VODKA AND SYMPATHY

Bruce Anderson talks to a physicist and part

time taxi-driver whose story mirrors the triumph and tragedy of post-communist Russia

Moscow MOSCOW is full of people who are selling and buying. On convenient pieces of waste ground, impromptu markets are springing up: the local equivalent of car boot sales. Pedestrian underpasses beneath main roads are full of kiosks. This informal sector is helping Russians to realise that their living standards now depend upon their ability to compete in the labour market. Such a movement from status to contract is essential if Russia is to make the transition from a command economy to a free society.

The buying and selling also applies to public transport. In Moscow every private car can become a part-time taxi. Muscovites and foreigners will stand on the kerbside, flag a car down and negotiate the fare; foreigners pay more.

There are casualties. Some Russians who have no nostalgia for communism still cannot get used to the free market. One afternoon, as I was trying to flag down a taxi, I met one Russian who was finding it hard to move from status to contract. Arkady immediately insisted that he would not accept a fare. He had stopped in the hope that I was British or American because he wanted to practise his English. It quickly became clear that he was not just interested in language practice, which he hardly needed. This was a man who was bursting to talk, and who seemed to find it easier to unburden himself to a transient stranger.

Arkady had a wry, eager, intellectual face. He had been trained as a physicist, and had graduated with high honours. The old Soviet system was good at education, especially in the sciences. When Arkady started work in the mid-Eighties, he had expected to spend his entire career in a research establishment. 'A military one?' I enquired, and he seemed embarrassed, which probably answered my question. But he had clearly been much more interested in pure research than in its practical applications. By temperament, Arkady was a laboratory worker. He was certainly no politician.

A liberal by inclination, he had disliked the old Soviet system, but he was not the stuff of which heroic dissidents were made. This was a man who enjoyed a quiet life: scientific research, his viola, chess, his lam ily. He had not been a Communist party member, but if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, he probably would have joined, to help his professional advancement.

During the Soviet era, that would have been a straightforward matter. As he was good at his job and got on well with his colleagues. he could have predicted his promotion path. He would have known roughly when he would have been entitled to a larger dacha, a bigger car, access to the special shops which had Western goods. It was a system in which status was far more important than salary, and in which pay differentials were far less important than privileges. The General Secretary of the Communist party was paid only five times as much as a manual labourer; his standard of living was immeasurably greater. The rouble's official exchange rate and the average Russian's pay-cheque had one thing in common. Neither was a guide to purchasing power.

We had now arrived at the Pushkin Gallery, my intended destination, but Arkady had only begun his tale. So I suggested a drink at a nearby pavement café — another sign of the new Russia. By then Arkady seemed impervious to newness. He had been comfortable under the old dispensation, because he had known who he was and where he was. Then, with brutal suddenness, the previous system had disintegrated, leaving him to be torn by the process of adjustment. In the early days, he had been a devotee of Mr Gorbachev, and had been delighted by perestroika and glasnost. 'Yes,' he admitted ruefully. 'I thought that Russia could become more like the West, that we would all be able to enjoy political freedom, and that the Soviet inefficiencies would just disappear. And I thought it would be easy.'

He had quickly discovered that freedom brings confusion in its wake. Even while Mr Gorbachev was still in power, Russians were made aware of the rouble's weakness. Goods began to appear, but dollars were needed to buy them. This led to chaos in the labour market, as Russians scrambled to find jobs that paid in dollars. Young Russians with three degrees threw up university lectureships to work in bars, and promptly earned several times more than their professors. Some Russian females, as well endowed academically as in other respects, became whores. Boys would play truant from school to do odd jobs around the first Moscow branch of McDonald's. It was not easy for high-official fathers to convince them of the error of their ways when they could retort that their takings from McDonald's were already higher than dad's salary.

In the early Yeltsin era there was a move back to stability. The rouble's exchange rate began to reflect its real value, and there were attempts to create realistic rouble salary levels. But the public sector always lagged behind. Sometimes, indeed, the government ran out of funds, so that pay-cheques would not arrive. Arkady had gone through several phases of mounting salary arrears. He also began to realise that the Soviet-style privileges which his predecessors had enjoyed would no longer exist. He was going to have to depend on his earnings, in a world where there were too many research institutes, working for a government which had too little money.

Some of his colleagues who were quicker on the economic uptake had already privatised themselves. I enquired whether any of them had gone to the Middle East. He understood me, and smiled, 'No, no; we were not involved in that sort of research.' But there had been rumours in scientific circles about lavish offers from dubious regimes.

Arkady began to realise that he, too, would have to move. He had a young family, an overcrowded flat, an overworked wife, dependent elderly relatives and an inadequate pay-cheque — plus no prospects. 'No sort of life.' he said emphatically. He was not even able to find the same consolation in his work; home troubles began to overshadow his lab-life. So he went to the private sector, became a technical consultant to a construction firm, and everything seemed set fair. At first, it was a wrench to leave his laboratory, and he did not find his new work anything like as stimulating. But his salary had quadrupled, with every hope of more to come. He had his eye on a large flat in a 19th-century house. Though it would have needed a lot of refurbishment, he was hoping to exploit his new contacts in the construction world to have the work done well and cheaply.

Then came catastrophe. In August 1998 the rouble collapsed, and with it the nascent Russian stock market. Several banks closed their doors, including the one in which Arkady had deposited his savings. 'There wasn't much,' he said stoically, 'but it would have been useful.' Needless to say, his construction firm also went bust. Arkady had no money, no job and, apparently, no way back; his country seemed to be falling apart. Most Russians have a streak of peasant, make-do cunning which enables them to hunker down and slog through adversity. Not Arkady. In hard times he was a prisoner of his sensitivity and his high expectations. He spent some months looking for work and finding only menial odd jobs. This was not a menial man.

It was a black period. 'Sometimes, I almost decided that there was no point in going on, but I thought that it would be even worse for my family if I wasn't there,' He paused, 'Though there were days when I felt so useless that I even wondered about that,' There was a further long pause. But that wasn't the worst moment. It came when I had to sell my viola. It was not especially valuable, but it had been my father's and my grandfather's, and I could make it sing. I've got another one now which is supposed to be as good, but it'll never be the same. The man who bought mine; God, he got a bargain, I was so desperate. Anyway, he's moved to Petersburg, and I've lost touch with him. I'd give him five times what he paid to get my little violuschka back.'

I thought he was about to start crying, so I tried to cheer him up by pointing out that he had been able to rejoin the viola-owning classes. He agreed. The recovery had started within a few months of the crash, Construc tion was an early beneficiary, for the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, had grandiose ambitions to transform the city, and always managed to find the money to implement them. Some of Arkady's former colleagues started their own firm and brought him aboard. His financial worries were over.

Eighteen months ago, he had moved to a bigger flat. He was earning more than ever. But I sensed that there had been a huge psychological price. Russia is the only country outside Africa in which life expectancy is falling. Much of this decline is due to bad food, chain-smoking and excessive vodka, but there are other causes. Arkady was a gentle man, who would have been suited to a predictable life, and who had found it almost impossible to cope with the anarchic changes which had overtaken Russia. Whatever confidence he had possessed, he had lost. This was probably a man who always had a laver of skin too few for his own good. But he would have been happier in a society based on status, not on contract.

Despite the rewards, he still found it demeaning to sell his services in the labour market. [ tried to rally his spirits. 'Look,' I said, 'I've been coming here around once a year over the past decade, and if you'll forgive an outsider's naivety, I think that things are coming right. I'm sure that the transition would always have been appallingly difficult, but the first ten years will have been the worst. You're earning a decent salary, and you're helping to build a Russia which your children should be able to enjoy. Doesn't that make it all worthwhile?' Arkady was now slightly drunk; this was one Russian who seemed unused to vodka. There was the longest pause yet, before he fixed me with a haunted stare, 'It's all right for you Westerners. You come here, eat caviare, see the good side. And maybe you're right; maybe things will improve. But I feel used up. I was born in a bad world which has gone, but I cannot find pleasure in this new world that's replaced it, which you tell me is good. Perhaps it will be okay for my children. I don't think it'll ever be okay for me.'

I then went for a pee, and when I came back Arkady had gone, to my intense vexation. I did not even know his surname, let alone his telephone number. I have met a lot of fascinating people in Russia, but he was the most interesting, and — if this does not sound too cynically anthropological — I would like to have been able to monitor his progress, or lack of it.

He made me aware of one point. Russia has often eaten its young. Much of its history is a cry of anguish. From serfdom to Stalinism, we know about the casualties of previous eras, and Arkady might seem to be a citizen of post-atrocity Russia; part of the new middle class who are the key to the future. But there are other, less obvious casualties. The inevitable and indeed desirable process of change and progress condemns a lot of decent Russians to lives of quiet desperation.