THE LESSONS FROM 1990S RUSSIA FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD
This writer’s family fled the Soviet Union with few belongings and his memories from childhood have now merged with his adult experiences to give him an insight into the current global situation
In the winter of 1998, the Logaevs got ready to move out of their small village in eastern Russia and settle in Germany. After a long visa process, granted to them on the basis of their German roots, the Logaevs – who comprised a husband and wife, their two sons and 80-year-old mother – put a modest sum of money together to aid their journey, and told their neighbours of their upcoming trip.
The day before, one of their son’s friends, 20-year-old Dmitriy Khudorovskiy, dropped by their home to say goodbye. The family celebrated into the late hours and, after everybody had gone to sleep, Dmitriy quietly went out to the garden shed. He came back minutes later with a sledgehammer and beat the sleeping Logaevs to death.
The news report that carried details of their murder was one of the scant belongings my mother and father brought with them on our own resettlement out of Russia. It was there to convince appropriate crossborder authorities of the real dangers posed to certain minorities in the new ethnonationalist Russia.
The latter, of course, was just partially true – the ethnonationalism was only subsidiary to the main driver of violence in the country, zero-sum survivalism. With the Logaevs, it was the small tranche of money the family had stowed away for their departure that formed the motive for their murder.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and money flowed into the pockets of those who were unbound by any moral and ethical framework, social discohesion spread through the country and with it a sort of belief that everybody was out for themselves. My research into this topic came naturally – my family navigated this tricky climate for years before eventually emigrating. I remember overhearing stories of young girls being sold into the sex trade by their mothers to subsidise heating bills, and groups of men who prowled corridors of apartment blocks intimidating homeowners to get them to sign away their property ownership.
When I arrived in Europe as a child, these stories stood in stark opposition to those of prosperity and freedom which were used to paint the Soviet Union’s collapse in Western news media and other official narratives. Life, of course, had never been prosperous in the Soviet Union. Neither had it been, by any means, crimeless – my father has often told stories of the teenage-gang violence that upended many people’s lives during his younger years.
But in the 1990s, instability reached fever pitch. Poverty diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria and AIDS climbed at enormous rates, and life expectancy for an average male sank to 57 by 1994. The female rate, though not as drastic, had also suffered a decline, to 71.
Most of this was caused by the dismantling of the welfare state, precipitating widespread alcohol abuse, suicide and violence. As a result, societal trust was destroyed. Public polls at the end of the 1990s showed the dark mark the transition to capitalism had left on Russia.
Two-thirds of citizens had sought a return to the electionless, but stable, system of the Soviet Union in 1998. Two years later, those feelings had only intensified – the number of citizens who lamented the
Soviet Union’s demise reached 70 per cent.
The liberal democracy imposed on the country by the Russian government, with insistence from the US and its economic arms, the IMF and World Bank, had, by estimates of the World Health Organisation, resulted in one million excess deaths and forced hundreds of thousands to flee abroad. It also scarred an entire generation of Russians, who became intrinsically distrustful of politics and, remarkably, of their own suffering countryfolk.
Listening to those who lived to tell the tale, as well as adding my own childhood experiences, helped me to form a picture of a scarred society for my novel, which incorporates scores of stories I’d recorded over the years into one fictional character. Hopefully, it will help Russians abroad – and those at home – to see their history better.
As for Western readers, I hope it serves as a sort of loose guide to what the 1990s in Russia were really like.
One does not have to read deep to see similarities between the country captured on my novel’s pages and one that is closer to us both geographically and culturally – Trump’s America, which exhibits a worrying disillusionment with democracy and an appetite for political violence.
Going To Zossen is the debut novel by Russian-Irish journalist Arthur Velker, writing under the pen name A V Pankov. It follows two people trapped in a remote Arctic town during the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse.