Just one year before Igor and I began our trip across a country in crisis, things looked very different in Russia. In the summer of 2008, nearly twenty tumultuous years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was again a global superpower. The 2000s had seen the emergence of a bona fide middle class, maybe for the first time in Russian history. For this, there were oil prices and Putin to thank. Mostly oil prices. The price of a barrel of oil, the linchpin of the Russian economy, hit a twenty-year high at US$147 that year.
Igor wasn’t by any stretch the poster child for the new Russian middle class. He wasn’t an IT consultant or banker. But in practical lifestyle terms, he wasn’t so far off. He made, as manager of a fashionable downtown St. Petersburg café, a decent salary. And even though Moscow was then Money magazine’s most expensive city in the world and St. Petersburg sat in twelfth place, the fact was that one could live quite cheaply amid the opulence.
Igor had helped his long-time girlfriend Anya buy a car, and they regularly went on all-inclusive vacations to Tunisia and Egypt, where Igor scuba dived and Anya sunned on the beach. Igor still lived with his mother, but so do many single Russian men, and even some married ones. He had saved a lot of money over the years, which he kept in cash and stocks. He planned to buy his mother a retirement home in Abkhazia in the coming years so that he could take over her apartment. He held his cash mostly in dollars and euros, but the ruble was now so strong that he was considering, partly out of national pride, converting to Russian currency.
Oil and the improved economy weren’t everything, of course.
Global Russian sports dominance had been restored to the glorious Soviet-era levels. Moscow’s CSKA basketball team had won a Euroleague championship. The St. Petersburg soccer club Zenit took the 2008 UEFA Cup. Russia beat Canada at the World Hockey Championships. Women’s tennis was dominated by Russians, and all three owners of heavyweight boxing belts in North America were citizens of the former Soviet Union.
Russians even had a piece of global popular culture, something beyond the scope of the former Soviet empire. Universal Pictures released Russian-Kazakh film director Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted (known as Extreme Danger in Russian), in which Russian heartthrob Konstantin Khabenskiy smooches Angelina Jolie. (Technically, the interaction described in the Russian media as a “kiss” is more like this: Khabenskiy’s character, who has just been shot in the chest and is actively spitting up blood, receives mouth-to-mouth from Jolie’s character. But still, there was a Russian actor making lip contact with Angelina Jolie, directed by a Russian director in a Hollywood production.)
Russia had been a wreck in the nineties. A small number of businessmen, known as oligarchs, had privatized the country’s immense resources for their personal gain. President Boris Yeltsin drunkenly bumbled and stumbled across the world stage, to the country’s collective national humiliation. The nineties saw the degeneration of the Russian educational system and a devaluation of the ruble that overnight turned many a person’s life savings into pocket change. It all must have seemed like an embarrassing and cruel joke to the citizens of what had recently been one of the world’s superpowers.
Then Putin, a former KGB bureaucrat from St. Petersburg, came to power and things began to change, for the better and for the worse. Putin looked different, almost like the young reformer some believed him to be, and he behaved differently. A biography intended to introduce Putin to the world depicted him as the product of a hardscrabble youth in St. Petersburg, a man who had followed his dream of becoming a KGB officer against all odds.
Igor too had grown up in St. Petersburg courtyards, the spaces between apartment buildings where there’s often a playground for kids and benches for the adults to sit together and talk. The courtyards are where much of the social life in Russian cities takes place. While Igor wasn’t the tough that Putin was portrayed as, he had to fight when fights came to him. Igor, like many, could relate to this romantic story of fighting one’s way out of the St. Petersburg courtyards to the highest office in the land.
Putin played to nationalist pride by reinstating the Soviet national anthem, albeit with new lyrics (this was the second time in the anthem’s history that it had been rewritten; the first was during Khrushchev’s thaw to edit out a reference to Stalin), and he stood up to the Western powers where Yeltsin and Gorbachev before him had only seemed to bow down. He corralled the oligarchs: the result of his showdown with oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who defied Putin by, among other things, funding the parliamentary opposition) was that Khodorkovsky, once sixteenth on the Forbes list of billionaires, sat in a prison cell in Siberia for a decade. And he secured his power base. Less than a year into Putin’s presidency, the state controlled the three major television networks. Putin installed his former cronies and their cronies’ cronies from the KGB and its successor organization, the FSB, throughout every layer of government. He decreed that the country’s regional governors would be appointed by the Kremlin, consolidating power in his tightly controlled circle.
He missed no opportunity to show that he was a macho badass, the iron-fisted leader that some believed Russians needed. Long before he hunted Siberian tigers and wild bears and flew with cranes, he landed a fighter jet in Chechnya and fought as a black belt in judo competitions.
And these shows of strength had powerful effects. An all-girl pop group had a hit song entitled “A Man Like Putin,” with lines such as “I want a man like Putin, who’s full of strength / I want a man like Putin, who doesn’t drink / I want a man like Putin, who won’t make me sad.” Opinion polls routinely asserted that Putin was the sexiest man in Russia—proving that, like the citizens of many other nations, Russians confuse power with sexiness.
The quid pro quo of the stability Putin offered soon became clear: the citizenry would support him, often vociferously, overlooking the corruption, the curbing of civil liberties, the state control of the media, the suppression of the opposition, the small group of former security service operatives who now held the country’s reins.
In March 2008, Putin’s hand-picked successor (term limits prohibited Putin’s running for a third consecutive term) Dmitry Medvedev, a technocrat who had never held elected office and had no political base beyond Putin’s support, won the presidency of Russia with more than 70 percent of the vote. Medvedev immediately appointed Putin as prime minister. Anyone on the streets of Russia at the time could have told you what Medvedev and Putin admitted four years later: they arranged the temporary power switch so that Putin could run for president again in 2012. Putin was the boss all along. It was his show. And everyone knew it.
But stability was less than perfect. One result of Putin’s quid pro quo was that corruption was institutionalized in almost every aspect of society. Today, Russia generally occupies the upper percentiles of Transparency International’s list of the world’s most corrupt nations, in the company of the Republic of Congo, Laos, and Tajikistan.
In a survey by the Foundation for Public Opinion Reports on attitudes toward corruption, 50 percent of Russians said they were certain they would have to bribe someone in the event they needed to address the authorities. However, when asked what seemed to be the biggest social ill in Russia, “corruption and bribery in organs of power” ranked only eleventh. In part, corruption ranks so far down the list because everyone is used to it. The study projected the total cost of day-to-day corruption in Russia for 2010 at 160 billion rubles, or around US$5.3 billion. In the survey’s comments section, respondents detailed their various experiences with corruption: I paid off the police when I beat up a bastard; We bought our son out of court so that he didn’t go to jail; I needed to build a garage in my dacha and I had to bribe the chief of the garden settlement otherwise he wouldn’t allow it; and I have to bribe somebody every day.
Igor, like many, got a taste of this way of life early in the Wild West nineties when Putin was still building his political base in the St. Petersburg city government.
Three boarders lived with Igor and his mother in the spring of 1995. The boarders, one Russian and two Chinese, occupied the second room of the small flat, and they founded what Igor believes to have been the very first Western-style potato chip company in St. Petersburg.
Despite the strong presence of potatoes in eastern European cuisine, potato chips were a rarity in the Soviet Union and in post-perestroika Russia. What passed for potato chips during Soviet times were rectangular, unsalted wafer-like snacks flavoured with dill. The potential demand made American companies salivate, and several of them attempted import operations during the period of glasnost. History supported the move. Potatoes didn’t even exist in Russia until Czar Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg, sent a sack of them back home during his seventeenth-century travels in the West. At first the unfamiliar tuber was rejected. According to the Cambridge World History of Food, conservative religious factions and pagans called them the “devil’s apples,” and the empire’s eventual decree that they be grown on common land was met with the so-called potato riots of 1843. Today, over 150 years later, it’s hard to imagine Russian cuisine without the potato. It’s a staple in almost everything, from the ubiquitous New Year’s potato salad Olivier to vodka to the wonderful concoction pirozhki s kartoshkoi, which is essentially mashed potatoes baked into a soft, flaky bun, a delicious carb overdose that’s nearly as popular in Russia as sandwiches are in the West.
The Russian and Chinese entrepreneurs renting Igor’s room spent their days in a little warehouse slicing and frying potatoes, and they returned home smelling of salt and grease. There were only two beds in the flat’s second bedroom, and they alternated: one of them got a bed to himself for the night while the other two slept valetom, “top to tail.”
Igor knew whether or not the chip makers were home as soon as he stepped through the door. If he heard the chomping of chips, they were there. They constantly ate chips. That was the sound of the apartment after they moved in, and to Igor it was a comforting sound. Crumbs littered the flat. The crumbs ground under his slippers when he went to the bathroom. They spread throughout the apartment, down the hall, into the kitchen, somehow finding their way under the bed in the room Igor shared with his mother. Igor’s cats, Russian blues, licked the crumbs off the floor whenever they needed a salt fix.
Late one night, Igor remembers peeking into their room. The three of them reclined on the beds—one of the Chinese guys alone on one bed and one with his head by the Russian guy’s feet on the other. They held books over their faces and spoke stiltingly in the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto. When they saw him, they welcomed him in and handed him a bowl of chips.
“Teach me that language,” Igor said.
“Do you know what Esperanto means, Igor?” the Russian guy asked.
“No.”
“One who hopes,” he said. “We four men here, us and you, we’re all Esperantos!”
Igor mouthed the word. It reminded him of an English word he’d picked up from a Western movie: desperado.
Igor had never known his real father. Igor’s mom and his biological father, Uncle Vova’s twin brother, divorced one month after Igor was born. Igor was sent to Abkhazia to live with his grandmother. Around the same time, Valiko, a Georgian, married his grandma. Igor lived with them for five years (and afterward spent every summer there until he was thirteen).
In that time, his mother had married a policeman who turned out to be an alcoholic and an abuser. One night when Igor was twelve, he’d had enough. He was still way too small to stand up to his stepfather, and he didn’t know there was not—and still is not—any Russian law specifically prohibiting domestic abuse. As his mother and stepfather fought, Igor called the police. He gave the officer his name and address and said that his father was beating his mother. The officer told him he’d send someone right over.
Twenty minutes later, the police knocked at the door. Igor stayed in his room. He could hear his mother crying. The police didn’t come inside. His stepfather left the apartment. Igor could hear them talking and laughing in the hall. He crawled under the bed. They talked and laughed for a long time. When the door opened again, he heard his stepfather coming down the hall and into the bedroom. He snatched Igor’s foot and pulled him out from underneath the bed and kicked him a few times.
“Don’t call the cops on the cops, idiot,” he said.
The next day, after his stepfather went to work, Igor and his mother packed up their stuff and moved in with her brother, who at the time was living in a single room in a dormitory.
“We had nothing,” Igor says. “No TV. I was hanging out reading books. Uncle was taking me to the bathhouse. I was going to school. Well, basically, man, I was happy.”
Igor has a way of reducing a whole, rather shitty-sounding period of his life to one surprise emotion with the phrase, “basically, man …” It doesn’t cross his mind to characterize his childhood as anything but pretty happy.
The three of them lived in his uncle’s dorm room for a year and a half. His grandfather Valiko used to send money when they needed it. Then one day his mother received a call informing her that her husband had been convicted of a crime called prevysheniye polnomochiy and sentenced to prison. His mother didn’t know exactly what he did, but it must have been pretty serious. He was a low-ranking cop, and minor indiscretions, such as taking bribes, are the norm. The name of his crime translates as “going beyond one’s commission.”
The apartment was still registered in both their names, so Igor and his mother moved back in and started renting out the extra room. She didn’t tell Igor that his stepfather was in prison; she said he was away on a long business trip. At this point Igor was fourteen, and he understood that something was wrong, because his stepfather never even called.
His friend Oleg, whose father was a high-ranking police officer, found out about Igor’s stepfather’s situation and passed the news along to him. He was living in Kresty prison, a notoriously overcrowded prison in St. Petersburg. Oleg told him that his stepfather had a nickname in jail: Archimandrite. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, it’s a term used for the highest-ranking abbots, from among whose ranks the Church selects its bishops.
“He was believing in God very much,” Igor says. “He was there for two years.”
In the meantime, Igor’s mother finalized the divorce, and because her ex-husband was in prison, she’d been able to take registration of the apartment on her own. He came over a couple of times after that. Igor was much bigger now and already lifting weights after school. He could stand and look him in the eye and squeeze his hand when they shook. His stepfather couldn’t go back to work for the police, so he started working for a security company and trying in vain to win back Igor’s mother.
“He was saying how much he was earning, and it was a lot,” Igor says. “I understood it was some criminal company. He was calling for a while and then, I don’t know the reason, he left for his native city and there he became a drunkard living on the street. This is the end of the story with him. Maybe he is dead.”
While Igor told me many of the stories in this book over and over again, he only mentioned this one once.
Had his stepfather the cop, who had connections with gangsters, been around during the school fiasco, he might have had some leverage in negotiating with the school director. But he wasn’t.
Igor had only his mother, who rarely made it to the annual parent days in Russian schools. She worked around the clock to make what they lived on. “Mom was always working in state tax department,” Igor says, “always very tired, always like, ‘Do everything by yourself.’ She wasn’t helping with homework or school. Basically, I was on my own. I was thinking myself, studying myself, and, sometimes, copying off someone else.”
During that last week of ninth grade in 1995, he should have been thinking about his summer plans to visit his grandparents in Abkhazia. But word had circulated among the students that any of them intending to continue to the tenth and eleventh grades should schedule one-on-one meetings between their parents and the school director. Igor’s school had a focus on English language learning, and Igor had solid marks. From a purely academic standpoint, there was no reason for him not to continue at the school.
Igor was sixteen years old. He’d recently been called to the Military Registration and Enlistment Office, where he’d gone through a medical exam to assess his preparedness for the armed forces. He’d been asked for his preferred division and he’d announced Paratroopers, Special Forces. The idea seemed romantic to him at the time.
It was clear even to him and his teenage peers what these parent meetings with the school director were all about: those who could meet her price would see their kids attend the tenth and eleventh grades; the children of those who couldn’t pay would take “early graduation.”
Igor waited with two of his classmates, two brothers, Mitya and Kostya, in the hall outside the director’s office. The brothers’ father was inside having his meeting with the director. When he emerged, he had his hat in his hand and a weary look on his face. He closed the door quietly behind him.
“No, children,” he said, “you won’t be here for tenth grade.”
“It was difficult times at this period,” Igor remembers. “I was standing with my classmates after this, saying nothing. Then we realized it’s time to say goodbye.”
Igor understood that the kids whose parents managed to pay didn’t have to say goodbye to each other. This new insight went a long way toward helping him make sense of those strange, unknowable ideological terms in his head and on the lips—sometimes hopeful and sometimes derisive—of the adults: glasnost, perestroika, capitalism, democracy … He now had an inkling of what it took to live in the new country he and the rest of the population found themselves in. The Russian Federation was only four years old; its market economy was a colicky infant. By some estimates, 50 percent of the country was living in poverty.
Igor and his mother decided that he would enrol in a vocational program. He wanted to continue at his current school, but they had no choice. She could not afford the bribe.
When the potato chip makers came home late at night, Igor woke up. Usually he heard three quick, consecutive bathroom trips, and then they retreated to their bedroom. What followed was the comforting sound of Esperanto recitations and chip munching. On the night before his last day of school, though, they scuttled loudly into the bedroom, banging drawers and speaking in hushed and frantic voices. Then they left again, slamming the door. That was the last time he ever heard them.
When he came home the next afternoon, he found the apartment uncomfortably quiet. His mother was working late in the tax office. Igor knocked on the renters’ door and stepped in. There was one table in the room, and Igor noticed that their books, which usually occupied the shelf, were missing. He opened the top drawer of the dresser, where they kept their documents. It was empty except for a constellation of potato chip crumbs.
They had left without their clothes, which were strewn all over the room, taking only their documents and the textbooks on the constructed international auxiliary language. They never returned to the apartment. Probably owed a gangster some money, Igor thought.
He surveyed the room. It would take three years to finish the vocational program. Only at that point would he be able to get a job and support himself and his mother so they wouldn’t have to rent out the room. Until then, he would sleep in the other room with her. But he began thinking about the room as his at that moment, and he liked the idea.
Igor had plans to meet his former classmates later that day. Right now, he wanted to have a pre-celebration dinner to mark his graduation. (“Well,” he says in retrospect, “it wasn’t technically a graduation. More like, ‘Sayonara, baby.’“) He opened the fridge and found it completely empty except for one beet. “At that time, I fucking don’t care what to eat,” Igor says. He took the beet from the fridge. It was about the size of a softball. It fit perfectly in his large palm. He peeled it and tried to bite into it like an apple, but it was too hard. He took out a small cutting board. He cut it in half and then chopped each half into little cubes. He ate the cubes one by one with his fingers, feeling strangely free and happy.
He left the apartment and took the path past his childhood playground, past the brick wall at the technical university that he used to scale as a kid, across the train tracks with their memorial signs marking Doroga Zhizni (the Road of Life), which provided the only access to the city of Leningrad during the 900-day siege of World War II. He climbed through the iron bars of the fence into the courtyard of his now former school, Gymnasium 192, Bruzovskaya Shkola, named for the symbolist poet Bryuzov. He looked up at the fourth-floor classroom that had been his.
Mitya and Kostya showed up. He had given them some rubles to buy a couple of bottles of port wine. The labels had three sevens, but they called it Triple X. They sat on a bench in a courtyard and drank it.
