Secret Origins of the New Russians

In 1999, when my study of Russian mass culture was at the stage where I was still casting my net widely, I decided to investigate the new Russian romance novel. The results were not encouraging—so disheartening, in fact, that I decided there was no need to include the topic in my research.

What I found in my admittedly unscientific survey of Moscow bookstores was hundreds of translated bodice-rippers (mostly from the Harlequin line) and virtually no Russian-sounding names on the romance shelves. In the end, I found only two to take home. Their titles did not simply speak volumes; they obliquely spoke to the absent volumes of locally produced romance fiction. One was called Bogatyi muzh (Rich Husband), and the other bore the title Zamuzhem za novym russkim (Married to a New Russian).

Were I to do a similar search now, I would find a treasure trove of love stories written by and for Russian women.³ The paucity of such tales in 1999 struck me as a useful data point, however. The small number of books showed how new this particular market niche was, and the painfully generic titles only reinforced this conclusion. In English-speaking countries, calling a romance novel “Rich Husband” is like calling a crime novel “Murderer.” You might be able to get away with it, but only when you still have the market cornered.⁴

The titles also suggested a potential problem for the genre’s Russification. Less than ten years after the end of communism, where is a wealthy suitor to be found? And if he is found, what are the chances that he is not a criminal? Just as Prince Charming is hard to locate in the absence of hereditary titles, rich men who came by their money honestly were not exactly thick on the ground. In fact, they were nigh on inconceivable.

Unfortunately, my copy of Married to a New Russian has not survived the two decades and, at last count, nine different offices since I rescued it from a crowded bookshelf on Tverskaya Street. Its lack of an Internet footprint would be the envy of a fugitive oligarch but does not help me reconstruct its contents. So I am left judging this book not even by its cover but solely by its title.

Luckily, Married to a New Russian is a title that says it all. The phrasing—reminiscent of the 1988 American comedy, Married to the Mob (“Zamuzhem za mafiei” in Russian)—combines wealth with an appropriate whiff of criminality. Russian literature’s long-standing problem with positive heroes had come to a crisis point in the early post-Soviet years: who could the “good guys” possibly be? Or, in terms more appropriate for the romance novel, was a good man ever harder to find?

Romance novels might seem like a perversely oblique entry point into the phenomenon of the New Russian, but the genre actually highlights two fundamental features that define the phenomenon. First, to state the obvious, the New Russian is male. This could simply be a matter of grammatical gender and the tendency to consider a human type masculine unless otherwise specified, but even a cursory survey of the term’s uses show that it has little room for women. The novyi russkii is a man, and there was initially no corresponding novaia russkaia to denote a rich Russian (business)woman. When Serguei Oushakine did research on popular notions of the “new Russian woman,” the term he used was novaia russkaia zhenshchina, which, far from a term of art, proved open to a wide variety of interpretations and imagined lifestyles (“Quantity of Style”; “Fatal Splitting”). The recent television series based on Elena Kolina’s Dnevnik novoi russkoi (Diary of a new Russian woman) series may have made the novaia russkaia more available as a term, but now that the New Russian phenomenon has become part of a bygone historical moment, it seems unlikely to catch on.

The second feature appears obvious but holds the promise of intriguing cultural ramifications. The New Russian is, of course, rich. As a fictional character, he is more obviously at home in the genres of crime, political/economic intrigue, and humor. His inclusion in romance fiction puts the character type under a particular stress that emphasizes the moral complexity underlying the New Russian and his role in post-Soviet culture. For the New Russian to be a worthy partner to a romance heroine, he has to have the admirable qualities that, in his “home genres,” he so demonstrably lacks.

The New Russian is not just simply a bad or crass rich person; his riches are tainted by the original sins of post-Soviet capitalism. Late capitalism in the West fosters the illusion of the deservedly rich or, at the very least, the socially responsible rich (largely through philanthropy). The New Russian could not have inherited his money; nor could anyone say with a straight face that he came by it honestly.

Were we to stop there, the New Russian would appear to be an understandable target for simple class-based resentment, and his story might end with the beginnings of economic justice after a latter-day storming of the Bastille—or, more appropriately, the chichi Moscow neighborhood known as Rublyovka. But the deployment of the New Russian rarely seemed to point his readers and viewers in the direction of social engagement. In fact, the New Russian served a dual role in popular consciousness: he represented not just the injustices of the new system but also a deep discomfort with the problem of wealth itself.

