Executive Intelligence Review
Vol. 27, No. 31
August 11, 2000
Exhaustion: Russia's Precious
Senior Intelligentsia Is Under Threat
by Konstantin Cheremnykh
Six years ago, the Leontieff Center, regarded as a
vanguard of liberal economic strategy, published research
which forecast a decline in the population of St.
Petersburg by 400,000 during the next decade. The tendency
might change after a ``positive social drift,'' wrote the
authors. From the context, it was clear that the ``positive
social drift'' meant the ``natural'' extinction of the aged
part of the population.
The economic program of Yegor Gaidar's Democratic
Choice Party, presented at its founding congress in 1994,
included a proposal to raise the pension age by five years
(above the age of 60 for men). By that time, the
life-expectancy of men in Russia had dropped to 59 years.
As I had an opportunity to talk directly to one of
the members of the research team, most of whom originated from
the St. Petersburg Institute of Economy and Finance, I
know precisely that the two above-cited examples are not
accidental. They reflect the common viewpoint and
intention of the masterminds of what was called the
Russian liberal reform.
``You see,'' this person told me, ``actually, these
[Gaidar's] guys are not resolute enough. To my mind,
people of so-called pension age should not be granted the
right to vote. Because they cling to the outdated
political system, and are unable to change themselves.
Actually, pensions could be eliminated--''
``?|?|?''
``Why, their relatives should take care of them.''
And what if the relatives are disabled or deceased,
or never existed? I was too shocked to argue. This young,
pleasant, and energetic person was talking about millions
of people, with a careless smile that reminded me of
something very relevant, though rather distant from
white-collar theorizing in a cozy St. Petersburg flat.
The white-collar theoretician would find perfect
mutual understanding with the practitioners, who appeared
on the scene in Russia's big cities in 1992-93, in the
period when the real estate market took shape--in the same
anarcho-criminal way as any other market in newly
transformed Russia, blessed by ``progressive mankind'' with
a radical market change.
A person named Aleksei M., who began his career as a
journalist for real estate magazines, was exposed in 1994
as a serial murderer, his victims being mostly old people
and alcoholics in the central districts of Moscow. He
would find a lonely person, seeking to exchange his flat
for a smaller one, then arrive at his place with a pile of
prepared documents, which the victim needed only to sign.
With a nice smile, he would offer to complete all the
bureaucratic work. After the victim signed the documents,
the young man would kill him and promptly resell the flat.
The affair was exposed only after several corpses were
dragged out of the garbage dumpster in a courtyard where
the young man had several clients.
``Actually, President Boris Yeltsin should praise my
work,'' Aleksei told the TV, with the same type of careless
smile. ``I've been carrying out sanitation work,
eliminating unfit individuals.''
The same ``sanitation'' was carried out by a number
of criminal groups in St. Petersburg. One of them, a kind
of ``joint venture'' between criminal types and policemen,
was officially registered as a real estate agency. It is
registered still today, although two of its founders are in
jail, and the last director was murdered by a group of
people, probably relatives of his former clients, who used
pieces of drainpipe as a murder weapon. These anonymous
Robin Hoods of the St. Petersburg real estate cesspool
were apparently quite sure that it was useless to appeal
to any law enforcement agencies.
If you enter any district court or almost any police
station in St. Petersburg, avoiding a piece of plaster
falling on your head, you will immediately get a sense of
the atmosphere reigning in the local body designed to look
after order and justice in the surrounding area. The scene
at a local clinic or emergency rescue station is no less
desperate.
I very seldom visit my local clinic, which was
lucky enough to acquire a new building shortly before the
reforms started. The entire lobby is packed with small
vendors who trade all kinds of small wares, like perfumes,
stockings, shoes, porno magazines, and frying pans. It
looks like a small market near a metro station, or
anything but a medical institution. The traders pay rent,
and the clinic thus manages to survive.
Most of the patients visiting the clinic are elderly,
because a minority of the younger generation can afford to
visit private physicians, while the absolute majority,
what is regarded as ``middle class,'' rushing between
three or four jobs, has practically no time or opportunity
to take care of their health. Many small private clinics,
designed for patients with average or below-average
incomes, have gone bankrupt during the last three or four
years, as the ``paying capability'' of their clients could
not keep up with their rent, not to mention the unofficial
fees, which any director of a clinic, or of any enterprise
or shop, is forced to pay to local racketeers.
In order to go on working under these humiliating
conditions, and not to become an element of the ever
farther penetrating criminal network, one needs specific
human qualities. Regardless of the self-justifying
complaints of those who failed to resist the pressure from
the criminal milieu, it is a challenge more to one's moral
integrity, than to physical security.
A resisting director, scholar, schoolteacher or
physician constantly faces compromises with evil, such as
being forced to rent a part of his building to a shady
trading company in order to keep his institution alive;
forced to use textbooks provided by the Soros Foundation,
while trying to compensate for their lies about culture
and history, with his own knowledge and authority. Still,
the most tragic choice faces a doctor who has no
possibility of treating his patients, due to the lack of
medicine or its exorbitant price, dictated by the
thoroughly criminalized pharmaceuticals market. For him,
the fact of ruthless and deliberate Darwinian selection is
most obvious, and very often all he can say is the words
of the old village woman from Solzhenitsyn's essay
``Matryona's Yard'': ``I am so tired of burying all of
you....''
- Engineers as Fruit Vendors -
Shortly before the 1996 elections, the Russian
``democratic'' leadership offered what should be regarded as
a political kickback to the vast Russian criminal class,
at the expense of other layers of society. According to
the amended pension legislation, years of labor in prison
were now included in the person's labor record, whereas
years of higher education were not. Periods of work in the
Far North and other areas with similar hard conditions,
previously registered as two years for one in the
personnel record, from which the amount of the pension is
calculated, was now to be regarded like any other work.
This gift to organized crime, taken together with the
humiliation of the intelligentsia, could be interpreted as
just a recognition of the fact that the criminal class had
become the ruling class in post-Soviet Russia, while
various unnecessary intellectuals and useless skilled
workers, were no longer regarded as an honored part of
society.
In a way, this amendment was another version of
Gaidar's proposal, noted above, for it forced millions of
intellectuals, in order to earn a larger pension, to seek
any job they could, after the age of 60. Often this was
possible only by selling their intellect and experience to
the new ruling class, which emerged (or, using the
terminology of the Mont Pelerin Society's Vitali Naishul,
was institutionalized) in the initial period of
privatization.
During that process, the population of the big cities
was divided by a red line, into a community of the filthy
rich, with their own system of schools, clinics, and
well-guarded clubs for a limited number of persons; the
category of disabled and ``hopelessly'' aged people; and
the majority, in between, filled with hostility and
alienation, and always at risk of finding themselves on
the bottom. This average working--or, rather,
surviving--class coincides with the non-voting class, as
most of them, despite hating the liberals profoundly, are
able to survive due to possibilities provided by the
petty, semi-anarchic and totally criminalized street
market. Therefore they are terrified of the idea of a
``society of order,'' ``dictatorship of law,'' or anything
like the former Soviet rule. The part of this majority
which participates in local elections, usually expresses a
preference for one racketeer or corrupt official over
another. Only arbitrary police actions, as was the case in
Nizhny Novgorod, prevent the election of purely criminal
figures to the posts of Mayor or Governor.
Striking up a conversation with a small-scale street
vendor in the Luzhniki market of Moscow or Haymarket
Square in St. Petersburg, you are startled at the academic
language, surfacing through the superficial layer of
street subculture. Soon you guess, although you're
embarrassed to ask, that this woman with swollen hands and
weather-beaten face is a former engineer, scientist,
scholar, librarian, or archivist, thrown out of her milieu
and left in the merciless wilderness of the street market,
the only place where she, or he, is able to earn enough to
support the family.
Those average former members of the intellectual
professions, who missed the opportunity to sell themselves
to George Soros, are hired by organized crime, with regard
for their professional knowledge: a writer as an
image-maker, an officer as a bodyguard, a chemist as a
producer of synthetic drugs. All of them are treated like
inferior beings, {Untermenschen}, or, if they're luckier,
like servants. Most of them, however, have not yet
forgotten that they once were more independent in their
mind and behavior, despite the well-documented limitations
of the Soviet system. Most of them realize that they have
found themselves in a worse cage than the old one, but the
everyday atmosphere of alienation, in which each is
supposed to survive by himself, leaves no window of hope
for some common purpose, which might suggest at least some
higher justification of their efforts to survive.
Nonetheless, most of them have not yet completely
degenerated as human beings, as is evident from their
desperate attempts to pull ends together for the sake of
their children or grandchildren. And most of them would be
happy, if some new political leadership were able to
invent a labor exchange based on morals, not only on
formal skills. The system of selection in the state
bureaucracy, however, remains based on formal criteria of
``professionalism,'' according to foreign teachers of
recruiting (this term has been recently adopted into
modern Russian), who worship at the Leontieff Center and
related ``strategic'' entities, as well as PR services
(``Don't {pi-ar} me!'' is a common Russian expression
these days), image-making companies, and so forth.
- Beyond the `Cadre Problem' -
The new Russian leadership is either too busy at the
heights of geopolitics, from which a single human being is
not quite discernible, or is blindly relying upon the
intelligence community's principles of personnel policy--a
combination of these same criteria of ``professionalism,''
with some record-based personal confidence. These
principles are relatively functional for purposes of
building up a small team for immediate tasks, including on
the level of state policy, not for the objective of
organizing the vitally necessary mobilization of the
nation, its most efficient generations and communities,
and their combined human potential. Instead of appealing
directly to the population, the majority of which
expressed support for the new leadership, this leadership
is bogged down in the linear logical calculations of a
chess game, moving figures back and forth, and seemingly
seeking some magic combination or mystical remedy for
setting scattered elements into motion.
Playboy politician Boris Nemtsov, who arouses public hatred
primarily with his permanent careless smile, is
energetically pushing a proposal for a relatively large
increase in salaries for the bureaucracy, although his
experience as a model democratic Governor should have made
him quite aware of the fact, that larger official incomes
do not suppress the appetite for still larger
off-the-books earnings. Even if the salaries of ministers
were increased a dozen times over, they would still be
remote from the incomes of the real elite, formed during
the process of ``liberal reform.''
This real elite is comprised not only of the
scandalously famous oligarchs, whose names are common in
our newspapers, from the respectable {Vedomosti} to a
yellow rag like {Moskovsky Komsomolets}. The business
figures, who assembled at the Kremlin to meet the
President on July 28, are not the richest people in
Russia. The most luxurious country house, really a country
castle, on the outskirts of Moscow is said to belong to
the director of a former state trading entity, transformed
into a foreign economic association (VEA), and then into a
private concern, with a monopoly on such a ``bottomless''
branch of exports as the timber trade. His name does not
appear in the mass media, nor does the name of the
president of the Diamond Exchange, nor do the names of a
lot of other former semi-state monopolies, founded in the
late Gorbachov period of ``the big sell-off.'' Names like
Roskontrakt, Mashinoeksport, Raznoimport,
Interprivatizatsiya, Rosvnesh-this, Rosvnesh-that, or the
recently founded Rosspirtprom, are not on the surface of
political struggle or media analysis. But, any Prime
Minister has to contend with the fact of their existence,
and his own complete inability to change anything in this
sphere--because each of these semi-official, semi-private
entities is needed for a potential occasion, especially in
the election period, when the state leadership urgently
needs to lay hands on easily accessible funds--even if he
understands quite well, that immense financial flows,
directed by the shadow ``gray'' and ``black'' oligarchs,
are siphoned out of the real economy. The country's real
economy remains underfinanced, undersupplied,
underdeveloped, and {exhausted} for years and years--while
the leadership fails to solve the notorious ``personnel''
issue in a way that would eliminate the unofficial
practice of a 40% or larger kickback to a fat, semi-state,
semi-official Ivan Ivanovich for each project, program, or
venture.
- The Salt of the Earth -
Sooner or later, the official authorities acquire
enough courage, if not to gather the scattered stones,
then at least to count them.
A recently published report in {Kommersant}, authored
by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and based on reliable
data from still functioning academic institutions,
presented a horrible picture of the attrition of
industrial facilities, which creates a chronic and
increasing danger of all kinds of technogenous
catastrophes. Fully half of the industrial facilities are
out of service, and more than 10% of them are closed down
each year, being completely destroyed or just stripped.
