Muscovites have taken to capitalism like pigs to swill. You can see and feel the white-hot energy of the free market, a kind of economic Darwinism.
Here’s a hypothetical question for those moments of awkward silence in the pub: what would have happened if, during the Cold War, Russia and America had changed sides? When the dam of the Berlin Wall had come down and capitalism flooded into the Soviet bloc like cold water and drowned 100 million people in the unquenchable desire for 50 varieties of doughnut, T-shirts advertising Hard Rock Cafés in crap cities, reality TV and fantasy porn, designer everything, and things that cost more if given English names; what would have happened if, at the same time, a wall had gone up on the 49th parallel and along the Rio Grande and, overnight, America had become a centralised command economy devoted to the promotion of the common wheel and the negation of personal gain? If all the shops had been full of the same suit and loaf of bread, and if there was one television channel, one newspaper and a thousand 19th-century classics in the bookshops but no 20th-century ones. Who would’ve coped better? In short, are some people more suited to collectivism and some to individualism?
You may not think that a fair swap. You might think that the point of the Cold War was not a struggle between competing economic systems but a more romantic arm-wrestle between good and bad, or perhaps right and wrong. That’s the assumption that most of us who grew up with the phantom of choice and the scion of liberty believe. You don’t have to be any sort of ologist or an expert in isms to know that the Americans would’ve been crap commies. Not that they couldn’t have managed all the authoritarian secret police bits perfectly happily, or that they wouldn’t have gotten used to censorship and the absence of adversarial politics in a week or two.
It’s the working for the collective good that would’ve stymied them. The land of entrepreneurial individualists – where ‘runner-up’ is a long-winded way of saying ‘loser’ – simply wouldn’t have been able to pull together for no noticeable individual advantage. It’s just not the American way. The waves upon waves of immigrants who went to America didn’t make the gut-busting slog to be team players.
I was in Moscow a couple of weeks ago and was astonished at how naturally and enthusiastically they’d taken to capitalism, like pigs to swill. You might say, well, that’s the nature of the free market. As P.J. O’Rourke so neatly put it, capitalism is what people do when you leave them alone. (Democracy, by the way, isn’t.) But that’s not necessarily true. Many of the other communist bloc countries have had real problems with multiple choice. Albania, for instance, really didn’t get the hang of it, imagining that capitalism was some sort of giant pyramid scheme with free money. The central Asian ’stans, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova have all had problems adjusting. But in Moscow you can see and feel the white-hot energy of übercapitalism, a reductive market fundamentalism.
I was shown around town by a rich, young entrepreneur who had made a tidy fortune from dozens of businesses, from frozen food to publishing to gas to restaurants, and even a company that made $5000 ornamental fountain pens. He’d started by importing Dutch shampoo and was a millionaire within a year before he was 20. Moscow isn’t a pretty city, but it certainly is an impressive one. What it lacks in looks it makes up for in power. It’s not built on a human scale. It’s supposed to dwarf the individual to proclaim the sovereignty of the masses, but now it looks like the great barracks of Mammon. You can buy everything, Dmitri told me with excitement. Everything is for sale. You can buy a judge, a priest, drugs, women, guns, caviar, children, a panda.
You can buy Boy George and Bill Clinton and the Berlin Philharmonic and 500 Uzbek virgins for your birthday party. You can buy silence and history and the truth, and you can buy any rule, regulation or restriction anyone else can come up with. This is capitalism. You can buy anything, he said excitedly. What do you want? Girls? Drugs? Food? Drink? Gold? A football team?
The story of competitive acquisition in Russia is eye-bulging and heroic. The rich like to collect, but they don’t like to wait. So they buy lifetimes’ expertise in one week with one phone call. They have the largest holdings of Ferraris or jukeboxes or small jade frogs with ruby eyes. It doesn’t matter; ownership is everything. I realised a salutary truth: in Moscow, they understand the lesson of capitalism, the true nature of the market, in a way that we have never dared. It is unrestrained economic Darwinism.
The press here is full of stories of foreign businesses being taken to the cleaners, fleeced, robbed down to their Calvins for not bribing enough, for not being frightening enough. The new Moscow marketeers laugh Slavicly: how stupid Western businessmen are. One of them I know went to a large Russian utility that he’d made a loan to, and owned a chunk of, and asked for his money back, as agreed in the contract. The Russians said no. They didn’t say, no, sorry; no, maybe in a month; no, can we make a deal; or, no, the accountant’s locked the chequebook in the desk and gone away for the weekend. They simply, boldly, unsmilingly said no, they wouldn’t give him his money back. Because he wasn’t big enough or strong enough to make them, and if he ever mentioned it again, they’d have his children killed. And, added the chairman, they’d use his money to do it. He went home.
Moscow airport is full of green-looking Western businessmen with white knuckles, holding back the tears because they have to go home and tell their boards and investors that they’ve lost the lot. And then they’ve got to go and tell their wives that they’ve got to sell the house, and try to explain this as a net gain because they’ve still got the kids.
Moscow capitalism is unencumbered by rules, aesthetics, manners, hypocrisy, taste and morals. It is the real thing: naked and toned, priapic and ravenous opportunism. Rich Muscovites have taken every Western excess and doubled it with amoral glee. The comforting snobberies and polite avaricious indulgences that took the West thousands of years to discover and refine are consumed and improved by Moscow’s new entrepreneurs. Of course, all this two-fisted consumption only applies to a tiny epicurean sliver of Russia’s population; the vast majority remain huddled in lives of relentless emptiness. There is precious little trickle-down. This is the truth about capitalism in its purest form: most people lose out so that a very few can overdose.
But they also seem to understand. When it was time for me to leave I fretted as ever about missing the plane. Moscow roads are gridlocked with the second-hand nicked motors of entrepreneurialism. Don’t worry, said Dmitri, my driver will take you. Thanks, but he still has to use the same communist roads as everyone else. No, I’ve got a police car. How can you get a police car to take me to the airport? I’d buy one, he said, as if explaining an obvious and simple fact to a stupid child for the umpteenth time. Five hundred dollars to buy a police car – it takes you to the VIP lounge in the airport. Of course you can buy a police car. They’re capitalists, too. The only Western snobbery that Moscow seems not to have taken on board is charity. I never heard the word mentioned once. All things considered, it would’ve been in bad taste.