"Casino Moscow" Explores Economic Chaos of Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine

When my family moved to Ukraine in 1995, I was too young to fully understand the completely fucked up economic situation. But I could see the effects everywhere: desperate people waiting in line for bread, babushkas begging for change outside every metro station, packs of half-wild dogs running through the streets and fighting.

My parents moved our family of five from the Jersey Shore to the Ukrainian capital for a one-year missionary trip. The combination of extreme culture shock and the chaotic state of affairs that defined this place and time resulted in one of the most formative years of my adolescence. My parents moved to Kyiv full-time in 1999, and we still visit frequently and hold on to a deep connection with the people of Ukraine. Having spent so much time in Eastern Europe, I was excited to finally read Matthew Brzezinski’s book Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism’s Wildest Frontier. And I was even more excited that a good third of the book dealt with Ukraine.

The book jacket explains that as a “rookie Wall Street Journal reporter,” Brzezinski “is instantly plunged into the crazed world of Russian capitalism, where corrupt Moscow bankers and American carpetbaggers preside over the greatest boom and bust in international financial history.” Brzezinski — nephew of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski — doesn’t write in the detached economic prose of a WSJ article. He’s market savvy and explains complex economic issues, but his writing isn’t stuffy or packed with insider lingo. Instead, the book reads more like a travelogue through Russia and Ukraine, as Brzezinski recounts his nights on shitty Russian trains, his vodka-pounding sessions with Russian power brokers, how he bribes officials with cigarettes and bumps into mafia bodyguards armed with automatic guns.

Brzezinski’s description of Ukraine in the early 1990s is so poignant that it brought up memories I didn’t know I’d forgotten. When he talks about the crackly phone lines in his apartment, it reminded me of calling up friends and having a Ukrainian woman jump into the conversation when the lines got crossed. He describes living in a run-down neighborhood (as most were) near Kyiv’s weedy botanical gardens, and although he doesn’t give street names, I’m quite sure he lived in the same area as my family, Druzhby Narodiv. During this time, he explains how the old army trucks that delivered milk and pumped it from a rusty spigot into old beer bottles. I laughed aloud as I read him describe how, in Kyiv, “it was a matter of some prestige” to been seen carrying items in a plastic bag. I remember old women carrying their treasured personal belongings in plastic bags with pride, as if toting plastic was a badge of honor. They carried the bags around until the plastic stretched into shreds or disintegrated.

This was a time of fast-paced transition from post-Soviet collapse to “capitalism” and “democracy” — at least that was the idea. As Brzezinski explains, the early and mid-90s in Ukraine and Russia was a time of power-hungry oligarchs, brazen political corruption, mafia domination and economic inflation. While a few powerful locals (mostly ex-Party bosses) and a slew of Western vulture capitalists got filthy rich, the average person saw their society decay as almost every measurable standard of living dropped.

The Ukrainian people amazed me as an adolescent, as they still do today, with their unique blend of steadfastness and compassion, but Kyiv was a scary place in those early days. A man was found dead in our apartment lobby, his body face-down and his throat slit. Other Westerners constantly warned us to stay away from men who drove black Mercedes or BMWs. There was no real functioning Ukrainian media, but we heard all sorts of stories about ego-bloated mafia men beating pedestrians who refused to move out of their way as they drove their cars on the sidewalk. We American kids traded stories about which courtyards and alleyways had been sites of mafia executions. Most of this violence was brutal but targeted, centered around the flourishing organized crime scene. Still, I bought a whole bunch of knives off street vendors and began carrying two switchblades with me everywhere I went, just in case I lost one. I also carried a $20 bill, which was enough to fend off a thug or pay off a cop shaking me down for a bribe, but not enough cash to get too upset about losing.

Brzezinski didn’t escape the chaos of post-Soviet Kyiv unscathed. He recalls being hog-tied and robbed by a gangster who used the guise of a pretty woman in distress to gain access to his apartment. Brzezinski had all his shit stolen and was left unconscious but alive. Yet this relatively petty crime belies what Brzezinski sees as the real problem: “The economy was a continuous vicious circle of rip-offs, rooted in the communist premise that property belonged to no one — and was thus up for grabs by everyone.” Liberated under the flag of capitalism, only the iron-fisted had the power to grab what could be grabbed. The average citizen was left out in the cold.

 

Inflation was rampant and seemingly unpredictable, peaking at a mindboggling ten-thousand percent. When living in Kyiv, we Westerners dealt with this by carrying only American dollars and exchanging them for Ukrainian koupons only when we planned to immediately spend the money. Most vendors were more than eager to accept our American cash.

I’ll never forget the story of a young Ukrainian couple that became friends of ours. They had saved up their money for years in order to buy a modest car, a Russian-made Lada. The currency crisis eroded their savings, and their money could buy only about a pound of sausages. Families all across the former Soviet Union have similar stories.

A good portion of the book is dedicated to chronicling the rise of several New Russian oligarchs. As the government sold off public enterprises, powerful bankers were able to snatch up real estate, factories, even entire industries. And once they had snatched it all up, they bolstered the weak and corrupt state to protect their new wealth. One Russian oligarch brags to the author about how his companies are responsible for one-twentieth of Russia’s total Gross Domestic Product. The only thing comparable in American history, the author wonders, may be John D. Rockefeller, but, “there was a key difference between [the Russian oligarchs] and America’s robber barons: Rockefeller built his Standard Oil from nothing, while the oligarchs seized the assets of Soviet Russia. They had not created wealth; they had simply grabbed it.”

The author also investigates several prominent crime bosses, trying to find out how they operate within the economic and political structures of their time and place. Reading about the oligarchs and the mafia bosses, it becomes clear that the lines between mafia criminals and legitimate businessmen were illusory. Both existed in the same sectors of society at the same time, even in the same person.

In one of his many reporting trips into the Russian hinterlands, Brzezinski visits the oil fields of far northeastern Russia. Here, newly privatized companies had decided not to pay their workers or their taxes, which cripples local economies. This part of the book was perhaps the most depressing for me to read, as Brzezinski reports on the massive ecological destruction brought on by a combination of human apathy, broken-down equipment and total incompetence.  

The author also visits Chernobyl, touring the abandoned facility in a crummy “protective” suit, a radiation detection device in hand. He has some really interesting things to say about Chernobyl as a metaphor for the post-Soviet socioeconomic reality. 

Russia has changed a lot since this book was published, and I’m unsure what light this book has to shed on the current state of Russia’s capitalist experiment. Casino Moscow doesn’t have much to offer that would help understand Russia’s renewed imperial efforts in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. But I still think it’s a fascinating read in its own right, a well-researched and well-written book that delves into a critical time in Russian and Ukrainian history. 

Review of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

A Review of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” - a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you haven’t read this Russian classic, that’s okay. There are other Russian novels that are higher up on the must-read list. (“Crime and Punishment” takes #1 on mine). But this novel earned its status as a modern Russian classic for good reason. It’s still going strong fifty years after its publication in Russia and it deserves a read by pretty much everyone.

Why? Well, for one, Solzhenitsyn accomplishes an incredible amount in a small number of pages. The book weighs in at about 55,000 words, making it possible to finish the book in a Sunday. Each sentence is crafted with surgical precision. There are no wasted words, no paragraphs that could be shortened into sentences.

As the title implies, the novel takes place over the course of an average day in a Siberian prison camp. Not much different happens on this day as opposed to the nearly 4,000 other days that make up Denisovich ’s sentence in the prison camp. When the circumstances and environment are so extreme, you don’t need twists and surprises to make the story work. There are no prison breaks, sorry. No one gets shot in the head by a guard. And as much as I might want them to, the prisoners don’t riot and burn down the officers’ quarters while they’re sleeping in their beds.

Instead, we have an 18-hour day of toil, hunger and ice. There are no breaks for chapters or extended flashbacks. The reader gets almost no back story on Denisovich. This book is a great example of what I like to call parachute fiction: the reader is dropped in to a unique environment and left to figure it out for himself. Like a new jack thrown into the prison camp, the reader stands beside Denisovich as he struggles through life under authoritarian Soviet rule. The point of view is so intimate, that the reader is right there with Denisovich as he tries to fend off the ever present dangers of frostbite, starvation and violence.

I won’t summarize the course of Denisovich’s day, because Solzhenitsyn does such a masterful job of taking the reader by the hand and letting them experience it on their own. Besides, what stands out most in this novel is not the plot, but the way Solzhenitsyn takes a frozen Siberian wasteland and chisels an intense literary experience out of it. By ratcheting up the tension, slightly shifting the narrative tone, drawing out some scenes while compressing others, Solzhenitsyn immerses the reader in Denisovich’s struggle. Despite the gray, icy feel of this novel, the reader leaves feeling not depressed, but invigorated.

I first read this novel when I was 15. I remember sitting on a balcony at my parents’ apartment in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine. Even though I was in the former Soviet Union, Siberia was still incredibly far away. It's so far away, I almost cannot imagine it as an actual place. This was the mid-90s, when Ukraine was still reeling from the Soviet collapse. Bread lines still reached down the street and babushkas begged for change in the snow. I read this book, like many other Russian novels, as a way to try and understand the Russian soul. I remember "One Day" being incredibly difficult to read in English, and the overall feel of the book being bleak and disheartening. A dozen years later, I re-read this book for a class as part of Johns Hopkins University’s master’s writing program. The experience was vastly different. Of course, some of this is due to changes in me, personally, and changes in the mindset I bring with me to the reading experience. But I’m convinced that the reason I liked this book so much more this time around is in no small part because of the translator.

During our class discussion, the professor handed out excerpts of “One Day” from three different translations, and we compared and contrasted them as a class. Russian is a terribly difficult language to translate into English, as demonstrated by two of these three translations. They sound clunky, disorganized and are frankly tedious to read. This is how I remembered “One Day,” as a painfully garbled but somehow rewarding read. But HT Willetts has done something very beautiful with Solzhenitsyn’s original Russian text. He has given us an English version that flows smoothly. There’s a subtle poetic tone to much of this novel. It’s a master work of translation, and it kept me turning the pages one after the other.

So if you haven’t yet read this masterpiece, pick up HT Willetts’ translation and enjoy. As always, I’d love to read your comments.

"We" Are in Trouble

A review of the novel "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The future is looking bleak. Powerful institutions are gaining an even stronger hold on society. People are retreating further into apathy, accepting whatever they are told. Free thinkers are being marginalized. Automatons are gaining strength. No, this isn’t a cynical diatribe about life in 21^st Century America, although it very well could be. Rather, it’s the overarching theme of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel, “We.”

I’ve put off reading this classic science fiction novel for some time, and on a recent trip to Europe, I finally dug into it. I cannot recall the last time I read a historical work of literature that spoke so clearly and prophetically about the future. Zamyatin’s dystopian view of society is so real, so vivid and so complex that it’s uncanny to think it was written in Russia 90 years ago.

In the world of “We,” society is dominated by the great “Benefactor,” a mysterious, elusive source of repressive dictates. The citizens have ceded their power to this “Benefactor” and his benevolent OneState, which controls the minutiae of everyday life. Society is structured according to the theory of “mathematically infallible happiness,” that monopolistic power can and must determine the life it decides is best for its people.

No one has a name, only a number. Imagination has been all but destroyed through propaganda, violence and, eventually, forced lobotomies. Sex is regulated according to a system of hormone tests that determine how much sex people need. “Pink tickets” are handed out to each person based on their hormone levels, and these tickets are then exchanged with their sexual partners. (There are no booty calls in OneState. Talk about a depressing future.)

The narrator has some number that I don’t remember and didn’t write down. He’s so loyal to OneState that he is the chief engineer behind a technological project to spread OneState’s ideology to alien planets. He is working on a spacecraft that will explore the galazy for life forms in order to preach the gospel of OneState to them. The narrative takes the form of a journal and something of a missionary pamphlet on how great OneState and the Benefactor truly are. The narrator is a faithful follower of the Benefactor. He doesn’t “like or understand jokes.” He respects authority and law for its own sake. He doesn’t drink (which is illegal), and he doesn’t think.

That is, of course, until our monotone narrator meets the sexy, rebellious I-1330. Yes, he falls in love with her, and, yes, he has a change of heart and mind. But it’s a long and arduous process of realizing how to think and function outside of the system. Once he drinks and has sex with I-1330, he deems himself “sick” and “done for.” Liberation of the body and mind is, to the narrator, akin to self-destruction.

I won’t give away the ending, but it’s magnificent, like that last loop on a speeding rollercoaster that leaves you out of breath.

The story behind “We” is equally as intriguing as the story itself. It was written in Russian, though it appeared first in English. Only in 1988 did people living in the Soviet Union get the chance to pick up this novel in its original Russian. If you give a rat’s ass about history and politics, and have even a remote interest in science fiction, this book is a must have. I am an idiot for taking this long to read it.