Emigration Is Capitulation (1.2)

Did you dream about going abroad when you were a child? I grew up in a military town, where foreign countries seemed like something mythical, and life there seemed beautiful and fantastical. There was no particular patriotism among Soviet officers. What you felt instead was a general cynicism. The coolest guys were the ones who had managed to serve for a few years in East Germany (the former German Democratic Republic): they had VCRs, and their kids had chewing gum with collectible wrappers inside. I remember that in the mid-1980s, when I was still in school, I saw a can of Sprite for the first time. I was blown away by both the taste and the design. It felt like I was holding something perfect in my hands, something worth living for. I had an empty can of Cuban mango juice on my shelf. All those little bottles, wrappers, labels—kids of my generation were always dreaming about them. Pepsi wasn’t cool, because you could buy it in a store. Coca-Cola was cool. Later I was disappointed when I finally tried it and realized it was just another fizzy drink.

Did that obsession with consumer goods affect you? Did you overcome it? A lot of people seem to have stayed at that level—they’ve just changed the labels. If, at twenty, I’d had the chance to buy myself a Mercedes, I would have run out and bought one. People here lived in poverty, they had nothing, and someone from a military town couldn’t help being drawn to shiny Western trinkets. But your views change. In the 1990s I was a quasi-liberal, a fan of the free market and—terrifying as it is to admit—of Chubais (Anatoly Chubais, a key architect of Russia’s privatization). Now I see him as a harmful and socially dangerous figure. During privatization he handed property over to certain people and believes that by doing so he finished off the remnants of the Soviet Union and created the oligarchs. But neither we, nor the authorities, nor—most importantly—the oligarchs themselves believe that this property truly belongs to them. They’re tenants, and they understand perfectly well that it can all be taken away from them at any moment. They got that property through a strange redistribution. It’s not even called “taking away”—it’s called “taking back.” And that’s exactly what the authorities exploit.

Like what happened to Khodorkovsky? Yes. Could the same procedure be used against anyone? Absolutely—and in some cases, it probably should be. All these people who own the means of production don’t seem to feel like masters of the country. It’s as if they don’t feel at home here. How do you explain that? What kind of elite psychology is this? A political and economic establishment has emerged that lives in a state of total apocalyptic foreboding about Russia’s future—and doesn’t even try to hide it. The higher the status of the person you’re talking to, the more cynically and bluntly they say that whatever is left of the country will be taken by the Chinese, and that nothing will work out here because the population is shrinking, drinking itself to death, and the government is full of idiots. What’s more, it’s often government officials themselves who say this. They see themselves as some kind of enlightened shepherds who have grasped the inevitability of the end and given up on everything. That’s why they treat Russia as an open hunting ground where money can be made quickly. For convenience, they create an oasis for themselves—Moscow—where, traffic aside, you can live comfortably. In terms of standard of living, entertainment, and restaurants, Moscow is no worse than New York—a wonderful city, if you have money.

And a business jet so you can fly off to the Riviera at any moment. Yes, all you need is a passport and an open visa. Today that has become the default model of behavior.

And who are these people? Can they be described in one word? Crooks. People who believe that Russia consists of two castes. They keep forcing on us this myth about the dark side of the Russian soul. About a people who do nothing. No matter what you do, these lazy brutes still won’t work. A typical example: I recently read an interview in Kommersant with a Moscow construction businessman, and it made my blood boil. He says, “I offer Russians jobs for $800 a month, but none of them want them, so I hire Tajiks instead.” But the cost of living in Moscow is such that anyone who wants even a basic quality of life—sending a child to daycare and school, buying decent clothes and food, keeping a son out of the army, and taking one trip a year to Turkey—obviously cannot live on $800 a month. In other words, this businessman thinks Muscovites should work for $800 a month so that he can make a 300 percent profit on construction.

Our establishment believes that all of us should turn into some kind of Chinese-style cheap labor so they can keep racing around in their jets. You can’t call the entire elite crooks, but people with that mindset are extremely harmful, and unfortunately they are the ones now in charge everywhere: in business, in government structures, in the technical sphere. They sincerely believe they know better than everyone else what needs to be done. The prevailing view is that the people are worthless, while they are the enlightened guys who can manage the dark masses.

What keeps them here? Money, of course. You can’t just pack up and leave while oil is at $120 a barrel. And status. They love going to Spain, for example. But if you start acting up in a restaurant in Spain or try driving around with a flashing official siren, they’ll slap handcuffs on you and throw you in a cell in no time. Over there, nobody cares how important you are in Russia. But here, you’ve grabbed God by the beard—you’re the master, a patrician, speeding along with your flashing light past ten thousand people sitting in traffic, cursing, running late too, but unable to do anything about it. And you’re speeding because you’re in a hurry to get to a restaurant and arrange a kickback worth a couple of million. And of course that gives them a huge rush. A vast country, a nuclear bomb, 120 million educated people—and they race their chariots around Moscow.

So the elite are potential emigrants? They are already emigrants to some extent: their children study abroad, they own property there, and they do not tie their own future—or their children’s future—to Russia. They understand that sooner or later everything here will collapse, they’ll be hanged—meaning there is no future here. They sincerely believe that when they ride around with flashing lights, they are carrying their cross along with them, but their children deserve a better future, so they should study in Switzerland and live normally abroad, not among these animals. Take Luzhkov, for example—everything was great for him, and then bang: he and Baturina send their daughters abroad, and after that they leave too. They all understand that today you’re powerful, and tomorrow you’ve been devoured. If these people are carrying their cross, as you put it, does that mean they have some moral justification for what they do? Or are they simply predators? Without question, they have a fully developed moral system. They seriously believe they have honestly earned this money: after all, nobody but me can work, because everyone else is an idiot and incapable of being a deputy minister, while I can. Yes, I steal $10 million a year, but I work like a dog, I slave away on Saturdays, I get screwed over in these endless pointless meetings, and I suffer terribly. Those millions are only modest compensation, and if I went into business I’d make twice as much. So let that bastard Navalny try working in my position first, and then he can accuse me of something. If I don’t get this money as a kickback, then Navalny will steal it—but he doesn’t deserve it. That fool would only drink it away anyway, while I’d at least spend it sensibly—buy a house in Spain, in Marbella. They are constantly waging bureaucratic wars that lead to stress-induced pancreatitis and nervous disorders.

But they look quite prosperous. Even so, it’s a very nerve-racking job. This isn’t golf—it’s a serious daily struggle over spheres of influence and cash flows: someone is trying to put you in prison, and you’re trying to put someone else there. If you look at the top three on the Western Forbes list, those people seem driven by a sense of mission. Warren Buffett gave 80 percent of his fortune to charity. And our top ten rich men—what is their mission? What have these people done for the country after making billions from it? There’s a demotivator meme online—it looks like a Soviet postcard with Stakhanovite workers (model labor heroes of the USSR) and the caption: “The single idea behind all our efforts is to make a pile of cash and f*** off to Brazil.” It’s exaggerated, of course, but broadly speaking that’s how it is. It’s not a mission, it’s a way of seeing themselves in the world. All they want now is to stage an IPO, issue some bonds, dump them on someone, and buy themselves Chelsea Football Club and half of Belgravia in London. That’s the role model now. Everyone looks at Abramovich and thinks: well done, he got out smartly. Now everyone looks at Baturina: she remained a billionaire by moving a significant share of her money abroad. Which country is the biggest investor in the Russian economy? Cyprus. Everyone takes money out of here to Cyprus, and then it comes back into Russia disguised as foreign investment, which is supposedly better protected. This is done not so much to reduce taxes as simply because no fool wants to be an owner here. And if tomorrow the Cypriot government decided to nationalize its offshore companies, then Cyprus would own all of Russia. And when I hear officials say they will defend an independent energy policy and won’t let America impose anything on us, I say: what independent energy policy, if a third of Russian oil is sold through an offshore company and the money for that oil stays in Switzerland? In that sense, everything that needs to be said about our elite was brilliantly summed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski: “If $500 billion belonging to the Russian elite is kept in American banks, then you should decide whose elite it is—ours or yours.” That says everything about them. And it makes me laugh when our pseudo-patriotic officials, in a frenzy, accuse me of having studied at Yale and sold out to the West. Many people still think you got a grant from the State Department and are now slandering the country with American money. What I want to say is that these crooks who have bought up condominiums in Miami are the ones who are absolutely under the thumb of Western intelligence services—if necessary, they can always be charged there with money laundering. In other words, our elite is essentially controlled from abroad. There is such a concept as “illicit enrichment”—the gap between official income and actual property. It’s telling that Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption is the only one our country still hasn’t ratified, because that article would be absolutely fatal for our officials. As for the claim that our people are hopeless and will drink themselves into oblivion anyway—you won’t deny that there is some truth in that, will you? People are drinking themselves to ruin, and it is sad and painful to watch. You go to a village and see that everyone is drunk: men, women, even teenagers. People my age are already full-blown alcoholics. IF I END UP ABROAD, IT WILL NOT BE OF MY OWN FREE WILL. ONE OF THE REASONS: I DON’T LIKE LIVING THERE. (quote) What should be done about them? I spoke with Sergei Shnurov, who takes a very cynical view of the situation. He says: take any little man who is drinking himself to ruin, give him a cap, a baton, and a whistle, and he will immediately start taking bribes and turn into a crook and an exploiter. Do you believe in these people? I believe in them absolutely. There are people who have, let’s say, been lucky. And I certainly belong to that group: I have never lived in poverty, I received a good education, I have a decent salary. The duty of those who, like me, have been lucky is to help those who are drinking themselves senseless in a village in the Ryazan region. Yes, if you gave that man a whistle and a baton right now, of course he’d go out and use them like a bandit. That means their children must be the lucky ones, and then they will stop drinking. I do not believe in an apocalyptic end; I believe it can be prevented. We simply need to concern ourselves not only with ourselves and our money, but also with those people who are drinking—because they understand too that it is bad. Everyone has that proverbial moral law within. They want to live with dignity too; some people just need a helping hand. What you’re saying—that people must understand, become aware, feel responsibility—sounds utopian. Do you really think that’s possible? It’s not utopian. Finland and Norway also had serious drinking problems, but the state did not allow it to continue; it helped people, and they stopped drinking. If there is the will, everything can be regulated; the main thing is for young people to have prospects. And this applies not only to alcoholism, but also to bribery. The standard example is Georgia. In Soviet times, corruption there was monstrous. They overcame it. Political will decides absolutely everything. Here too I see a huge number of people who think as I do and share this sense of responsibility. Since the late Soviet period, our ruling elite has been shaped by negative selection. In other words, the worse you are, the more you lie and steal, the faster you rise. And yet millions of people are completely normal. To be Navalny means to be normal. Maybe I’m flattering myself, but it’s the only possible position.

INSERT (at the end?) A parody Twitter account called “Alexei Analny” recently appeared and gained more than 400 followers in 15 minutes. After Yuri Luzhkov was removed from office, Kommersant and the Gazeta.ru portal held a virtual election for mayor of Moscow. Navalny won with 45 percent of the vote, ahead of banker Alexander Lebedev and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. In the “Runet Blog 2011” competition, Navalny won the “Best Investigative Blog Post” nomination for his post about “capital” at Transneft, and also took first place in the “Best Blog by a Politician or Public Figure” category. He launched the RosPil website, which publishes information about suspicious government procurement contracts. The site is funded by voluntary donations.

Profile (at the end?) Alexei Navalny was a member of the Yabloko party until he was expelled on the grounds of “causing political damage to the party, in particular through nationalist activity.” In 2008, he bought small stakes in major companies—Surgutneftegaz, Transneft, Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, TNK-BP, Sberbank, and VTB—and, as a shareholder, demanded disclosure of internal corporate documents. Alexei Navalny succeeded in getting a criminal case opened against one of Gazprom’s managers, as well as securing the resignation of the director of VTB Leasing. An active blogger, Navalny has more than 28,000 followers on Twitter, and his LiveJournal blog has over 40,000 readers.

You don’t believe in people who “go into government”? No. I have a bit of experience: I lived with my family for a year in the Kirov region. Empirically, I became convinced that all of this is fiction—the idea that if we put good people into a bad system, it will somehow fix everything. A good person cannot survive there, because they will be ineffective. So how, in that case, can this process of transferring power to honest people even begin? Only through sheer political will. The country’s leadership should be doing what their job description requires: serving the state and the people. Right now, a “normal” person is someone with whom you can “get things done,” whereas what we need is meritocracy in the best sense—the rule of professionals.

As for faith in people—are you sure Russians are capable, in principle, of living better? I’m convinced of it. Our people are no different from Americans, Finns, or Germans. What do you think the mood is right now among our intelligentsia, the intellectual elite? They are often in an apocalyptic mood too; they also think everything is going to collapse. Everyone is waiting for change, but unfortunately the so-called intelligentsia thinks it can sit on the internet and watch everything fall apart, and then someone wonderful will come along and do something. I appreciate that some people see me as exactly that kind of person. But that won’t work. What I do, anyone can do. I insist that it’s not frightening, not difficult, and not expensive. Anyone can become an urban guerrilla, a fighter—or, more accurately, a normal person. A citizen. You don’t have to tear your shirt off and rush into battle every time you see injustice, but you can always take a few concrete steps within the law to improve life and restore justice in a particular case.

> If I end up abroad, it will not be of my own free will. One of the reasons: I don’t like living there

Under what circumstances would you yourself be ready to emigrate? Under none. Though I’m a rational person. If someone were chasing me with an axe, I’d run from him. Anyone in Russia who fights the authorities does not rule out any scenario; everyone has the examples of Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky, and others before their eyes. If I end up abroad, I will have gone into exile, not left of my own free will. One of the reasons is that I don’t like living there. I used to think I was a modern person, what you might call a mobile professional. I recently spent six months in America—a wonderful country: everything is cheap, there are no traffic jams, and if there’s a police officer standing on the road, you’re sure he’s there to protect you. But I realized I wouldn’t be able to live there. The smiles and the constant “How are you?” irritate me. It irritates me that they don’t have black bread. I happily went to some restaurant on Brighton Beach because they had herring there. My cultural codes are completely different from theirs. They don’t know who Cheburashka is (a beloved Soviet and Russian cartoon character), and they don’t understand the value of a chewing-gum wrapper insert. At children’s summer camps, they were taught different swear words. And then there’s the language—I know English, but at my age I’ll never fully grasp all the subtleties of the language and humor. Recently I found myself at the same table with graduates of a conservatory. Many of them are wonderful musicians, accomplished people, and all of them are planning to leave. It’s a new trend. Now everyone is talking about yet another wave of emigration—apparently the sixth by now. Where does this packed-suitcase mood come from? There is no opportunity for self-realization. For example, the programmer who built the RosPil website is an absolute Russian patriot, but he lives in California and works in Silicon Valley. Maybe that’s why he’s a patriot? He would like to work here, but he can’t imagine what he could do. He understands that Skolkovo is a money-laundering structure. And if you’re a person of the arts, then you have to dance at corporate parties and join United Russia if you want to be allowed onto Channel One. Of course it’s easier to leave and work in the US or Europe. You don’t condemn them? No. But in a certain sense, leaving is capitulation. I condemn those who hold the view that Russia is full of nothing but cattle and there is nothing to do here. I’m against that consumerist approach. You have to try to do something. I’m not saying everyone must go to Strategy-31 protests. But anyone, within the framework of their profession, can refuse to live by lies. Do something—anything—and make your position clear. You can leave, but help someone at least—say, those drunk people in Ryazan. They are drunk partly because you left and did not help.