Better a thief than a drinker of blood: Moscow’s mayor says do svedanya

Better a thief than a drinker of blood: Moscow’s mayor says do svedanya

Posted on October 5th, 2010 by Daniel Kalder

Last week Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor of 18 years, was fired by President Medvedev. The news scored lots of column inches in the Huffington Post, Reuters and all the major papers, which is a rare honor for a regional politician in a faraway country of which we know little (and we do know little). Partly this was because Medvedev fired him, and thus the story fits into the lazy trope so beloved of the world’s kerrrrap Russia correspondents, who otherwise might have to learn something about the country they purport to report upon: is this a sign that Medvedev is his own man, or does he still have Putin’s hand up his ass?

Yawn. But Luzhkov had previously achieved minor international renown for two reasons — 1) his fondness for sending in the cops to bash gay rights activists on the head while Orthodox grannies cheered from the sidelines; and 2) his penchant for tearing down historical buildings and awarding the redevelopment contracts to a construction firm which just happened to be headed by his beefy wife, Yelena Baturina, who just happened to become Russia’s richest woman while fulfilling these contracts. Curious, no?

But there’s more to Luzhkov than that. I first learned of his legend in early 1997, when I moved to Moscow, little realizing I was about to spend the best part of a decade living there. A bald, energetic, tubby little man who liked to wear worker’s caps, he’d been in charge for about five years, having replaced a disastrously inept and corrupt soviet era functionary named Gavriil Popov. At the time I’d say he was genuinely popular; certainly he’d poll somewhere in the 90s whenever he ran for re-election. That may sound a bit Mugabe-esque and it probably was, but even so I never met anybody who actually hated Luzhkov.

Certainly, in comparison to the justly loathed Boris Yeltsin, he was a paragon of efficient leadership, respected by Muscovites as a strong man who got things done — just don’t ask too many questions. While the rest of the country was falling to pieces, Luzhkov attracted massive investment to Moscow, lit up the once dark and filthy streets, and paid benefits to pensioners that were technically the Federal government’s responsibility. Thus while an old babushka in Moscow still lived on the brink of starvation and despair-induced madness, thanks to paternalistic Papa Luzhkov she nevertheless received free prescriptions the collapsing state could no longer provide elsewhere in the country. The misery was, to a small degree, lessened.

Some of the things Luzhkov achieved back then were truly impressive. For example, he had the colossal Christ the Saviour Cathedral, destroyed by Stalin in 1931, rebuilt in slightly over 2 years (compare that to the chronic dithering over the site at Ground Zero). Furthermore, he got it done in a country suffering massive financial and societal collapse. Just don’t ask too many questions. Luzhkov threw a massive street party to celebrate the Cathedral’s resurrection, which coincided with the city’s 850th anniversary. A 1000 member choir sang on the steps while a giant hologram of the Virgin Mary floated in the sky above and his own inflatable effigy drifted through the streets atop a pope-mobile. Jean Michel- Jarre performed a little downriver in front of Moscow State University’s Stalinist -Gothic facade. I remember it all very well. I was starving and the only thing I could find to eat on the street were Snickers bars. I scoffed two and gulped down a bottle of Coke and my guts complained mightily. Russians like big ideas: they do not always attend so well to the small details.

Luzhkov loved street parties, and he threw many of them for the little people, whenever he had an excuse. Then again, there were some things he did that weren’t so successful. He assumed control of the Moskvich car plant, claiming he would save this magnificent symbol of the proud Russian auto industry. The Moskvich remained a joke. He set up ‘Russkoye Bistro’ a Russian pie chain to rival McDonald’s (which the city co-owned). “What? Why the fuck should Russians only eat American burgers when our own pierozhki are just as tasty? I mean look — look at this ball of dried bread and cold cabbage, and yes I do believe that’s some kind of meat in there! Mm! Vkusno!” The crowds stayed away.

Then there was his long patronage of the uber-kitsch Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. Tsereteli’s most famous violation of the Moscow landscape was a bizarre monument to Peter the Great on the Moskva River, a giant googley-eyed metal Tsar standing on a toy boat. Legend has it that Tsereteli originally offered the eyesore to New York City as a monument to Christopher Columbus. The NYC authorities turned him down. Undaunted, wily Zurab slapped a new head on it and sold it to his good buddy Yura L — Russia is all about contacts, you see. A few months after I arrived, an enraged defender of good taste planted a bomb at the foot of the sculpture, but called it in to Moscow’s useless cops before detonation.

(Personally speaking I was not upset by the monument — I even liked it. Certainly it was hilariously bad but somehow it fit Moscow’s bizarre landscape, which is filled with contrasts, contradiction, incongruous juxtapositions and monstrous testaments to aesthetic ugliness as well as edifices of great beauty. Incoherence and evil are part of Moscow’s spiritual fabric, and they must be embraced if the denizen of that wicked megalopolis is to stand a chance of surviving.)

Luzhkov’s ambitions were national however, and in 1999 he made a bid for the office of prime minister, teaming up with presidential candidate Yevgeny Primakov, an ex-prime minister under Yeltsin who had been swiftly removed from power when he showed too much interest in investigating the corruption his half wit-boss had permitted to flourish. Luzhkov and Primakov were running against a certain Vladimir Putin. This was a bold move, even in those innocent days when the mass media was controlled by a handful of corrupt billionaires rather than a single corrupt government. Boris Berezovksy, who owned Russia’s main TV channel unleashed the dogs upon Luzhkov and suddenly the news was awash with tales of the mayor’s suspiciously great wealth, his palatial estate and his eccentric love of bees, portraying him as a combination idiot- crook. Luzhkov’s campaign was shot, and Putin romped home to victory. (And then, rather amusingly, turned upon the members of the Yeltsin clan such as Berezovsky who had helped him to victory, chasing them into exile, where many of them affect a dissident pose to this day).

Many people assumed Luzhkov was finished. A friend of mine, a member of the soviet/Russian liberal intelligentsia who had read all the banned books back when they were still banned was very upset: ‘Luzhkov is a political corpse,’ she cried. ‘It’s terrible.’

‘But surely he’s a crook,’ I said, operating on the entirely reasonable assumption that every single major politician/businessman in Russia thieved on a cosmic scale.

‘Yes, but Putin is ex-KGB. And as Joseph Brodsky said: “Better a thief than a drinker of blood.”‘

That statement is as good an encapsulation of Russian politics as any I have heard. So many ‘experts’ remain wedded to a childish neo-Cold War narrative about goodies and baddies, ‘reformers’ and ‘dictators’ that is, quite simply, embarrassingly stupid. The slightest familiarity with the backgrounds of almost all prominent ‘reformers’ reveals a cast of dubious characters ranging from ‘liberal’ scallywags who rose to prominence under the shitbag Yeltsin (Boris Nemtsov), washed up relics of the perestroika era (Grigory Yavlinsky) and outright loons (Eduard Limonov). There is no struggle between darkness and light taking place in Russia today: there never has been. There is merely a perennial tug of war between bad and worse: better a crook than a vampire.

But the skilled politician Luzhkov survived, rapidly making peace with the Kremlin. Soon he was sucking up to Putin, eventually abandoning his own party for the one affiliated with the President. He kept his nose out of national politics, and in exchange, he was given massive autonomy in Moscow. It was around this time that Luzhkov embarked upon his program of the demolition and reconstruction of Moscow, which so mysteriously enriched his own family. Municipal safety officers would declare old buildings dangerous and then raze them to the ground. Thus Luzhkov could ignore issues surrounding a building’s historic status — why does that matter if it’s a death trap? And he was also able to take properties without paying their owners — if it’s unsafe, then it’s worth nothing. Families living in historic quarters of Moscow would suddenly find themselves banished to dismal suburbs beyond the outskirts of the city. Luzhkov was fond of replacing these old buildings with pink and beige plastic-looking hotels and luxury apartment blocks for millionaires. He had an obsession with money and status that would make a UAE sheikh blush.

Ironically enough, my friend who had prematurely mourned Luzhkov’s political demise was subsequently a victim of of one of his property grabs. Her family had lived in the same apartment since before the Revolution, first as a private residence, then sharing it with others as a communal apartment, before she bought it all back in the late 90s. Then the inspectors declared it unfit and it was torn down. Distraught, she wrote a letter to Luzhkov explaining that her family had always lived there. The paternalistic city boss took pity on the damsel in distress. She alone among the ex-residents of the building was awarded a replacement apartment that would remain her property. By no means was it worth what she had lost, but it was better than a city-owned cube in a prefabricated, concrete high-rise.

Luzhkov carried on like this for a long time, obliterating Moscow’s history, replacing it with kitsch crap, seemingly with impunity. Even though unbridled loyalty from his underlings excused a multitude of sins in Putin’s eyes, I often wondered how he could let such blatant corruption continue, especially after he changed the law so that regional leaders were no longer elected but rather appointed directly by him. Well, it seems that Luzhov finally overstepped the mark. While he was on holiday in Austria at the end of September, Medvedev offered him the chance to resign and go honorably. Luzhkov, so long the unchallenged master of Moscow, refused. And so he was fired.

Apparently he learned he was out of a job from watching the TV news. That’s good: I like to think about that moment, when he realized all his power was gone. It must have shocked him terribly, felt unreal. Even now, I’m sure he doesn’t fully understand what happened. Yesterday I read he is going to fight for democracy in Russia, a classic pose beloved of every greedy bastard who loses his place at the trough. That could be very dangerous for his health, of course. A defining moment in Putin’s presidency was when he dispatched Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly the richest man in Russia, to a radioactive penal colony in the Far East. Like all the Russian oligarchs, Khodorkovsky amassed his wealth in extremely dubious circumstances, and he probably got what was coming to him. Justice was hardly the point of Khodorkovsky’s trial however — he was punished as an object lesson for all the other billionaires, that they might know what happens to those who defy Putin. With that one deed Putin re-instilled a fear of the state that had disappeared in 1991. And how it worked! What meek and obedient boot-lickers these masters of the universe became!

With the termination of the powerful Luzhkov, Putin/Medvedev have signaled to other regional leaders that nobody is invulnerable. Everybody should know his place, and fear losing it. And since they are going to steal, they should remember to share. Personally speaking, I wish Putin had cut Luzhkov off a lot earlier, about seven or eight years ago, which is when he really went berserk. And now what? Well, I’m pragmatic. Of course the next Mayor shall thieve, but I hope that he does so on a more modest scale. And although Luzhkov’s career has ended in well-deserved disgrace, this is how I shall remember him: for a while he was quite competent, he did not begin as an ultra-crook, and he was not a drinker of blood.

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Daniel Kalder

Daniel Kalder is an author and journalist originally from Scotland, who currently resides in Texas after a ten year stint in the former USSR. Visit him online at www.danielkalder.com