THE BOULEVARDS OF MOSCOW ARE VERY MUCH TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY Russia, a kaleidoscope of flashing neon, ostentatious wealth, and the hectic traffic of a city too busy to stop. But walk down Maliy Karetniy Pereulok, a backstreet in the city’s prestigious central Petrovski district, and step through the wooden door of the simple red-brick building at number 12. Here, time reverses itself. Visitors find themselves inside a musty archive of repression. Photographs of Russians executed during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s are displayed in open shoe boxes. Storage boxes and cardboard file folders, their contents a history of state-sanctioned savagery, are stacked floor to ceiling along narrow corridors and crammed into seemingly every niche. Personal items that belonged to prisoners of the gulag invite inspection.
A human rights organization called Memorial, which documents the crimes of Stalinism past and present, maintains this museum and has its office here. The quarters have the feel of a relic, and the museum visitor traffic is low. But during the golden era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika—roughly from 1988 through the first half of 1991—the building buzzed with researchers, journalists, visitors, and foreign dignitaries. Curiosity about the Stalinist period was intense then. (Remarkably, the reform-minded FSB, which had replaced the KGB in a convoluted bureaucratic change in 1995, assembled the photographs of purge victims that ended up in the museum’s collection. “The current FSB wouldn’t do something like this, but then they did,” said Nikita Petrov, Memorial’s KGB expert. Petrov himself is a throwback to an earlier time, with long gray hair parted on the side, green T-shirt, denim jacket and pants, and trimmed gray beard.)
Perestroika was a flash in time when many Russians dared to hope for a break with the past. Tens of thousands marched in the streets for an evolving list of causes, scanned newspapers for the latest exposés of the Communist Party, and forced genuine change in the country. But when the economy crashed and the government of Boris Yeltsin wiped out their savings—not once, but twice—by summarily devaluing the ruble, Russians felt tricked.
Now Russia is again Russia, its dark side emergent and, for the most part, tolerated by the populace. Petrov, a chemist by training and a historian by profession, tried to explain why.
“Russian history taught its people to be indifferent toward the suffering of others at their death,” he said. “It’s hard to say whether history produced the culture or culture produced the history. Whichever, it’s the consequence. People are used to death. It’s a psychological defense toward death.”
To underline his point, Petrov turned to Europe. “In 2004, there was a terrorist act in Spain,” he said, referring to the Madrid train bombing by al-Qaeda that killed 191. “Lots of people went into the street in protest. That would never happen here. Why? Here it’s ‘Why should we go into the street? It would have no impact.’
“That’s actually quite a logical response. [But] it has resulted in people not being brave. They take no responsibility toward events—they can’t affect anything.”
Some have interpreted this detachment as an inevitable outcome of Putin-era prosperity—many Russians had never lived better and so were not motivated to challenge the system. But my own observation was that Petrov had it right—Russians had reverted to what they had always been, which was generally passive.
It was not hard to find evidence that the state had turned back to its old self, too. In 2004, Qatar convicted two Russian intelligence officers of murdering Chechnya’s former president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, by blowing up his car in the tiny Gulf country. Moscow asked that the men be permitted to serve their sentence in Russia, and Qatar agreed. But once the officers were home, Russia set them free. That seemed to demonstrate that if one carried out a killing on behalf of the state—even if it was arguably terrorism—one would be protected. It reinforced an atmosphere of impunity for such crimes; there were few examples of anyone convicted for a major Russian murder. The Qatar episode and others like it mainly suggested that people should keep their heads down.
One of those who surprisingly did so was Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who for two decades was Russia’s premier expert on the nation’s elites and their wealth and position in government. Her most recent study, she told me over coffee, was a measure of the wealth accumulated by military officers and the FSB leadership under President Vladimir Putin, including their shares of ownership in Russia’s biggest companies. Almost offhandedly, I asked where the study would be published so that I could pick up a copy. I didn’t want to burden her with a request to send me one. She is an enormously busy woman, frequently published in Russia and the West and widely quoted on the Russian power structure. Even the Kremlin has sought her advice.
Her expression turned dark and awkward. She said she wasn’t sure where—or if—she would publish her findings. After so many years of demystifying the elite, she suddenly felt at risk. “This type of information is dangerous to life,” said the sixtyish woman. “A lot of people had unpleasant things happen to them. There can be accidental car crashes. A lot of people died and that is why I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I learned later that Kryshtanovskaya turned over her study to friends in a think tank abroad, who paid her and used it under their own byline.
