The New Russian and the American Psycho

Vladimir Tuchkov’s cycle of stories Smert’ prikhodit po internetu (Death by Internet) is a New Russian master text and one of the main literary examples highlighted by Lipovetsky in “New Russians as a Cultural Myth.” Published in 2001, Tuchkov’s book bears the revealing subtitle A Description of Nine Unpunished Crimes Secretly Committed in the Homes of New Russians. As the subtitle suggests, the recurring theme is that of New Russian excess and the sense that New Russians are people to whom no rules actually apply. The pleasure is that of reading good satire, but also the thrill of watching people get away with the unthinkable.

The collection’s first story, bearing the Gogolian title “Strashnaia mest’ ” (A terrible vengeance), sets the stage with a tale of a New Russian’s unlimited power and total lack of mercy. The fabulously wealthy businessman Nikolai spends all his time managing his business empire, leaving his wife, Olga, to dedicate herself just as doggedly to hosting a nonstop array of high-society orgies. But when her parade of meaningless sexual encounters gives way to real feelings for one of her guests (a TV personality), Nikolai will not stand for it. Nikolai imprisons her lover in their house, informing him that although he will remain alive, Nikolai is taking away his life and identity. The lover is replaced on television with a double, and after a few weeks, Nikolai has the man’s four front teeth removed and replaced with a steel bridge. The man is given ratty clothes to wear and released back into the general population. No one believes his claims that he is a well-known public figure, and he is eventually institutionalized for delusions of grandeur.

In “A Terrible Vengeance,” the businessman’s wealth and influence defy all rules and laws. In the United States, people used to say that Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, had a “reality distortion effect,” which meant that his sheer persuasive enthusiasm seemed capable of convincing his interlocutors that he could achieve the impossible. Nikolai goes one step further: he is literally the master of all he surveys, meting out “justice” to those around him with the impunity and confidence of a feudal lord. Even his imprisonment of his rival is couched in terms of magnanimity and hospitality. Olga’s love is maintained in Nikolai’s mansion under more than comfortable conditions; when Nikolai’s project is complete and his rival has now entirely lost his identity and become a “new person,” Nikolai tells him: “Well, now, at last you can abandon my hospitable home, where you have been inappropriately happy for someone of your former social status” (18). Nikolai’s destruction of his rival efficiently hits him where gender and class intersect, simultaneously stripping him of the attributes of wealth and success and the physical features that presumably make him attractive. The punishment administered by Nikolai is a feat of socioeconomic alchemy; standing at the pinnacle of a complex social hierarchy, he has performed the class equivalent of what used to be called gender reassignment surgery.

“A Terrible Vengeance” surrounds Nikolai with the aura of the powerful feudal lord, but the connection to a medieval ethos is still a matter of simile and transposition. Nikolai is analogous to the lord of a manor, but he functions within a contemporary context, however exaggerated his capacity to exert his will might seem. The second story has no need of comparison or analogy, in that its protagonist’s entire project is to literalize the metaphor inherent in his New Russian status.

“Stepnoi barin” (Lord of the steppe) is about a rich banker named Dmitry who buys land outside of Moscow in order to set up his own feudal estate. He has no overt political agenda, although in the hands of a different sort of satirist at a different point in time, his localized New Middle Ages might look like a comment on Stalin’s attempt to “build socialism in one country.” Once the estate is operating, he seems to be interested solely in satisfying his own desires and indulging his own whims. But the origins of his impulses are more complex.

As the first line of the story tells us, “Dmitry was the product of great Russian literature” (20). But where the implied reader of the Russian classics is presumably moved to compassion for the downtrodden, disdain for material riches, and other such “spiritual” concerns, Dmitry learns the opposite lesson. Having virtually memorized the complete works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he finds the greatest pleasure in the scenes in which evil and cruelty triumph: “Thus he was an unusually shameless, calculating, mean, and cruel person in relation to those who stood lower than him on the social ladder” (20). Where generations of readers were taught to empathize with the proverbial little man chasing in vain after the carriage speeding in front of him, one imagines Dmitry responding to the same scene as if it were the social class equivalent of hard-core pornography.

Naturally, Dmitry builds a luxurious house for himself, but then he immediately turns to the construction of twenty-five “dilapidated” huts, complete with holes in the walls and crooked windows. Once these are finished, he begins hiring serfs. The serfs sign a contract (laser-printed, in duplicate) listing all the agricultural implements that will be at their disposal, requiring them to live full-time in the country, and promising them two thousand dollars per year. In exchange, Dmitry gets the fruits of their labor, along with the right to impose physical punishment, authorize or forbid marriages, and unilaterally resolve any disputes. The serf has the right to break the contract, but only on Yuri’s Day (the autumn St. George’s Day, November 26, when serfs were allowed to change masters before 1597).

Dmitry starts administering harsh punishments on the second day of his reign. Soon he is raping peasant women, sometimes in the presence of his wife (whose moral degeneracy now matches his own). Recalling that some feudal masters had theater troupes composed of serfs, he stages a production of Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit with an all-female, all-nude cast, which is instructed to spend most of the play beating each other. When Yuri’s Day arrives, he arranges a feast, provides copious amounts of vodka, and all his serfs extend their contract for another year.

Within three years, the serfs have adapted completely:

They started to see their master not as an eccentric rich man, but as their own father, tough, but fair, constantly worrying about their well-being. Deep in their hearts each one of them knew that without their master, they wouldn’t plow, and they wouldn’t go to church, and would start killing each other… . So the serfs, whose psyches were so seriously reconfigured, were wrong to have counted on the possibility of returning to contemporary society. They couldn’t live there; its laws would strike them as wild and inhuman. (26)

Even Dmitry is stunned by this turn of events and starts to consider “reforms” (such as cutting their quitrent by twenty percentage points), but by now he’s gotten old, and his eldest son Grigory has taken charge. The story ends with the observation that the serfs have started having children who look exactly like Grigory.

Lipovetsky is correct when he argues that Tuchkov’s New Russian heroes are better understood along a “spectrum of social roles” (2003, 63) rather than through psychological realism, and that they exemplify a “trickster archetype” (2003, 64) that serves as a “negative variant of a cultural hero” (2003, 64). But I must disagree with his analysis of the role of power, that his “bankers do not care about power over somebody or something; they desire power as such, as a fetish, and they realize that this kind of power tolerates no compromise” (2003, 63).

