City On Edge

By Kevin Fedarko

Like any reasonable businessman in Moscow, Boris Berezovsky took the possibility of an assualt on his life for granted. The chairman of Logovaz, the country's leading dealer in Zhiguli cars (a Russian-made Fiat), he never traveled without a bodyguard to ward off attacks by racketeers, competitors or any of the city's other assorted thugs. Yet such precautions couldn't prevent a remote-control car bomb from exploding as he walked out of his downtown office early this month. Berezovsky escaped with only burned hands. But his bodyguard suffered severe chest injuries that required six hours of surgery, six passersby were wounded and the driver of the car was decapitated by the blast.

Such crimes have become depressingly familiar in Moscow. A day after the attempt on Berezovsky's life, an elderly man lost his leg to another car bomb. Two days after that, Alexei Yeliseyev, the second in command at Vnukovo Airlines, was beaten to death in front of his house. That same day two people were shot to death by gangsters during a car chase on the Rublev Highway. What surprised onlookers was not the sight of a high-speed gun battle along the heavily guarded road. It was the fact that a modest, Russian-made Zhiguli was able to overtake a more powerful Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Events like these prompted Russian President Boris Yeltsin two weeks ago to announce a crackdown on what he described as the "criminal filth" plaguing Russia, and especially Moscow. His decree, giving the police broad new powers to conduct searches and detain suspects, drew a sharp outcry from civil libertarians and last week was overwhelmingly condemned by the Russian parliament. Yet it was a symbol of the desperation to which Moscow, the once proud seat of the Russian and Soviet empires, has been reduced.

Today all the hopes, anxieties and contradictions of Russia's fumbling transition from communist monolith to Western-style free market are reflected in this city of 9 million. The crumbling of communism has rendered it a city adrift -- a metropolis that has lost its sense of historic mission and is struggling to find a new identity worthy of its former grandeur. Moscow finds itself seized by a debilitating sort of urban schizophrenia. On one hand, a small but highly visible minority of residents are enjoying the rich possibilities of upheaval. "Life has never been more exciting in this city!" gushes a street entrepreneur. Others, however, are gripped by a feeling of profound disorientation, even despair. "There is no future here," says Vasili Alexeyev, who shares a single-room apartment with his wife and two sons. "Before, life in Moscow was bad; now it is even worse. We live without hope for tomorrow."

Moscow has not always been this way. In 1916, a year before communism's whirlwind transformed Russia into the Soviet Union, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva described her native city as a vast hostelry of "forty times forty" churches, where small pigeons rose above the golden domes and the floors below were polished by kisses of the faithful. Under the Soviet regime, with its Stalinist housing bunkers and oppressive military bearing, the city became a grimmer place, but one that was anchored, orderly, predictable, even if, to many outsiders, drab and downcast. By 1976, the British journalist Geoffrey Bocca could describe the scene as a "crushing concatenation of faceless, shabby, shoving, rude and, above all, indifferent, uninterested people."

Today, however, both these visual keynotes have been replaced by the chaos of capitalism's dikaya zhizn, or "wild life": weather-beaten babushkas who beg from filthy sidewalks, marauding bands of gypsy children, Lycra-skirted strumpets cavorting with Western businessmen, bankers tooling around town in armor-plated Mercedes, mafia moguls in sharkskin suits who dine on Maine lobster with a $238-a-bottle champagne in five-star hotels. A sense of bewilderment plagues Moscow's residents as they attempt to sort out the conflicting claims of their half-remembered, precommunist culture from the hedonistic and corrupting pull of the West. It is the sort of spiritual vertigo that accompanies economic and cultural free fall, and it has left many ordinary Muscovites with an uneasy feeling of limbo.

And of fear. Criminal gangs have transformed a city that during the days of the Soviet police state was one of the safest in the world into a virtual criminopolis. Last year in Moscow police reported more than 3,000 murders -- an increase of 1,740% since 1987. Those seven years also introduced a rash | of previously unheard-of crimes, such as contract assassinations (about 100 last year) and murders by bombing (which the police now call "good-morning murders" because the explosions usually go off around dawn). A presidential study has concluded that virtually every retail trade booth, store, cafe and restaurant in the Russian capital pays protection money of up to 20% of gross receipts to organized crime. Resisters are beaten or killed. "In my 17 years on patrol," says police Lieut. Gennadi Groshikov, "I have never seen so much crime in Moscow; nor have I seen anything as vicious."