One of the things that foreigners least understand about Russia is why ordinary Russians seem largely unperturbed by the violence and death around them.
Yuri Sinelshchikov, a former deputy Moscow city prosecutor who had dealt with murder his entire professional life, thought it was a matter of practicality or personal priorities. People simply lacked the inclination to care, he said. There was nothing in it for them.
“If people go in the street, they won’t gain materially,” he said. “Any murder can be compared to a show where an actor comes to entertain them. It doesn’t really affect someone unless it happens to them directly. People get angry if they lose a meter of land, or their children are hurt, or someone installs a door that is heavy and could hurt someone.”
The keenest observers on almost any matter in nearly any country are often the bankers, who have much to lose if their judgment is wrong. So I asked a few in Moscow to analyze the Russian mind-set. They were Americans and Europeans who admired Putin’s government and were earning eight-and nine-figure payouts as lawyers, investment bankers, and investors thanks to the Russian juggernaut.
“The local attitude is, ‘Shit happens,’” said Rory MacFarquar, Moscow research director for venerable Goldman Sachs. Slender, baby-faced, and bookish, MacFarquar was persuasive partly because of his long years and deep study of Russia, and also because of his clear and painstaking choice of words. He tended to see things in a historical context. “There is an enormous perception gap about life. It’s not something trivial like ‘life is cheap,’” he said. “Russia has gone through unimaginable tragedies in the twentieth century.”
The United States reacts with great shock to events such as 9/11 and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre because they are so out of the ordinary, he said. But “enormous tragedies” occur with such relative frequency in Russia that its people become almost numb to them.
“One thing the West noticed [after 9/11] is how many people were put in danger. [But] that wasn’t a big thing here,” MacFarquar continued. “The level of routine ecological danger here is enormous. The systematic official lying has led to a universal assumption that the danger is pervasive, which leads to fatalism.”
Al Breach, an executive at United Bank of Switzerland, put it this way: “Life isn’t straightforward here. It’s not significant enough.”
It seemed to me that five or six hundred years of Russian history provided ample reason for its people to become inured to suffering. But two Russian historians told me that my thinking was too simplistic. “I would advise you not to make too much of a continuum of history,” warned Alexei Miller, on a visit home from Budapest, where he was teaching at Central European University. Miller was especially contemptuous of anyone who would mention Putin and Russia’s iconic sixteenth-century czar, Ivan IV—known as Ivan the Terrible—in the same sentence. Alexander Kamenskii, an oft-quoted professor at Russian State University for the Humanities, felt much the same way. “People say that Russians are used to being slaves, are used to dictatorship, and that’s just the way it is. That’s a myth,” Kamenskii said. “Why should we think that people who lived under dictatorship liked it?”
Miller’s and Kamenskii’s admonitions made sense in the abstract—history is not science, and the past doesn’t necessarily dictate the present. But it was hard to understand why in this instance they didn’t see what seemed obvious: that Russians in a sense have chosen to live in the tradition of their medieval ancestors.
It isn’t that Russians favor dictatorship. But they have gone along with autocratic rule even when offered an alternative, as in the parliamentary and presidential elections over eight years that cemented Putin’s grip on power. And there does seem to be a straight line to the present from Ivan the Terrible and the Russian tradition of fear-based rule.
Russia’s first crowned czar and grandson of the creator of the Russian state, Ivan, who took power in 1547, had thinning hair, deep wrinkles on his forehead, and was physically impressive, with a rippling beard and a barrel chest. His more sympathetic biographers thought that he was initially a conscientious and even empathetic leader. Emulating Spain, England, and Portugal in the pursuit of empire, he captured parts of Siberia, fought against Poland for control of the Baltic Sea, and against the Tatars in the east. Ivan opened Russia to the West, welcoming trade with Europe and forming a particularly warm relationship with Elizabeth of England; Elizabeth had a soft spot for Ivan and on at least two occasions offered him asylum should he require it.
Yet, though Westerners were accustomed to savagery against one’s own kind, they were startled at what they witnessed in Ivan’s Russia. An English merchant named Jerome Horsey wrote of a prince named Boris Telupa who, accused of treason, had a stake “thrust into his fundament through his body, which came out at his neck, upon which he languished in horrible pain for fifteen hours.” Telupa’s mother was gang-raped, Horsey wrote, and Ivan “commanded his huntsmen to bring their hungry hounds to eat and devour her flesh and bones, dragged everywhere.” Anthony Jenkinson, England’s envoy to Russia, described the punishment of an unfortunate aristocrat, as Ivan’s men “cut off his nose, his tongue, his ears and his lips.” Ivan had a particular fascination with potions. Convinced that one Prince Vladimir was out to destroy him, he handed a goblet of poisoned wine to the unfortunate man, who died in great agony. His wife and nine-year-old daughter similarly perished after being given the same concoction. When some of Vladimir’s retinue refused to beg for mercy, they were stripped naked, shot, and left for birds and wild animals to eat.
