I sometimes wonder why Russians seem to hate each other so much. There's a hackneyed old story from (I suppose) the Brezhnev years that illustrates the point. A Frenchman, an American and a Russian are told they can have their heart's desire for one night only. The Frenchman says he wants to spend the night with the world's most beautiful woman. The American says he wants to be the richest man in the world and manipulate the world's markets. The Russian is more modest. He simply says he wants to see his rich neighbor's house burn down.


Well, all right, you may say, but that's not exactly undifferentiated hatred, is it? It's merely hatred of someone who has more than you do. Yes, but you have to concede that even this subspecies of hatred is peculiarly Russian. The notion of absolute equality -- as God's and the tsar's miserable subjects -- is deeply rooted in Russian history. And all the Western idea of freedom has meant here is a subversion of that primal order: the opportunity for one section of the community to upset an ancient, divinely ordered balance and exploit some other section for its own profit.


Individualism here means license, make no mistake about it. Getting more than anyone else is still seen as thieving; there is no such thing in the Russian Orthodox vision of the world as the Protestant work ethic or the idea of self-betterment by effort. And don't imagine that the eradication of the kulaki (rich peasants) in the '20s and '30s was accompanied by anything other than the full support of those less well-off than themselves. Come the day when anyone with money is officially, rather than privately, described as an enemy of the state, then there'll be the same lines for the denouncer's mail-slot and the firing squad.


What we have here, now, that is, is a politics of envy: the have-nots against the haves. In the State Duma, those who have not been brought under the wing of government -- with its ambassadorships and sinecures and apartments and signing rights -- rail, in the most monstrously personal terms, against those who already enjoy these things. They wrap themselves in the mantle of moral purity, until they, too, sooner or later, are spotted for the noise they make and are drawn into the kingdom of the haves.


Outside the State Duma, the same sort of thing goes on. The intelligentsia rants -- as it has always done -- at the corruptions of commerce and all who have anything to do with it. And ordinary people denounce as mafia any neighbor who has so much as a new Western television set -- until, of course, they get one of their own.


But none of this really gets to the heart of the sheer feral bloody-mindedness of Russians when it comes to appraising their acquaintances -- or, better yet, their old friends. Time and again, out here in the village, I've heard one neighbor describe another as "a piece of filth" or "beyond contempt" -- only to see them be extraordinarily cordial when they've finally met. Time and again, in the city, I've heard people bonded by years of friendship dismissed by one another as childish babblers or ambitious hucksters. This one's KGB; that one has the morals of an alley cat. The mention of a name can turn an idle conversation into a minefield or a shooting war.


I've thought about these Russian high-decibel goings-on for a good while now. And I've come to the conclusion that they're the products, in the end, both of the Soviet system and of the massive migration to the cities under Stalin. Before the Revolution, after all, horizons were small: no wider, by and large, than a village or an estate. But after the Revolution and the migration, well, there arrived in the cities some of the virtues and vices bred in rural isolation: fear and suspicion of strangers, for example, and a habit of interreliance that made friendships in the new city apartments both intense and crucial to survival. Adding to the hothouse atmosphere, of course, was the presence both of spies and of universal ideology. Neighbors became people you expected the worst from. Friendships became subtly ideologized: They came to bear a weight they could not really sustain. A change in attitude or a failure to pay dues or court became a betrayal of friendship. Hatred was the by-product of an intimacy that was (and is) always embattled.


So: "Yevtushenko is a piece of trash!" "Voznesensky worked for the KGB!" "X is a hooker!" "Y is a hood!" I know that Russian friendships are close and wonderfully enduring. But sometimes I think I'd give them all up -- if hatred is the price you have to pay for them -- for a little bit of Milquetoast Western tolerance.