Remnick - Resurrection : the struggle for a new Russia

Remnicks skilled technique as a reporter produces the utmost liveliness his eye for the amusing detail rarely fails.

The New York Times

Inquisitive and humorous, [Remnick] captures the Russian scene in all its dramatic contrariness.

Wall Street Journal

Insightful vivid Mr. Remnick writes passionately.

Washington Times

Resurrection is the best of the current books on the rapidly evolving country.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

David Remnick is a marvel.

David Halberstam

A writer who has the ace reporters nose for a good story, and the cultural range and fluency of a classical belles-lettrist. A pleasure to read.

E. L. Doctorow

[Remnicks] reporting is reliable, his knowledge is deep, and his judgment is sound.

Christian Science Monitor

By turns blackly comic and deadly serious, [Resurrection] reads like a fast-paced novel, filled with sharp and unforgettable characters.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Resurrection is a work of enormous power and distinction. David Remnick is an acute political analyst and an equally acute observer of the small movements of life. As I read his brilliant, horrific report from Chechnya, I thought of Orwell.

Janet Malcolm

An extraordinarily good writer with a vivid sense of the comic and a wonderful dramatic sense reads like an entertaining novel.

New York Review of Books

FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1998

Copyright 1997, 1998 by David Remnick

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Random House LLC, New York, in 1997.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87216-1

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by John Gall

v3.1

David Remnick was a reporter for The Washington Post for ten years, including four in Moscow. He joined The New Yorker as a writer in 1992 and has been the magazines editor since 1998.

To Esther

To live in Moscow at centurys end is to exist in a strange and contradictory landscape, one filled with both ruin and possibility. The signs of a fallen totalitarian state persist: Lenin gazing out over October Square; the apartment buildings on Leninsky Prospekt built by prisoners of the gulag; the old and the poor marching on May Day, sometimes even carrying portraits of Stalin. At the same time, the newspapers (when they are not shilling for the government at election time) are alive with real news and varied commentary; stores with high-quality goods are opening all over; the airports are mobbed with people traveling abroad as often as their incomes will allow. On Lubyanka Square, the statue of the founder of the secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, is gone (it was torn down after the collapse of the August coup); and, nearby, a stone from Solovki, the first of Lenins concentration camps, honors the millions killed under the old regime. And yet the old KGB structures (using new names and old methods) are still at work. All around, the bright lights of commerce flare while the mayor orders police to arrest the homeless and put them on trains.

In the provinces, the contrasts are more subtle, but they are there all the same: Japanese businessmen eating in the sushi bars of Khabarovsk while laborers in town wait six months or more for their wages; in Ivanovo, where three quarters of the workforce has been laid off from the textile mills, television carries up-to-the-minute reports from the film festival at Cannes; the scholars and scientists of Novosibirsk arrive home after yet another conference at Harvard and walk past refugees living in the airport; the shoppers in Murmansk try to read the labels on bottles of Norwegian shampoo and try not to worry too much about the nuclear waste threatening their city, their harbor; on the Leningrad Highway, a new Mercedes with dark-tinted windows streaks past a beggar. The symbols of transformation are stark and banal and true.

But the transformation of Russia is not merely a matter of its outward signsits relics and innovations. The process roils in the mind and heart of every Russian. Although the epochal news stories are now a matter of historythe end of the Cold War, the end of communism, the end of empireevery Russian (even the young) lives in multiple worlds: in a past that still shapes his thinking and language and habits; in the sometimes unbearable present, with its economic and psychological shocks; and in the future, which is even more unknowable, more unpredictable, than it is elsewhere.

After having endured an inhuman, unthinkable epoch, every Russian is, in some way, engaged in building a new reality, a new state, a new identity, a place in the greater world. An American might look for a parallel in the late eighteenth century, but there are important differences: the colonists could draw on English law and custom to create American political and legal culture; they were also a relatively healthy people, not one recovering from a history of annihilation, propaganda, and neglect. In one way or another, Russians struggle almost daily with essential questions about themselves: What is our country? Who are our heroes? What is our past? What do we believe in? Who are our friends and who are our enemies? Are we Europeans, or are we Asians, or are we wholly other? What experience can we borrow and what is alien and unusable?

Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed and the threat of nuclear confrontation subsided, American interest in Russia has eased. Enrollment in Russian language and history courses has plunged. Having been denied the front page or a chance at prime time, some news bureaus grow bored, frustrated with the indifference back home. This is a serious mistake, for the process of creating a new countrya country that will undoubtedly reassert itself in every sense in the twenty-first centuryis at least as interesting, as essential, as the process of erosion and collapse. It is not, however, an easy subject to grasp. The events of 1991 provided a dramatic ending to the Soviet era; the story of the new state is only just beginning, evolving, often in ways that are hard to see. The texture of Russian life after 1991 is so fluid, so changeable and supercharged, that it is nearly impossible to capture in words and images. One of the best writers of the dissident generation, Vladimir Voinovich, explained to me one afternoon that while his existence as a man and as a citizen is now easierhe happily splits his time between Moscow and his place of exile, Munichhis job as a writer is no less difficult than it was in the days of Leonid Brezhnev.

The absurd in Russia is permanent, it just takes different forms, Voinovich told me. Under Soviet rule, life had congealed; it was organized and static. Writers could regard Soviet reality like Czanne regarding a bowl of fruit. It was easier. Now the well-established life is collapsing and a new one is being built all in a fast and chaotic way, and its hard to write about it. Its like writing about a sinking ship while sitting on deck. When I wrote