Deaf prostitutes, Mother Russia and Uncivil Society (and life in the 'Nazi block' of flats)

My memory of Moscow in the 90s concurs with that of Dominic Cummings (and implications for the war in Ukraine)

One of the things

Dominic Cummings substack

said in passing was that people in the British establishment don’t really have any idea just how much pain Russia can absorb. They also fail to understand just how different Russia is from the rest of Europe. Prior to what we call the Great War, the river of the Tzarist state was perhaps converging with the rivulets moving East and Central Europe in a Westerly direction. War, revolution, civil war, internal genocide, concentration camps, purges and finally the Great Patriotic War put paid to all of that. Russia is different. Poised between East and West. Bursting with culture, history and national destiny but lacking natural borders, the only kind of stability that most Russians can understand is that which comes from a local determination to survive, and to carry on, despite the heavy and certain expectation of calamity. Where they survive in that part of the world, hobbits dig very deep holes. Their fatalism inures them against the shock of national tragedy.

I was in Moscow in the mid-90s, just after finishing my Ph.D. I had spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards from Budapest, where I still have good friends. I visited Poland, Czechoslovakia (as was) and the GDR. I was in Budapest in the summer of 1989, and after talking to East German holiday makers (who were hovering and trying to decide whether to slip into Austria) I travelled through Czechoslovakia into East Germany, crossed Checkpoint Charlie and spent three months hanging out with a bunch of anarchists and Socialist Workers in Kreuzberg – in the shadow of the wall. Drawn home on account of a girl (big mistake), I missed the biggest party of the century by about 2 weeks. Years later I gave away free tickets to Glastonbury and missed Oasis, Jimmy Page & Robert Plant, the Cure, Simple Minds and Sinead O’Connor. Now I have Spotify – but missing the collapse of the wall still hurts.

By 1995 I knew about Soviet history and had had enough experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ to have few illusions about applied Marxism. And I was getting pretty sick of the academic kind also. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the Russians I met. In 1992 we were guests of the most generous families you could imagine. In the middle of severe food shortages, they would insist we drank vodka and ate their last (raw) salmon. I remember a chemistry professor showing us his beautiful dacha and swimming or rather floating in a great oxbow arc in a clear fast running river. It was like something out of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (which is a beautiful novel btw). As we were drying off his wife punched him in the nose. With blood streaming everywhere, there ensued the kind of impassioned argument which I had imagined only wronged Roma lovers and Spanish bullfighters are capable. The самогонный напиток (‘samongeny napitok’ … or moonshine) that we were drinking, he later told us ruefully ‘had been distilled’ (meaning hehad distilled LOL) from berries that were supposed to be kept for vitamin C for the babies in the following winter.

In 1995/6 the wild-west economy was heating up. Millionaires were ten a penny. For those with access to state assets, money was growing on trees. Moscow was a disturbing place. I arrived, the day after my doctoral defence, with the mother of all hangovers – a level of poisoning that would have made a Cossack blush. My sister had put me on a plane at four in the morning. On arrival, the waiting taxi took me to one of a dozen low-rise blocks of flats. It was snowing gently and minus 15 degrees. My head was throbbing, and I felt like vomiting. The driver remarked casually that I must have been favoured by someone in the ‘nomenklatura’ (the rhizomic soviet bureaucracy that still called the shots): ‘You have been allocated an apartment in the Nazi block’.

It turned out that the German prisoners of war were better builders than their soviet counterparts. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the Great Patriotic War, Russians respected German build quality and attention to detail. For the next few months, I bussed it into work at 7.00am and began to get a feel for post-soviet Russia. For the record, the chemistry professor’s hooch had tasted good – wholesome even. It wasn’t laced with methanol, unlike many of the yogurt cartons of spirit that the bus drivers necked before engaging 1^st gear.

One morning, the bus was late, and I shared a plastic beaker of this stuff with a fellow passenger. He was about 30 but looked mid-sixties. Divorced and without much hope or expectation, his inner world mirrored the slushy grey concrete blocks of the suburb in which he lived. Brutalism is a pretty fair description of both the inner and the outer experience of 20^th century Russia.

The job was not taxing. I had plenty of time. Again, I was blessed with ‘kitchen friends’ — people who would feed you, nurse you and, if necessary, kill for you. But by this time, they had young families and no money. Moscow was the play town of the ‘new Russians’ – corrupt and venal by definition. My Muscovite friends disliked and feared them in equal measure; but also knew that they couldn’t compete. I, on the other hand, had hard currency and time on my hands. I wanted to party – but not by myself. My flag of convenience friend, Chris, was a young fertilizer salesman from South Africa. I say ‘convenient’, but actually, we did like each other. He was on the make and trying to ferret out commercial opportunities. I was teaching in a new Soros-funded university that was disturbingly close to the KGB headquarters. In the evenings we sought the company of girls – not too successfully I should add. My ‘seeking’ was somewhat cautious. In the first week, Chris managed to snog a young lady who turned out to be a mafia moll of some kind. We spent the next few months hot footing it out of bars when we came across members of his seemingly infinitely extended family.

Breathless newspaper columns in Europe described Russia as the new wild west. It was not glamorous, but then neither was Dodge City circa 1870. We avoided the police as much as the mafia. They were often on the same team and always sought to extract a kind of wergild — the price of continued admission to this life. Once we came out of a club, the strains of Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ still concussing our inner ears. There was something strangely appropriate about the coolest, most monied, Muscovites hipping out to West Coast gangster rap. As we emerged, we encountered an ambulance — the driver sucking sardonically on a cigarette as two prone figures bled out on the pavement. ‘Should he not hurry and get them to hospital’ we enquired. He replied with the most Russian of explanations. The paperwork involved in taking alive but dying patients to the hospital ‘had to be seen to be believed’. If they waited and went directly to the morgue, it was only a single form. ‘And these are just a couple of hoods!’ And it was true. They were. A policeman told us to butt out and so off we went.

Though shocking, this public indifference to suffering and death in the street was ubiquitous. Love, concern and a spirit of sacrifice were reserved for those inside the family. I began to realize what a strange place the Soviet experiment had produced. Forced collectivization had destroyed the peasantry and the continuity of a Russian culture that was a thousand years old. And diverting sufficient agricultural surplus and young men to the overnight construction of identikit, off-the-peg Soviet cities, it made possible the shock modernization of the 1930s — the 'miracle’ that had produced enough T34 tanks to defeat Nazi Germany. The price was enormous, not least the millions who died in famines of the early 1930s in Ukraine. But the results were undeniable. In the face of Nazi Blitzkrieg, a spontaneous movement of Russian workers boxed up whole factories and evacuated the entire industrial base by rail, 2000 miles to the east in the Ural Mountains. This was a stupendous achievement. It made Dunkirk look like the school run. But by late 1942 the Soviet machine was churning out sufficient engineers, soldiers, tanks and munitions to swamp Hitler’s war economy. And this progress, such as it was, continued after the war, allowing the Soviet Union to marshal and concentrate resources sufficiently to sustain and arms race with the West and even get the first cosmonaut into space (and let’s not forget poor Laika).

But it takes more than factories and apartment blocs to create a truly modern society. It turned out that the wholesale destruction of the Kulaks and of rural life had not properly modernized Russia. Soviet socialism never really produced a society of mobile, billiard ball individuals, whose agency could be aggregated and directed towards the collectivist ends of the proletarian state. Rather, Russian society had been brutalized. Individuals cowered certainly. The institutions of family and church were suborned — the former to the greatest degree in the GDR where the Stasi managed to turn the entire country into snarks and snitches, spying on their most intimate friends and family. But nevertheless, as the state ossified into a long process of bureaucratic subsidence, family and friend networks were all that there was. Everything depended upon who you know. The corruption of the powerful Nomenclatura (those with official positions) and the newly rich Muscovite elite, was only different in scale. The truth of all state socialist societies was this: to live at all was necessarily ‘to live by lies’ (as Solzhenitsyn put it) and hence was to be corrupted.

Unlike its Warsaw pact allies, the Soviet Union had experienced this for longer. It had no memory of a different way of living. And the scale of human suffering had been that much greater. The impartial formally-rationality and commitment to abstract norms and rules which, for Max Weber, defined the modern project, never stood a chance in the highly politicized climate of permanent terror and upheaval that defined Russian experience between 1917 and Stalin’s death in 1953.

Reflecting on the death of those two mafiosi, I came to realize that Russia remained in many ways a bastardized and monstrous peasant country — without peasants: a Frankenstein society animated by the ghostly sensibility carried over from the land of Tolstoy. Soviet peasant metaphysics said: “look after you and yours. Nothing is your responsibility”. Moscow in the 1990s embodied a kind of urbanism without civility. There was no real public sphere or civil society. Rather, endless familial and friend networks used the simulacra of public institutions to defend the tiny kitchen fiefdoms which alone provided a veneer of safety — or at least the feeling of security, however misplaced.

I could give numerous examples. On one occasion, we came across a man who had fallen badly. His leg was broken, and the bone was visible. There was lots of blood, and he was going into shock — and it was very cold. Minus 20 degrees. We did what any ‘normal’ person would do, which was to drag him into a supermarket — one of the new upmarket shops selling overpriced western goods to ex-pats and New Russians. The manager rushed over. Gesticulating wildly, he exclaimed angrily that the blood was ‘ruining the floor’ and demanded we took the guy back outside. We refused and an argument ensued. In the end we got an ambulance, and he was taken to the medical facility at the French embassy, that was relied upon by all the ex-pats (more of this place below). The manager muttered and cleaned up the blood. The shoppers continued to shop – impassively and without comment. “Shit happens. It’s not my responsibility. You don’t understand. You’re English. How could you?”

This failure to comprehend was fair comment. Great Britain has never been invaded — and England not since 1066. I came out of a cinema in Budapest once and started to cross the road. My Hungarian friend stopped me and asked where I was going. ”Where are you striding…so confidently?” I didn’t know. I was just getting us on our way, somewhere. Was this the ‘famous ‘Camford’ confidence’ he asked (knowingly making an Oxbridge joke about my privileged education), or the more general imperial assurance of the never-setting-sun? He was right of course. I was 18 at the time. I knew nothing. I was thousands of miles from home, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, surrounded by young men with guns in a dozen different uniforms – Hungarian military, military police, state police, plain clothes but not-so-secret police, Russian military, East German military police etc. I spoke no Hungarian, let alone Russia or German. There were no mobile phones. I had no Visa card and only one pair of jeans, and yet, he implied, I ‘strolled’ around as if I owned the place. Whereas any self-respecting group of Eastern European intellectuals would suffer agonizing indecision about what film to watch. “You English, have never known crushing defeat” he observed. We left it there. On the way to our chosen drinking hole, we passed through a square which had been the last holdout of the Germans before the Red Army took the city. The buildings were still pockmarked by thousands of bullets. The defenders all died. In their place were seemingly hundreds of stray cats and kittens. All pretty normal. But that was Budapest. Moscow is another universe of psychological trauma.

Chris and I took to drinking in an ex-pat dominated Irish bar within one of the new supermarkets. It was relatively safe. The barman was Irish and had recently escaped losing a leg. A parachuting mishap with a friend in Russian special forces had left it broken. The Russian hospital who put it back together was outwardly a clean, modern institution. Unfortunately, not having been paid, the nurses took to stealing supplies and selling them on the black-market. On the day he was brought in, there were no bandages. The doctor, who probably also had not been paid, shrugged his shoulders and placed the leg in a cast without any internal bandage. An hour or two away from irreparable gangrene, the physician at ‘the French hospital’ shook his head – not in amazement in resignation. He was seeing this kind of thing every week. His advice? Avoid Russian institutions like the plague and assume that even the most basic health and safety protocols are compromised.

Over the months we became part of a regular drinking club at that bar which included a Canadian pornographer, Cornelius the Zimbabwean ambassador, one of his attachés who was called Dave and about 11 deaf prostitutes who took refuge from their day job. Dave was a troubled ex-Rhodesian soldier who had been trained by the British SAS and went on to fight for ZANU-PF. He’d done very brutal things in his life and didn’t sleep. They had siloed him to a kind of hell in Moscow until he could draw his pension. I liked him. I would not have wanted to cross him.

