In Europe

Russian
Playboy
. He is cheerful, enthusiastic and optimistic. After all the misery, he says, the Russians have an incredible talent for dealing with setbacks and overcoming them. That's how they have been able to form an entire economy, uniquely their own.
    His own company's results are an eloquent example of that: officially speaking, the figures are impossible. The total circulation of his Independent Media Group is over a million, but according to government figures there is no way so many Russians could buy his publications. Supposedly, only a very small group can afford them.‘If the statistics were right, this publishing house would have gone down the tubes long ago. Our turnover definitely does not depend on those couple of thousand exceedingly wealthy families. I have only one explanation for it: there is a sizeable, relatively solid middle class on the rise in the cities, people who get up early, work hard and actually have money to spend. The only thing is, they don't exist in the official statistics. And that's only logical: after all, who wants to pay eighty per cent taxes?’
    He tells me about an acquaintance who imports washing machines. ‘He's a clever fellow, he bribes the border guards and sells his machines on the black market. Officially, he doesn't exist. But he has quite a few people working for him, it's a real company. His employees don't declare their earnings either. And they still live in their old Soviet apartments,which cost next to nothing. Almost everything they earn is disposable income. We estimate that approximately a fifth of the Russian population, about thirty million people, profit from this new economy in one way or another. Of course, that still leaves you with 120 million others.’

Chapter SIXTY-TWO
Chernobyl
    THE COLD HOLDS NO SECRETS FOR THE RUSSIAN RAILWAYS. UPSY-DAISY , scoop a little more coal into the furnace and the train compartments turn into cozy living rooms, the corridors into warm loggias, the passengers eat and drink, someone sings a tune, and meanwhile the Moscow-Kiev Express barrels on through the moonlit night. In the bar, as they say here, ‘we let our souls fly’.
    The next morning, Irina Trantina is waiting for me at the station in Kiev. Through her many contacts, she has arranged a special tour for me, and it's all she can talk about. As soon as we are in the car she says: ‘Do you know where I was that day, 26 April, 1986? Right here, at this station. I worked in the ticket office, I had night duty, and the first thing that struck me in those early morning hours was the total silence. There were no police, no one. We thought that was very strange, but no one could explain it. The next day a friend of mine picked up a report on Voice of America, they said something about an explosion near Kiev. That was all. When I got to work that day, the whole station was full of panicked people. Someone said: “They're from Chernobyl. The nuclear power plant there blew up.” More and more rumours like that started going around. On 30 April I saw a special train from Chernobyl come through here, full of top officials and their families. Then everyone in Kiev knew that something had gone very wrong. But the radio still didn't say a thing.’
    Kiev celebrated May Day in the normal fashion, with the usual shows and parades. ‘The whole charade had been going on for five days, and I'd had enough of it. A friend of the family was quite high in the military, and I called him. He was extremely candid: “Irina, we have an enormous problem. A nuclear power plant has blown up. No one knows whatto do, that's the reality of it.” The next day all of Kiev was in total panic, everyone was trying to get away, it was like a war. We simply devoured iodine, we thought that could keep the problems at bay.’
    The official announcement came on 5 May: ‘There are a few problems, but absolutely no risk.’ Four days later the order came for all children to be evacuated. The newspapers in the West talked about nothing else. But most of the people of Kiev still knew nothing at all.
    The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments,