Moscow Orientation – Day 4 – Political Attacks

I arrived at the Center today and stumbled into the middle of contemporary Russian politics. The front of the building had been spray painted with graffiti in what amounts to the latest political attack on the oligarchs here. And I got to see it first hand.

The paint job was clear, in multiple colors, large, and apparently unrushed – it said “We sell power to oligarchs cheaply.” An arrow pointed to the front door that also serves as the entrance to the private club that Arkady founded. The door itself was covered in a caricature of a chess Knight – perhaps a reference to Kasparov and his outspoken criticism of the Putin government?

So does something like this happen in Russian without official imprimatur? One, the club is very low key and unobtrusive – this is certainly not a random act by someone taking a wild guess. Someone has done their research. Two, there are two embassies directly across the street with 24 hour police protection. It’s hard to imagine that they didn’t notice someone carefully spray painting such a large statement.

We traveled just outside of town to a dacha, where we met with Roy Medvedev, an eminent historian and biographer with a fascinating history of his own – his father was purged by Stalin, and he himself was thrown out of the communist party for criticizing Stalin too harshly. His thesis was that economic development isn’t dependent on democracy movements in the former soviet states. He cited industrial production figures and agricultural export totals to support his argument. So by his methodology, Ukraine and Georgia are the most democratic but lag far behind Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which are totalitarian states.

He didn’t really convince me. He mentioned that a tv crew in Turkmenistan is paid 1/3rd of what they are paid in Russia. But a special services soldier is paid 3 times more than a Russian counterpart. He cited Terrorism as the reason. Not likely. It’s a classic dictator tactic to make sure that the army is fat and happy – it makes it a lot easier to retain one-man rule that way. That’s just one example where he compared sums of money across borders without adjusting for any economic factors like cost of living.

He was an interesting character nonetheless. We all packed into his tiny study, jammed with books in many languages – many of which he wrote. The shelves were positively groaning under the weight of them all, and were fronted by souvenirs from places he had been – Eiffel tower, postcards, statue of liberty, samurai sword, etc.

On the way out, I bought a biography of Andropov from him and had him inscribe it to me. He told a funny story. One day, the FSB (previously better known as the KGB) called. They said that they wanted to present a copy of the Andropov biography to their director on his birthday. Fine, he said. He agreed to inscribe it to him. So a driver and an escort from the security organ came to his house. But there was a misunderstanding – they wanted Medvedev to present the inscribed book in person. So he hopped in the car and went to the FSB headquarters. There he met for 10 minutes with the director – Vladimir Putin! Humbly, Medvedev admitted that he remembers absolutely nothing of the conversation since he didn’t consider it very important – he had no idea that Putin would turn out to be president a couple of years later.

Our driver Sergei asked which dacha he lived in. We pointed it out, and he registered his surprise – I didn’t think someone so famous would live in such a dumpy place, he said. Then he went in a got a book signed.