That was how Russians grew up in the sixteenth century. Ivan was out to destroy Russia’s power structure—shared by the Church, wealthy and politically powerful landowners called boyars, and individual princely rivals to the throne—and become its sole, almighty ruler. His enforcers were an ultra-loyalist six-thousand-man band of thugs whom he called the oprichniki. They roamed the countryside on horseback in black robes, a dog’s head and broom etched into their saddles, massacring thousands, including much of the population of the ancient city of Novgorod. To retain their loyalty, Ivan granted them control of the richest part of the country, along with Russia’s principal trade routes.
The consequence of Ivan’s violence was a terrorized, terrified, and cowed population. In a letter to England’s Queen Elizabeth, King Sigismund Augustus II of Poland asked in wonder why Russians, while no doubt fearful of their czar’s savagery, also seemed to defend him as a mark of patriotism.
The most-admired historical figure in Russia is Peter the Great, who two centuries later presided over the torture and execution of hundreds of actual and alleged traitors, including his own son, Alexei. He doled out such punishment “to make an example, to terrify, to force submission,” wrote biographer Robert Massie, but with the ultimate aim of gaining “the power to work his reforms and—for better or worse—to revolutionize Russian society.” He fretted that the pain and death he inflicted might cause his Western friends to think less of him, and ordered that a lengthy letter be delivered to Europe’s heads of state imploring them to ignore reports of his brutality against his son. At the end of the self-serving missive, composed the day after Alexei’s death, Peter advised his European counterparts, “In case also that anyone wished to publish this event in an odious manner, you will have in hand what is necessary to destroy and solidly refute any unjust and unfounded tales.”
The czars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were also to be feared, as exemplified by the organized attacks on Jews that they carried out. But some were victims of assassination themselves. Among those suffering that fate were Czar Alexander II, who was killed by a bomb in 1881, and of course Nicholas II, who was shot dead along with the entire Romanov family in 1918.
Soviet rule brought a new wave of official violence. Josef Stalin executed nearly all of his senior-most comrades from revolutionary days, almost his entire upper echelon of military officers, and millions of others when one included deaths in labor camps and from forced collectivization. Stalin was Ivan’s natural heir, and said as much himself. During the darkest days of Hitler’s invasion, Stalin could be found scribbling the words “teacher, teacher” on the pages of a biography of Ivan. He “constantly compared his terror to Ivan’s massacre of the boyars”—the landed aristocracy—according to a biographer of the twentieth-century dictator. Stalin thought that Ivan’s only fault was that, in slaying the boyars, “he should have killed them all, to create a strong state.”
One of the most credible and revealing accounts of Stalin’s time is Special Tasks, the memoir of Pavel Sudoplatov, who directed overseas assassinations for the dictator. Contemplating his own and others’ acts during the Soviet era, Sudoplatov wrote that “victorious Russian rulers always combined the qualities of criminals and statesmen.” Indeed, his book is a dispassionate catalogue of official poisonings, stabbings, and other plots, including the killing of his first victim, Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist whom he cultivated for five years before blowing him up in Germany with a booby-trapped box of chocolates. Sudoplatov played a leading role in one of the most infamous political assassinations of the twentieth century, that of Leon Trotsky. The revolutionary leader had fled to Mexico after earning the enmity of Stalin, who ordered Sudoplatov to make his slaying a priority. So in 1940, Ramon Mercader del Rio, a Spanish national working for a Sudoplatov deputy, dispatched him with a pickax to the head.
Musa Eitingon Malinovskaya is the daughter of Mercader’s supervising agent, the legendary Soviet master spy Leonid Eitingon. Dressed in a silk scarf and a denim blouse for coffee at an upscale Moscow café, the sixty-year-old Malinovskaya told me how, as a teenager in the 1960s, she shared ice cream with Mercader and her father. She had no idea who he was, nor of her father’s role in the Trotsky assassination, but the two men had an evidently warm relationship. “My father introduced him to me as ‘my friend from the Spanish resistance,’” Malinovskaya said. “…I heard about him killing Trotsky only in 1989 when I read about it in Literaturnaya Gazeta.” Malinovskaya was clearly proud of her mother, Musa, for whom she was named. She showed me a 2005 advertisement featuring a 1935 photo of her mother as a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old Army parachutist. But she was singularly devoted to her father and eager to talk about his association with Trotsky’s slayer. One got the impression that it was the most important thing she could say about herself. The murder perhaps helped to break the ice at cocktail parties.
In 1954, a Sudoplatov protégé named Nikolai Khokhlov became the first Soviet defector to publicly divulge firsthand knowledge of the Kremlin’s assassination program. He became a valuable source of intelligence for the CIA and survived an attempt by Russian agents to assassinate him using radioactive poisoning. The West usually prosecutes its traitors but, as Khokhlov was witness, the Soviets regarded them as fair game for murder.
Another defector, Bulgarian novelist and playwright Georgy Markov, died in a most exotic way. He was working as a London-based journalist for the BBC when Moscow and its Bulgarian allies joined forces to kill him. In 1978, an assassin jabbed a tiny ricin-laced pellet into Markov’s thigh as he waited at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge. Although the murder weapon wasn’t found, an excited British press reported that the pellet was fired from an umbrella, and that idea stuck with historians.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia became a fledgling democracy in 1991. It should have been an opportunity for the nation to demonstrate that murder and mayhem were not embedded in the Russian DNA, that the notion of a centuries-long continuum of violence was fatally flawed. The czars and the dictators were gone; tyranny no longer ruled the land. But its people quickly learned that democracy Russian style could be ruthlessly bloody. A historic tradition seemed to be reasserting itself. The chosen style of rule—tyranny or democracy or something in between—seemed to matter little.
There were, of course, differences between the old and the new. Ivan, Peter, and Stalin alike reserved the right to decide who would live and who would die. Ivan and Peter tortured their unlucky victims to death, and Stalin had them shot in the back of the head or sent to prison camps to be starved and worked to death. This was state murder. But none of these three strongmen permitted murder in the streets. On the contrary, they were very nearly pathological about order and concealing Russia’s dark side from the rest of the world.
Under the rule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the old order was turned upside down. There was little if any state-sponsored murder. But contract killers brazenly murdered prominent bankers, metal traders, oilmen, and hundreds of others for violating unspoken “rules of the game.” Kidnappers chopped off the fingers and heads of their victims, sometimes before even requesting a ransom. Russia’s richest billionaires, known collectively as the oligarchs, left a trail of dead bodies—by coincidence or otherwise—as they accumulated unimagined wealth; these victims were often business rivals. The state solved few cases, and in that way seemed an accomplice to some of them.
But if Yeltsin, the nation’s first popularly elected president, appeared to tolerate the bloodbath, it wasn’t his creation. Rather, it filled the vacuum created when the once-feared KGB and other law enforcement agencies seemed to vanish in the unraveling of the Soviet Union. Grievances that previously would have been forgotten or settled through legal or other peaceable means suddenly poured into the streets. Bitter scores were settled in shootings carried out directly by, or ordered by, swindled business partners, gangs denied a piece of the action, and so on. The murders and murderers were cold-blooded and had unmistakable attitude. Bankers were among the most frequent victims because of their access to money; scores of them were killed in shootings, bombings, and at least one poisoning during the 1990s.
Lesser citizens also could be caught in the cross fire. In summer 1993, three gunmen murdered a café manager and then, at a kiosk where they found service unsatisfactory, shot a saleswoman and a customer dead. In April 1995, two gunmen killed a Russian stockbroker’s six-year-old daughter, who was on the way to kindergarten. And in November 1996, a bomb buried in a Moscow cemetery killed some dozen mourners. Organized crime became Big Business. Experts said that more than four-fifths of Russia’s banks were controlled by gangs, whose tentacles spread west to Israel, Europe, and the United States. These Russian gangs poured into Germany, for example, bringing with them the most grisly crimes the country had experienced in decades. In a 1994 case, German police came upon the bodies of a bordello owner, his wife, and four prostitutes, all of them apparently killed by a Russian gang. Police agencies such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had never faced a challenge so difficult, a shadowy underworld that had come to be known as the “Russian mafia.”
As the 1990s drew to a close, Yeltsin retired from the presidency. He was succeeded by a former KGB spy catapulted into office by powerful men confident that they could manipulate him—but who would turn out to be wilier than any of them. Once again, Russia would be ruled by a strongman.