The authorities are trying to strike back. Last Tuesday, just after midnight, 20,000 soldiers and police in camouflage gear swept through several dozen Moscow hotels, businesses and banks, hoping to cripple the criminal gangs. In the meantime, citizens are afraid to go out at night; stores have difficulty keeping pistols, Mace and bulletproof jackets in stock; dinner conversations stop abruptly whenever a tail pipe backfires in the streets. "The crime problem today knows no limits," says Pavel Gusev, editor in chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, who travels with a bodyguard. "In the U.S. your Mafia has already divided up spheres of business, so the bosses no longer kill each other off. Here we have a wild market where state holdings are being turned over into private hands."

But Moscow's makeover is not just due to the crime explosion. A stroll through the center of the city reveals the transformation nearly everywhere. The city's seemingly ubiquitous statues of communist-era heroes, such as "Iron" Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and Mikhail Kalinin, an early Bolshevik who once authorized the death penalty for children as young as 12, have been disdainfully torn down. Gone too are the metronomic boot clicks of the goose-stepping guards outside Lenin's tomb, who once immutably marked off the minutes and hours of the Soviet state. Remarked a Russian father as his family paid a visit to the mausoleum: "They used to stand for hours in line here." Now virtually no one comes.

Tourists and shoppers flock instead to the McDonald's in Pushkin Square or to Tverskaya Ulitsa, Moscow's Fifth Avenue. There, dazzling neon signs invite motorists and pedestrians to savor the sensations of a swinging metropolis awash in restaurants, nightclubs and luxury boutiques. This is the new Russian capital, Moscow as Vegas of the North.

The city's noviye bogati, or nouveaux riches, are a small but growing elite numbering some 300,000 (a class of notables whom 13% of the country, according to a survey conducted by Moscow News, would like to see thrown in prison). These are the post-Soviet sybarites who patronize Moscow's Volvo and Mercedes dealerships, pamper themselves with Estee Lauder "exclusive skin-care consultations" and blithely plunk down the equivalent of an average worker's monthly pay for French champagne and Danish liqueur candies at the gilded- mirror displays in Yeliseyevsky Gatronom, the grande dame of Moscow supermarkets.

"These people feel good about themselves," says Alexander Fyodorov, a suntanned nuncio of the nouveaux riches who divides his time between homes in Moscow and Miami and business trips to Europe. "They earn good money, and they deserve to spend it however they want."

Fyodorov, a former engineer, is the CEO of a company that sells everything from Twix candy bars to $80,000 Jaguars. His well-guarded headquarters, a suite of offices stylishly caparisoned in halogen lamps, marble tiles and tastefully understated artwork, occupies several floors of a converted kindergarten on Marshal Zhukov Street. Scurrying around the cubicles is a multilingual staff that manages Fyodorov's advertising firm, his home-security company, his men's clothing shop and his private day-care company (which supervises the offspring of wealthy jet-setters for $300 a day). Fyodorov's other enterprises include Wild Orchid, a popular women's lingerie shop, and Collection, a luxury-car dealership.

Unlike the old Soviet elite, who led quiet, if profoundly hypocritical, lives of sequestered privilege while paying lip service to Marxist notions of egalitarianism, the noviye bogati seem determined to part with their newfound wealth in the most ostentatious manner possible. "Russians who come to me want to spend their money and want it to show," says Mats Lofgren, a Swedish furniture dealer. "They won't waste their time on functional furniture. I show them the gold-plated faucets and ornate lamps, and they take it. I had a Russian come in recently who announced, 'My friend just spent $50,000 doing his apartment, and I want the same. Only make it $60,000.' "

For a stark contrast to this conspicuous opulence, one need only walk to the nearest metro station. Filled with lavish mosaics, frosted chandeliers and archways of stained glass, the metro offered a magnificent expression of Soviet splendor that belied the brutality of the era that produced it. Yet for millions of Muscovites who ride the trains each day, the metro no longer provides a voyage through a subterranean communist cathedral, whose effect is both sumptuous and muscular. Today it is overrun with beggars, reeling drunks and small-time entrepreneurs dragging trollies laden with crates and boxes.

The scene is similar in the city's bustling train stations. In the crowded waiting room at Kursky station, one of the city's seediest, a teenage gypsy girl stood screaming while blood spurted from gashes on her arms. "I want to die," she wailed. "My life is nothing. I am pregnant, but no one believes me. They think I am lying." She raised a blood-splattered cardigan that reeked of urine to reveal her puffy belly. A middle-aged woman stopped to stare, as the howling resumed, "I can't bear this. I hate this life!" Several militiamen who work at the station turned to find out what the commotion was about. When they spotted the girl, they nodded their heads and continued their rounds. "What kind of people have we become?" asked another woman. Such scenes fill Muscovites with a sense of dazed anguish, partly because in the past any castoffs of the socialist state foolish enough to make a public appearance were either deported from the city or thrown into psychiatric prisons.