Despised as he may have been, the New Russian crystallized a range of ambient anxieties about humans’ relationship to money. Money in the Russia of the 1990s and early 2000s was like a radioactive isotope in a 1950s monster movie or a 1960s Marvel comic: it had a distorting, mutating effect on those exposed to it directly. Money was the radioactive spider that bit the New Russian Pyotr Parker. Sadly, with great power came great irresponsibility.

Words Fail Us

To understand the New Russian phenomenon, we must first deal with an unfortunate but productive fact: the phrase is a terminological nightmare. According to a 2002 article commemorating the term’s tenth anniversary, the phrase “New Russian” first appeared in the September 7, 1992, issue of Kommersant-Daily. One theory has it that the term is a play on the French phrase “nouveau riche” (which came into Russian as a single word (nuvorish); from there, it is just a phonetic hop, skip, and a jump to nouveau russe. How nouveau russe allegedly found its way into Russian is left to the imagination.

A more likely explanation blames English rather than French and has the advantage of a paper trail. “New Russian” is less a sociological description than the uninspired name of a sequel, based on a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of the Soviet Union. The culprit here is the award-winning New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith.

Smith was the Times’ Moscow bureau chief from 1971 to 1974, and he achieved the pinnacle of foreign correspondent-hood by using his experience in the Soviet Union as the basis for a reader-friendly, journalistic account of life behind ideological enemy lines. Smith’s book was called The Russians, and that is where our trouble begins. The Russians was a title that was immediately legible to the book-buying public and infuriating to those of us who already knew something about the subject. Though it might seem like a moot point now (and I’d be happy to argue that it actually is not), the casual conflation of the Soviet Union and “Russia” encouraged a troubling ignorance about the USSR. It should come as no surprise to readers of this book to hear that Russia was one of fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union and that, while Russian was the lingua franca for the USSR, even the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) contained sizable minorities who would not be considered “Russian” by anyone in the Soviet Union. But the title of Smith’s book really left us a problematic legacy when he decided to follow it up with a sequel. Even by the mid-1980s, Smith’s The Russians was an inadequate guide to life in the USSR. So Smith went back, interviewed more people and published another bestseller in 1990, The New Russians.

My search of the Universal Database of Russian Newspapers would confirm the Hedrick Smith hypothesis. Doing a search for novyi russkii or novye russkie is a slog, given how common both words are on their own (and given the system’s stubborn resistance to look only for the words as a single phrase). But the earliest mentions I could find (as a noun phrase, and not as a descriptor for another noun, such as “new Russian book” or “new Russian film”) were brief reviews of Smith’s book in 1991, where the title was inevitably translated as Novye russkie. Within two years, the phrase started to appear in reference to a new class of rich business people.

The term’s origins had to be foreign, for precisely the same reasons that it is problematic. No one in the last years of the Soviet Union or even the first years of the Russian Federation would have used the word russkii as part of the name for this phenomenon. As explained above, it would have been inappropriate and quite simply puzzling for a Soviet citizen to use “Russian” as a generic term for people in the USSR; doing so would have been making a nationalist or ethnic point that is absent from the earliest New Russian discourse.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, using russkii would have been even more fraught. The sudden independence of the multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional Russian Federation required terminology that was generally inclusive, as well as a way of indicating when such inclusivity was not the point. The language still contained adjectives for “Russian” that distinguished between Russia-the-state/empire and Russia-the-ethnicity/language, based on the current term for Russia (Rossiia) and the medieval term for the state that gave rise to Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Rus’). Russkii referred to the language, the culture, and the ethnicity. Rossiiskii referred to everything related to the Russian state/Soviet federative republic. In late Soviet times, rossiiskii, though available, was not in great linguistic demand.⁵

Nouns were slightly more awkward. Though russkii is technically an adjective, it, like so many adjectives in Russian, functions quite happily as a noun. In Soviet times, the plural russkie were Russian-speaking, ethnic Russian Slavs, whose ancestors were Russian Orthodox. If your parents were ethnic Ukrainians, but you were born in the Russian Republic and spoke only Russian, you were still technically a Ukrainian (and “Ukrainian” would appear on the notorious “line 5” of your internal identity papers). Particularly confusing to Americans, Jews whose ancestors lived in Russia for generations would still never be “Russians” on their IDs; instead, they would be Jews.

Calling everyone who lived in the Russian Federation russkie was simply not an option. Fortunately, there was an old-fashioned word just waiting to be resurrected through the dark magic of the census bureaucracy: rossiianin. Like rossiiskii, it comes from the modern word for Russia, and therefore does not have any particular ethnic connotation. When talking about a Russian in the sense of “citizen of the Russian Federation,” rossiianin and the feminine rossiianka are the correct terms. Unfortunately, when Smith published The New Russians and when it was noticed in the Soviet press, there would have been no reason to translate the title as Novye rossiiane. So Russia was stuck with a phrase that suggested an oddly ethnic specificity.

Who Were the New Russians?

This is one of many questions not answered in the current chapter. The aim is not to provide empirical studies of the lives of self-identified “new Russians,” nor to develop an economically based definition of the category. As a concept, the New Russian floats free from any actual lived experience, financial portfolios, or criminal holdings. Indeed, I will not be the first to argue that the New Russian never actually existed.⁶

If I stress the imaginary nature of the New Russian more than I do that of the sovok or vatnik, it is because the latter terms are so clearly a matter of stereotype and projection rather than sociology. No one would expect a census to give us a sovok head count, but one might reasonably expect to be able to determine who the New Russians were and how many of them were out driving their Mercedes or BMWs at any given time.⁷ After all, the New Russians were all about wealth, and wealth is quantifiable.

But if the New Russians were characterized by wealth, the accumulation of assets did not necessarily make someone a New Russian. Like the sovok, the New Russian is a set of assumptions and projections, but with an important difference: the sovok could be observed (or at least imagined) up close, while the New Russian kept his distance. One of the many compelling images of nineteenth-century literature can, predictably, be traced back to Pushkin: in his story, “The Stationmaster,” a sad, pathetic “little man” finds himself chasing after an important person’s carriage on foot, unable to catch up. In post-Soviet terms, that little man may or may not be the sovok, but the person in the carriage is a New Russian.

There are many reasons why the New Russian in the carriage (or, less anachronistically, the imported luxury automobile) will always remain out of reach. The most obvious is the disparity of power and wealth, but the ramifications of that disparity are greater than one might imagine. It is not just that the poor and the rich live in two different worlds, but rather that the life experience and newly invented habitat of the new rich is so far from everyday experience that this world is being imagined in an empirical vacuum. Most ordinary people will never interact with the superrich, in any culture; but when the rich have been with us for decades or even generations, their lives have been assimilated into an imaginary construct that becomes familiar, and that presumably has some connection to the world of the actually existing rich. The rich are celebrities (Donald Trump, for instance, even if he is probably more celebrity than rich) or from famous families (the Rockefellers). By comparison, the New Russians are generic, impersonal, and created almost entirely out of whole cloth.⁸ The New Russian is a figure of urban folklore.

We find ourselves once again confronting the problem of origins. The established rich in countries that have long tolerated a class of the inordinately wealthy tend to have a “just-so” story to explain why they have (and even deserve) the privileges and power they have accrued. The wealthy man (and it is usually a man) is a “genius,” most recently in the world of high technology, often ascribed talents and accomplishments that he clearly lacks (Bill Gates didn’t even write MS-DOS, but in the Nineties, he was commonly assumed to have invented the Internet, a tech phenomenon his company was very late to grapple with). The wealth may be inherited, but it is the result of a genius founder (Carnegie, Morgan) or goes far back enough in history to confer nobility or be the result of nobility (the Windsors).

The premise is that the system for the accumulation of wealth is somehow rational, perhaps even just. While there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that this is the case, there are nonetheless narratives that sell the system’s validity. Even the reverse scenario, in which a person or family’s rise to wealth is interpreted as part of an evil conspiracy (the Rothschilds), is still based on the premise that the accumulation of capital is understandable.

The post-Soviet case is another matter entirely. Here we have the accumulation of massive wealth in a manner that is almost entirely opaque to outsiders, with little effort wasted on legitimation through public relations (PR). Two seemingly opposite but essentially homologous scenarios are usually invoked: people became wealthy from the massive theft of state property, or they got rich by making money out of nothing at all. In each case, wealth is detached from the part of the economy that seventy-plus years of Soviet rule always put at the center of everything: production.

In the 1990s, evidence of Russian industrial or consumer production was hard to come by. Instead, starting with the institution of the mysterious system of “vouchers” that kicked off the privatization process, stories about rich people were peppered with names of mysterious “financial instruments” and other foreign phrases (“promissory notes,” “futures,” “derivatives”). I would be lying if I claimed to understand these terms (and probably would be richer if I actually were proficient in their use), but I have had an entire lifetime of knowing that I know nothing about them. An underinformed Westerner slowly steeps in the waters of finance for years, while most Russians found themselves thrown in the deep end without the benefit of lessons, time, or flotation devices.

Russian capitalism was the perfect storm of injustice, theft, and deceit, not to mention the complete abandonment of years of rhetoric about the collective good. Economic exploitation, sudden and dramatic inequality, and grotesque consumerism were shocking and diffuse. All of this makes for an abstract enemy; a real, concrete enemy has the virtue of an identifiable face. Such a face has endless possibilities: you can punch it, you can spit at it, and you can laugh at it. In this regard, the New Russian was a gift to the people. Because the New Russian gave all these negative phenomena a face.

Is a Crocodile Longer Than It Is Green?

In 2002, Pavel Lungin released the film Oligarkh (Tycoon), adapted from Yuli Dubov’s 1999 novel, Bol’shaia paika (The big slice), which in turn was inspired by the life and career of one of Russia’s most notorious oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky.

The oligarch and the New Russian are not entirely overlapping categories; actual Russian oligarchs look restrained in comparison to the New Russian of folklore, while the New Russian need not be rich enough to be an oligarch. Yet the English and French translations of the film’s title render the terms equivalent. The full English title is Tycoon: A New Russian, while France cuts to the chase and calls the movie Un nouveau russe. Lungin’s film is a touchstone for the post-Soviet representation of the new rich; even with the caveat about assuming that the New Russian and the oligarch are the same thing, Tycoon is an unavoidable part of any analysis of the New Russian phenomenon.

Early in the film, when the future oligarch Platon Makovsky and his friends are still university students, the impending transition from ossified state socialism to savage, unrestricted capitalism is established and parodied in a lighthearted scene that could have turned tragic for one of its participants. One of Platon’s friends, Viktor, has made the political mistake of arguing in a certain Professor Koretsky’s class that the Soviet economy is shrinking and on the verge of collapse. Koretsky’s response is not to engage with the substance of the argument, but rather to pontificate in a familiar Soviet vein:

• Koretsky: If I understand you correctly, when you say “ineffective economy,” you mean the economy of socialism?
• Viktor: I was solving a theoretical problem. This is mathematics, not ideology.
• Koretsky: Don’t try to weasel your way out of it. So the socialist economy is not viable? And what about Marxism-Leninism? Do you propose repealing it as well? … For the future of our country, for the life we have today, generations of Soviet people went hungry, gave their lives for the ideas that you are trampling under your feet.

To the untrained ear of a viewer born after the Soviet collapse, his words might seem simply laughable, but older generations, who managed not to sacrifice their lives for Soviet ideals, will easily recognize Koretsky’s tirade as a direct threat to Viktor’s future.

By this point in the film, we already know one important thing about Platon’s circle of friends: they live life to its fullest when testing the boundaries of convention. These are men who play with fire. In the previous scene, after a night of drinking in a four-person train car packed with revelers, one of the main characters, Mark, wakes up naked next to a similarly disrobed train conductress. She informs him that they had a fabulous night together, and that if he doesn’t follow up on his promise to marry her, she’ll file a personal complaint against him that will ruin his life. Mark’s friends reassure him that being married to a conductress is not so bad; it has its perks, and he’ll get used to it. Then they all burst out laughing, and Mark realizes that the whole thing is a practical joke.

Now, when Viktor is facing actual danger in his confrontation with Koretsky, it is Mark who calls Platon and tells him to come to Viktor’s rescue. What follows is a moment that turns Viktor’s brush with career tragedy into comedy gold.

• Platon: Forgive me for interrupting you, but it seems that Comrade Koretsky is overdramatizing the situation. We are just sharing ideas, including controversial ones.
• Koretsky: Strange logic you have there!
• Platon: Logic cannot be strange. It either is, or it isn’t. On the level of logic, you can prove anything. How about I show you that, say, a crocodile … [draws on the chalkboard]? Yes, that looks about right. Does it look right?
• Audience: Yes!
• Platon: A crocodile is more long than it is green. Because it’s long on top and below, while it’s green only on top.
• Koretsky: This is a circus!
• Platon: Just for Comrade Koretsky I’ll prove that the crocodile is more green than it is wide. The crocodile is green lengthwise and across, but wide only across. Thank you!

Why include such a scene early in the film, especially when it is nowhere to be found in the novel on which it is based? And, for that matter, why discuss it at such length now?

The crocodile scene fulfills a variety of important functions for this film. First, there is the obvious one, involving entertainment: it’s funny. If we look further, however, we see a discursive clash waged before our very eyes. We are in the role of the audience at the lecture, watching a debate that has serious implications. If we assume that the classical economics on which Viktor must be basing his conclusions is somehow neutral or objective (an assumption that the entire enterprise of the transition to capitalism takes for granted), then Viktor is the voice of cold reason, a representative of what some in Washington derisively call the “reality-based community.” Koretsky does not even attempt to refute Viktor’s arguments, presumably because he can’t (i.e., Viktor is objectively right). So Koretsky switches registers, proving himself a past master of Soviet cant. Or to put it more bluntly, Soviet bullshit.

The philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, famously turned “bullshit” into a term of art, distinguishing it from mere lying:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (55–56)

At this point in Tycoon, we could allow for the possibility that Koretsky is sincere, but over the next two hours of screen time, the professor evolves into Platon’s primary antagonist, and his motivations are anything but noble.

Marxism-Leninism, the philosophy Koretsky so pompously evokes, would lead us to expect arguments in the form of a dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). Any argument that takes that form would be reaffirming the premises of Marxism-Leninism even if explicitly refuting them. But it is Koretsky himself who makes the dialectic all but impossible by responding to reason with bullshit. Enter Platon, who replaces the synthesis with an absurdist argument that exposes the absurdity of the entire debate. Platon’s “crocodile” proof could be seen as a synthesis only if we do what Platon himself is doing: ignore the content entirely and focus on the underlying problem of logic itself. The result would be a dialectic of “reason-bullshit-metabullshit.”

Yet the stakes of the bullshit argument could not be higher, and this is why the crocodile scene pairs so well with the previous train conductress episode. In each case, a real or imagined transgression could lead to personal ruin. When Mark implores Platon to come to Viktor’s rescue he uses the same word (personalka or “personal complaint”) that the conductress used in her threat against Mark himself. The conductress’s blackmail threat was based on a falsified incident (Mark hadn’t actually slept with her, and she didn’t want to marry him), while Viktor endangers himself by insisting on “facts” and “reality” in the face of falsity and bullshit.

Taken together, these two scenes are concise allegories of both the film’s central conflict and the rise of the New Russian. The three-part, nondialectical argument about economics and crocodiles points to the actual tripartite relationship that drives much of the film: a love triangle. Right after winning the argument, Platon races back to the woman whose bed he left two hours before: Masha Koretskaya, Koretsky’s wife. Not only does this ensure Koretsky’s lifelong hatred of Platon, but it also easily symbolizes Platon’s approach to his surroundings. The world as it exists is nothing but an imperfect arrangement of raw materials, from which he can take the best and leave the rest. Given the familiar, indeed, clichéd trope of the female character standing in for Russia (or the USSR) itself, Platon is seizing the country from a man who no longer knows how to husband it.

If Russia is going to belong to the Platon Makovskys of the world, it is because these New Russians, rather than simply accepting the world as given, hack the world as if it were a vulnerable computer system. They zero in on weakness after weakness, exploiting them precisely because they are available, and because no one else has gotten to them first.

Using the model developed by Mark Lipovetsky, we might say that Platon Makovsky is a trickster. But he is not just any trickster, in that the film continually links him to Soviet literature’s master of this particular art: Ostap Bender, the protagonist of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s 1928 novel, The Twelve Chairs. The connection suggests itself early in the film, when we see that one of Platon’s first schemes involved the inexplicable overproduction of short, Russian-style brooms (veniki)—150 million of them, in fact. This is all part of a complicated scheme to acquire wealth without cash changing hands and is an ironic counterpoint to one of the many quotes from Ilf and Petrov’s novel to become part of everyday speech: “the company does not make brooms” (firma venikov ne viazhet). The expression has come to be something of a boast, or at least a confirmation of quality: “I did a good job remodeling your apartment? Of course I did—the company doesn’t make brooms.” In Platon’s case, the company actually does make brooms, but it is their production, rather than denial of production, that suggests a kind of illicit success.

The Twelve Chairs also reminds us of the two scenarios of New Russian enrichment discussed above: theft from the state and conjuring money out of thin air. Among Bender’s many other catch phrases is his response to a demand he deems unreasonable: “What else do you want, the key to a room full of cash [kliuch ot kvartiry, gde den’gi lezhat]?” Indeed, this was the first phrase the authors associated with him as they wrote the book; the entire character was built around it (Ilf, xvi). Bender attributed this dubious sentiment to his interlocutors, but it was actually his primary motivation. Platon, with his knack for determining just which state property can be had for a song, builds his empire in part because he finds the keys to rooms full of cash.

Like Ostap Bender, Platon claims to be dealing with concrete items (Ilf and Petrov’s chairs, for example), but his success looks more like magic. He conjures up deals, schemes, and money through the dizzying force of his argumentation, convincing his audience while still leaving them confused. From the outside, Platon’s generation of money from nothing may as well be magic. In Russian, one of the main verbs for casting a spell or enchantment is zagovorit’, a word whose root (govor—speak) suggests the verbalization of magical thinking. Russians cast spells by speaking them into existence, a capacity at which Platon excels. Take, for example, the scene when he explains his broom scheme to his partners: his description of the relationship among three cooperatives, none of which can actually deal with money, and his plan to circulate brooms and vacuum cleaners through this system of exchange until they somehow turn into automobiles, has the same effect on his audience as his crocodile proof: everyone in the room is reduced to amazed laughter. But they are also convinced.

When the New Russian simply appropriates state property, he is getting something that, as the Russians would say, “is just lying there for the taking” (plokho lezhit), like the mythical room full of cash. But when he works his economic trickster magic, following a logic most of us can only marvel at, the choice of the crocodile for his absurdist proof starts to make sense. Yes, the crocodile is a dangerous creature hiding behind a smile, but Platon is assessing its color. The future New Russian oligarch fights “Red” platitudes by measuring something green. “Green,” of course, is precisely what matters to the New Russian. It is not just the color of the crocodile, it is the color of the money that he conjures out of thin air. The switch from red to green is the measure of the New Russian’s success. Compared to him, ordinary Russians may as well be colorblind.

Loved Labours Lost

If New Russian were just a synonym for oligarch, we would not need the phrase at all. The term may include oligarchs, but it is far more capacious. There is a spectrum of New Russianness, with oligarchs at the far end. Who might be found on the way to other side?

If we start with the New Russian as an economic pseudophenomenon—or perhaps a pseudoeconomic phenomenon—we of course return to wealth. But not to the mere fact of having wealth, something that will end up falling under the Putin-era category of “glamour.” Being a New Russian is about gaining wealth, and that is where our trouble begins.

Like all countries, the Soviet Union needed its citizens’ labor to survive. Where it stood out was in the creation and inculcation of labor as a cult. Initially a Marxist correction to a capitalist system that typically valued intellectual or “white collar” work over actual physical labor (whether on farms or in factories) while validating the ownership of capital above all else, the notion of Soviet citizens as laborers took center stage in Stalin’s time. The most famous example is that of Alexei Stakhanov, who in 1935 repeatedly broke records for the amount of coal mined in a single shift or even half-shift. Feted as a national hero, he inspired an entire movement of “Stakhanovites,” dedicated shock workers who committed themselves to constant feats of industrial and agricultural labor.

The Brezhnev era provided a countermyth: the image of the Soviet worker as a lazy, often drunken, shirker, indifferent to the poor quality of the goods he made. The unofficial literature of the time certainly bears this out, from Venedikt Erofeev’s tale of epic goldbricking in Moscow-Petushki (1969) to the many sections of Zinoviev’s Homo Sovieticus disparaging the skill and enthusiasm of the Soviet worker. In the popular parlance, the labor problem was summed up with a joke: “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.”

This discrepancy between the official cult of labor and the unofficial assumption (or recognition) of the shoddiness of Soviet industry, the surliness of the Soviet service sector, and the inadequacy of Soviet goods should remind us that there is no reason to expect that actual economics and labor should be identical to their representation or popular understanding. Privatization in the 1990s was an incomprehensible mess, whose results were not exactly inspiring for ordinary people: unemployment and plummeting living standards for a large portion of the population accompanied by spectacular wealth for an infinitesimally small layer, with thriving criminal enterprises somewhere in between.

It was not just jobs that were disappearing; the fig leaf of socially useful labor had been stripped away. “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us” was a joke, but it was also a tacit social compact. In Soviet times, unemployment was not just virtually unknown but technically a crime. The legal charge against the unemployed was tuneiadstvo. Often translated as “parasitism” or “social parasitism,” the term does not have the same biological connotations, but the discourse surrounding it made abundant use of variations on the Russian word parazit. Not working was tantamount to exploitation of those who worked.

When we look at the categories of people who get labeled “New Russians,” while they all may be frenetically active, what they do would not have been called “labor” just a few years before. Buying and selling, brokering deals, making connections with organized crime, and, most important, focusing on profit were all considered unproductive, even parasitic. The notion that the New Russian rich weren’t actually “producing” anything helps explain the widespread acceptance and enthusiastic participation in pyramid schemes such as MMM. MMM was accused of simply printing worthless paper and making useless promises; how was anyone supposed to tell the difference between that and “legitimate” business?

Generally speaking, three types of people are usually covered by the classification “New Russian”: oligarchs, successful or would-be businessmen several rungs below oligarch status, and organized crime leaders. What unites them, and potentially makes “New Russians” a meaningful category, are the following features.⁹

1. (1) Money. In Soviet society, cash was not king. Certainly, money was always welcome, and a huge portion of the country could legitimately consider itself underpaid. But where capitalism manages scarcity through the medium of money (making money scarce), scarcity in Late Socialism was primarily a matter of goods and access. After the reforms of 1990 and the subsequent end of the USSR, money became paramount. The New Russians’ perceived comfort—if not obsession—with money, their proficiency in the magic of currency manipulation (foreign exchange, “dark money,” “noncash” money that technically existed only in bank accounts and could not easily be turned into paper bills), and the financial instruments that surrounded money put them in a category of their own.
2. (2) Labor. Virtually nothing that the New Russian did to generate this money qualified as labor in the Soviet sense. This does not mean that the New Russians were not active (indeed, hyperactive) in managing their affairs. But they were not working with their hands, not producing goods, not providing recognizable services, and not engaged in typical intellectual labor. The New Russian was the parasite triumphant.
3. (3) Taste. Like the sovok, the New Russian was ridiculed for his bad taste. But the form and content of this bad taste were altogether different.
4. (4) Conspicuous consumption. Here the New Russian was the anti-sovok: accumulating luxury goods and name brands with an impressive single-mindedness.
5. (5) Corruption. The New Russian was generally assumed to have broken laws and traded influence to get where he was.
6. (6) Spiritual and social vacuity. The New Russian presumably had no social conscience and no sympathy for those less fortunate than him.
7. (7) Absurdity. The New Russian was easy to laugh at.

The Putin-era successors to the New Russian neutralize most, though not all, of these complaints. Bad taste and gross conspicuous consumption have given way to glamour. Asocial selfishness takes on the guise of philanthropy and political engagement. Corruption gets folded into a system in which the state, rather than private business, has primacy. The next chapter witnesses the transition from New Russians to merely rich Russians.