Has the Weather Cleared?

There's a man in my village whom I always think of as its weather vane. A onetime researcher and teacher, he's highly intelligent and well-read. But he's also dour and sardonic and fond of a drink. He likes to do things with his hands, and he's often up to his elbows, during the daytime when he's not in Moscow, in car engines or water lines or clapped-out old refrigerators. I suppose I regard him as the nearest thing we have hereabouts to a muzhik, one of those Russian good old boys who are instinctively in touch with the earth and people's motives and the spirit of the times. An hour's conversation with him has often told me more than anything else -- I like to think -- about the way the ordinary Russian's mind is working.


Imagine my surprise, then, when during a visit last weekend I found him in a mood of quite extraordinary optimism. I mean, here was a man who had always painted the bleakest possible pictures of the future. Gorbachev? "Can't last -- and shouldn't." His government? "The same old bandits swilling at the public trough." The August 1991 coup? "The entire Stalinist system will be back in place within a year. And there's nothing that anyone can -- or wants to -- do about it."


And yet here he was, three years on from the coup, announcing with conviction that "Things are definitely changing for the better now."


I asked him how they were changing. "People are beginning to work," he said. "They're beginning to understand that they actually have to do things -- move house, change their lives -- in order to make money." Is that what he was going to do? "No. I don't know," he said. He said he'd actually just resigned from the job he had, working for a joint venture set up with a German company. "But that's not the point," he went on. "The point is that I now have options." He told me that he'd privatized his dacha, and that he'd actually managed to lease the land it stood on for a number of years. "I can either sell the whole thing, dacha and all, or else sell just a piece of the land for someone to build on. I can go, I can stay, I can work, I can rent. I feel like I'm in charge of my own life for the first time."


Later, as we prepared a barbecue in his wild garden, his optimism remained unshakable. "But what about the wholesale theft of the economy?" I expostulated. "The corruption of the banking system? What about all the palaces the new rich are building in the fields around the village?"


"Oh, let those people have their palaces," he said calmly. "Sooner or later, the whole thing will be regulated. And then they won't be so easy to come by."


I tried again. "Then what about all the money that's still being smuggled out of the country illegally, for investment in the West?"


"It'll come back," he said decidedly, standing up from the fire with a skewer in each hand. "It'll come back when people realize that there's even more opportunity to make money here. Look," he added, waving one of the skewers. "There's this friend of mine -- we were at school together -- and now he has millions. He has a big place in London and, OK, he's a hood. But he called me recently. He wants me to help him find a plot of land in the village. He wants to build here, to live here, to invest here and do things here. I think that's important."


Even when we went inside to watch a television documentary on Stalin's hatchet man Lavrenty Beria, his mood stayed serene. The documentary was interspersed with ads for MMM and I said I couldn't believe that they were still allowed. "In any country with true economic laws ...," etc.


He said, "What you don't understand, Jo, is that those ads have actually done more to teach ordinary people about capitalism that any propaganda from the West ever has. They've taught people that they're all consumers now. And that in order to consume, they have to get out there, join in and make money any way they can."


The next night, still slightly puzzled, I went for dinner at another dacha in the village, with a couple who have always tended to keep their modest foreign earnings in a bank abroad. And I found to my surprise that they, and everyone else at the table, were excitedly discussing which Moscow bank was giving the best return on it today.


All I can say is that perhaps the times really are a-changing in this extraordinary country. Maybe my village weather vane really does know which way the wind is blowing.