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liber-legis · 3 years ago

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From “Godfather of the Kremlin” by Paul Klebnikov

The Death of a Nation

The result of Gaidar’s hasty liberalization of prices meant that more than 100 million people who had achieved some kind of basic material prosperity under the Soviets were plunged into poverty. Schoolteachers, doctors, physicists, lab technicians, engineers, army officers, steelworkers, coalminers, carpenters, accountants, telephone receptionists, farmers—all had been wiped out. The crash liberalization of trade, meanwhile, allowed Russia’s natural-resource wealth to be looted by insiders. The Russian state was deprived of its biggest revenue source; consequently it had no money for pensions, worker’s salaries, law enforcement, the military, hospitals, education, and culture. Gaidar’s shock therapy set in motion a relentless decline—economic, social, demographic—that would last until the end of the Yeltsin era.

While the rest of the developed world continued to grow, the Russian economy was shrinking. In the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union had been the world’s third largest economy (after the United States and Japan). Naturally, the Russian economy alone would be significantly smaller than that of the former Soviet Union. But the real decline occurred after the Soviet Union broke up. From the beginning of Gaidar’s shock therapy, Russia’s gross domestic product shrank by approximately 50 percent in just four years. Eventually, Russia would sink below the level of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. ON a per capita basis, Russia would become poorer than Peru. Decades of technological achievement were lost. Renowned scientific institutions fell apart. The Russian cultural establishment disintegrated. And the country’s assets were sold off.

Anyone who traveled to Russia in the early Yeltsin years was treated to the spectacle of ordinary Russian citizens trying to get by. Outside the ramshackle, hollow concrete structures that were the Soviet Union’s supermarkets, new private bazaars formed, which included not just brawn babushkas selling vegetables, but also little huts offering bad quality imported goods: CD’s of disco music, fake Nikes, Marlboros, cans of Vietnamese pork. These bazaars sprawled out in the mud and the garbage at subway stations, along the big avenues, in populated areas.

On Stoleshnikov Lane, near the legendary Moscow Art Theater, around the corner from the Bolshoi Theatre, elderly men and women gathered daily and formed two parallel lines along what de fact had become a pedestrian street. Anyone who ran the gauntlet of these pensioners, neatly dressed in their tattered clothing, was besieged by silent pleas to buy a teakettle, a pair of knitted stockings, three wineglasses, a secondhand sweater, a used pair of leather shoes. Meanwhile, beautiful antique volumes began piling up in the bookstores, selling for ridiculously low prices—Moscow’s intellectuals were selling their libraries. In the flea markets outside the city, you could buy the highest Soviet battle decorations, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor: the old veterans of World War II were selling their medals to buy a few scraps for the dinner table.

With Russia in a slump far worse than the Great Depression, people tapped an old survival instinct. Amid rumors of crop failure and impending food shortages, millions of city dwellers traveled to the countryside to plant cabbages and potatoes in their garden plots. The arable land just outside Moscow was swarming with people digging and planting. It was back to medieval agriculture. Chubais and Gaidar were proud of the fact that mass starvation had been avoided. But it was avoided not because prices had been liberalized, but because the Russian people had returned to the countryside. It was with a shovel and sack of seed potatoes that Russians escaped starvation in 1992 and 1993.

Any doubts about the first years of the Yeltsin Era’s being a disaster were dispelled by the demographic statistics. These numbers, even in their most general form, suggested a catastrophe without precedent in modern history—the only parallel was with countries destroyed by war, genocide, or famine.

Between 1990 and 1994, male mortality rates rose 53 percent, female mortality rates 27 percent. Male life expectancy plunged from an already low level of sixty-four years in 1990 to fifty-eight in 1994; men in Egypt, Indonesia, or Paraguay could now expect longer lives than men in Russia. In the same brief period, female life expectancy fell from seventy-four to seventy-one. The world had seldom seen such a decline in peacetime.

Each month thousands of Russians were dying prematurely. Such a drop in life expectancy, labeled “excess deaths”, has always been the standard algorithm in demographer’s calculations of the death toll of disasters—whether Stalin’s collectivization in the 1930’s, Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia in the 1970’s, or the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980’s. American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimated the number of “excess deaths” in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was as high as three million. By contrast, Eberstadt observed, Russia’s losses in World War I were 1.7 million deaths.

Many premature deaths occurred among the elderly—the babushkas, church ladies, and old men—people who had seen their life savings disappear in the great inflation of 1992, who had seen their pension checks turn worthless, who did not have families to support them, and who simply could not scrape together enough money for a nutritious diet or medicine. The stress of finding themselves in the ferocious unknown world that emerged after Communism was also a major (though unquantifiable) factor in killing off the elderly. It was a frightening experience for them—coming in the twilight of their lives, when they were weak and slow—the feeling of seeing the world turn upside down, the streets become unfamiliar, all the comforting supports of life swept away. Many hung on for a while, wandering around town; the men became drunks sprawled in the icy gutter; the women became bone-thin ladies begging it the entrance of churches; then they died. The younger generation had turned its back on its elders and allowed them to perish.

A more visible factor in the rise in mortality was the disintegration of Russia’s public health system. Hospitals were suddenly unsanitary, underfunded, underequipped, bereft of medicine. Suddenly Russia was suffering outbreaks of diseases associated with the most impoverished regions of the Third World: diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and typhoid.

Tuberculosis, the great killer of the Industrial Revolution, was largely wiped out in the twentieth century with the advent of antibiotics and better public hygiene. But in the 1990’s, Russia found itself with hundreds of thousands of active TB cases and even more dormant cases. The most worrying aspect of this phenomenon was the appearance of drug-resistant TB—a highly infectious strain of the bacterium resistant to any known antibiotic. The breeding ground of this scourge was the prison system—active TB afflicted up to 10 percent of Russia’s huge prison population. Under conditions of overcrowded cells and minimal medical treatment, the disease spread rapidly and was transmitted further into the general population. Each year some 300,000 people (mostly young men) entered the prison system, while a slightly smaller number of convicts were released upon the completion of their term. According to two researchers studying Russia’s problem, Dr. Alexander Goldfarb of New York’s Public Health Research Institute and Mercedes Becerra of the Harvard Medical School, Russia’s prisons released 30,000 cases of active TB into society, and 300,000 carriers of the dormant bacterium every year. If nothing was done to address the problem, Goldfarb declared, the number of TB cases would continue to double every year, reaching 16 million by 2005 (11 percent of the population).

If the living conditions were appalling for the one million young men in Russia’s prisons, they were hardly any better for the 1.5 million in the armed forces. Every year, 2,000 to 3,000 young conscripts perished—either by suicide, murder, accident, or hazing incidents. (The precise number of these kinds of deaths was not released by the army.)

The Yeltsin era witnessed an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases. Between 1990 and 1996, new syphilis cases identified every year skyrocketed from 7,900 to 388,200. AIDS was virtually unknown in Russia in the years before Communism fell. Since then, fed by burgeoning intravenous drug use and rampant, unprotected sex, AIDS spread with geometric rapidity through the Russian population. The government had no idea of the precise number of people afflicted, but based on the growth of visible AIDS cases, Dr. Vadim Pokrovsky, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, estimated that Russia would have 10 million people infected by 2005 (almost all between 15 and 29).

A significant portion of the increase in mortality rates in Russia was due to lifestyle choices: an unhealthy diet, heavy smoking, and perhaps the highest rate of alcohol consumption in the world. Drug addiction took an increasing toll. Initially, post-Communist Russia had served only as a transshipment point for opium and heroin form Southeast Asia or Central Asia to the West. Soon the drugs began to appear in Russia itself. By 1997, Russia’s domestic market had ballooned into one of the largest narcotics markets in the world. According to official estimates, Russia had 2 million to 5 million drug addicts (3 percent of the population). These were mostly young men and women.

For the older generation, the poison of choice was alcohol. It was impossible to tell just how much alcohol was consumed in Russia, since so much of the vodka was produced in bootleg distilleries. One 1993 survey found that more than 80 percent of Russian men were drinkers and that their average consumption was more than half a liter of alcohol per day. In 1996, more than 35,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning, compared to several hundred such deaths the same year in the United States.

Heavy drinking and crime contributed to a spectacular rise in violent and accidental deaths—the single fastest-growing “cause of death” category. Between 1992 and 1997, 229,000 Russians committed suicide. 159,000 died of poisoning while consuming cheap vodka, 67,000 drowned (usually the result of drunkenness), and 169,000 were murdered.

While Russians were dying in increasing numbers, fewer children were being born. In the late 1990’s, there were 3 million state-funded abortions each year—nearly three times the number of live births. Abortions had long been used by Soviet women as the primary method of birth control. The average Russian woman had three or four abortions: many women had ten or more. As a result of these multiple abortions, as well as drug addiction, one third of Russian adults were estimated to be infertile by the late 1990’s.

The rapid decline in births, combined with an even faster growth in mortality rates, produced a relentless decline in Russia’s population. In 1992, the Russian population was 148.3 million. By 1999, the population had fallen by 2.7 million people. If it had not been for the immigrants coming into Russia from the even more desperate situation in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, the Russian population would have shrunk by nearly 6 million between 1992 and 1999. These figures did not include the millions of Russians (mostly the healthier, more enterprising members of the younger generation) who had emigrated to Europe or North America unofficially.

The most pitiful victims of Russia’s social and economic decline were the children. In 1992, 1.6 million children were born in Russia; that same year, 67,286 children (4 percent of all births) were abandoned by there parents. By 1997, the breakdown in parenting had grown to catastrophic levels. That year, 1.3 million children were born, but 113,000 children (equivalent to 9 percent of all newborns) were abandoned. Russia had no real program of adoption or foster care, so most of these children ended up on the street. According to some Western aid agencies, there were more than 1 million abandoned children wandering around Russia’s cities by the end of the 1990’s. The rest ended up in the vast orphanage network. Here they were left in dark, overcrowded wards, haunted by malnutrition, insufficient medical care, and routine abuse by the staff and older orphans. At least 30,000 Russian orphans were confined to psychoneurological internaty for “incurable children”; an easily reversible speech defect such as a cleft palate was enough to get a child classified as “imbecile’ and locked up in an institution where he or she would be essentially left to die. It didn’t need to be this way—95 percent of Russia’s orphans still had a living parent.

When I first went to Togliatti to interview the directors of Avotaz, I decided to take the train to Moscow. The journey would last twenty-four hours, but I usually liked traveling by train in Russia—rumbling through the countryside in those 1930’s -era railcars was one of the best ways to meet people.

In the carriage of my Togliatti train was a mother with an ailing seven-year old child. It was hot. The boy was stripped to his underwear. He was covered with sores—he had a very wiry, blistered little body. His mother was evidently taking him home after an unsuccessful attempt to get him treated for some skin disease. The boy was in agony. He kept wanting to scratch himself. He was crying. His mother applied plasters to the worst of the sores. “Mama...Mama...it hurts,” he called out.

The boy’s suffering continued throughout the night, his cries echoing through the darkened railroad carriage. The next morning the passengers seemed more silent and subdued than usual; there was a palpable sense of people trying to harden themselves against the child’s suffering. The boy finally fell asleep in midmorning. I saw the mother sitting in the corridor alone, gazing blankly at the passing Russian landscape.

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seiya234 · 4 years ago

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The man on the porch was whittling; he wasn’t entirely sure what this was going to be yet, but he was getting a duck call feeling from the wood. It would be a good gift for Lily since she had gotten into bird watching recently and-

There was a disturbance in the air.

There was a disturbance in the air, and the man gently laid down wood and knife in time to see another man appear out of the mists, walking determinedly until he came to a standstill in front of the porch.

They stared at each other for a long moment, then the man on the porch finally said, “There are rules against visits like these.”

The other man, dressed in a bespoke suit, shrugged. “To people like....like us, the rules don’t matter.”

The man on the porch-let’s call him the Old Man, for brevity’s sake, though he is wearing the face he was born with- nodded. “Perhaps.” The Old Man examined the man in the suit for a second longer, then sighed.

“Well, you’re here now. Do you want anything to drink?”

“Any loose souls?-“ At the look on the Old Man’s face, the man in the suit-call him Alcor call him the Dreambender but perhaps in this context call him the Young One- held up his hands. “Kidding. I’ll take a Sprite.”

There was a minute or two of rustling as things got settled-the porch swing lengthening to accommodate two, a Sprite appearing from the ether, the delicate dance of one demon encroaching upon another’s territory- before the two finally settled. The Old Man turned back to his whittling, while the Young One looked awkwardly around.

(henry knew dipper; it would take only ninety seconds for him to get awkward and sweaty and-)

“This isn’t the Shack,” the Young One said indignantly.

“It’s not,” the Old Man agreed.

“What... what happened to the Shack?” the Young Man asked, with a quiver in his voice. The Old Man for a second thought uncharitably about what on earth the Young Man expected; wasn’t the whole point of this, frankly very dangerous, exercise to see how the other demon lived?

(but this was dipper and that hurt, that loneliness in his voice was something that henry himself felt every day so)

“It’s still in Soos’s family. I think they run it as some combination general store and supernatural research library now.”

The Young Man took a slurp of his Sprite, and the Old Man tried not to wince at the noise. “So what’s this place supposed to be then?”

The Old Man felt a smile creep on his face, even after all this time.

“It’s the Hut.”

(perhaps if they got their bearings straight, henry would take dipper inside, show him on a tour. start with the stan-o-war ii, dry docked on land after stan’s accident, and how it formed the heart of the hut. the modern kitchen he insisted on and the less modern woodstove that was mabel’s desire. mismatched wood colors through the house from all the leftovers uncle dan got from the mill and the floor mosaics that mabel herself inlaid over the course of several years. the triplets’ rooms, rooms he had grown himself, from one nursery to three separate rooms, powers he still didn’t understand flowing out of him, willing wood to grow and shape to cover and protect the ones he loved and-)

The Young Man winced. “The.... Hut.”

The Old Man’s blood chilled, and he saw the Young Man shiver. “Yes, the Hut. It was your sister’s idea.”

Mentioning Her quickly quieted the other demon, just like the Old Man intended, and if his stomach felt queasy from playing such a dirty trick, well.

They sat in silence for another few minutes, and just when the Old Man was about to politely ask his guest to leave, the Young Man said, “You... you know, the Shack has legs now.”

“Like Baba Yaga’s hut in fairy tales?”

The Young Man grinned. “Yup. Tried to tell them once that that was a little on the nose, but then the Shack got mad at me and hid from me for several months after that.”

“Huh.”

(the hut had never gained that kind of life, he had brought it entirely into the mindscape after willow’s great-granddaughter had died, and all her cousins were already settled and he had felt his family spreading ever farther, growing ever larger, and it was wonderful and beautiful but he needed his ground, his earth, their home...the hut was his. it would always remain his.)

The Young Man finished his soda, and made to eat his can when-

“Is that Gompers?”

“Yup.”

“Like, actually Gompers? Flesh and blood Gompers and not like, one of your Nightmares?”

The Old Man nodded. “Not sure how he gets in here.”

The Young Man snorted. “Gompers does what Gompers wants.” Then he waved his hand, and was immediately discomfited when one did not appear at his hand.

“You have to ask,” the Old Man chided slightly, before creating another Sprite for his fellow demon.

They drank their drinks.

They watched Gompers eat the Sprite can, stare off into an unknown dimension, and blip away from the lawn.

They took another drink.

“So what actually brings you here?” the Old Man finally asked. “And please, no malarkey about doing it because you could, or something like that-”

“-that is part of it-”

“-but not all of it.” The Old Man sat back in his rocker, and waited.

(he could outwait dipper. he had always been able to outwait dipper.)

The Young Man rolled his second Sprite can between his hands.

“You know there’s universes? Where Mabel got turned instead of us? Or Stan?”

The Old Man nodded. “Of course there are. Just like there are ones where Pacifica got turned, or Soos, or Waddles or.... well. That’s the point of the multiverse isn’t it? Infinite possibilities. Such as-” He waved a hand to indicate the both of them sitting there.

The other demon snorted. “Truth.” Then he became solemn again.

“I met a demon Mabel once. Forgot about her for awhile but then I ran into a gift she had left me and it got me thinking.”

There was an appreciative silence for a second as Gompers blipped back into the Old Man’s Mindscape with a six pack of beer for the Old Man, before the other one went on.

“She had changed so much...and I... I don’t feel like I have. I’m old, Henry, so fucking old. And yet I feel like I haven’t learned anything.”

The Young Man stopped but the other demon could fill in the blanks.

“You worry that you’re still thirteen, deep down inside.”

The Young Man gave him such a dirty look (so like acacia) that for a second the Old Man almost laughed but then he caught himself. Then the Young Man sighed.

“Yeah, that’s... that’s about it.”

The Old Man sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy to say or hear.

“I’m afraid... You’re right. You always will be. There will forever be a part of you who died when you were thirteen. Your power will forever grow because part of you is frozen in that part of life where all you were doing was growing. A part of you will always be petulant, temperamental, stuck on your sister and your loved ones at thirteen-”

The Young One, who had been increasingly gritting his teeth, finally interrupted.

“And the poìn̶t of ̷t̡hi̢s i͜s̵??”

“You didn’t let me finish. Look, think about Gompers-”

“Oh cool, now you’re comparing me to the goat, fucking fantastic.”

The Old Man took a deep breath. This was a Young One in front of him after all.

“Gompers is still the same. He never seems to age, he still enjoys hanging out in my yard... but he’s different as well. He’s learned new things-”

“-like the beer trick-”

“-and by extension teleportation. In my dimension at least there’s a whole scholarly literature dedicated to him by now. They call him ‘The Wandering Goat,’ and there’s a whole society dedicated to spotting him in the wild.”

The Old Man unclenched his shoulders, leaned back into his chair.

“So yes, a part of you is forever thirteen. But there’s also so much more to you than that, that is constantly changing and growing. And that’s a wonderful thing. Focus on that instead.”

The Young One was quiet for a long minute. The Old Man took another sip of his beer, satisfied, glad he could reach out to his fellow demon

(his brother his brother his brother)

and help in some way.

“Wonderful?”

Maybe not.

“W͝o̜̰n͈̳ḍ̣̻e̴̜̺̤r̗̜͔̪̼̬͍f̙͍̩̮̺͝ù̘̭͍ḷ͙͎̜͇̱̮?̤͉̼̟̜̳”

“Dipper-”

“How the f̸̶̧̧͜u̶̧c̷̷͟͠k̶̛ is this supposed to be ẃon̡d͢e͡r̶̶͠f͟u̶͡l̡?”

Okay. The Old Man could have worded that better.

“Okay, maybe not wonderful but-”

The Young One threw his soda out into the yard, and Gompers, after shooting him a dirty look, wandered over to go eat the can.

“So there’s no hope for me?”

“I didn’t say that-”

“I just have to, have to, have to accept this?!”

“Please don’t put words in my mouth.”

The Young One whirled on the Old Man.

“And don’t tell me how to feel!”

“I wasn’t.”

“I came here because I thought you would understand-”

“You came here because you wanted a concrete answer and now you’re upset that you didn’t get one.”

The Young One got up. Darkness and golden lines flooded his being, eyes began to open up where eyes did not belong, and from his back unfurled two terrible wings of ebon night.

“Y͠ou̢ da͟r̶e-”

In response, the Old Man grabbed the Young One by the scruff of his neck, and tossed him off of his porch.

The Young One went ass over teakettle, rolling in a few somersaults before coming to a halt in front of the totem pole. He quickly stood up, snarling, not even bothering to dust himself off.

Before the Young One could speak, the Old Man said calmly, “I am sorry what I. said upset you, but that doesn’t excuse rude behavior. If you want to prove to me you are your actual age, please act like it.”

The Young One looked at him for a second, ichor spilling from his eyes and mouth, before saying, “You’re not him.”

“No. I am a version of him but I am not your Henry, no.”

“Good. Then-” the Young One lifted a hand, claws lengthening- “I don’t h͘ave t̵o̸ ͞fe̸e͞l͢ ̧ba͢d ab͏o͢ut̨ ̷t͝his͞.”

“Are... are you serious? Is this really the course of action you’re choosing to ta-”

In response The Young One turned around and toppled over an apple tree and that was enough.

The Young One watched as the Old Man stood up. A second ago he was wearing an old Oregon State sweatshirt, and oil stained jeans with work boots. Now however...

Now he was all in black, from the pressed slacks, to his long coat, even his button up shirt....the only two things that stood out were the stark white of his preacher’s collar peaking out from his chest and his feet, now pale and bare.

There were no wings, no oddly colored sclera, not even the expected antlers- nothing to outwardly suggest that the Old Man was anything but a normal man.

But that was because he didn’t need it.

The Old Man took one step off the porch. His bare foot touched the ground and the Young Man instantly fell over onto his face.

Another step and the Young One felt his heart (his heart?!) stutter in his chest and he knew had he been mortal, it would have simply stopped beating, severing soul from body. The Young One pushed himself up and

Another step sent his arms out from under him and back face down in the dirt, while some invisible force

(it wasn’t raw power it was the dread you heard when the front door opened and you could smell alcohol and you knew Dad was going to come in your room any second with an excuse ready to go and you just wanted to sleep but there! the door cracked-)

pressed down on him.

Another step and the Young One felt the power begin to drain from him, flowing from his veins into the thirsty earth below him, feeding the grass and the trees, the worms and the nightmares, wrapping tendrils around the bones of all those who died before in the great circle of life.

Yet another step, and the Young One felt... he felt...

(lowering henry’s casket into the ground with the kids, lowering mabel’s casket into the ground with the kids, then willow’s then hank’s then it was acacia and he was alone he was all alone he was all alone he was all alone h̶e ̀w̛a̷s ̸a҉l͘l a͡l͏o͞ne͘ ͘HE̛ ̨WA͜S͏ AL̵L͘ ĄL̨ON͢E ͡-)

He felt tears pooling around his face. And a cold hand on his shoulder.

The Young One looked up, and saw into the face of Death.

(the man in black, he who walks behind, the kindly one, judgement, sedna, the demon with no real name because he didn’t need one, he was elemental he was relentless, he was unceasing, he was cold and he was death-)

Then the hand was grabbing his own hand, was pulling him up and it was just

(henry)

the Old Man again, gently brushing the Young One off.

“I am sorry for losing my temper with you. I know better than that,” the Old Man said as he led the Young Man back to the porch.

An olive branch. “Well, I did provoke you,” the Young One responded.

“I probably could have worded my advice better,” the Old Man said, handing the other demon a Sprite.

“And I could have taken my head out of my ass for a minute and actually listened to you.” The Young One proffered his can towards the Old Man. “Truce?”

The Old Man smiled. “Truce.”

They stood in awkward silence for a second before the Old Man asked, “Would you like to come inside? You can’t stay here for very long, we know that but... I could perhaps maybe make some time.”

The Young One smiled.

“I would love that.”

#transcendence au #seiya writes!

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