For Cornelius and Dave, the company of commonwealth ex-pats represented a kind of refuge from the grotesque racism that saturated daily life in Moscow. Walking to a blues bar that I used to frequent with Dave, we would be followed regularly by random strangers yelling “черная обезьяна” (chernaya obez'yana or ‘black ape’) at him. Although he appeared unfazed, living with this into an indefinite future must have sapped his will to live. Dave got very drunk pretty well every night. Cornelius just rolled his eyes. I remember asking him if he found it ironic to be finding refuge drinking with a South African and a Brit in an Irish bar. He said it was as ironic as a bunch of prostitutes finding refuge with a Canadian pornographer. We spent the next two hours inventing ‘A Zimbabwean, Afrikaans and Brit walk into a bar…’ jokes. We didn’t give up our day jobs.

The other guy in our little gang was Oleg. He was an apparatchik and not-so-secret agent for the KGB — there to spy on us scribbling into a little black book. At first, he would sit apart from us, taking the odd note and getting bored. I’m not sure if he was there pimping the prostitutes, or because of the Embassy people, or just keeping an eye on the ex-pats. Probably all three. The girls liked Oleg but also made fun of him. However, they needed all the help they could get.

Deaf prostitutes are a ‘thing’ in Russia for a reason that goes to the heartless void at the centre of the Soviet experiment. In the 1970s the Soviet State was offered a large quantity of under-the-counter antibiotics that had been banned in the West because of side-effects which included congenital deafness. Fully aware of the problem, the bureaucrats ran an actuarial analysis and concluded that the cost savings were worth a little bit of deafness on the side [Repeat that in a cod-Russian accent and you can get the idea]. “Ethics?…It eez a grey area”. Thousands of kids were affected. Two decades later, in the post-Soviet era, hundreds of deaf girls in their early 20s had little choice but to work the streets.

Anyway, we all got along very well. My mother had been a deaf teacher in the 1970s and I enjoyed the girls laughing at my faltering attempts to learn Russian sign language. After a couple of weeks, Oleg used to come and sit with us and get drunk —although he was very anxious and begged us to promise not to tell his bosses. Perhaps he was playing us. I’m not even sure if he would have known. In Russia the very last person with whom you can have a truthful relationship is yourself.

So, what bearing does this have on our present predicament in Europe? I hear people confidently predicting that the people will turn on Putin, or that the Russians won’t have the stomach to carry on the war, or that the state will implode. All I can say is that the oligarchs, New Russians and state bureaucracy are unpopular — but they always have been. War is unpopular. But it always has been. Perhaps there will be a coup, and they will shake off Putin. I’m pretty confident that they won’t embrace any kind of liberal democracy — any more than Ukraine has suddenly earned its credentials as a member of Club-Euro. Russia is different. The people will endure as they always have done. Societal collapse if it comes will mean something very different because there is precious little ‘civil society’ to collapse.

I think the West has both to stand up to Putin and to attempt to edge Russia in our direction. But this is a project of 100 years minimum. My gut feeling is that it would require a re-Christianization and a flowering of the Orthodox Church — even if that comes in the guise of Christian nationalism. To the extent that it’s a good thing (which is not straight forward), liberal individualism can’t be magicked into existence by Euro-fiat or by the United Nations, nor by large corporations with ESG departments. Where it exists, it emerged on the back of Christian culture. Yes, the territorial ambitions of Russian strongmen have to be thwarted, as do the legitimate fears of Western aggression. Germany was insane to rely on Russian energy (as Trump told them in 2018). But in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall coming down, the West was hubristic in the extreme to imagine that democracy could be ‘instituted’ as if in a game of civilizational Catan. The luxury beliefs of our own liberal class in dealing with China, Russia and other authoritarian states have caused untold harm not only to the citizens of those countries but to the West.

Having said that, Russia is the Eastern edge of European Christendom. We have no interest in societal collapse or wholesale failure. The war should be stopped. Security should be guaranteed for both sides. Our goal should be as long a period of calm as possible — a time for markets, education, generational succession of families (without war-time losses and trauma) and the reassertion of Christian values to heal the Russian soul. The worst prospect would be a materialist, technologically revanchist, Manichean and transhumanist Russia led by Faustian oligarchs. If any group of people have it in them to bring on the ‘end times’ it is a coterie of Russians with the reach and genius of Elon Musk and the morality of a mafia pimp.