My reunion with the motherland went in the classic style. Sheremetyevo-2 Airport does everything it can to make people start cursing it—the motherland—within ten minutes of stepping off the plane. We waited 2 hours 20 minutes for our luggage. As you can imagine, exactly what you need after a 12-hour flight. The loudspeaker lady who announced, "Attention passengers arriving from Los Angeles, your baggage is on conveyor belts 3 and 4," was greeted with applause. The guys from the Tokyo–Moscow flight got their bags before we did, but they had waited 2 hours 40 minutes. They didn’t clap. They had no strength left. In general, SVO-2 is a perfect illustration of the fact that, despite the huge number of people in uniform in this country, there is no authority at all. No vertical authority, no horizontal authority, none of any kind. Let me explain (those of you who’ve flown into SVO-2, remember this with me): The arrivals area at SVO-2 has three access roads. Each has two lanes. Nothing spectacular, but in principle it should be enough for an airport to function normally. What happens in practice: The first—the closest and most convenient road—is reserved exclusively for the “in-house” taxis. The sides of the cars proudly read: "Sheremetyevo International Airport. Transparking." It is almost empty. The third is for buses and minibuses. Fair enough. And the second is for everyone else. 95% of the traffic. In other words, it is packed solid with the parked cars of semi-legal taxi drivers. These are the same guys in knit caps who are always getting in your way as you leave the arrivals hall, pestering you with, "Need a taxi?" So one lane is clogged with taxi drivers, and in the second lane the cars of people meeting arriving passengers pull up. And of course, when they find the people they’re meeting, they stop, block traffic, and load them and all their junk into the car. Everyone behind them waits. They don’t even honk. Because two minutes later they’ll do exactly the same thing themselves. There is simply no other option. Thin, icy slush underfoot. Arriving passengers drag their luggage carts across the sidewalk by the first access road. They’ve got children, duffel bags, and downhill skis in cases. The people meeting them shout, "Kolya, you won’t get through there—go around on the right!" The arrivals nervously drop things off their carts or tip the carts over entirely. And under their feet are the "need_a_taxi?" guys. The line of cars waiting to pick people up stretches far beyond the airport. The wait time is enormous. In other words: absolute hell and hardcore. Now let’s think about why all this happens. It’s all pretty banal. Some bitch in SVO-2 management is running a taxi business. To do that, they set up their own taxi outfit with exclusive operating conditions and, on top of that, protect the semi-legal taxi drivers, maintaining the desired price level (the fact that these semi-legal taxi drivers are “their own” and don’t let outsiders in needs no proof. You can just ask any taxi driver). And it doesn’t even matter how much this bitch makes—100,000 rubles a day (about $1,100) or a million. Go to the SVO-2 website and look at the financial indicators. 60% of the market. 15.2 million passengers a year. It’s obvious that this whole taxi and parking business is dust compared to the scale of the airport’s core operations. It’s an important infrastructure element, but not a serious source of profit. And yet the penny-ante interests of some mug in SVO-2 management lead to all 15.2 million passengers cursing and calling the airport—and the whole country behind it—a dump. Cars stuck in this artificially created traffic jam burn ten times more gasoline in a day than the entire take from the taxi racket. Not to mention the value of passengers’ time. Let’s go to the website of the company "Transparking." ***Transparking LLC was established in 2000 and is the official carrier of Sheremetyevo International Airport. ***In other words, it doesn’t even belong to SVO-2. And Transparking LLC does not appear on the airport’s list of affiliated entities either. The semi-legal taxi drivers, naturally, don’t have a website. But there’s no doubt that at the end of the workday each one pays up, the foreman puts the money in a little bag, and carries it to that same bitch in SVO-2 management. Let’s return to the main point. There is no authority in this country. Everyone passes through SVO-2. Rich and poor. Big shots and nobodies. People with connections and people without. Deputies and ministers. Everyone looks at this and says the same thing: They’ve completely lost their fucking minds here. Everyone understands the essence of the problem. The colossal damage is obvious. The solutions are obvious too. But nothing happens. Because the director of SVO-2, his chief deputy, and some attached FSB officer (Federal Security Service—because of course there has to be one, strategic facility, border crossing) successfully divide up the stolen cash every month, not forgetting to set aside a small pile for their “protection” in the Ministry of State Property (which manages the state shareholding) and the Ministry of Transport (the профиль ministry). Of course, the scheme may contain nuances, but overall it looks exactly like this. That is how the mechanism called the “vertical of power” on television is actually implemented in practice. *Do whatever you want—just don’t forget to praise the country’s leadership and kick money upstairs. *And these people couldn’t care less what I think of them, what you think of them, or what 15.2 million passengers think of them. And there are no systemic factors whatsoever that could make SVO-2 management give up earning their ten personal kopecks.
Take, for example, Mikhail Mikhailovich Vasilenko, director of Sheremetyevo International Airport. One might suppose he should simply be paid more, so he wouldn’t be tempted to make money on the side. Let’s look. It turns out Mikhail Mikhailovich already receives one of the highest salaries among executives of state-owned or state-participated companies: 7.2 million rubles a year (about $79,000). One might suppose that the powerful processes of Modernization being carried out by Russian President Dmitry A. Medvedev will sweep away unfit managers like Mikhail Mikhailovich. Let’s look. It turns out M. M. Vasilenko made the TOP 500. No. 275. Medvedev’s golden кадровый reserve (elite presidential personnel pool). In other words, it’s not modernization that will sweep Mikhail Mikhailovich away—Mikhail Mikhailovich is modernization. He’ll sweep everyone else away himself. To paraphrase a famous movie quote: We have no methods against Mishka Vasilenko, none. There is, of course, a theoretical possibility that events could unfold like this. During one of those direct call-in sessions with the public, the president or prime minister is informed—say, by a pensioner from Voronezh—about the outrages at the airport. The president or prime minister is outraged and sends in an inspection. M. Vasilenko promptly checks himself into a hospital for the duration of the inspection. Three months later, based on the results of the inspection, he is removed—or, more likely, he is forced to increase the size of his monthly payments to his superiors. Either way, all of this belongs to the realm of manual control, not a functioning system of government. Those were the thoughts that came to me as I stood at Sheremetyevo-2 International Airport waiting for the car that was picking me up. Most likely, all the other passengers were thinking something similar. Because out loud they were all saying the same thing: These bastards ought to be killed.