Strongman, The

Moscow’s main station for southern destinations – became a Dickensian dosshouse full of pickpockets and sick people. Amputees from the first Chechen war (1994– 96) began to clump around metro carriages asking for alms.
    Business, of sorts, spread everywhere – most visibly in the shape of tiny kiosks selling suspicious-looking alcohols and foodstuffs. Meat, unfit for human consumption, was sold at marketplaces that sprang up spontaneously on pieces of waste ground, which became breeding grounds for rats and disease.
    Desperate people sank their savings into pyramid schemes that invariably collapsed, leaving them penniless. In 1992 the government issued privatisation vouchers to every citizen. The idea was that these could be exchanged for shares in enterprises being privatised. In practice millions of people just sold them or gave them away and they ended up largely in the hands of a few shrewd entrepreneurs or state enterprise managers who thereby became Russia’s new capitalist owners.
    Industry collapsed. Workers were not paid, or were paid several months in arrears, and often with goods – towels or soap or tampons – rather than money. Enterprises themselves traded with each other by barter. A once proud country received shipments of food aid – sugar and margarine from the European Union’s surplus stocks and US army rations left over from the Gulf War. A superpower was now holding out a begging bowl.
    Flying to Vancouver in April 1993 to ask President Clinton for help, Yeltsin pointed out: ‘Remember that East Germany needed $100 billion to get rid of the communist monster.’ He returned with the promise of just $1.6 billion, much of it in the form of credits and food aid. Some wondered whether the West lacked imagination. Did Russia not need a ‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild its decrepit Soviet-era infrastructure, which was in little better shape than Germany’s after the Second World War?
    Western consultancies probably profited more from Western aid packages than the Russians did. I remember interviewing the manager of a small Moscow bakery who had been on a month-long management course, paid for by Western governments, with some consultancy in England. ‘All I really needed,’ she told me, ‘was the money to buy some top-class bakery equipment. I know how to manage my company!’
    Russian society was truly battered by the abrupt transition from communism. People had literally lost their own country: the Soviet Union, a land of 250 million people in 15 national republics, splintered. Twenty-five million Russians suddenly found themselves residents of foreign countries, stranded in what became known as the ‘near abroad’. Inhabitants of Siberia could no longer escape to holiday in the Crimea (now in Ukraine) or even in Moscow, because air fares were beyond their reach. I was astonished, on a trip to Siberia, to hear people calling European Russia the ‘mainland’, as though they were marooned on a remote island in the middle of an ocean.
    There was little sign that the Kremlin’s Western advisers understood how to handle this dislocated society. Western governments didn’t seem to notice the chaos and squalor – or they didn’t care, so obsessed were they with the vision of building capitalism, regardless of its immediate impact. Western corporations only saw a massive new marketplace for their goods. A strange Russian phrase, Produkt kompanii Prokter end Gembl (produced by Proctor and Gamble), boomed out at the end of every other TV ad like some new political slogan. I think Russians must have been driven mad by those words. They seemed to replace ‘Long live the Communist Party’ seamlessly, but instead of promising a radiant future they promised Head & Shoulders and Pampers, which few Russians could yet afford.
    American consultants in sharp suits swarmed around, cooing over Nizhny Novgorod’s privatisation projects and its pioneering young reformers. The city on the Volga, previously known as Gorky, was the first to sell off major chunks of the state’s assets to ordinary people. In many ways it really was inspiring. I remember watching go-ahead Russians, keen to set up their own private businesses, inspecting 195 state-owned trucks and vans, many of them in a dreadful condition, and then bidding for them at an auction. The problem for me, and I suspect for many Russians, was the sight of so many foreigners supervising the process. To all intents and purposes it looked as if