The necessity of raising this issue has been evident for
years to any honest specialist, or former skilled worker,
turned bodyguard or a fruit vendor. A second horrible
chapter must be added, however, in order to complete the
realistic picture of today's Russia: about {human
exhaustion}.
Most of all, this syndrome affects those decent
persons who are strategically necessary for the existence
of the state and its future, but remain neglected and
overlooked. They are the people who don't need a thick
packet of hard currency or a police order to make them
work for the nation--those who take responsibility for the
cause to which they have dedicated their lives (that is
how they regard the results they achieved in the
pre-reductionist era), and for the personal problems of
their close colleagues and their families. This syndrome
affects aging directors and senior specialists, who spent
their whole lives in the real economy, for the sake of
their country and people. This syndrome affects the
veterans of war, who interpret the year 1991 as a second
1941, the year of the Nazi invasion. This syndrome affects
all those who haven't abandoned their work, despite being
underpaid or not paid for months, and forced to find
supplementary jobs, often boring and disgusting, in order
to preserve the results of their former work.
For such a person, the feeling of his own necessity
in his job, the personal responsibility for the health of
patients, or for the minds of pupils, works a powerful
anti-entropic impetus, enabling a person, even in a most
physically worn-out condition, to pull together and feel
much younger and stronger. As long as an older, devoted
physician or teacher still has a job, and, therefore, some
possibility for serving the good, his spirit and body
remain integrated. Sometimes you can witness a miraculous
transformation of a person, emerging from inside and
shining through his eyes.
One person of this type is often sufficient to keep a
whole laboratory, workshop, clinic or school alive,
attracting honest colleagues to himself and his cause by
his personal example. And more and more often, when such a
person passes on, a whole unit of scientific, educational,
or social work falls apart. The vacuum is filled by petty
younger persons, faceless lazybones or energetic
swindlers, who sooner or later destroy what had been left
by the predecessor and his generation.
Will Russian eye surgery survive after Svyatoslav
Fyodorov? Does the Russian cinema for children exist after
Rolan Bykov? Can Russian historical science recuperate
after the deaths of Lev Gumilyov and Igor Dyakonov? What
is the St. Petersburg theater after Georgi Tovstonogov and
Igor Vladimirov? Who can replace Yevgeni Mravinsky in
Classical music, and Mikhail Anikushin in sculpture? Are
there still figures of the scale of Yevgeni Yukhnin in
shipbuilding technology? Are there really prominent
figures in the St. Petersburg school of psychiatry after
Dmitri Ozeretskovsky, Fyodor Sluchevsky, and Boris
Lebedev? The teachers are leaving bleak shadows behind
them, and that is the best case. More often than not, the
careless heirs are capable sooner of distorting and
falsifying the original thought of the founding father of
their institution or the fundamentals of his contribution
in art or science.
In economic management, where the ``liberal reforms''
have ousted the most capable figures, the picture is even
more disastrous. Some of the experienced and highly moral
and responsible figures were dismissed on ideological
pretexts, others passed on from suicide or homicide. The
degeneration of St. Petersburg, from a major industrial
center to a capital of tourism and services, with the
foreign-owned Baltika Brewery as the champion in
production and incomes, is the result of an intentional
extinction of top management cadres: the discharge of
Baltic Shipyard's General Director Viktor Shershnyov, the
murder of the St. Petersburg Fuel Company's Dmitri
Filippov, the death of the Northern Machine-Building
Plant's General Director German Gardymov, the unlawful
incarceration of Baltic Shipping Company President Viktor
Kharchenko. There are no appropriate figures to replace
them. The new generation of managers cannot protect
themselves and each other from the vicious epidemic of
criminal violence, which is already carrying away the
lives of the few skillful younger managers. There is a
vacuum, left by the exhaustion of what had been the salt
of Russia's earth.
- A Vicious Circle -
The first months of the new leadership of Russia made
clear that the energy of youth cannot compensate for lack
of education, experience, and morality. The new leaders
will fail to live up to their capability, unless they make
an emergency effort to save the remaining part of the
older generation of specialists, before the merciless
conditions of everyday survival eliminate them, one after
another.
There is no more time left to wait, before addressing
the problem of human exhaustion, than there is for the
revival of exhausted industry.
The collapse of the physical economy, causing the
deterioration of budget revenues; the wear on industrial
facilities, resulting in accidents; the collapse of
morality and responsibility in law enforcement bodies,
making them an accessory of organized crime; the collapse
of quality in public services, multiplying the challenges
for physical survival--all this, taken together, disrupts
the tissue of society and separates the surviving islands
of thought and decent creativity from each other. It is a
vicious circle, which revolves like Kafka's penitentiary
machine in the desert of public medical and social care,
leaving the most precious and unique personalities, still
surviving and still fighting for the survival of their
institutions and their families, completely unprotected
from any kind of emergency, whether it might come from a
car driven by a drunk ``new Russian,'' from an incompetent
surgeon, from an unscrupulous business partner, from a
corrupt policeman, or from a careless paparazzo.
Sometimes, so little is needed to keep them safe: an
audience of interested students; a good old movie on TV,
at least once a week to provide an island of optimism and
spiritual health in the ocean of hard porno, soft soap
operas, and killer thrillers; a bus not packed like a can
of fish; a suburban train which arrives on time; a doctor
who is attentive enough to concentrate on his patient's
condition, despite his own hurry to get to a second job.|...
``The greatest danger is far from the most evident,''
it was sadly put by the author of {Kommersant'}s report on
industrial attrition. How many years of Darwinist
selection of the national human potential must pass,
before the issue of human exhaustion, and primarily the
exhaustion of the intellectual force, is raised on the
level of state policy?
- Sunstroke -
My grandfather died in the hot and weary summer of
1954, which was later called ``the year of the
academicians''; one summer wiped out a whole galaxy of
outstanding scientific minds. Popular explanations of this
wave of deaths pointed to peculiarities of the calendar,
or the weather, but there was apparently a more
significant underlying factor. When years of constant
psychological tension, with a brother-in-law in exile and
a lot of friends jailed, suddenly ceased, in what was
later called the thaw, this weakened the threads that had
been keeping the body and spirit on high alert, and
provided an entryway for the vicious rot of entropy.
Sunshine, hitting the separating seams, broke his heart,
which he did not suspect was exhausted.
The implicit belief that the year 2000 was a kind of
boundary which, in some miraculous way, would put an end
to the disaster, along with a simple superstition
associated with the turn of the millennium as a finish
line in a sports race, after which one might, finally,
have a little rest, was very common among the older
generation of intellectual Russians, for whom 1991 marked
the beginning of the new, ruthless era, in which knowledge
was neglected, morals undermined, and human life,
especially of an aged or disabled person, depreciated.
This year has carried away Professors Boris Zanegin
and Elmer Murtazin, two of the most decent specialists in
foreign relations, the founders of Russia's Anti-Colonial
League. One more of the League's founders, Nikolai
Korolyov, died last summer.
``I am so tired of burying all of you|...''
On the night of July 17-18, Russia and mankind lost
Prof. Taras V. Muranivsky, the President of the Schiller
Institute for Science and Culture in Moscow. A day later,
Prof. Sergei B. Lavrov, President of the Russian
Geographic Society, followed him to the Heavens. Both men
had taken little care of their hearts, and disliked
visiting doctors, and never had a physician on hand to
monitor their health.
Late that night in the Schiller Institute's Moscow
office, I woke up, hearing somebody turning the key,
walking along the lobby, coughing and opening doors.
``Taras Vasilyevich?'' I called out, forgetting in my sleep
that he had been taken to the hospital. It was silent,
still, and terribly hot.
I have never believed in anything mystical, and so I
am just sure of the fact that before leaving this world,
the soul of Taras entered the place of his creative work,
which had become his cause and had been keeping his body
and spirit alive and committed throughout these disastrous
years in Russia, despite exhaustion, and against the
entropy of despair. And I am still feeling giddy from this
stroke of discovery, of this tragic and powerful evidence
of the other world, where the heavenly Russia gathers its
best sons, leaving the results of their labor for those
who may once get up from their knees to raise the dropped
banner of national and public dignity.
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