Civil society: nothing ventured, nothing gained

Lev Lourie

In their wisdom they don’t ask us. Everything is decided in the district committee, the Masonic lodge, the shareholders’ meeting in London, the mob hideout. Deliverance will come only from the Czar or God: we can’t liberate ourselves. Does that mean that the Russian citizen is defenseless and alone before the callous authorities and the rapacious boss? No—if he had trusted them even slightly, he would have long ago gone begging.

The educated Russian philistine’s interest in politics has the nature of a hysterical expectation of coming upheavals. The agreement to unite with Belarus has been signed—better apply to leave for Germany. The Communists won a majority in the Volgograd Oblast legislative assembly—better stock up on sugar and matches. Yevgeny Kiselev and Nikolai Svanidze’s Sunday news broadcasts resound like the theme of fate in the weekly political symphony. Thanks to these modern-day Homers, politics takes on the contours of an epic. Boris Berezovsky, Anatoly Chubais, and the president do battle like Hector, Achilles, and Agamemnon, complemented by a host of minor mythological beings—cyclopes, nymphs, cannibals (Viktor Anpilov [outspoken orthodox Communist "street" politician], Eduard Limonov, Ivan Rybkin [ex-Speaker of the State Duma and now prominent member of Yeltsin administration].)

The way most Russians see life and politics was shaped by the workplace intrigues they witnessed and took part in. The picture painted in their minds by newspapers and television commentaries brings this experience home. The department head—a fair-minded old boy (variation: a thieving retired colonel)—hits the bottle often. A triangle forms around him. The supplier (a shrewd Jewish go-getter); the redhead (a supposedly principled technocrat, lover of the great outdoors); the party-committee secretary (a worldly-wise old boy who has outlasted more than one department head). They fight it out among themselves for the boss’s job, his secretary, junkets to the Black Sea. In the engineers’ smoking lounge opinions are divided. Nothing depends on the employees, but since there’s nothing else to do why not blather?

"A hundred friends is better than a hundred rubles," as the Russian proverb has it. The moral is cynical: a friend is equated with a ruble. But if you want to get on in life you have to know how to spin on the same merry-go-round with the company, the clan, the family circle, your compatriots. Since time immemorial, friendships and acquaintanceships have given Russians a unique infrastructure, facilitating the barter of favors away from the gaze of the authorities. We do the people we know a good turn, in spite of Lenin’s Cheka and Yeltsin’s Tax Police.

Civil society in Russia might well be stronger than in Protestant Europe. It’s simply different: pooling money for somebody’s funeral, helping the son of a needy friend to get a free education, giving temporary shelter to someone who’s got divorced. New economic conditions have merely actualized the cells of the para-civil society that already existed. The stronger the links within small groups, the more decisively their subculture stood out, the more they have thrived: mafiosi, Afghan vets, compatriots’ associations, nomenklatura clans. The Tambov gang competes with the Kazan and Chechen gangs for the drugs market. Former political prisoners organize the most effective of the existing non-profit organizations, Memorial. Colleagues from the foreign broadcasting field of the 1980s take over television channels and newspaper editorial offices. Every entrepreneur staffs his company with the children of girlfriends and his wife’s cousins. Take a look at the list of a major company’s directors and you’ll see names from its president’s 1985 datebook.

The problem is that the clan-clique system created in a totalitarian and authoritarian society is sailing against the Westerly wind of change blowing in Moscow and Petersburg. As in 1714, during the reign of Peter the Great, fitness for service is at odds with the perquisites of noble birth: perhaps another abolition of the "order of precedence" system awaits us. Finding himself in a Western company, the post-Soviet man suddenly understands that, although his niece is a known quantity, she cannot cope with Word for Windows and thereby might deprive her uncle of the opportunity of vacationing properly in the Canary Islands. He may have shared a bunk in the zone with Ivan Six-Pack, but the simple sucker who wore out his pants sitting in a smart office knows how to hack the Citibank computer, while Ivan just swills vodka.

You feel this in everyday life as well. It is simpler to open your own school and staff it with qualified teachers than it is to get your child into a specialized English school through an official you know in the State Public Education Administration. You can give "illegal" passengers a lift in your car, greasing the palms of traffic cops along the way, but you might also lobby in the Legislative Assembly to get the tax for private cabs lowered. [In Petersburg it is common practice to flag down motorists and ask them for a lift, in exchange for a sum agreeable to both parties. In recent years the city authorities have taken various measures to eradicate this alternative means of transportation.]

The cells of the new civil society appear among those groups who either were not really raised in the old clan system or who cannot solve their own vital problems with its help. Having had the chance to drink on the shop floor, earn something extra on the side, play dominoes at the beginning of the month, crank out rejects and still receive an annual bonus, the average factory worker proved worthless as a trade union organizer. Miners, who had absolutely nothing to steal (and you can’t exactly get drunk down in the hole), were forced to unite. Young "white collars" from the mathematics departments and polytechnic institutes are quick to open Internet clubs and organize condominium housing. They understand why it is necessary to get one’s own deputy into the local assembly and how to do it.

Thus far the civil society has been organized mostly by its most active members (especially in the hedonistic realm). Youth clubs spring up like mushrooms and their profiles mark the social-aesthetic stratifications in today’s youth culture. Finishing the night shift at a kiosk, the simple-minded "techie" student rushes to the Metro club, where no one will bore him by recounting the plot of Tarantino’s latest film. The daughter of a successful bureaucrat in the mayor’s office discusses Trussardi’s newest creations at the Pyramid. After the Swahili seminar, some hardcore at the Polygon is just the thing for the budding philologist. Tired of struggling with ex-members of the faculty Party committee, researchers open private laboratories and publish their own books, bypassing the sluggish Nauka publishing house. In general, the civil society has won a decisive victory in the publishing business.

The next phase is the struggle for rights in their broader sense: the organization of consumer cooperatives and political parties. The dad-lies-on-the-couch-and-swears-at-Yeltsin approach to politics is no longer relevant. When that frustration becomes "these jackasses want to take away our jobs and drag our boys off to the army," there is hope. Organizing the cells of the civil society should and will become an affair as natural as going to clubs, collecting money to buy a gift for a co-worker’s newborn baby, or taking part in collective libations on International Women’s Day.