Slouching Toward Chaos : Economic Reform Has Deepened Divisions in the Russian Republic, Breathing New Life Into Anti-Semitism and Fascism

It takes more than a thick wad of rubles, although a thick wad is necessary, to get into the Atlant Health Club. Only a privileged few Muscovites know where it is, hidden away behind the grimy, anonymous facade of an old apartment building on Volokholamskoye Shosse, a few kilometers northwest of the Kremlin. They push through scuffed, wooden doors with the glass long since broken out and grope up a dark, stone staircase. For a minute or two, their nostrils fill with the heavy aroma of sweat, urine and old cabbage that permeates Moscow’s stairwells. Then they reach the glow of a light bulb and find a new, solid door, recently painted, and a small white sign with red letters that spell “Atlant.” They ring a buzzer. A tall, wiry young man opens the door warily. If he recognizes and admits them, they enter a world quite unimaginably lavish by the standards of ordinary Russians who, not far away, are standing in line for bread.

Deep maroon carpets cover the walls of Atlant’s vestibule, and an interior staircase is paneled in marble. There are a spacious sauna, lined in birch, and a massage room with a masseur and a masseuse. In the cozy kitchen and dining room, proprietor Gennady Belistov makes sure that his clients can choose from the best that is available in Moscow, starting with imported liquors and wine and ending, on some nights, with fresh lobster. “I can get it because I’m smart and I have good contacts,” Belistov said one night recently. A caricature of Belistov hanging on the kitchen wall elaborates on those contacts. Its caption reads, “The Mafia is immortal.”

Every Monday night, Pyotr Maskov and a few of his partners from their new brokerage firm, Alliance, reserve the premises and unwind at Atlant. It costs a basic 1,000 rubles to rent the place (the equivalent of about $20, or twice the monthly wage of the average Muscovite), plus whatever Belistov charges for the food and drink he puts on the table. The price is steep, but business is good for both men. Atlant, Belistov says, is booked solid by the new Russian business elite through the end of the year. He is expanding, adding several new rooms downstairs, including a workout room, a small bar and a couple of bedrooms where clients and their guests can retire for a bit of rest.

Maskov, Atlant and the bread lines outside the unmarked entrance are what economic reform and free enterprise have brought, thus far, to Russia. And the yawning gap between the men in Atlant and the people outside, so reminiscent of a vignette of the pre-revolutionary rich and poor from “Doctor Zhivago,” is just one of the old social cleavages that have emerged, like mammoths preserved in Siberian frost, to confront post-communist Russia with some of the same problems that led to revolution in pre-communist times.

In the media, in political forums and on the street, there are ominous rumblings of anti-Semitism, isolationism, nationalism, even fascism. Angry traditionalists and unrepentant communists are forming alliances on the far right, waiting confidently for the failure of Boris Yeltsin’s “Westernizing” economic reforms and the breakdown of his new commonwealth. The opposing Russian democrats, once united against communism, are splintering. And the post-communist euphoria in Moscow is giving way to gloomy foreboding, to fears of chaos and the extremist politics and leaders it breeds.

Pyotr Maskov’s journey to Atlant began in the front seat of a Russian taxi, he said recently in his office. He is a tall, thin man with a neatly razored mustache and sharp cheekbones. He wore a glen-plaid suit, a black shirt with a Benetton logo and a paisley tie. His secretary brought in a hot lunch of soup and beef, which he ate as he talked.

“By education, I’m an artist,” he said. “I completed the graphic arts course at an institute here during the Brezhnev times. But I went to work as a taxi driver, because an artist’s pay was very low and because, in order to get commissions or participate in certain programs, I would have had to compromise. For instance, I might have had to go to Komsomol (the youth branch of the Communist Party) headquarters and do their portraits. In my taxi, I was relatively free.” He was also free to work the black market.

“I dealt in whatever was in short supply--shortwave radio and video equipment, clothes, shoes,” he said. “It was called speculation, but I don’t think it was shameful. I was always drawn to commerce.” He made a point, he said, of never breaking his word on a deal and of never gouging his customers, keeping his profit margins modest. “You can’t take maximum advantage of our shortages. If you do, you lose customers in the future. You have to be sensible, and I was.”