He often went fishing with Mitya and Kostya on the weekends. Before dawn, they would get up and take the suburban train as “rabbits,” the nickname for passengers sneaking rides before the ticket takers started checking. They’d get off at a military base and climb through the barbed wire. They always caught a lot of fish there. They didn’t start a fire because the military helicopters might see them. It was exciting to be where you weren’t supposed to be. And they’d fish all day. They’d catch plotva and karas and okun, and Igor would bring them home to feed his cats, his two beloved Russian blues.
They had all expected to be in school two more years. Their sudden freedom came as a complete surprise.
Kostya said, “The school director is a fucker.”
“Fat ass,” Mitya said.
“I heard a joke about her,” Igor said. “She leaves the office going down the narrow corridor and then remembers that she forgot her bun in the office. She tries to turn, but her ass keeps hitting the wall. Finally she understands: like a truck, she has to make a three-point turn.”
They laughed. He repeated, “Three-point turn.”
At the time, Igor was a tall, skinny kid. He wore his hair long. He liked listening to punk and heavy metal. The Triple X reminded him of a famous Russian punk song by the band Kino, fronted by Viktor Tsoy (a sort of cross between Jim Morrison and Sid Vicious). The chorus went, “Mama is anarchy / Father is a glass of port wine.”
They talked for a long time, drank all the wine, did some pull-ups on the courtyard monkey bars. After a couple of sets, Igor felt woozy. He shook hands with his former classmates and stumbled home. He wobbled down the street and tried to feel happy, as if he had had a celebration. He fumbled the keys in the apartment door and entered to the same silence he’d come upon earlier. His head was spinning. He ran to the bathroom …
“I remember this moment,” Igor says, “head spinning, puking up beet, groaned, and went to sleep.” He went to sleep on one of the beds in the rented room that would one day be his, amidst the heavy smell of grease and salt and potatoes.
Corruption could occasion your “early graduation,” but it could also save your life if you knew how to play the game. Just a few months before Igor and I met in 1999, he had received a notice to appear before the local military recruiter for the spring draft. He went through the medical commission and proved himself, unfortunately, after years of daily workouts and his vocational training in electronics and truck driving, to be an ideal specimen for war.
When he received the dreaded three-day notice requiring him to report for duty, it was all but certain that he would be shipped to Chechnya, where a cruel and bloody war was brewing.
“The first day, I was sitting and thinking, What the fuck is going on?” he says. “I remember it was a sunny day, very hot in the marshrutka [shuttle bus]. And I was sweating. In my mind, I was three days from a date with Chechnya. I was thinking, What can save me? I was thinking about it. I thought, I will go there and die. Three days of life. How to spend it? I already forgot how nervous I was.”
Two of the most common techniques for evading military service were paying a bribe to a doctor for a false medical report and enrolment in a college, which would bring about a deferment. Ultimately, Igor utilized both.
With three days to go, it was too late to organize a bribe to a doctor, even if he’d had money, which he didn’t. He had just started his first real job, serving draft beer and shashlik at Chaika, one of the city’s upscale restaurants catering to foreign businessmen, governmental officials, and prostitutes, on the same dock where I’d later see him swimming. His only hope was to convince the recruitment officer that he had enlisted in a military or police academy, which would land him an automatic deferral. So the next day, first thing in the morning, slightly recovered from the shock and feeding off adrenaline, he called a friend who was studying at a military and space university. He asked how one went about entering, and followed his instructions. He went to the registrar, picked up the applications, and filled them out. He pleaded with the secretaries to process them on the spot. He showed them his draft notice. And they took pity on him. On the third day, he returned to the recruiting office with proof that he had filed enrolment papers.
The recruiter looked at him blankly. Igor recognized this look from the face of the school director who had him kicked out of school.
The recruiter at first said nothing as he scanned the documents.
“Okay,” he said finally. “If you don’t enter the university, you will be drafted in three months.” He tore up the draft notice and made some notes in his file.
“I felt like I was reborn,” Igor says.
Reborn, Igor had no intentions of entering the military space university. He decided to enrol at the shipbuilding university, not so much because he wanted to be a maritime engineer as because it had the easiest entrance exam, testing only one subject: mathematics. He signed up, and this bought him the summer, three months to prepare for one entrance exam in math.
Then he promptly forgot about it.
Working as a barman on the dock run by the restaurant Chaika, right there on the Griboyedov canal, Igor sold beer to tourists taking trips along the city’s canals. He partied every night with the ship captains.
One morning he awoke with a mind-numbing hangover and the realization that his entrance exam was three days away, and if he missed it, the likelihood that the recruiter would approve another educational deferment was slim. He had, in effect, another three-day notice. He hadn’t prepared for the exam at all. And math was not his thing.
“Then,” he says, “it came to me. I remembered: I’ve got my old pal Tarasov.” While Igor had attended a secondary school with special emphasis on English, Tarasov had attended a secondary school with special emphasis on mathematics.
He called up Tarasov and offered him a bottle of cheap Russian vodka in exchange for taking his entrance exam, and Tarasov happily agreed to come right over to prepare.
At first, Igor thought about switching the photo from Tarasov’s passport to his. He tried, but it didn’t look convincing. “I thought about chancing it, then thought, Fuck it. We will burn. I said, ‘Okay, Tarasov, don’t shave.’ And he has a heavy beard. I said, ‘Don’t wash hair.’ He had long hair like me at the time.” He put the passports back together and they parted ways.
After just three days, when Igor saw him outside the university on test day, he barely recognized him. Tarasov looked like a bum. He had a thick beard, and his hair was scraggly and greasy. Igor was impressed. Igor mussed Tarasov’s hair, gave him his passport, and administered the sign of the cross over him. “Go,” he said. Tarasov went. Igor watched through the crack of the door as he showed the passport to the proctor. The proctor made a notation, and Tarasov sat down to take the exam.
Igor went to the second floor, where there were two Russian billiards tables, and started shooting by himself. He was practising that shot where you carom the cue ball off the object ball and into the pocket. The exam took two hours. Igor thought, By the end of two hours, I will make the carom every time.
But after only thirty minutes, Tarasov strolled in. He approached the pool table and handed back Igor’s passport.
“What the fuck?” Igor said. “It’s a two-hour exam.”
“I’m finished,” Tarasov said. “Also, I helped a couple other guys. Then I left.”
“Okay,” Igor tells me. “I knew I had the right man. And that’s how I got into the shipbuilding university, and out of the army for the second time.”
In a redemptive story, Igor would learn his lesson. He’d focus on his studies, apply himself, maintain good standing, and stay out of the army. But his intentions at the university were far from academic. He hardly showed up except for biweekly badminton classes. He was there for one reason: to stay out of the army. His marks showed it. Within a year, he was on academic probation, and then he found himself facing expulsion. By that time, he had learned something about how Russia works. Now, he decided, with the salary from his work at Chaika—he would soon graduate from working the canal dock to being head barman, with a good salary and tips—he could put Russia to work for him.
“Then began my search,” he tells me, “who to bribe to get rid of fucking army for good. I began to save money.” The highest rate Igor came across for a medical certificate that would declare him unfit for military service in 2001 was five thousand dollars. But even in matters of such delicacy, Igor considers himself a master negotiator. “So I was calling to all my pals to get this info. Then found through some guys the real price: six hundred dollars.”
Igor called the doctor who charged six hundred. She lived nearby. He brought her the money.
She took the cash and looked him over. At that point, Igor had been lifting weights for almost six years. “Oh, you are a huge guy,” she said. She thought. “Let’s say you broke your back training.” She told him which X-ray clinic to go to. “I will call ahead,” she said. “Everybody will know about you.”
The next day, he went to the clinic. He gave his name and waited. Shortly, an attendant called him into the back and hung a set of X-rays on a light box. The X-rays had his surname printed on them. The attendant pointed to a small line in the spinal column—a clear fracture.
Armed with his independent medical analysis and fraudulent X-rays, the next step was to go through the medical screening at the commission with the military doctors. His doctor had connections there too. She said, “Go. Doctors over there know everything. When you’re seeing the specialist, he will ask you to make push-ups. You need to say, ‘Oh oh, my back! I can’t!’ And he will look at your X-ray and say, ‘Aha, I see.’“
“And that’s what happened,” Igor says. “I also went to the psychologist that day. He asked me, ‘What do you think about the army?’ I said, ‘I don’t like when someone is commanding me.’ He was writing in notebook.”
After the medical screening, Igor returned to the recruitment officer who’d given him his three-day notice two years earlier. It was the final step. He was nervous. If it didn’t work, there’d be no more options.
“Well, Igor Yurievitch,” he said. “We can’t take you in the army.” He stamped Igor’s file.
In two days, Igor got what they call his “military pass,” declaring him ineligible for service in the Russian armed forces. “Whole process took four days,” Igor says. “And when I’ve got it, I remember the air was so fresh. Like a breath of freedom or something.”