But how can power function as an absolute in a social context? Tuchkov gives us New Russians whose obsession with power absolutely requires that other people suffer in its exercise. Death by Internet rarely shows the protagonists deriving actual sensual pleasure from their abuse of their underlings; Tuchkov’s New Russian is no American Psycho. Yet the New Russians in these stories dehumanize their victims just as efficiently as Bret Easton Ellis’s sadistic serial killer, not by taking pleasure in their pain but by being indifferent to it. These New Russians hold the human life of the underclass in such low regard that they cannot even be bothered to enjoy their victims’ suffering.

Both the American Psycho and the New Russian are incapable of empathy, and in each case their callousness is easily interpreted as a comment on the worlds that made them. But where Ellis’s Patrick Bateman is the perfect extrapolation of a heartless capitalist world, Dmitry in “Lord of the Steppe,” as the product of Great Russian Literature, is even more demonic: he has spent his life surrounded by cultural inputs that demand an empathic response, only to identify with the purveyors of cruelty. Culture is no insurance against savage exploitation; on the contrary, virtually any cultural production can be appropriated to teach an unintended and undesirable lesson.

Tuchkov’s New Russians, then, are the men who, through some murky combination of nature and nurture, are best equipped to take advantage of post-Soviet chaos and recreate their surrounding microworlds according to their needs. In the language of Lev Gumilev, whose pseudoscientific theory of ethnogenesis grew in popularity at roughly the same time as the New Russians appeared on the scene, Tuchkov’s New Russians are passionaries, albeit unforgivably selfish ones: they are people whose sheer vital energy and drive move those around them toward creating a new a new collective identity.

The New Russians of Death by Internet would make excellent cult leaders. For that matter, so would Platon Makovsky from Tycoon. But rather than prophesy the end of the world, the coming of aliens, or transcendence into a higher realm, Tuchkov’s New Russian cultists gravitate toward the feudal or medieval. The greatest threat of his imaginary New Russian is that he will recreate a feudal social structure by sheer force of will.

Jokes and the New Russian Body

Tuchkov’s psychopathic, faux-medieval oligarchs take the popular discourse of the New Russians to its logical extreme. After all, how do we spot a New Russian? All the urban folklore reinforces the conclusion that the New Russian is identified in relation to his possessions. The New Russian may be described as a physical type, but the most important attributes are metonymic: the cell phone, the clothing, the Mercedes 600, and, behind all this, the money. A feudal scenario in which people themselves become the New Russians’ property therefore makes a great deal of sense; the New Russian cannot relate to others as actual subjects (i.e., as people) but only as objects for him to manipulate. In Martin Buber’s terms, he is incapable of an “I-You” intersubjective connection, only “I-It.”

Certainly, the popular jokes about the New Russians and their satirical representation in film and fiction reek of class resentment, but they lack an important element of representations of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” both in the West and, just a few years into the twenty-first century, in Putinist Russia: a palpable sense of envy. How hard can it be to make people want a fancy car and the latest gadgets? But when paired with the New Russians, fancy commodity fetish objects and the money that purchases them manage to look unappealing.

Jokes about New Russians were fertile ground for scholarly analysis in the 1990s and early 2000s, most notably by Emil Draitser and Seth Graham. Both Russians and Russia watchers seized on a phenomenon that was strangely reassuring: after several years in which the previously reliable folklore genre of political and topical jokes (anekdoty) had dried up, suddenly Russia was undergoing a renaissance of jokelore. Soviet political jokes often focused on the self-seriousness and hypocrisy of the regime and its leaders, a subject that lost its relevance after 1991. If Russian humor had found a new topical target of ridicule, surely this had to mean something.

A sizable portion of the New Russian jokes I’ve heard and read do, in fact, focus on commodity fetishism, mocking the New Russian obsession with things without simultaneously engaging in the older, Soviet moralizing about veshchizm. One of the classics is about two New Russians talking about a tie. One of them says, “Check it out, I bought this tie for $1,500!” while the other replies, “You idiot! You could have gotten it for $2,000!” At the usual risk of killing humor by explaining it, I want to point out the obvious detour from conventional values that is at work here. As a means of exchange, money is presumably valued for what it can buy, but for the New Russian, what he can buy is valued in accordance to how much money he can spend on it. Curiously, the obsession with material things threatens to dematerialize them entirely: they exist only as excuses for money to change hands.

In another joke involving the inevitable Mercedes, a New Russian gets into a car accident. He survives but moans repeatedly, “Oh, my poor Mercedes! My Mercedes.” An onlooker notices that the New Russian has lost one of his arms. “Forget about the car! What about your arm?” The New Russian looks in the direction of his now-missing arm: “My Rolex! My Rolex!” Again, his values are distorted, this time in favor of objects at the expense of his own body.

In still another joke, the New Russian body is whole but is rendered little more than a vehicle for his beloved gadgets:

Three New Russians are engaged in conversation, when one notices something odd about another New Russian’s finger.

The second New Russian explains that he has a pager implanted in his finger.

Then the first New Russian’s ear starts to buzz. He explains that this is his portable telephone getting a call.

Soon the third one’s stomach starts to rumble, and he appears about to vomit. “What’s happening?” they ask him. “I’m getting a fax.”

In such jokes, the New Russian is a nightmare vision of the posthuman. He is not simply a cyborg (as in the previous joke), not merely obsessed with the material objects and gadgets he could potentially be using to extend his sense of self beyond the human body. Rather, he is an emptied-out self that has transferred virtually all of its value and all of its meaning into items beyond his own flesh, without compensating for this deprivation through even the vaguest appeal to the spiritual, intellectual, or sublime. He is the posthuman who has not transcended but descended.

Thus the New Russian embodies (to the extent that he can even be said to have a body anymore) a reflexive, undertheorized rejection of humanism, from the liberal humanism that animated Western Europe after the Renaissance to the sentimental humanism of Russian literature and culture (Radishchev’s appeal to empathize with the downtrodden, the nineteenth-century Russian validation of the “little man”). To him, other people are like objects, and not particularly valuable objects at that.

In one anecdote, two New Russians are talking about remodeling their homes. One asks, “Who does the work on your house?” The other replies, “Tajiks. How about yours?” “The Swiss.” “Why not Tajiks?” “Do you have any idea how expensive it is to ship Tajiks to Switzerland?”

In another, a New Russian refuses to provide funding to scientists in need of support, but he is generous in his handouts to beggars. Someone asks him why, and he responds, “You never know, someday I could be a beggar too. But I’ll never be a scientist.” This is not just selfishness or self-centeredness; it is the inability to think of other people in terms outside of himself and his needs.

The sheer vacuity of the New Russian, both as a self and as a body, is particularly clear in the last joke I want to tell for the moment:

A husband returning from a business trip sees a Mercedes 600 parked in his driveway. Inside, he sees a crimson jacket on a hanger, a cellular phone on the table, and his wife in bed with a man. The husband pushes the man:

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

“What do you mean? Don’t you see? We’re making New Russians.” (Quoted in Draitser 2001, 449.)

Here the New Russian is reduced to his essence, a set of external attributes used to conjure him up through sympathetic magic (plus a healthy dose of adultery). The body to go along with all the possessions is merely an afterthought.

The joke works because before the husband encountered the couple, he saw a Mercedes 600 in the driveway, a crimson (probably raspberry) jacket on a hanger, and a cell phone on the table. The New Russian’s identity was tied so closely to these (and a few other) particular objects that the listener is supposed to get the joke immediately.

Why these three things? The Mercedes could theoretically be any fancy, expensive car, except that linking all New Russians with one particular model of automobile suggests that little personal assessment is going on. This is not a matter of a man with money picking out the car that suits him best; it is a rich man who buys the car that everyone else of his status already possesses.

The cell phone obviously would not work even a few years later, now that nearly everyone in the country (or at least the big cities) has one of their own. But the presence of a lone cell phone in a crowd of people without phones is particularly disruptive, and not simply because of envy. The caricature has it that the New Russian is always yelling into his phone, heedless of the reactions of those around him. Cell phones may or may not still be annoying, but they are no longer marked as belonging to a particular category of person.

The raspberry jacket, however, takes some explanation. This jacket first appeared as part of Versace’s 1992 collection, which was excellent timing from the point of view of a New Russian trying to show off. Soviet officials and factory heads were not exactly fashion icons; the drab grayness of Soviet men’s style was as pervasive as their clothing options were limited (Molchanova; “Pochemu novye russkie”). What better way to stand out than with a bright red jacket (probably not from Versace, but who would notice)?

The raspberry jacket quickly became shorthand for New Russian. Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of the MMM pyramid scheme, traded in his customary track suit for a raspberry jacket for his televised 1993 New Year’s address to his “partners” (read: “dupes”). In Aleksei Balabanov’s 1997 hit film, Brother, one of the criminal leaders is a bald man in a raspberry jacket who is constantly laughing at the folk sayings and clichés out of which he constructs nearly every one of his utterances. His absence of imagination in fashion is outweighed only by his lack of wit when it comes to speaking. Balabanov returns to the 1990s criminal business world in his 2005 film, Zhmurki (Dead Man’s Bluff), casting a backward glance at a bygone era. Naturally, he gives the film’s most iconic character, Mikhailych, a raspberry jacket.

This jacket is fashion for the man who wants to be considered fashionable but has no inclination to spend the time actually assessing the clothing he is to wear, just as the Mercedes 600 is a default rich man’s car. So perhaps we should give the New Russian a break: perhaps it is not that he has bad taste, but that he simply has no taste at all?

Alas, no. For the New Russian to fulfill his discursive function, his taste has to be terrible. Fortunately, he is up to the task.

Bad Taste, Revisited

One of the many functions of New Russian jokes is to take a potentially threatening, disturbing figure and reduce him to a laughingstock. There is nothing inherently funny about amassing millions of dollars through quasi-criminal enterprises, siphoning off state resources, or hiring hitmen to solve your problems. But a fool who shows off his terrible taste and total ignorance of high culture every time he throws his money around is entirely another matter.

As I indicated in chapter 2, the New Russian as a folk figure is the mirror image of the sovok. Where the sovok is flummoxed by the new capitalist consumer paradise, the New Russian revels in it. Where some versions of the sovok combine consumer cluelessness with a reflexive, often laughable fixation on high culture as framed by decades of Soviet education, the New Russian is incapable not just of appreciating but even of recognizing art. What unites the New Russian and the sovok is that both of them exemplify terrible taste.

The New Russian’s bad taste has two components. The first is the assumption that aesthetic value depends on flashiness and expense. In this, the New Russian resembles the American stereotypes of lottery winners and shares an aesthetic with Donald Trump (often derided as “a poor person’s fantasy of what a rich person is like”).

Hence the joke about a New Russian who brings a gold ingot to a jeweler and asks him to make him a ring. The jeweler says, “Which one?” and starts to show him a catalog. The New Russian just looks at him. “What are you, an idiot? Just drill a hole!” Or the joke where the New Russian brags to his brother about his amazing new, custom-made BMW. The body is platinum, the bumper is gold, the tires are silver. It has a diamond-encrusted steering wheel, and pearls all over the exterior. “How often do you drive it?”—“I never do. It uses too much gas.”¹

The New Russian’s tackiness would not be complete, however, if it merely consisted of his positive, or active, bad taste. Even worse than what he likes is the vast aesthetic and cultural world that he is incapable of appreciating. His ignorance of Culture-with-a-capital-C is so vast that he does not even recognize the huge gaps in his knowledge.

So we have the New Russian going back to the jewelry store, this time to buy a crucifix, since everyone is wearing them nowadays. He wants a gold one, of course, as heavy as possible. The clerk finally finds a huge gold crucifix, almost to the New Russian’s liking. “Just one thing—Can you get me one without the gymnast?” (Anekdoty nashikh chitatelei, no. 33 [1997]: 6, as quoted in Graham 2003, 41).

In Paris, the New Russian points to the Eiffel Tower and asks the tour guide, “So have you guys found oil yet or not?”