Today at least 40,000 street tramps sleep in Moscow's metro tunnels and solicit change outside its new temples of affluence. That is still less than half the estimated homeless population of a city of comparable size, such as New York City. But places like Kursky station have become overrun by these panhandlers. Some are tubercular. Others are covered with skin ulcers and body sores. The existence of most is sufficient to provoke the spleen of passersby. "Disorder, dirt and a total lack of care for others," says Vera Alexeyev, a housewife who has lived in the city for more than 10 years, "is what strikes me most about Moscow today."

Barely a step above the denizens of the streets are those who haunt Moscow's hard-luck flea markets. At these outdoor bazaars, the bottom of the city's economic food chain -- mainly pensioners who brew "tea" with shredded carrots and can't remember the last time they bought a new scrap of clothing -- peddle their household goods to pay for tomorrow's potatoes. A short stroll from Moscow's Kiev train station, the sidewalks teem with faucets, shower fittings, cartons of milk, boxes of laundry powder, lamps, washbasins, doorknobs, frying pans, toothpaste, glue, string and old pairs of shoes.

Back in the Soviet era, when the criminal code barred trading, there were no peddlers. Now much of the country's economic engine is driven not by the haut monde boutiques on Tverskaya but by the corrugated larki, or street stalls, which have sprung up across Moscow (and which the city government moved in to control earlier this year). These sidewalk clearinghouses offer a bizarre inventory of items, from Pierre Cardin cigarettes to banana-flavored liqueurs, exotic massage oils, cut-rate lingerie, canned ears of baby corn and pirated videos of Western B-movies.

Business is brisk, owing in no small part to the irrepressible spirit of Moscow's "hoboes" -- the term favored by the city's free-market hucksters -- who engage in a frenzy of buying and selling whatever goods they can lay their hands on. It is difficult to know whether these are the entrepreneurs who will eventually help rebuild the nation's economy or the scam artists who will pull it down. Perhaps they are a little of both. In any case, their impact has been undeniable: last year, by one estimate, hoboes moved 3 billion rubles' worth of goods and accounted for more than 10% of all officially registered trade.

One such trader is Leonid, a lanky, unshaven roughneck who formerly belonged to an elite unit of the Soviet army. After leaving the military in the late 1980s, Leonid spent several years repairing apartments and fixing toilets, until he started brokering Russian-made wine in front of the Kiev railway station. When he was pushed out by a group of gypsies who controlled the wine trade, Leonid turned to imported cigarettes. Since then, he has branched out; one week he may move a consignment of flashlight batteries, the next a shipment of government-issue boots, obtained from a corrupt policeman. His ability to broker everything from investment bonds to manicure scissors can earn him 70,000 rubles a day.

Despite the odor of seediness that clings to the hoboes, many are highly educated. Leonid is studying at a Moscow college. One of his colleagues, a linguist, spends his free time writing a semantic analysis of Communist Party documents. Another is a chemist who puts his skills to work by distilling juniper-berry moonshine for his friends. All are energized by the frenzied pace of street-corner capitalism, even as they fear the joyride may not last forever. Leonid, who once saw "unlimited possibilities for business," now is concerned that the government or the mafia may soon strangle the uncontrolled free market.

But while inspiring to some, this sort of breakneck change seems only to increase the suspicion among many Muscovites that the qualities that once made their home special may be disappearing. Throughout its tumultuous past, this city always retained the atmosphere of a large smoke-filled kitchen, where people gather late at night to share and confide in an atmosphere of unselfish friendship. Muscovites rely on this "kitchen unity" as a kind of spiritual lodestar that guides them in more difficult times.

Now, however, the city is being knocked off its bearings, forcing citizens to fend for themselves. "One of the most frightening things about life in Moscow," says Galina Volchek, director of the Sovremennik Theater, "is this sense of inner, psychological defenselessness; the feeling that you are totally alone in facing whatever may happen." Russians have a word for this feeling of vulnerability in the midst of wrenching change: bespredel. Its literal meaning perhaps best sums up the new Moscow: no limits.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly, John Kohan, Ann M. Simmons and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow