future remains bleak for many workers like Fyodorova in Russia’s manufacturing sector. Despite being awash with oil and gas money, the government has failed—more accurately, it has declined—to use its riches for rebooting the country’s mostly stagnant industry in any serious way. Life for factory workers in the old so-called worker’s paradise has barely improved during the past two decades. Many employed in sectors kept alive by inertia, corruption and high import duties—such as the auto industry—put in their hours with a carelessness and disorder best conveyed by the word bezalabernost’, which means “lack of a working system.” The work ethic remains so weak that apart from weapons and a few small civilian aircraft, Russia now produces virtually no manufactured goods that can compete in the world market.

However much that is a legacy of the Soviet Union, which famously pretended to pay workers who pretended to work, it is also an old trope in Russia, whose fairy tales teach that the lazy and bumbling will be rewarded as long as their hearts are pure.

The current lack of drive also derives from Russia’s natural-resources economy, in which what really matters is how to take—including by theft—rather than how to produce. Despite endless official promises of change, there is little indication it will happen soon. The present system works well enough to sustain the ruling classes and, for the time being, enough of the great unwashed to keep them from thinking of revolt.

Not that some efforts to change haven’t been serious. Some facets of education have improved since the 1990s, when there was no money to pay teachers, and a few entrepreneurs have been working hard to start new businesses, despite the government’s choking regulations and demand for bribes. So is it Russia’s fate to remain perennially underdeveloped? Or is it simply enduring bad luck, as it has been for centuries?

During the supposed rule of the proletariat, the main Soviet labor unions were weak organizations that actually represented the interests of management. Although that remains largely true today, a smattering of scrappy new workers’ groups has emerged to speak for real workers. I dropped in on a meeting of one of them in a central Moscow basement one cold January evening. At the bottom of a set of narrow stairs, ten members of the Moscow Workers’ Union sat around mismatched tables surrounded by busts of Karl Marx and shelves groaning with Lenin’s collected works. The dusty relics seemed more comic than usual because the dogged earnestness of those present seemed intended to defy the consistency with which Russia’s leaders have exploited its toiling masses. Solemnly agreeing that conditions for workers are increasingly miserable, the men nevertheless made no resolutions for action.

Vassily Shishkarev represented employees of ZiL. Tall, bearded and weary-looking, he argued that workers were far better organized in the past, even during the dangerous days before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, than they are today. “People don’t discuss wages and factory work on the shop floor,” he lamented. “Instead they talk about mushroom picking and potato harvesting like a bunch of farmers. That’s because they’re forced to survive on what they grow in their spare time and on food from relatives in villages back home.”

Echoing Anna Fyodorova, the veteran ZiL worker who had protested at the cautious demonstration, he said those who live well in Russia are almost exclusively “those who steal state property, company shares and money.” He questioned why the Moscow city government, which owns more than 60 percent of ZiL, hadn’t fired its management for its “miserable” failure to modernize. Of course the question was rhetorical. “Ordinary people understand you can’t survive by being honest,” he said by way of an answer. “Putin and his gang are building no new factories,” he said. “They’re just taking for themselves and their cronies.”

ZiL would surely have been shut down many years ago in any country with a competitive manufacturing economy. Its survival speaks volumes about the nature of business in Russia, which has much less to do with producing than expropriating—in this case subsidies from the city government. Shutting down the factory was also far from the union members’ minds. On the contrary, Shishkarev criticized ZiL’s cutting of Soviet-era social welfare, insisting wages be raised to compensate for reductions. How should ZiL boost salaries despite making no money? His answer was a shrug.

Back in the ZiL complex, mild-mannered spokesman Victor Novochenko admitted that his company is an anachronism. Despite workers’ nostalgia for the good old days, he said, unloading Soviet-era social burdens and property is crucial to ZiL’s hopes for reviving its fortunes. “We take up far too much expensive real estate in the center of Moscow,” he added. He also pinned hopes on replacing the company’s predominantly poorly trained pension-age workers by appealing to the government for help in training qualified personnel.

But the authorities’ record in such matters has been miserable. Under Putin, the government’s main strategy for assisting ailing industries has been to arrange takeovers by state-controlled companies or business groups close to the Kremlin. Investigative journalist Yulia Latynina, one of Russia’s most incisive columnists, told me she’s convinced state control is the worst way to encourage industrial restructuring. “In the best-case scenario, it results in the inefficient use of government funds to create unfair competition and stifle the market,” she said. “In most cases, it means straight-out theft by the new managers.”

Visiting another auto factory, the mile-and-a-half-long plant of Russia’s largest carmaker, Avtovaz, is like stepping back in time. Until it was phased out in 2012, the most popular model of Avtovaz’s signature vehicle—the Lada—had been based squarely on the Fiat that was 1966 European car of the year. The factory is located in the city of Togliatti, on the banks of the Volga River in the Samara region south of Moscow. Named after the Italian communist politician, the industrial eyesore is wholly dependent on Lada and the myriad auto-parts and tuning companies it helped spawn. It’s also a center for organized crime where journalists who dare investigate the notoriously corrupt auto retail market are often killed. Until a third of its workforce was cut in 2009, the factory employed more than a hundred thousand workers—many of them women—who welded, screwed and hammered its products together, a massively labor-intensive process that required no less than thirty times the man-hours it took to build a car in the West. I spent less time than I wanted to on the factory floor because the midlevel directors accompanying my every step were far less interested in allowing the company’s countless woes to be exposed than in hustling me to attend a vodka-soaked lunch—the usual blind for journalists. I barely managed to escape by claiming I had a plane to catch back to Moscow.

My friend Kolya once bought a Lada Niva, a small four-wheel-drive jeep. It needed service within a week because assembly workers had left metal shavings in the transmission. When I asked why he hadn’t bought a much more reliable and comfortable used foreign car for the same amount of money, he shot me an exasperated look. “How long have you lived here? Don’t you know you can’t expect a new car to work right away?” No wonder slightly used Russian cars—driven long enough for their owners to have hammered out some faults—often cost more than new ones.

Instead of shutting down such companies or forcing them to change, the government has kept them and the hundreds of thousands of jobs they generate on life support partly by keeping prices very low—a new Lada costs around five thousand dollars—and continuing to raise duties on imports of foreign cars. That alone would not be enough to keep the domestic car industry afloat, however. Pride has driven politicians, such as Moscow’s former Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, to funnel huge amounts of government money into keeping it alive. When the global financial crisis of 2008 forced car factories to a standstill, threatening to deal Lada a long overdue death blow, it was Putin who rode to the rescue. Advertising efforts were redoubled, and, more effectively, import taxes were again raised, now to an average of 25 percent.

When Putin visited Togliatti in April of 2009 for a highly publicized meeting with Avtovaz workers, he vowed to do what was needed to keep the company going. The government soon announced it would spend billions of dollars on a bailout on top of the raised import duties. Now the company survives as a symbol of Putin’s determination to exhibit himself as the defender of the Russian proletariat. Arguments about the steps needed for any real reform of the Russian auto industry aside, the Lada is such a bad car—and Avtovaz’s executives are so bumbling—that it exposes Putin to ridicule every time he steps near one. In August 2010, the then–prime minister exchanged his chauffeured Mercedes for a tiny Lada Kalina he was said to be driving across Siberia. His publicity stunt, intended to display the car’s reliability, achieved exactly the opposite.

Amateur video footage posted on YouTube showed Putin traveling with a massive convoy of cars, buses and trucks—which included three Kalinas, one apparently broken down on the back of a tow truck. Putin tried again in 2011, when he showed up at a Lada showroom to promote an ostensibly new model the government was billing as Russia’s new “people’s car.” The then–prime minister failed to get the car to start, which he later very uncharacteristically blamed on himself, then failed to open the trunk until two company officials rushed to his aid. Nevertheless, Putin pronounced the new Lada a “good car.”

While the authorities’ penchant for propping up grossly inefficient state enterprises partly explains Russia’s manufacturing failure, a more deeply rooted problem plagues new business owners. An entrepreneur named Vladimir Maltsev told me that the common scourge of corruption threatens the viability of his small wholesale trading company every day.

I met Maltsev when I was hailing a taxi and he stopped. (Russians often use their cars as gypsy cabs when times are tough. In the 1990s, several cars would sometimes screech to a halt the minute you stuck out a hand out and the drivers would argue about who would get the equivalent of the two-or three-dollar fare. Now it’s usually quicker and cheaper to call a real taxi.) Although I’d spent years driving in Moscow and knew very well how the traffic police operate, I was researching the topic and asked Maltsev how often he was stopped. “Every day,” he said with a sigh. When I went on to ask about other forms of corruption, he told me the tax police had recently frozen his company’s bank account after claiming he had failed to file an apparently crucial document with his corporate return. When Maltsev—a stout, mustachioed man with dark curly hair—showed up at the tax police building with the proper paper, which bore a stamp showing it had indeed been filed, he was nevertheless made to wait in line at an office that never appeared to open.

“I kept returning,” he said, “until someone approached me to say he sympathized because he saw me standing in line every day. The man then gently suggested I visit another office down the hall, where it was understood I’d pay a bribe and my problem would disappear. It did.” Maltsev, who on that occasion coughed up five hundred dollars, said routine pressure like that is effective because it paralyzes companies. “Business owners will do anything to unfreeze their bank accounts,” he said. Since the collapse of communism, officials have called entrepreneurship and small and midsize businesses the keys to future economic success. At the same time, however, running one’s own business has gone from merely extremely difficult to downright dangerous, and not only for Russians.

Among those who opened businesses in the 1990s were thousands of adventurous foreigners who came to Russia to make their fortunes in the country’s wild new capitalism. Some struck it rich, but life has been far from easy for many of them. One is a dentist named Giovanni Favero, whose high-tech American-Russian Dental Center occupies plush quarters in the center of Moscow.

I met Favero in 2001, when I needed an emergency root canal and his clinic was the only one listed in the telephone book that answered on a weekend. That was the first of many regular visits I paid to the genial, white-haired man in his early seventies who speaks in a deliberate, indeterminate American drawl. Favero had run a practice in Sacramento for more than twenty years when he first came to Russia to lecture about American dentistry in 1991. He’d believed Soviet standards were advanced until he examined a Russian patient who’d just visited a dentist but still needed twenty-one cavities filled and a root canal. “When I saw the kind of dentistry that was actually practiced here, I said, ‘Wow, I can really make a difference,’ ” he told me.

Favero eventually realized he could make an impact only by running his own practice. He also stood to make a fortune from newly wealthy Russians with very bad teeth. After opening his first clinic in 1995 and a second several years later, he now employs some forty people. Explaining why owning a business in Russia is more difficult than he’d expected, he began with a story: one morning, he found two thugs waiting for him outside his apartment.

“Instead of going to the elevator, I started walking down,” he said. “But they ended by pushing me down the stairs, where I got into a corner and tried to defend myself.” The thugs bloodied Favero and broke several ribs before running off. He believes they had been sent by the Russian he’d appointed to be his company’s nominal director—something often required of foreigners. Apparently the man wanted to intimidate him into surrendering the practice. Having set up bank accounts and prepared all the paperwork necessary to transfer ownership of the clinics, the director needed only Favero’s signature.

Although he went to the police instead and managed to maintain control of his practice, Favero said the authorities provide no guarantee of security. “You never know what’s going to happen.” Like so many others, he complained about constant demands for bribes by the tax police and other officials. The state’s drive to reassert command over private industry is even worse. “They’ve taken back control,” he said of officials under Putin. “Everyone wants to be a bureaucrat because that’s how you make money. They let you work only if they think they can get you in the end.”

Favero sees Moscow’s glossy new buildings and bustling streets as a facade that hides the corrupt deals that stand behind everything. Advertisements for dental services plastered across Moscow are a symptom. “They advertise like crazy to get one-time patients, screw them and then close,” he said of some of his competitors. “They don’t need to care about doing a good job. With more than ten million people in Moscow, they don’t need repeat customers.”

Favero, who once caught a former partner secretly transferring money to the United States, said successful businesses like his are always under threat of being taken over by someone with better political connections. “If you go into partnership with somebody and the company is losing money, it’s your company,” he said. “If you make money, it’s theirs. Believe me, they’ll find a way to get it from you.”

He attributes such behavior to the Soviet legacy of trying to “screw the system.” “People will tell you what you want to hear to get what they want, and if you don’t find out whether they’re lying, it’s your problem.” Although he believes that when he leaves he’ll have to abandon the investment he’s made in his clinics during the past decade, he doesn’t regret his time in Russia. “It’s a real learning experience to find out just how lucky we are in America.”

Far from showing any signs of waning, the informal economy of connections, agreements and favors, which was called blat in the Soviet Union, has relentlessly grown since Putin first took office in 2000. Among other authorities who have grandly acknowledged the problem, Dmitri Medvedev as president in 2008 claimed that corruption threatened Russia’s very viability as a state. The government’s own figures put the country’s “corruption market” at an estimated three hundred billion dollars a year. In 2011, the police said the average bribe paid to officials was ten thousand dollars, while Transparency International ranked Russia 143rd out of 182 spots on its corruption index. The bribes inflate the price of everything from real estate to food as companies pass on the hidden costs of doing business. Maltsev told me he had no hope anything would change. “It’s only words,” he said of Putin and Medvedev’s promises. “Corruption has always been all-pervasive. It’s an integral part of our state.”

Instead of tackling crime, the police spend much of their time falsifying statistics to meet Soviet-era quotas for cases they’re required to solve, sometimes by framing innocent people. An ex-detective who spoke to me anonymously because he was afraid of reprisals from former colleagues said police even set up crimes they appear to solve as a cover for their real activity: using their official positions for profit. Police couldn’t live on their meager official salaries, he explained, let alone afford the rows of shiny luxury cars parked in front of many police buildings. Those who don’t agree to take part are fired or framed. “It’s a business,” he said, summing up. “And it goes all the way to the top.”

The near-total nature of Russian corruption provided rich material for Nikolai Gogol, whose 1836 play The Inspector General is a brilliant satire of bureaucracy in the nineteenth century and one of the landmarks of Russian drama. In the comedy, the crooked officials of a small town mistake a visiting civil servant for a high-ranking government official whose inspection they desperately fear. Cottoning on, the young man takes advantage of the fawning local officials: he moves into the mayor’s house, where he flirts with his wife and daughter while taking bribes from the town’s merchants in return for promising to exile the hated town boss. The pretender skips town just before he’s found out and the real inspector general arrives.

Recent accusations have placed Yuri Luzhkov, whom the Kremlin ousted in a political power struggle in 2010, among the country’s most notoriously corrupt officials. Luzhkov was Moscow’s mayor for seventeen long years, ten of them under Putin and Medvedev. Running the city like a personal fiefdom enabled him to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into ZiL in a futile populist campaign to revive the company. Medvedev fired him after a cynical state media campaign that accused him of making his wife Russia’s richest woman by funneling city contracts to her construction company. But a year before his unceremonious removal, when the Kremlin was exhibiting no disapproval of his tight control of the city because it suited its needs, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov published a report about the mayor in which he put the price for a kilometer of road then under construction in Moscow at a whopping $570 million.

“If you compare the cost of Moscow’s roads to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland,” Nemtsov told me soon after his report was issued, “the particle collider is cheaper. So is the Channel Tunnel [between Britain and France].” It’s no accident that the Russian capital remains one of the priciest places on earth: its costs reflect a closed political system in which construction companies enjoy close ties to political leaders. “In any country in the world, the Czech Republic, Britain, Germany, even Italy,” Nemtsov said, “it would be cause for a criminal investigation. Those two”—Luzhkov and his wife, Elena Baturina—“would be sitting in jail. But not in Russia.”

Nemtsov added that among the countless politicians up to their eyeballs in corruption, Luzhkov and Baturina were “so odious” that any move against them would send a loud signal to politicians and law enforcers across the country. The move came the following year, when Nemtsov’s accusations—although never attributed to him or many other critics of Luzhkov in the opposition—suddenly found their way onto state television as part of its smear campaign. However, the allegations were no sign of a real battle against corruption. They were used to remove political rivals—in that case the last powerful regional leaders installed during the Yeltsin era.

Luzhkov fought back in a show of resistance exceedingly rare among top politicians; he was, after all, a founding leader of Putin’s United Russia Party. But his inevitable defeat came when Medvedev used his presidential power to fire him. His replacement, a dour bureaucrat named Sergei Sobyanin, who had previously served as Putin’s loyal chief of staff, put Moscow firmly under the Kremlin’s direct control. But although Baturina’s business interests have steadily declined since then, few Russians believe that she, Luzhkov or any other truly high-placed official will be formally called on the carpet for corruption. Sobyanin later faced accusations that he ordered Soviet-era asphalt sidewalks in the city center to be ripped up for replacement with concrete bricks. His wife owns a brick and paving business.

“Many have stopped believing it’s possible to defend their rights if they’re the victims of corruption,” a lawyer named Yevgeny Arkhipov told me. Arkhipov, the director of the watchdog Anti-Corruption Committee, which operates hotlines throughout the country on which people can report abuses of office, said the lack of perceptible change following Medvedev’s promise to fight corruption when he became president in 2008 disenchanted many people, according to the opinions expressed by thousands of callers. That feeling would swell into the protests of 2011–12. But in 2008, just as he was preparing to publish a report on corruption, Arkhipov and several other members of his group were forced to flee the country after he was warned they would be investigated. They released their findings in Ukraine, where they took refuge for two months, until they felt they could safely return.

Arkhipov confirmed that such intimidation is effective for frightening Russians into remaining silent. The authorities’ marginalization of civil society, erosion of public institutions and crackdown on freedom of speech has been thorough enough, he told me, for many to no longer know even how to go about defending their rights. “The stricter their control, the more their activities are hidden from the public,” he said, “and the more difficult it is for people to fight corruption. Better to pay a bribe than start a conflict with an official.”

Not everyone has been cowed. In 2006, I visited a small plant in a nondescript brick building in residential northeastern Moscow, where dozens of workers were hunched over sewing machines and steam presses, producing uniforms for the likes of McDonald’s, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble. The textile company had been started by one of the Soviet Union’s first private businessmen to be allowed to operate legally, Ilya Handrikov, who launched his venture in the 1980s under Gorbachev’s new laws after he was expelled from college for selling clothes he’d made himself.

No fat cat, the gregarious entrepreneur drove a humble Russian-made hatchback and worked out of a cramped office next to his shop floor, behind mannequins displaying the factory’s products. When I first spoke to him, he told me that conducting business honestly was one of his main goals and highest obstacles. He said laws and regulations governing business were purposely vague and often difficult to pin down. Asked about his most frequent problem, he cited visits by fire inspectors and financial regulators who demanded bribes to stop them from reporting fabricated violations.

“When a fire code inspector comes by, he can ‘find’ any number of them,” he said. “Which is of course why the majority of manufacturers have to pay bribes.” When a drunk policeman appeared at the factory’s front door, it turned out, after much barely coherent explanation, that he was looking for a different company. “Doesn’t matter,” he slurred after finally being made to realize his mistake. “You’ll pay me, too.”

Such visits prompted Handrikov to launch an organization to aid businesses like his. Now one of the country’s most prominent corruption fighters, he told me that corruption is choking off hope for Russian businesses to compete globally. “Manufacturing has been destroyed,” he said. “Small and midsize businesses have been trampled. How can you expect companies pressured by taxes, monopolies and political clans to create innovative ideas? They can’t because all their energy goes toward simply trying to survive.”

Forced to rent his factory’s premises on the black market for years because city authorities refused to answer his myriad requests to lease it officially, Handrikov was also compelled to pay the fines their deputies stopped by to collect. He said the problem could have easily been resolved with one hefty, well-placed bribe but refused to pay it. For other companies that didn’t have the money to comply with often arbitrary official demands, he said, submitting was cheaper.

“To our misfortune and unhappiness, the bribe is the main instrument of our daily life,” he added. “And because our bureaucracy is the crucial main link between the state and society, things are getting worse and worse for the individual.” Estimating that 30 percent of his expenditures were going toward kickbacks, he said he and other small manufacturers were barely able to stay afloat, in his case despite having big-name clients. “It’s very hard to live by the rules. If you follow them all, pay all your taxes while everyone else doesn’t, that’s unfair competition.”

In 2005, one of Handrikov’s anticorruption groups collected the signatures of big-name legislators and heads of major unions on a petition that entreated Putin, then in his second term as president, to adhere to United Nations and European anticorruption standards. No reply ever came. “When they don’t want to answer us,” Handrikov said, “the question naturally arises: What’s our dear presidential administration really busy doing?”

Partly in explanation, Handrikov described his association’s effort to stop the sale of illegally imported clothes from China in 2005. Brought into the country on five thousand railcars the government had paid to transport, he said, the clothes were being sold by officers of the Federal Security Service, the country’s security forces, who stood to make a huge, tax-free profit. When the Accounting Chamber—Russia’s version of the IRS—sought to investigate the issue, the government barred it from proceeding.

Few who know Handrikov were surprised when he was finally forced out of business during the financial crisis of 2008, after the tax authorities demanded a fifty-thousand-dollar bribe. According to Georgy Satarov, that kind of corruption is a direct result of Putin’s effort to consolidate power in his own hands. Bald, gravel-voiced Satarov co-chairs Handrikov’s association and heads Moscow’s INDEM (Information Science for Democracy) think tank, which studies corruption. One of Russia’s leading political commentators, he told me Putin gave the bureaucracy a free hand by silencing the government’s critics. “Corruption allows people to be easily controlled because it’s easy to manipulate those who’ve been compromised. On the other hand, it also hurts the authorities because it sharply reduces the competence of state agencies.”

Soon after Putin won a third term as president in 2012, state television began showing police confiscating massive piles of cash and jewels during raids on the luxurious apartments of high-ranking bureaucrats. The bread and circuses, part of the president’s show of governing in the interests of the people, were part of the most visible anticorruption drive to date, which included the sacking of the defense minister. Far from praise, however, the campaign drew comparisons with similar drives under Brezhnev, which also had the unintended effect of exposing just how rotten the system was—especially then, when most people had to wait in line for basic goods. But in 2012, warnings that corruption threatened stability usually ignored the important fact that it’s also central to how Putin exercises his power.¹

One of my many personal experiences with official ineffectiveness took place in my apartment on the top floor of a small nineteenth-century Moscow building. One midmorning when I was working there, I heard the doorbell ring, followed by the voices of two men who said they were police officers checking on residents’ registration papers. Annoyed by the distraction and eager to return to work, I opened the door without checking the peephole. In burst two unshaved thugs, one short and fat, the other tall and thin. The tall one was waving a pistol he claimed was loaded. Encouraged by their amateurishness and perceptible nervousness, which suggested they probably weren’t hardened criminals—they hadn’t even bothered to wear police uniforms, which were easily obtainable—I managed to fight them off, aided by my claims that video cameras were recording their break-in and by threatening reprisal from influential friends.

When I later phoned my wife, Elizabeth, an American who was working at the English-language daily newspaper the Moscow Times, she dismissed my arguments that informing the police would be useless. When the police arrived more than an hour later, the two detectives began by carefully inspecting the apartment for indications of wealth, then checking and rechecking my passport and residence permit, no doubt for any inconsistencies that would enable them to solicit a bribe. After listening to my story and laboriously writing a report, they handed it to me to sign. It contained very little of what I’d told them; instead it said only that I’d called the police after my doorbell was rung by two strangers who had left by the time the officers arrived. Their response to my incredulousness helped open my eyes to the effect corruption has on the state’s ability to provide basic functions such as security: you have to understand the chances we’ll catch the would-be robbers are very small, they said, and we have quotas for crimes we have to solve. Help us out, sign the paper and we promise to do everything to find them.

Many question how such effects of corruption can be measured or even defined in a society that sees it as a normal part of everyday life. Pollster Lev Gudkov, on the other hand, maintains that corruption is measurable and says the assessment must include far more than the amount of cash that changes hands. “Big business can only function by ‘paying’ with political loyalty to the authorities, for example,” he told me.

Gudkov heads the Levada Center, Russia’s only major independent polling agency. It was founded early in Putin’s presidency after the state, upset about statistics that reflected badly on the Kremlin, forcibly took over a previous incarnation of the organization, in which a state-controlled company held a minority stake. That was a common tactic of the time: television stations, newspapers and other media were seized in Putin’s drive to take control of the enterprises that shape public opinion. (Many Russians now compare their once vibrant national television news to Soviet propaganda broadcasts.) But the Levada Center’s experts left their old employers and have since flourished, although in 2013 they began to fear the organization would be forced to close under a new law that requires all groups receiving funding from abroad to call themselves “foreign agents.”

Gudkov blames corruption on Russia’s “cynical climate of immorality.” That can’t be tackled as long as most Russians see a benefit in it, namely as a necessary means of getting things done, he said. “It’s like oil in a car’s engine. The system can’t work without it. It makes up for the ineffectiveness of institutions.” In that scheme, Gudkov said, the government’s ongoing anticorruption campaign is “political theater.” “It’s not because Russians are deficient in morality,” Gudkov concluded. “It’s caused by how our practical social and political systems are structured.” Real change, he said, must be seen as being in people’s interests. “But who’s going to deprive himself of his own bread and butter?” he concluded. “That’s just not realistic.”

Although many Russians believe corruption exists to a similar degree in Western countries—the source of much misunderstanding on both sides—most are well aware that their economy is very different. That’s a very old story, the perception of economic backwardness having played a huge role in Russians’ conception of themselves for much of their history. One of the reasons is that Moscow’s models for a great number of important things have come from the West, a central aspect of a very complicated relationship.

Muscovites first began looking westward in earnest in the second half of the fifteenth century, when Tsar Ivan III (the Great) consolidated the formerly weak medieval state of Muscovy. Crucial for Ivan’s success was that Moscow—previously one of many small warring principalities in the northern Slav forests—had recently instituted a change in its rules of succession that gave it a great competitive advantage. Previously, the throne had passed to the ruling grand prince’s eldest male relative. That scheme prompted inevitable battles between brothers, cousins and others with claims to leadership and also spread wealth so thinly that ruling families’ older branches often grew impoverished and weaker than those of new aspirants.

A ruinous civil war probably drove home the realization to Moscow’s rulers that their system, like those of the other Slav principalities, worked less than satisfyingly well. In any case, they settled on primogeniture—passing the throne to the eldest son only—and developed a complex ranking system. One of the new rules forbade younger sons from marrying until the eldest produced his own heir.² That arrangement gave the principality some guarantee against the previously habitual infighting among senior members of the ruling clan and provided a degree of stability not enjoyed by other formerly more powerful principalities such as nearby Novgorod and Vladimir.

Moscow’s advantage enabled it to absorb the neighboring principalities of Tver and Novgorod shortly after Ivan ascended to the throne in 1462. He soon renounced allegiance to the Tatar rulers of the Golden Horde, a remnant of the Mongol Empire to which Moscow still paid tributes. In 1493, Ivan began calling himself tsar—derived from the Latin word caesar—and naming himself sovereign of all Russia. (The title remained in formal use until 1721, when Peter the Great renamed himself imperator, emperor.)

Moscow’s new wealth also prompted Ivan’s newly ascendant court to search for an imperial style that would befit its grander status. Understandably, it first looked to the recently vanquished Tatars. So tsar and boyars—a rough equivalent of European nobles—dressed themselves in Turkic robes and called themselves “white khans” in their first correspondence to Italian courts.

When that failed to impress the crowned heads of Europe, it didn’t take long for Muscovites to realize the going power lay not in the East but the West. At that point they quickly abandoned Turkic terms and styles. Instead, Ivan began copying European princes. He sent to Italy for architects who would rebuild the Kremlin. The walls that still stand today—then painted white—date from that period, and the main entrance, the Spassky Gate, still bears a Latin inscription praising the Italian Renaissance architect Petrus Antonius Solarius for its design. At the same time, Ivan’s Greek wife, the Byzantine princess Sophie Paloelogue—who had been raised in Italy and was the niece of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor—was helping Westernize Moscow’s imperial style.

But as historian Edward Keenan points out, rather than slavishly copying its counterparts in the West, Muscovy’s emerging culture was unique and dynamic. Despite talk of Moscow as the “Third Rome”—Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, was the second—the cultural borrowing indicated not so much a lack of imagination on the part of the Muscovite princes as, Keenan believes, an ambitious search for their own imperial style. Not seeing themselves as successors to the Tatars, the fallen line of rulers, they were also not interested in the heritage of medieval Rus’, the Kiev-based civilization that had preceded Muscovy by a couple of centuries and that some began perceiving as Russia’s first incarnation only later. Keenan points to a list of 2,900 courtiers under Ivan III, nine-tenths of whom had distinctly Muscovite names—Ivan, Dmitri, Vassily—as opposed to Kievan names, such as Vladimir, Yaroslav or Sviatoslav.³

But if Russia’s early political culture started out as new and unique, comparisons to the West nevertheless soon came to play a very important role. Moscow’s growth set the tone for its future relations with Western countries, historian James Billington argues, by propelling it into a world it was “not equipped to understand… The Muscovite reaction of irritability and self-assertion was in many ways that of a typical adolescent; the Western attitude of patronizing contempt that of the unsympathetic adult.”⁴ I feel that that dynamic continues shaping Russian identity today.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron theorized that the farther east one travels in Europe, the more agrarian and backward the societies become. Born in the Ukrainian Black Sea city of Odessa and educated in Austria, Gerschenkron believed those levels of economic development deeply affected political regimes: the less developed a country, the faster it needed to catch up in order to keep pace with the constantly rising level of modernity in the West.⁵ The only possible way for one as backward as Russia to accomplish that was to force change from above. Hence the tyrannical regimes.

Berkeley historian Martin Malia went further to explain the often severe nature of Russian autocracy. Disadvantaged by its meager natural resources (before the extraction of oil and metals began), and challenged by its lack of mountains and other natural obstacles that would help stop invaders, only “brutal state action from above” enabled imperial Russia to become a major European power in the eighteenth century.⁶ The constant introduction of new agricultural techniques and technology that facilitated the Industrial Revolution was constantly helping the West raise the standard of what it meant to be European and modern. Russia’s difficulty in implementing the increasingly complex adaptations necessary to help it keep up forced it to rely on some segments of the population for innovation. Thus the vanguard of modernization passed to growing sections of the gentry and merchant classes—still a tiny part of society—that became more Westernized than the peasants who made up its vast bulk. Over time, that gap threatened to destabilize a highly conservative society. Although change was necessary to keep up, change that came too fast could be highly damaging.

The most rapid bursts of industrialization in Russian history, together with urbanization and other forms of modernization, took place in the 1890s and the 1930s. The first led to a collapse of the ruling structure and revolution in 1917, but the second did not. Why the difference? Keenan asks, seeking to explain the nature of those changes in “Muscovite Political Folkways,” one of the most seminal articles about Russian history.⁷

Normally, change among the elite—in education, Westernization, the absorption of foreign theories—is passed down to the rest of the population slowly over time. The end of the nineteenth century wasn’t normal, however. In the 1890s, the reforming Finance Minister Sergei Witte—who oversaw the institution of the state liquor monopoly that would vastly improve the quality of domestic vodka—orchestrated Russia’s greatest industrialization drive. That spurt was a response to Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of the 1850s.⁸ Like the Great Reforms of Alexander II, who freed the serfs in 1861 and instituted the first jury system, industrialization was seen as imperative for survival.

Witte’s modernization was massive, but not necessarily well thought out. With the push geared toward heavy industry, factories were built near the center of major cities, as I’ve mentioned. As with the Soviet modernization drives of decades later, its planners largely ignored light industry and the production of consumer goods. As Malia pointed out, another similarity was the peasantry being “squeezed through taxation to finance the whole undertaking without benefitting from it in any tangible way.”⁹

Literature and art reflected the momentous change. At the turn of the century, Russia went from being a follower in culture to a global leader. In painting, modernist literature, dance and other forms of expression—Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist painting, Osip Mandelshtam’s Acmeist poetry and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to name a few—St. Petersburg and Moscow took over from Paris and other capitals as the avant-garde’s spearhead.

Governmental changes were also great. In the country with a tradition of highly centralized rule, representative politics emerged for the first time. However, Alexander II, who had instituted the zemstvo—an organization of local self-government—and taken steps to grow municipal institutions, was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. His son Alexander III was reactionary and suspicious of the masses, as was his son, Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar. Nevertheless, one of Nicholas II’s concessions following a short revolution in 1905 was permitting the founding and operation of the Duma, the empire’s first parliament. It was a dramatic development. “This state and political culture,” Keenan wrote, “in which political power had always flowed downward and outward through politically castrated military and civil bureaucracies, suddenly gave birth to, and tried to accommodate, new political formations that had, or claimed, a share of real political power: parties, assemblies, committees of industrialists, Dumas, city soviets [councils], soviets of workers and peasants, trade unions and innumerable leagues, societies and associations.”¹⁰

Very unfortunately for Russia, however, Nicholas failed to avert a collision between the massive pressure for change and the more powerful inertia of historical continuity. Already barely able to keep a lid on a pot of boiling water, he stumbled badly in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), when Japan dealt Russia a huge humiliation by becoming the first Asian power to defeat a European one in modern times. Russia lost not only its Pacific but also its Baltic fleet, which had steamed all the way to the Far East only to be dispatched. The defeat proved the final straw that caused the revolution of 1905, but reactionary Nicholas soon backpedaled on most of his concessions.

Entry into World War I, in 1914, proved even more disastrous. Weakened by a woeful supply of weapons and ammunition, Russia suffered immense casualties. At one point in 1915, a quarter of the soldiers sent to the front were unarmed. Despite the troops’ often heroic fighting, the incompetence of Nicholas—who was increasingly relying on his wife, Alexandra, and her spiritual adviser, the peasant Grigory Rasputin—and his top generals stoked the flames of the general disillusionment that culminated in another revolution in 1917.

Under times of such rapid change, Keenan stressed, the usual slow processes of “socialization and acculturation” of new ideas and practices from the elite to the masses weren’t enough to maintain stability. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in November of 1917—following an earlier revolution in February, which gave rise to a provisional government led by moderate socialists—reinstated a traditional political culture. When the “spectacularly disruptive” rapid transformation destroyed the ruling elite, it was the peasant culture that provided stability—Russia’s traditional “normalcy.”¹¹

The social culture stabilized once again by the end of the 1930s, evidenced by the fact that not even World War II, which took a far greater human and economic toll than World War I, unseated the political structure. A new political elite had reestablished extreme centralization. The Communist Party, which muffled, suppressed and rid society of the rising classes and groups that had threatened to upend the traditional political culture, became the new beneficiary of Russia’s age-old system of closed, conspiratorial rule.

The new elite was composed of people of peasant or proletarian background whose attitudes derived from the centuries-old village political culture that grew from the need to survive extreme risk. Keenan described the continuity:

After a long period of social and political chaos, the great bulk of the Russian population shared with its leaders a conviction that only a powerfully centralized and oligarchic government can provide the order which they all crave. Having had little contact or experience with the notions of democratic electoral constitutionalism, they share the view that one can rely more confidently upon informal and personal relationships than upon those defined by the legalistic niceties so admired elsewhere. Having had decades of “wrong” government whose claims to legitimacy were generally considered within the political culture to be meaningless, they are more concerned that a government be “right” than that it be legitimate.¹²

Although there are many exceptions, Keenan’s observations about Soviet reality hold largely true about contemporary Russia. After another decade of radical change that threatened to overthrow the traditional political culture—the post-Soviet 1990s—Putin, in essence, reimposed the old way of doing things. As always, it has been fear of disintegration and chaos, the eternal specter of anarchy, that has helped unite Russians in their support of him. Putin has gone to extraordinary lengths to paint the 1990s as a period of chaos and criminality, tacitly appealing to people’s traditional anxieties. Despite the first major visible signs of public dissatisfaction among the urban middle class during protests in December 2011, a Levada Center poll conducted four months earlier showed that most Russians still believed order to be more important than democracy. Forty-five percent of respondents said the country needs democracy, but a “special” kind suited to its traditions.

“May God forfend a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless,” Pushkin wrote, referring to a very destructive peasant uprising that took place during the reign of Catherine the Great in 1774. Paradoxically—and maybe also predictably—it was precisely that kind of revolt that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.

It’s well known that forced labor is highly unproductive. Like serfdom, which lasted until 1861, the subjection of tens of millions of people to slave labor in the Soviet Gulag—the backbone of economic expansion under Stalin—did nothing to help Russian productivity. Although the Communist Party authorities may have put people to work very efficiently on paper, official statistics obscured the truth, just as government figures continue to do in Russia today.

Shortly after the Revolution, Lenin backpedaled on implementing economic centralization by adopting a temporary New Economic Policy, the NEP, in the 1920s to avert utter economic collapse by strengthening small private enterprises. After that experiment with limited “state capitalism,” Stalin introduced full central planning and enacted the first of many Five-Year Plans in 1929. Its aim was to “scientifically” translate schemes for building socialism into targets for industrialization according to schedules drawn up by Gosplan, the state planning agency.

With the country facing mass starvation following revolution, civil war and state-induced famine, the first plan projected that the national income would rise by a staggering 500-plus percent within four years.¹³ In fact, the scheme was a tool for aiding forced collectivization of the country’s farmland, part of Stalin’s “war” against the peasantry, which had disastrous effects on productivity. By comparison, NEP’s policy of allowing farmers to sell surplus yields instead of having the whole lot confiscated by the state had been a stunning success. Nevertheless, the dictator’s policies did transform peasant Russia into a largely urban society. A small part of the population before the Revolution, industrial workers doubled in number between 1928 and 1937, from 3.8 to 10.1 million, and later became the majority.¹⁴ Malia called Stalin’s industrialization the “Soviet experiment’s only real achievement.”¹⁵

The mechanism for achieving that change bred cruelty and paranoia. Less a real roadmap than a psychological tool for coercing loyalty, enslaving workers and justifying the elimination of anyone accused of obstructing the government, the Five-Year Plan also threw most Soviet resources at building heavy industry to the near exclusion of almost everything else. Coal, iron and steel production dominated, along with tractor and automobile manufacture. One of the signature projects was building a steelworks in the city of Magnitogorsk, roughly translated as “magnet city,” in the southern Ural Mountains, to exploit huge reserves of iron ore. Much of the work was carried out by prisoners, who also built gold and nickel mines, oil wells and lumber camps in the vast stretches of uninhabited Siberia and the country’s far north and east. Forced labor laid the foundations of many cities there, as well as the roads, railroads and other infrastructure they required.

All the construction was “carried out amidst constant crisis bordering on chaos,” as Malia put it.¹⁶ By 1930, industrial production was actually falling. Nine years later, the standard of living in the countryside was lower than it had been in 1913. Alexei Stakhanov—the miner who gave his name to the Stakhanovite movement, which encouraged “model” workers to achieve high productivity—was a favorite Soviet example, touted ad nauseam by propagandists. Stakhanov was reported to have mined fourteen times his quota in a single shift (102 tons in less than six hours). Actually, other workers whose efforts went unmentioned contributed to his achievement, however many tons he actually mined.

Far from becoming a model for socialist or any other kind of society, the inefficiency and shoddiness of Russian products had become legendary by the time my father began visiting the Soviet Union. On a Soviet collective farm in the southern Krasnodar region at which he spent some weeks in the 1970s, he reported that half the tractors, including the new ones, were under constant repair. Still, the director kept his farm in better shape than it would otherwise have been because he bought two tractors for every one he needed, a method of acquiring spare parts that spoke volumes about wastefulness and inferiority.

In Moscow, many brand-new buildings were ringed with nets to catch bricks that fell from their facades. Jokes were among the few things in which Soviet production excelled. One of them captured the spirit of sloppy work and shortages particularly well. It’s 1978. A dentist who makes good money because he, like all competent dentists, is paid under the table finally saves enough to buy a car. Taking an immense stack of rubles—neither checks nor credit cards existed—he goes to an outlet (there were also no showrooms) where Volgas are sold. After laboriously counting the money, the manager pulls out a big ledger and flips through its pages. “Yes, you can have your car in 1986,” he says. “April fourteenth. Do you want it in the morning or the afternoon?” The dentist thinks for a moment. “Better make it the morning,” he says. “The plumber’s coming that afternoon.”

Overcoming the late-communist era’s legacy of that kind of dysfunction remains one of Russia’s greatest challenges. My first summer job in Russia, in 1991, less than a month before the attempted coup d’état, was as a translator for CNN. My very unglamorous assignment was to help put together temporary studios for covering a summit meeting between Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush. Along with other television news channels, CNN set up some of its operations in the then astoundingly modern Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel on the Moscow River, which had been built in the late 1970s with help from the American industrialist and Soviet friend Armand Hammer. Having shown up in a blue blazer and harboring visions of not-too-distant stardom, I was happy to make the acquaintance of Kolya Pavlov but dismayed to find that my job would consist chiefly of lugging equipment from the basement to the conference rooms upstairs, where producers were setting up broadcast studios.

Nevertheless, all my interpretation skills were required. Despite the extortionary rates CNN was charged for storage, each visit to the hotel’s dank depths necessitated negotiations with the men in overalls who kept the storeroom keys. They were rarely there. I’d find the door shut, a string sealed with wax attached across the door crack (as if that seventeenth-century method of preventing or at least recording theft would have discouraged thieves in any way). When they did happen to be available, the gruff doorkeepers would come up with one reason after another for not allowing CNN the use of its equipment. Needless to say, incremental bribes were the only way to get things in or out. That was the Soviet economy in a nutshell.

Trying to get things done could become overwhelming. After I began reporting for the local English-language newspaper the Moscow Times, I broke a number of flimsy hotel telephones in provincial cities by slamming down their receivers. The frustration produced by hours of trying to reach one or another official is unpleasant to remember even now. Those were the Yeltsin years, when officials still spoke to reporters—if you could get through over the crackling lines, which produced mainly static. In the Volga River city of Samara, where I was trying to set up an interview with an up-and-coming young reformer type who was generating headlines after he’d modernized the local power utility, I spoke to any number of his secretaries before, during and after their boss’s lunch. Each time, I received a promise he’d provide a yes or no response to my request if I called back fifteen minutes later—when the phone would unfailingly ring unanswered. When someone finally picked up hours later, it was only to lay the receiver down again. Anyone who has tried calling Russian consulates abroad for information about how to apply for a visa will confirm that I’m not exaggerating here.

Nevertheless, I was genuinely taken aback during a reporting trip for NPR years later when I arrived at a tiny provincial airport an hour ahead of the departure time for one of two weekly flights to find the doors chained shut. It was near a small town deep in the taiga forest of the far east, where an overnight snowfall had prompted me to call twice in the morning to confirm the time. Ten minutes of banging and yelling summoned the nonchalant airport director and his secretary, whose only explanation for why the plane had taken off earlier than scheduled was a shrug.

I didn’t know whether to feel angry or desperate: the next plane wouldn’t be leaving for days. Perhaps it was my own fault for having scheduled important interviews the following day in Khabarovsk, the nearest big city. There was nothing to do but check into one of two hotels. Turned away from the first by a woman who demanded, “What do you want?!” when I rang the bell on the concierge’s desk, I managed to get a room in a crumbling hulk called the Youth Hotel.

If the airport staff members’ refusal to admit any responsibility for having misinformed me was typically Russian, however, so was their transformed demeanor the following morning, perhaps because they hoped their unacknowledged guilt would be absolved when they offered good news. A private plane flying natural-gas pipeline technicians would be passing through and the airport chief had convinced the pilot to take me along. Now apologetic, the director gave me a half-hour lift to the airstrip in his ancient military jeep, in which he was barely able to negotiate the unplowed road. Inside, the young woman checking me in had never seen an American passport before. “Have you been to Hollywood?” she asked, beaming. “Bruce Willis lives there, right?” More than being able to keep my appointments, it was her friendliness that sustained my smile as I finally trudged out to the airstrip.

Western visitors to Russia have regaled their friends back home with stories of shoddiness, disorganization and graft for centuries. When the Marquis de Custine visited in 1839, his overwhelming response was dismay. “Seen from the Neva,” he wrote of the river flowing though the grand imperial capital, “the parapets of the St. Petersburg wharves are impressive and magnificent; but from the first step on land, you discover that these same wharves are paved with inferior stones, inconvenient, uneven—as disagreeable to the eye as they are painful to pedestrians and treacherous to carriages.”¹⁷ Writing about the preliminary customs procedures—the full process would turn out to last days—de Custine described the petty officials he encountered on his first stop, the island of Kronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland just outside St. Petersburg.

The profusion of small, superfluous precautions creates here a population of clerks. Each one of these men discharges his duty with a pedantry, a rigor, an air of importance uniquely designed to give prominence to the most obscure employment. He does not permit himself to say so, but you can see him thinking approximately this: “Make way for me, I am one of the members of the great machine of the State.”¹⁸

In his description, the clerks make an inevitable mockery of efficiency and effectiveness. They also dehumanize those at the bottom of the ladder.

At last we finished with the customs ceremonies, the courtesies of the police, were rid of the military salutes and a spectacle of the most profound misery which can mar the human race, for the oarsmen of the gentlemen of the Russian Customs are creatures of a kind apart. As I could do nothing for them, their presence was odious to me, and each time these miserable wretches brought to the ship officials of all grades employed by the Customs Service and by the Maritime Police—the most severe police of the Empire—I turned my eyes. These ragged seamen are a disgrace to their country; they are a species of greasy galley slaves who spend their lives transporting the clerks and officials of Kronstadt aboard foreign vessels. In seeing their faces and in thinking about what is called existence for these poor devils, I asked myself what man has done to God that sixty million of the human race should be condemned to live in Russia.¹⁹

Quoting de Custine may smack of cliché because so many have done it during the century and three-quarters since he visited. But there’s good reason: much of the spirit that depressed that eloquent observer persists, despite great changes in the urban landscapes. Although arriving in Moscow’s recently modernized main international airport, Sheremetyevo, is less dismaying today than it was several years ago, it still gives a taste of the country that awaits your entry. Renovations that vastly improved the late-Soviet era’s dark gloom have had little effect on the lethargic movements of the stern customs officials who take their time poring over the passports of visitors. Having just disembarked from their planes, passengers are forced to wait in jostling lines, sometimes for more than forty minutes. Emerging into the scrum of the arrivals hall, pivoting away from one dubious-looking taxi driver after another, one wonders why a country whose officials cite attracting foreign investment as one of their top priorities provides such a disheartening first glimpse to foreigners, many of whom are prepared to think the best of Russia. Of course that’s an academic question.

Piotr Chadaev, considered the first of Russia’s nineteenth-century Westernizers, famously pronounced that if his country had a universal lesson for the world, it was that its example should be avoided at all costs. “That is but a natural consequence of a culture that is wholly imported and imitative,” he wrote. “There is no internal development, no natural progress, in our society; new ideas sweep out the old because they are not derived from the old but come from God knows where.” Chadaev believed his country was isolated from the West; that it was a backward place with no past or future. By arguing that Russia must follow its own path of development to fulfill its historical mission, he also influenced a seminal group of nineteenth-century intellectuals called the Slavophiles, who had come to believe Russian isolation was a virtue.

Although the fictional character Ilya Oblomov represents a specific type from a certain era, he is among Russian literature’s enduring archetypes. Young Oblomov, the product of a noble family who comes of age in the idealistic 1860s, is the embodiment of a generation of Russian intellectuals called the superfluous men. Generally young and aristocratic, they supported freethinking, often radical ideas, unlike most of their contemporaries. (Their later designation as superfluous arose because they appeared to have nowhere to channel their energies besides dueling, gambling and other self-destructive acts.) Oblomov plans to do great things that never materialize. Instead he spends his idle days living off a waning inheritance, a symbol of the demise of his class. Like the hopeless alcoholic Venichka Erofeev, whose tale of his train trip from Moscow to the suburban town of Petushki would lambaste the Brezhnev-era USSR a hundred years later, Oblomov is as comic as he is tragic. Published in 1859 by Ivan Goncharov, a St. Petersburg civil servant from a family of grain merchants, the novel Oblomov tells the story of the hugely lethargic Oblomov and his equally indolent valet, Zakhar, who live in self-imposed isolation in Oblomov’s once grand St. Petersburg apartment, where the wealthy hero has settled after giving up hopes of a respectable career.

Lying down was not for Ilya Illich either a necessity as it is for a sick or a sleepy man, or an occasional need as it is for a person who is tired, or a pleasure as it is for a sluggard: it was his normal state. When he was at home—and he was almost always at home—he was lying down, and invariably in the same room, the one in which we have found him and which served him as bedroom, study and reception-room. He had three more rooms, but he seldom looked into them, only, perhaps, in the morning when his servant swept his study—which did not happen every day. In those other rooms the furniture was covered and the curtains were drawn.²⁰

Unable to bring himself even to read a book, Oblomov spends his days in his dressing gown, daydreaming. Among other plans, he envisions schemes to reform his ancestral countryside estate into a model of prosperous activity. Unable to achieve his arcadian ideal, however, he ends up justifying his inactivity. In the first pages, he receives an annual letter from the bailiff of his estate that contains the bad news of an ever-smaller income, which spurs Oblomov to decide yet again to overhaul its management.

As soon as he woke, he made up his mind to get up and wash, and after drinking tea, to think matters over, taking various things into consideration and writing them down, and altogether to go into the subject thoroughly. He lay half an hour tormented by his decision; but afterward he reflected that he would have time to think after breakfast, which he could have in bed as usual, especially since one can think just as well lying down.

This is what he did. After his morning tea he sat up and very nearly got out of bed; looking at his slippers, he began lowering one foot down toward them, but at once drew it back again.²¹

Oblomov’s childhood friend Andrei Stolz, whose German name symbolizes his industriousness, represents his opposite. Productive and practical as he is, his efforts to prod Oblomov into action come to nothing. Nevertheless, the reader sympathizes not with the wooden Stolz but with Oblomov, who, despite his shortcomings, is warm, kind and imaginative.

Captivated by dreams of his once happy childhood, Oblomov personifies a state of mind: Oblomovshina, or Oblomovism, has come to mean a kind of inertia. He’s not the first literary archetype to have done so. All children are familiar with one of Oblomov’s best-known precedents, a fairy-tale hero named Ivanushka Durachok—Little Ivan the Sweet Fool—whose greatest desire is to while away his days lazing about on the warm tiled stove of his village hut. Like Oblomov, he is blessed with goodness and an easygoing nature. Unlike Oblomov, however, he manages to accomplish quite a lot.

Ivanushka often has two elder brothers who try to outwit him but whose greed and selfishness inevitably lead them to failure. In one tale, Ivanushka is fetching water at a river when he catches a magic pike. In return for its release, the fish grants him the power to make his wishes come true. Ivanushka’s first act is to order his pails to walk home themselves. Commanded to chop wood in the forest, Ivanushka has an axe do it for him and a horseless sleigh pull the load home. Angered by the bizarre sight, villagers petition the tsar to arrest Ivanushka. Lured to the castle, he ventures there still lying on his stove, which walks there by itself. But he is saved from execution by the tsar’s daughter, who falls in love with him. The tsar allows them to marry but has them sealed in a wooden barrel and set adrift at sea. After days of floating, the desperate princess begs Ivanushka to do something. When he wishes them to reach shore, the barrel instantly breaks open on land, where he conjures up a marble palace and they live happily ever after.

If fairy-tale characters that endure in the West—such as Aesop’s dogged tortoise and the Grimms’ seven dwarfs—tend to glorify persistence and hard work, Russian fairy tales often champion resignation to one’s fate. The unlikely hero Ivanushka defeats his enemies, marries the princess and ends up living in a palace because he is compassionate and selfless.

Literary and fairy-tale archetypes that instill the notion that people without coarse ambition are the spiritually purest reinforce Russia’s widespread fatalism, the idea that things will happen as they happen and nothing important can be done about it. However, today’s workforce is more directly affected by systemic problems in a sphere that has long been seen as one of the country’s great strengths: education. Like so much of Russian life, it is at the mercy of the self-interested bureaucrats and corruption that sap the strength of even those most committed to changing the Russian presumption that sloth conquers enterprise.

Russians and foreigners alike who are surprised the economy isn’t more diversified and robust often point to the country’s traditionally high educational standards. The Soviet Union used to boast that its system was the world’s best, and while communism may have been disastrous in many spheres, it helped educate a land of formerly illiterate peasants. In addition to making literacy nearly universal by building on the impressive gains made before 1917, the Soviet Union produced some of the world’s top physicists, mathematicians and engineers. Russian computer programmers and hackers remain some of the best anywhere, and with so many highly qualified people, the logic goes, surely Russian industry should have more to show for it.

However, closer examination of the schooling system gives a different impression of the difficulties Russia faces in building a competitive economy beyond the segment based on mining natural resources. To begin with, although technical training at top Soviet institutions achieved very high levels, the education that most Soviets received under communism failed to provide the basic curricula that are crucial for critical reasoning and initiative, the kind the best American schools and colleges provide. Heavy drilling in Marxism-Leninism discouraged creative thinking.

A handful of scholars, such as the literary theorist Yuri Lotman—of Estonia’s Tartu University, the Russian Empire’s first institution of higher learning, established under Swedish rule in 1632—were global pioneers in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. But the Iron Curtain cut off most others, especially social scientists, from key developments abroad. Among the fields that withered was psychology, which became a tool for justifying the incarceration of political prisoners in psychiatric wards, a practice that is showing signs of a resurgence under Putin.

Yevgeny Bunimovic, a poet and former teacher who is now a member of the Moscow legislature, disputes the claim that Soviet schools were the world’s best. One of Russia’s best-known experts on education, Bunimovic works in an office in the newly renovated city Duma building on centrally located Petrovka Street, where members of his staff are unusually cheerful for Russian government employees. “It’s a myth,” he said of the idea that Soviet education was among the world’s best. “In mathematics and chemistry, yes, the teaching was good. But not in history, which was subject to propaganda. And the negative influence of Soviet control remains very large.”

Another critic, Boris Davidovich, characterizes Soviet education as “totalitarian.” A mathematics teacher, Davidovich is also deputy director of Moscow’s School 57, located in an old neighborhood behind the Pushkin art museum, close to the Kremlin. “The method was based on power,” he told me, “specifically the state’s power over the teacher and the teacher’s power over the child, who was forced to learn.”

Then came the Soviet collapse. An almost overnight disappearance of nearly all education funding left schools to fend for themselves. Throughout the country, teachers were paid between five and ten dollars a month. Following the example of other state employees, many continued working despite receiving nothing at all. Most schools had no money for maintenance or new textbooks. Despite that, Bunimovic praises the Soviet legacy for helping schools remain open during those very difficult years. In the 1990s, the Moscow school system somehow managed to keep textbooks free of charge, but “there was no money for library books or chemicals for chemistry experiments, let alone any kind of renovations. God forbid something went wrong.”

School 57, which specializes in mathematics and is one of the country’s best, struggled to survive. Since Russian schools are funded by regional and municipal governments, those living in Moscow, by far the richest city, are luckiest. With fierce competition to get in, many of School 57’s students are gifted. But ten years ago, its green Soviet-era paint was peeling and the wooden floors were creaking and unvarnished. Deputy director Davidovich, a fast-spoken but philosophical man with graying hair and a short beard, exudes pride in the school, as do many others there, including the students. The end of Soviet-era controls “freed teachers,” Davidovich said. “Now they can speak the truth without fear. It’s a different mentality.” But when the government left schools to do largely whatever they wanted, it also effectively stopped enforcing standards. With the Soviet coercion gone, there’s been nothing to replace it. Davidovich believes the biggest problem now is students’ lack of motivation. “It’s very difficult to teach in those conditions.”

In some respects, the situation has changed dramatically since oil and gas money began flooding state coffers more than a decade ago. With the government finally paying attention to education, there’s been a sporting attempt to renovate School 57’s old classrooms with earth-tone colors and new lighting, which make it seem like a different place. Davidovich said the government’s decision to allocate a certain amount of money for each student has “transformed our situation.” Teachers are now paid a thousand dollars a month, small by Moscow standards but a far cry from the pitiful salaries of the 1990s. Still, the city government covers only around 75 percent of the school system’s budget, forcing directors to raise the rest themselves. Some comes from wealthy parents, many of whom demand special treatment for their children.

As competition for access to good public schools increases, parents complain about having to pay for their children to get into the best ones and then having to bribe teachers to give good grades. A middle-aged Muscovite named Tatyana Valentinovna told me she sometimes has to pay five hundred dollars. The prices increase for older students. In a 2011 poll conducted by an independent agency called the Public Opinion Foundation, respondents said higher education constituted the most corrupt sector of public life, even above the notorious traffic police.

Other systemic problems include government pressure to teach officially approved lessons, a consequence of increased spending on schools. Putin has called for a universal secondary school history textbook “free of internal contradictions and ambiguities.” Previously suggested new versions have muted criticism of Soviet crimes and praised dictator Joseph Stalin an “effective manager.” Bunimovic told me the education system is held hostage by a dichotomy between what the government says and what it does, as when Prime Minister Medvedev makes admirable speeches about the urgent need to improve education while heading a government that has very little tolerance for criticism.

“Medvedev has said our future depends on raising a new generation of critical thinkers, but how can you do that in a society in which newspapers are censored? You simply can’t have both,” Bunimovic said. He also criticized the government’s historical revisionism. “We have a government that sees enemies surrounding Russia,” he said. “That kind of thinking produces a certain type of student—not the critical, open-thinking type. Again, you can’t have both.”

Other schools, especially in Russia’s much poorer regions, are in far worse condition. Many still struggle to survive, and the level of education is often miserable. Even in the relatively wealthy capital, most schools look run-down. The difference in levels of education is helping fuel the massive gap between the poor, who get most of their information from state television, and the elite, many of whose children read critical media in Russian and foreign languages on the Internet. Educators also say corruption and pressure to toe the official line, those hallmarks of Putin’s Russia, are threatening the school system.

A medical student named Sasha Vitrogansky told me many medical school applicants pay thousands of dollars in bribes to pass their entrance exams and continue giving gifts to secure good grades. “Something wrong can always be found on our tests and reports,” he said. “If you want to pass, you have to take along a box of chocolates and a bottle of liquor at the very least. You force yourself to smile when you hand them to your professor.” Boris Davidovich told me that kind of bribery is seriously damaging even grammar schools such as School 57. “Corruption is lowering the level of education; it’s one of our biggest problems,” he said. “The state of our schools reflects society in general. It’s our common woe.”

Although the average Russian student now ranks close to the average American in world comparisons of educational achievement, Bunimovic concluded, neither country should be proud of that.

Since 1991, Russia has defied countless predictions and heartfelt hopes that its dominant way of doing things would change. Although travel abroad, the influx of foreigners, the freedom to read, the advent of the Internet and a new consumer culture have combined with other very powerful agents to produce some change, so far their influence hasn’t been powerful enough. Under the Soviet Union, the Communist Party’s monopoly on power enabled its leaders to embark upon, and often later abandon, grandiosely wasteful projects such as a railway through the largely unpopulated far east. Now vast income from the energy sector has replaced Soviet control and enables a less authoritarian regime to undertake similarly wasteful projects, such as funding the auto industry, for the sake of shoring up its power and glorifying itself.

Among the new initiatives was Putin’s most audacious effort to present Russia as a modern place: his successful bid to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in the popular Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the president spends much of the summer. Tens of thousands of mostly migrant workers toiled for miserly pay to rebuild the town’s rickety Soviet-era infrastructure on a scale reminiscent of the old communist developments. The defiance of logic also approached Soviet levels, and not just because the city’s subtropical climate necessitated hoarding the previous year’s snow under thermal blankets on the surrounding Caucasus Mountains. Staging the world’s premier international sporting event within a half day’s drive of North Caucasus regions where Islamist militants carry out almost daily attacks did more to defy reason.

Sochi has become synonymous with Putin’s crony capitalism because it enabled his associates at the top of Russian industry to reap billions of mostly taxpayer funds by helping build what have turned out to be some of the world’s most expensive sporting facilities. Companies belonging to one man alone, Putin’s childhood friend and former judo sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg, earned more than seven billion dollars, more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.²² Much of the work was shoddy, polluting and wasteful. The ski jump had to be rebuilt numerous times, until Putin himself fired the Russian Olympic Committee’s vice president, whose brother happened to own the responsible construction company. The final cost estimate for the seventeen-day event surpassed fifty billion dollars, almost four times the proposed amount, making it the most expensive Olympic Games in history.

Nevertheless, the corruption and lethargy that come with Putin’s system and its suppression of genuine enterprise may well continue sustaining the old way of doing things until the oil wells run dry.