One New Russian asks another: “So who are these guys, Bach and Beethoven, anyway?” The answer: “They’re the guys who write the ring tones for our phones.” Or, at a classical concert, one New Russian gestures toward the stage, asking, “Is that Beethoven?” Answer: “It’s hard to tell from the back.” Another joke has a New Russian relaxing with some music. His wife asks, “What are you listening to?” He answers: “Tchaikovsky. Piano Concerto no. 1, with orchestra.” “Then why is the disk labeled “Led Zeppelin III?” “Damn it! I’m always getting them mixed up.”

From the standpoint of the (post-)Soviet intelligentsia, the New Russian’s values are literally reversed: he loves flashy garbage and cannot be bothered with the heritage of high culture. It is bad enough that men with money now rule the world, but even worse that they are so irredeemably vulgar.

Emil Draitser (2001), Seth Graham (2009, 134; 2003, 48), and Helena Goscilo (1998) have all noted the resemblance between the protagonist of New Russian anecdotes and a much more established butt of Russian jokes: the Chukchi. The inhabitants of a Siberian peninsula separated from Alaska by the Bering Strait, the Chukchi feature in an endless parade of jokes, the popularity of which is in direct proportion to the overall ignorance about them on the part of the average Russian. Non-Chukchi Russian citizens outside of Siberia could easily go their entire lives without meeting a Chukchi; thus while the Chukchi jokes are unequivocally racist, they are not based on any animus toward Chukchi in particular.² Instead, the Chukchi is used as a shorthand for backwardness, lack of culture, and lack of civilization.

Draitser argues quite convincingly for the role of Chukchi as the generalized fool but also for the Chukchi as a stand-in for the Russian himself: “In Chukchi jokes, one cannot help but sense a certain compassion for the simpleton. Such relatively sparing treatment of the Chukchi man can be explained by a high degree of identification of the Russian joke tellers with the butt of their jokes” (1998, 94). For the New Russian, though, there is precious little compassion and even less reason to try to cultivate it. The Chukchi’s ignorance is posited to be either situational (i.e., he’s culturally deprived) or, worse, biological (the jokes’ racism). The New Russian has all the resources in the world available to him, and all he wants is more gold.

In framing the sovok as the Soviet intelligentsia, Victor Pelevin compared him to the estate owners in The Cherry Orchard. The New Russian calls to mind another of Chekhov’s plays: The Three Sisters. The women of the Prozorov family are revolted by their brother’s fiancée, and eventual wife, Natasha, who dresses badly and throws temper tantrums. The embodiment of the poshlost’ (vulgarity) that triumphs over their refined sensibilities, by the end of the play, Natasha is the mistress of the house. While she does not sell or chop down a cherry orchard, she can’t wait to completely transform the grounds, planning to plant “[cute little] flowers, flowers, flowers!” (Tsvetochki, tsvetochki, tsvetochki!).

Like Natasha in The Three Sisters, the New Russians are a reminder to their audience that the world no longer belongs to them. The jokes about the New Russians, by turning the new would-be aristocracy into figures of fun, soften the blow.

The New Russian in the Rearview Mirror

When Aleksei Balabanov made his cinematic return to the world of Russian criminal business with Dead Man’s Bluff, he treated the eight years that had passed since the release of Brother as if they were eighty. The film begins in a crowded lecture hall, with an instructor standing in front of a blackboard announcing the day’s topic: nakoplenie nachal’nogo kapitala, which can be translated either as “accumulating start-up capital” (if you’re an MBA) or, with a bit of a stretch, “the primitive accumulation of capital” (if you’re a Marxist). She explains that getting start-up capital “in our time” is very difficult, but in the 1990s, it was a different story. State property was being divided up, and all our current “so-called oligarchs” got their money back then.

A student comments: “I think back then it was easy to make money from nothing, both for start-up capital and for the rest of your life.” She brings up the problem of pyramid schemes, which the instructor is quick to pick up on. The instructor notes that there were also “criminal structures” which had become intertwined with the state authorities, who also got their start-up capital at that time.

Balabanov then jump-cuts to the scene of one man torturing another in a morgue, ending in a bloodbath. In the same amount of time it takes for the instructor to explain 1990s capitalism, three men die, with two more killed thirty seconds later. In the first scene, although the classroom has students of both sexes, the conversation about the criminal economy is conducted entirely by women, with the men either silent or trying to get out of the lecture. In the second, all the speaking parts are male, as are all the murderers and victims, but the action unfolds against a backdrop of naked female corpses. What could be more Nineties than that?

This aesthetic contrast is as important as the change in subject matter (economics lecture vs. indiscriminate murder), leaving open the possibility that what Vadim Volkov called the “violent entrepreneurs” of cutthroat capitalism can be hygienically sealed off from the calmer, more civilized world in which the lecturer and her students now live. Though the classroom scene is a prologue, its function is reminiscent of the epilogue of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. After two hundred harrowing pages immersing the reader in a repressive, patriarchal regime of scheduled rape and mandatory childbirth, Atwood jumps hundreds of years into the future to a scholarly conference for historians who study this miserable time in their world’s past. The tone is now matter-of-fact, if not lighthearted, a jarring counterpoint to the intense desperation of the novel’s first-person narrator. This epilogue (much like the historical appendix on Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984, whose most important feature is that it is not written in Newspeak), though not necessarily a pleasant reading experience, smuggles optimism into a bleak story. At some point, we know, conditions (will) change.³

The criminal New Russians of Dead Man’s Bluff are not quite so hermetically isolated from the world of their frame story, however. The connection between the two reinforces both the film’s satire and the instructor’s own words about the origins of the current “so-called oligarchs.” The film does not return to the classroom, but it does end with the revelation that our main gangster heroes have now cleaned themselves up and found a comfortable place as part of the apparatus of state, rather than private, corruption.

This, in fact, is the most common folk explanation for the fate of the New Russians. By “folk” I mean nonscholarly, lay explanations. Again, my concern here is not the actual socioeconomic transformation of post-Soviet Russia but its representation through media. I will, however, gesture toward the political developments that fostered a new environment for entrepreneurs in the 2000s.

A recurring refrain of the 1990s was that criminal organizations and the newly minted oligarchs (to the extent that this distinction even meant something to people at the time) needed be brought in line. Someone with a “firm hand” needed to put an end to bespredel, the boundary-less, terrifying chaos that allowed rich men and thugs to commit crimes with impunity. A weak central government run by an erratic, drunken president (Boris Yeltsin) gave way to a new administration under Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Over the first few years of the 2000s, Putin strongly centralized state authority (appointing governors rather than letting them be elected), allowed the development of a low-level personality cult focused on himself, and brought the oligarchs to heel. The message to the superrich was clear: if you want to keep your wealth and your freedom, you must recognize that you are subordinate, rather than superior, to the state. Meanwhile, oil prices and general prosperity began to rise as crime began to fall.

The New Russian was a fixture of an era when the state barely seemed relevant, and when money meant more than state power. The point I am making has less to do with how much actually changed in the 2000s than with the mood fostered by the media and entertainment industry. The culture had little room for the New Russian as anything more than a figure of fun, which meant that new models of wealth and power would inevitably arise.

On a discursive level, the decline of the New Russian and the resurgence of state power recapitulate a surprising Soviet pattern: the personal trajectory of the socialist realist hero. As Katerina Clark famously demonstrated in The Soviet Novel, the hero of socialist realism operated according to the dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness (15–24). Initially, the hero’s strength is connected to his relative lack of attachment to the sometimes bureaucratic structures of the Party and the factory; he brought the very initiative (spontaneity) that the inertia of these structures discouraged. However, in the course of the story, the hero would manage to do two things: successfully accomplish the task that the forces of consciousness/inertia thought impractical while recognizing the necessity of subordinating (or at least incorporating) himself to the wisdom of the very organization that had discouraged him.

As the New Russian, the wealthy Russian recognized few strictures on his behavior, let alone a moral framework within which he must operate. Reborn as simply the rich Russian, he now functioned within the framework of the state, allegedly for the good of the state (or at least, not against it). For the state, this scenario presents one problem: If the New Russians/oligarchs are not responsible when things go bad, who is?

Loving the Leviathan

Consider two post-Soviet Russian dramas about the struggle for ordinary people to hold on to their land in the face of overwhelming opposition. In 1995, the veteran actor Yevgeny Matveev directed and starred in a film that turned out to be the first in a trilogy: Liubit’ po-russki (Love, Russian style). The sequel, released the following year, was called Love, Russian Style 2. I leave it to my more perspicacious readers to guess what the final entry in the series was called when it came out three years after that.

Love, Russian Style tells the story of a group of former collective farmers whose plans to work their land are threatened by the insidious machinations of a local gang leader, who steals the land out from under them when a valuable source of mineral water is discovered on it. Our heroes are a motley group of salt-of-the-earth types: a former collective-farm director (Matveev); a rugged young man who seems to style himself after the 1970s Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky, singing the film’s theme song, Vysotsky style, from his prison cell; and a female refugee—but a “good” one, an ethnic Russian fleeing violence in a former Soviet republic. Their opponent is a rich, repulsive New Russian, while their means of resistance only reinforces the heroes’ old-fashioned purity (they actually find a cache of World War II weapons, fighting the New Russian’s hired thugs with a fabled tachanka). The iconography of their struggle could not be clearer.

Love, Russian Style was not a memorable movie (I seem to be one of the few who hasn’t managed to forget it), and its sequels, as is so often the case even with better films, brought diminishing aesthetic and financial returns. Yet it shares an overall plot with one of the most highly acclaimed Russian films of the twenty-first century, Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2014 Leviafan (Leviathan).

Though based on an actual event that took place in the United States ten years earlier, Leviathan establishes a conflict that is structurally equivalent to the one that motivates Love, Russian Style. In this case, a car mechanic named Kolya refuses to sell the land his house is built on, but the antagonist is not a private citizen. He is the town’s corrupt mayor, who supposedly wants to set up a telecom tower on Kolya’s land, but in the end builds a church at the behest of the local bishop (who is one of his friends).

Where Love, Russian Style embraces the optimism of a feel-good melodrama, Leviathan wallows in arthouse misery. The heroes’ success in the 1995 film and Kolya’s defeat almost twenty years later are each appropriate to their respective genres, but the difference in the status of the films’ villains also plays a significant role. Hating the New Russian in the 1990s was not just acceptable; it was practically a national pastime. And no matter how much power the New Russian might have, and no matter how many strings he was able to pull, he was still not the state. In fact, Love, Russian Style mediates among three separate constituencies (a kind of hate triangle), with the state still available as a possible force for good. The problem with the state is not that it is evil but that it is weak, and leadership positions can still be filled by good people (over the course of the trilogy, the former collective-farm director is elected governor). In Leviathan, private wealth and state power have merged (and formed a threesome of their own with the Russian Orthodox Church). Kolya has no other avenues of recourse, no means of (re)mediation. The ethically bankrupt New Russian can have people killed, but it is the state that can crush the soul. The state is Leviathan; the New Russian is somewhere between a piranha and a guppy.

We Need a (Rich) Hero

The neoliberal hope for the New Russian was not that he would lose his wealth or even his power, but that he would acquire a veneer of civilization and use even the tiniest portion of his wealth in support of culture, rather than as the unwitting instrument of its destruction. For the New Russian to cease to be the New Russian, he needed two things: a conscience and taste.

Taste proved relatively easy to acquire, a topic I’ll come back to. But where was the New Russian supposed to find a conscience? Jiminy Crickets were an endangered species, just as likely to be stomped on as adopted. If the New Russian needed a conscience, he was going to have to grow his own. Or, more to the point when it comes to the popular consciousness, we were going to have to watch him grow his own.

The standard trajectory for the New Russian plot followed the logic of tragedy: gifted and somewhat likable heroes, as they climb the ladder of success, become increasingly corrupt and difficult to admire. Such is the case with the aforementioned Oligarch, as well as Denis Estingeev’s 1994 film, Limita, and, to a lesser extent, Pyotr Buslov’s 2003 Bumer (Bimmer). Yet one of the most popular television miniseries during Putin’s first term was a gangster story that, by the end, was close to a Bildungsroman about building a better New Russian: Aleksei Sidorov’s 2002 Brigada (sometimes known in English as Law of the Lawless).

Over the course of fifteen episodes that unfold from 1989 to 2000, Brigada brings its viewers into the lives of four best friends (the “brigade” of the title): Fil, Kosmos, Pchola, and their leader, Sasha Belyi. Together, they build a small criminal empire, fighting off competitors and engaging in increasingly high-stakes activity (including, indirectly, the First Chechen War). The series stands out for its charming and compelling protagonists, especially Sasha Belyi, played by the young heartthrob Sergei Bezrukov. The heroes’ appeal would set off a minor moral panic about the series’ allegedly pernicious effect on its teenage viewers, much as the prostitute drama Intergirl did thirteen years earlier. In 2018, Pavel Maikov, the actor who played Pchola, denounced the series as a “crime against Russia,” making boys want to grow up to be gangsters (“Pchela iz ‘Brigady’ ”).

Of course, there are no data on the effect of this particular miniseries on young male Russians’ career choices. Instead, I would like to offer another interpretation of Brigada, one that does not nullify concerns about the romanticizing of banditry but rather supplements them with the possibility that the last few episodes offer the beginnings of a romanticizing of the Russian rich.

In 1998, Sasha Belyi’s sworn enemy, Vladimir Kaverin, is running for the State Duma. After Pchola is put into a coma in a botched assassination attempt, Sasha decides to join the race. At first he is motivated by revenge, but something happens during the campaign. His initially cynical tactics for rehabilitating his image start to become real. He distributes aid to the poor, sponsors the construction of Russian Orthodox churches, and campaigns for social justice and equality.

During the televised debate, Kaverin accuses him of hypocrisy, given his criminal past. Sasha’s response is not to cover up but to admit it. Yes, he’s violated laws, but who in Russia hasn’t? Lawlessness in Russia started at the top, with the people in power, and his task will be to put an end to the chaos. Unlike politicians, Sasha Belyi “answers for his words.”

Just one word away from one of the most common Russian criminal sayings (“answering for one’s bazar”—slang for spoken statements), Sasha’s declaration is about bringing the best part of the world of crime (a sense of “justice,” of “rules”) to an unjust but technically legal world. If we’re going to be covered by thieves, wouldn’t we be better off if those thieves had a code?

The makers of Brigada were caught in a moral bind: they wanted Sasha to be appealing, and even to grow as a person. But ending a fifteen-episode television series with the outright triumph of a gangster-turned-politician would have been too strong a break with the conventions of the genre, either a celebration of criminality or an openly cynical statement about politicians and criminals. So in the last few episodes, Sasha does grow a greater sense of responsibility and moral nuance, even if he can’t be allowed to win.

The story of Sasha Belyi is based on a dialectic of selfishness and empathy, self-centered utilitarianism and social responsibility. As a gangster and budding New Russian, Sasha is out for himself; the only thing that saves him from becoming a mobster Ayn Rand is his attachment to his mother and his loyalty to his three best friends. As time passes, Sasha marries, has a son, and the circle of his selfishness expands to include his new family. When he runs for office, he sees the opportunity to combine his own self-interest with the greater good of his fellow citizens.

Empathy and communal responsibility do not come naturally to the New Russian, but Sasha’s development provides a model for learning empathy through the gradual widening of his circles of community. Despite the many deaths that can be laid at the feet of Sasha Belyi, he inspires the hope that the New Russian might not be entirely a sociopath or psychopath. With the proper socialization, perhaps the New Russian can learn to fake human connections and communal responsibility until they finally become real.

The New Russian would prove to be a bad fit for the new millennium. Already taking a serious hit from the 1998 financial collapse, he embodied so much of what Putinism was supposed to overcome: the limitless power accrued at the intersection of wealth and crime.

The devaluation of the ruble in 1998 was an obvious disaster for the economy, but one that presented real opportunities for a certain type of entrepreneur. As Tycoon demonstrated, the New Russian business model was about import and resale, not production. The post-1998 environment, by making imports expensive, encouraged actual industry.

A little less than two years later, Putin began presiding over a country with a rapidly growing economy. Rising oil prices were its engine, but industry grew by 76 percent. The introduction of a flat tax in 2001, while obviously regressive, helped refill government coffers. During his first term, Putin and the oligarchs came to something of an understanding (at the cost of some oligarchs’ wealth, freedom, and lives): the oligarchs kept their money and their business, and Putin could count on them to support the government. The rich Russian was therefore no longer such an ideal target in the media and culture industry. What could replace him?

In 2002, Brigada had teased with the possibility of a rich hero: an ex-criminal, a reformed New Russian with a social conscience and the resolve to use at least some of his ill-gotten gains for the greater good. Just two years later, one of the oligarchs, Mikhail Prokhorov, set up a foundation to support culture, education, and science throughout Russia’s regions. The rich Russian as citizen and patriot was becoming thinkable.

It should be no surprise, then, that one of the fictional models of this civic-minded rich Russian should emerge out of a project conceived by an actual rich Russian, Konstantin Rykov. Rykov was one of the early content entrepreneurs on the Russian Internet in the 1990s, and his career has included serving on the State Duma, being an adviser to former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, and becoming one of the most powerful television and Internet content producers in the Russian Federation. A staunch supporter of Putin, he was also a target of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anticorruption campaign. During the 2011–2012 opposition protests, Rykov made several tweets threatening violence against the protesters.

One of the keys to Rykov’s success, both as a producer and a political figure, is his capacity for crafting both entertainment and political messaging that appeals to the country’s younger citizens. Like Putin’s gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov, he is able to combine nationalist/conservative politics with a countercultural aesthetic. He can make Putinism “cool.”

In 2009, he launched a massive literary “project” called Ethnogenesis. Based on the highly influential crackpot theories of Lev Gumilev (the son of the poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev), Ethnogenesis is a series of young adult novels spanning time, space, and genres, all connected by two threads: the Gumilev family and a set of mysterious, animal-shaped objects (predmety) that endow their owners with a particular power (teleportation, mind control, clairvoyance, and so on). All of the sixty novels and six novellas that compose this never-completed project either have one-word nouns for titles (Blockade, Dragon) or are named after famous people (Che Guevara).⁴ One particular subset of the Ethnogenesis novel that bears consideration for our discussion of the New Russian and the rich Russian: the trilogy called Milliarder (Billionaire). The fact that this title is so generic is in keeping with the project’s naming conventions, but the announcement of a billionaire as not just protagonist but hero is another thing entirely.

The Man Who Has Everything

The Billionaire trilogy was begun by Elena Kondrateva before Kirill Benediktov replaced her for the second and third installments.⁵ It centers on a rich protagonist who is a titan of industry, a paragon of virtue, and a man with an impeccable pedigree: Andrei Lvovich Gumilev. Gumilev is the grandson of the famous poet mentioned above, himself the protagonist of two other Ethnogenesis series, and the even more famous poet Anna Akhmatova, who barely merits a paragraph in one of the novels about her husband, as well as the son of Lev, the man whose theories give the series its name.⁶ And perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of these novels—which also involve transparent alien artifact hunters, a lost tribe of yeti, and a cryogenically frozen Adolf Hitler maintained by a colony of cloned Valkyries on a secret Antarctic base—is the fact that Gumilev never once brings up his famous forebears.

This is surprising not only because the hero’s name was famous long before he himself ever was, but because Gumilev, who repeatedly rejects the term “oligarch” as offensive, prefers to see himself and his kind as “aristocrats.” This trilogy and the series about Gumilev’s daughter, Marusia, actually confirm his argument, albeit on different terms: the Gumilev family is special because its members carry a strain of alien DNA, either attracting the mysterious objects (in Marusia’s case) or endowing them with special abilities of which they themselves might not be aware (in Andrei Lvovich’s case).

Andrei Lvovich is both the culmination of his storied ancestry and, as befits a series titled Ethnogenesis, the founder of a new and prosperous future for both Russia and humanity. Marusia is only the first of several of his descendants to appear in the books, and the technology he pioneers in the Billionaire trilogy will make the interplanetary, Russian-centered civilization in the twenty-fifth century (in the Sleepwalker trilogy) possible. He is also one of the first of a new breed of rich Russians who develop, rather than exploit, their country.

In fact, Andrei Lvovich shares the popular contempt for the “classical oligarchs”:

As for the fact that the resources sold by [such] oligarchs to the West, along with the entire raw material infrastructure that allowed them to pump petrodollars from Tyumen and Yugorsk, belonged to them only by the whim of the liberal “fathers of privatization,” these people tried not to think about that. Just like their responsibilities to “this country,” as they liked to call Russia.⁷ Gumilev, who tried to develop an economy of innovation for the good of all Russia, found these resource oligarchs unpleasant.⁸

By contrast, we are told in the very beginning of the novel that, after the 1998 financial collapse, Gumilev “quickly understood that the implementing the technologies his center developed in Russia would be much more complicated and expensive than in the West, but that did not stop him.”

Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if Gumilev is meant to be an idealized version of … Konstantin Rykov: “While he was still in college, Gumilev patented an array of IT inventions and became the first businessman to make millions on the Russian Internet.” If that is the case, the mastermind behind the Ethnogenesis series should find the Billionaire trilogy to be an unending source of flattery. The handsome Gumilev attracts nearly every woman he meets (though he is primarily monogamous) and keeps in such good shape that he manages to have “not a single gram of excess fat” on his body.

As befits a self-made billionaire, Andrei Gumilev combines concern for his motherland with an ethos of self-reliance. How else can one explain devoting an entire chapter of the first book to a business subplot that goes absolutely nowhere? After making an attempt on Gumilev’s life, a young man named Krasnov is arrested and about to be sent away for life. But Gumilev intervenes: he must find out why the man hates him so much. It turns out that Krasnov’s father had a genetic engineering research start-up that Gumilev bought for much less than it should have been worth, ruining the father’s life and leaving the son embittered (“You’re just a common pirate! You stole from my father, you stole his business! What do you need genetic engineering for?”). Gumilev patiently listens to the youth’s rantings, then calls in the father, pressing the elder Krasnov to admit the truth: he had embezzled from his company and racked up enormous gambling debts and begged Gumilev to buy him out.

At this point, both father and son are humiliated. But Gumilev is merciful and arranges to have Krasnov imprisoned under relatively decent conditions, with the prospect of a job on his realize. He also offers a job to Gordeev, the young man who helped apprehend Krasnov after the botched assassination attempt. He sees that Gordeev is a decent but directionless person who could use a sense of purpose and doesn’t want to reward him with mere cash:

Handing out money is against my principles. But giving you a good, well-paying job, that I can do. By the way, you’re no match for the would-be killer; he’s a unique specialist who will get his diploma, work for a while—he’ll be priceless. While you were kicked out of school. And when your grandmother left you her apartment, you sold it to buy a motorcycle instead of, say, investing it. Or even just putting it in the bank. The moral? You live from day to day. Do you know how many people like that there are in Moscow?

Gumilev’s behavior with Krasnov père and Krasnov fils proves him to be a man who has not only earned his money honestly and in the best interests of his country but has also not allowed himself to see money as the immediate solution to all problems. The caricatured New Russian is trapped within a very simple equation of money and goods, and he cannot think his way out of it. But Gumilev knows better than to simply throw money at a problem; instead, he uses the social and cultural capital that money has made available to him in order to help others solve their own problems.⁹ It’s not just a matter of believing in self-reliance. Although money is one of our most pervasive vehicles for symbolic exchange, the New Russian’s understanding of it is confined to the realm of the Imaginary. Money means access to material wealth, while material wealth demonstrates the possession of money. For Gumilev, money functions on a level closer to the Symbolic: money provides not mere possessions but possibilities.

Gumilev is the rich Russian who can be admired because he deserves to be rich. In fact, the source of his wealth and power transcends the problem of origins that haunts the New Russian, who cannot reasonably claim to have come by his wealth by legitimate means. He prefers to think of himself as an aristocrat (with alien DNA), and his storied lineage would certainly support such a claim. But it is the ability his DNA grants him that turns wealth into his birthright.

Early in the first novel, the narrator tells us that Andrei Lvovich’s strategy of investing in technology and employing the best and the brightest paid off better than anyone else would have imagined. He also has a knack for picking stocks that will pay off: “When he was asked how he calculated which shares he should buy, Gumilev only smiled and gently touched his finger to his forehead. Some interpreted that gesture as a not-so-humble reminder of his outstanding mental capacity, but Andrei had in mind his intuition. Intuition had always been his strongest suit.”

This intuition has made him master of all he surveys. As we see later in the first novel, when he is looking down at Moscow from his office building: “The entire city was at his feet—and not just figuratively. Andrei Gumilev was the sort whom one called the master of his life, someone who has it made, a self-made man.”¹⁰

Which is it, then? Is he a self-made man who picked himself up by his bootstraps, an Ayn Rand hero in a post-Soviet young adult (YA) adventure novel, or an aristocrat who was born into the role? Ethnogenesis combines all three scenarios. In the concluding volume of the Billionaire trilogy, the former Federal Security Service (FSB) general and artifact hunter Ilya Sviridov explains to Andrei Lvovich that he does not need an artifact because “you yourself are an artifact… . There are people in this world who can do things without an artifact”:

Andrei Lvovich, how did you earn your billions? Did you simply go for a walk and find a wallet with a billion in it? Or maybe you got an inheritance from a rich aunt in Australia? … You earned your money, and earned it honestly. And since that’s almost impossible in our country, one has to assume that something helped you… . You have an unbelievably developed intuition. On a level that an ordinary person could never reach.

Andrei Lvovich’s superpower, then, is a way out of the (anti)utopian closed circle of post-Soviet capitalism. Just as the imperfect ideologues of the new (Soviet) world were not the ideal people to populate it, there was no place for creating a system of “fair” capitalism that was not based on corruption. The billionaire’s intuition skips over all the messiness normally associated with 1990s wealth creation by invoking a power that comes from beyond economics.

Such a move is entirely appropriate for the Ethnogenesis series as a whole. Lev Gumilev’s theory assumed a rising level of “passionarity” that sparked the creation of a new ethnos. Where did this energy come from? Gumilev’s response was pseudoscientific hand waving: it came from “the cosmos” (space). Rykov’s Ethnogenesis series fills in the gaps by making this alien energy literal and material, manifesting it in both the artifacts (which give their bearers superpowers) and the inborn abilities of those, like Andrei Lvovich, who bear alien DNA.

The Billionaire trilogy, then, is not just a reassuring just-so story about good rich Russians; it is a myth of origin about rich Russians not so much as an aristocracy (as Andrei Lvovich would prefer), but as either the passionaries who will reinvigorate the Russian ethnos or the beginning of a new ethnos of their own.

The right kind of rich Russians will be rich because they deserve it, and they will deserve it because they are special. Unlike Tuchkov’s neo-feudal New Russians, these rich Russians will use their wealth for the betterment of the breed. The rest of us just need to be wise enough to appreciate their wisdom.

Born This Way

Billionaire, and to a lesser extent Brigada, point the way out of the New Russian paradigm and into something more respectable.¹¹ Sasha Belyi needed to launder more than simply his money; he needed to clean up his backstory. Andrei Gumilev, essentially a superhero, embodies the culture’s wish-fulfillment fantasy regarding its superrich: neither he nor his past need laundering because he has always been deserving of wealth, and his road to riches, rather than strewn with corpses, is paved by his efforts on behalf of the country he calls home. Gone are the New Russian’s corruption, boorishness, and selfishness; in Andrei Lvovich’s own words, what we have instead is an aristocracy.

The lack of an aristocracy has always haunted the New Russian; indeed, it is one of the reasons he exists. Recall the paucity of rich Russian bachelors as love objects in the early romance novels; without inherited wealth, the rich Russian hero could not escape the taint of his money’s origins.

In her excellent sociological study, Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie, Elisabeth Schimpfössl interviews dozens of people who fit the category announced by her title. The book is a treasure trove of revelations about Russia’s new masters of the universe; Schimpfössl deserves credit for her thoroughness, envy for her access, and admiration for her ability to listen to what she is being told without erupting into class-based rage.

Schimpfössl is quite clear-eyed about the contradictions inherent in the rich Russians’ self-image. On one hand, many of them want to give credit entirely to their own effort and grit: “When rich Russians talk about the roots of their post-Soviet fortunes, they often cultivate an image of rags-to-riches billionaires who can lay claim to humble beginnings and to having made it without enjoying any advantages, neither the cultural and social advantages they got from their parents, nor the vital social networks they enjoyed during their university years. Instead, they often cherry-pick elements of their work biographies” (30).

On the other hand, it is these cherry-picked biographies that offer more interesting, if no less problematic, explanations for their success. One of the most intriguing parts of Schimpfössl’s book are when her rich Russian subjects offer lengthier explanations for their success and justification for their exceptional economic status. Some of her subjects like to stress that their parents and grandparents were members of the Soviet intelligentsia, giving themselves an aura of inherited culture and intellectual heft. This provides support for their efforts to be a more sophisticated wealthy class than the New Russians.

The intelligentsia connection can be considered primarily sociological, a reference to the social and cultural capital that enabled the rich Russians’ rise. But a number of Schimpfössl’s sources suggest that they owe their success to “good genes.” As one tells her, “Listen, I got genes from my parents. Of course, these genes allowed me to develop myself and all the qualities that led to success” (69). Another says, “This is thanks to God and thanks to genes” (71). Schimpfössl notes, “Genes and God were the most frequently cited reasons for success, and the people I spoke to sometimes identified themselves as ‘chosen ones’ ” (71).

This faith in the power of genes did not occur in isolation, according to Schimpfössl:

Although justifying success by reference to genes is in many ways ad hoc and improvised, it is not random. This kind of essentialist reasoning is strong in Russia, not because everybody is obsessed with genes, but because it offers a convenient justification for inequality. What is supposedly grounded in nature is difficult to argue against. In addition, secular ways of “naturalizing” the social and the historical have a strong tradition in Russia. This is despite the fact that Marx considered consciousness to be determined by being. (72)

For the rich Russians, it’s not just genes; it’s genealogy. In order to be legitimate, in order to be a true modern aristocracy, they need a respectable origin story. The New Russian’s story was anything but that: it was about money, access, criminal ties, and, yes, cleverness. It is not enough for the New Russian simply to transform himself into something more refined, because his origins do not change. Instead, the New Russian has to be transformed into a vanished missing link in the evolutionary chain of the post-Soviet bourgeoisie.