Even then, in the mid-1970s, there was a symbiotic relationship between the black market and the Communist Party elite, or nomenklatura . The normal source for the items Maskov traded was travelers who returned from abroad, often bringing with them as many VCRs and personal computers as Aeroflot would let them carry. In those days, travel abroad required the approval of the party, and the nomenklatura were disproportionately represented in the customs queue at the airport. Taxi drivers such as Maskov helped them turn a quick, discreet profit on their trips before they even got home.

“When perestroika came, and the opportunity to work openly in business appeared, I began doing what I’m doing now,” Maskov went on. He and some friends formed a cooperative to buy and sell goods. They focused on calculators and computers, offering repairs and service. They bought computers, installed Russian programming and sold them. But with each year of perestroika , the more conservative elements of the party and government bureaucracies tried a little harder to squeeze the private sector out of business, either by raising taxes or putting certain activities off-limits. By 1989, Maskov recalled, the tax rates had become virtually confiscatory.

Then the government, under Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, offered a new deal. Private businesses could, if they affiliated with a new kind of organization called a Youth Creativity Center, get advantageous tax rates and, as Maskov put it, “engage in any kind of business that wasn’t illegal.” Among the sponsors of such centers was the Komsomol. Maskov’s cooperative joined a center called Evrika, under Komsomol sponsorship. The affiliation existed only on paper; the cooperative paid Evrika a percentage of its profits. But, Maskov said, he assumes that other businesses got more closely involved with the Komsomol, and that centers such as Evrika were a way for the party to invest some of its money in the private sector.

In 1990, the rules changed again, and Maskov changed with them. The old economic system had depended on the State Planning Committee (GOSPLAN) and the State Committee on Supply (GOSSNAB) to tell factories what to produce and to make sure they got the raw materials they needed. The new rules emasculated those agencies; they gave enterprises the freedom to sell at least some of what they produced on the open market, and left them the responsibility of finding their own suppliers and buyers. There was an obvious need for intermediaries. A Moscow businessman named Konstantin Borovoy responded by organizing a Russian commodities exchange that operates, under a brooding bust of Lenin, in a drafty old Moscow building that used to belong to the Soviet postal service. Maskov and his partners bought a share in the new exchange for 100,000 rubles.

The exchange is the old taxi-driver’s business, writ large and legal. A state textile enterprise, Maskov explained, might produce more cloth than the state can commandeer with its reduced ability to control factory output. It contacts Alliance to find a buyer willing to pay more than the state price of six or seven rubles per meter. Alliance finds a private entrepreneur, working in a factory that he has leased from the state, willing to pay about twice as much: 120,000 rubles for 10,000 meters. The deal is struck, and Alliance pockets a 2.5% commission, or 3,000 rubles. After one year, Maskov said, Alliance has a monthly turnover of 30 million rubles, from which it extracts commissions of 2% to 6%, depending on the deal. Its original 100,000-ruble stake in the exchange is now worth 8.5-million rubles, which explains why Alliance can afford a regular night out at Atlant.

But Alliance’s deals do little or nothing for the average Russian, who came to the perestroika era with neither black market experience nor connections to the nomenklatura. The textile factory in Maskov’s example is producing the same cloth that it produced under the old system, and even the shirt-making cooperative is turning out shirts that the old system might have produced. The difference is that the price is higher and the broker gets wealthy. Economic reform in Russia has, in effect, produced a lot of Michael Milkens but no Bill Gateses.

Nor is the average Russian’s lot going to improve as reforms continue. Russian President Yeltsin has promised to let most prices rise to market levels, which touched off panic buying and rationing in Moscow in November and December. At the Moscow city labor office recently, deputy director Vladimir Ivkin ticked off the impending consequences of the reforms. “With central ministries being shut down, we expect there’ll be a big army of ex-clerks and so on let go--about 140,000 people,” he said. “From factories that were in military production but are converting to civilian production or shutting down, we expect 200,000 workers to be laid off. Then, because of price increases and privatization, we expect another 100,000 layoffs. Add in returning officers and soldiers demobilized from the army, and altogether you have about 400,000 people likely to become unemployed this winter.” The city is prepared to pay an unemployment benefit of 260 rubles per month--about $5, or half the average Muscovite income. While rents are still very low, with some tenants now buying their apartments from the city for a nominal fee, food and consumer-goods prices are rising to market levels--a five- or six-fold increase for previously subsidized items such as bread.

Not since Stalin’s time has Russia had any officially recognized unemployment nor allowed prices for staples to rise beyond the reach of the average worker. No one in Moscow knows what the result will be, but many people are worried. Ludmilla Aniskovets runs a charity kitchen in a neighborhood about a mile from Atlant, sponsored by the Russian Christian Democratic Union and supported in part by donations from Christian Democrats in Western Europe. She feeds about 100 people a day, many of them the early casualties of reform--old people whose pensions have been outstripped by inflation. Some of them are homeless. Her patrons have the sad, wrinkled, vaguely puzzled faces of people who thought, when they began their working lives, that they were building a proud society of abundance for all and who still cannot quite understand how they came, at the end of those lives, to be sitting at dingy brown tables, slurping watery soup and borscht.

“Our people here for the most part were Yeltsin supporters,” Aniskovets said recently. Implied in that statement was the idea that they wanted a democratic, Western-oriented Russia, because those were the ideas Yeltsin stood for in his June, 1991, presidential campaign. “But if they get poorer and more desperate, they will be like a cornered bear. When a bear is cornered, he rears up on his hind legs and lashes out.” All they may need, she said, is an ideology and a leader to direct their anger.

On a warm, early September afternoon outside the Moscow headquarters of the Soviet Writers’ Union, a woman with stringy gray hair stood selling copies of a newspaper called Fatherland to the men of letters arriving for a meeting inside. The newspaper, organ of a Russian nationalist organization in what was then called Leningrad, featured a front-page cartoon of two men standing arm-in-arm in front of the seat of the Leningrad government. One of them, obese and ugly, with thick, painted lips and fingernails, carried a paper that said, “Charter of the Society of Homosexuals, St. Petersburg, 1991.” His friend, who had the hooked nose, dark beard and generally bestial features that certain Russian caricaturists use to describe Jews, carried a paper indicating that he was a deputy to the Leningrad city government, duly registered by the city’s mayor, Anatoly I. Sobchak. The headline next to them read: “Authorized to Defend Sexual Minorities.”

The accompanying story amplified the theme. “With the arrival in power of the democrats,” it said, “our life is getting worse and worse. The prices of food products are growing unthinkably. The one thing that isn’t growing is wages. More and more often, having seen the price tag in the window of a cooperative store, we walk on by, accompanied by the sneering look of the greasy, non-Russian businessman. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

“Our city is like a sick man, whose body is covered with ulcers and boils. There are many of them, but one of them in particular disfigures the face of the city.

“This sore is the Leningrad City Council. Since 1917, our city has not known such a widespread representation of criminals, sexual deviates of all colors, and Jews in the organs of power. . . .”

Inside the building’s wood-paneled auditorium, none of the 500 or so gray-haired, paunchy Russian writers gathered for their meeting would have put things so crudely. “This is unacceptable,” said one of their leaders, Gennady Gusev, when he saw the newspaper caricature. “On the other hand, there is a Jewish problem, a problem of their role in our development.” This was a shorthand reference to the notion, put forward by some Russian nationalist writers but virtually no other students of the subject, that the crimes and excesses of Bolshevism were due to Jewish influence in the Communist Party. That theme, however, was something the writers inside this auditorium would take up another day. They had assembled not to discuss the plight of the nation but to reclaim control of the power and perquisites of the union, a control they had almost lost in the immediate aftermath of the August coup.

The wave of reform launched by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 swept the old Stalinists out of the trade unions representing filmmakers, composers, artists and the like. But it broke against the rock of Russian nationalism when it came to the Writers’ Union, an organization that controls newspapers, a publishing house, country dacha s, vacation resorts and a “literary fund” that can support members who haven’t sold anything in a while. There were, of course, many Russian writers who greeted the advent of glasnost with great joy. But there were, perhaps, an equal number who viewed it quite dubiously, as an attempt to impose alien, Western values on Russia. These skeptics retained control of the Russian branch of the union and its newspaper and magazines. They blocked reform in the national union organization.

This so frustrated the reformers that they formed an insurgent group, called Aprel, in spring of this year. “The main difference between us and them,” said one of Aprel’s founders, Valentin Oskotsky, “is our democratic orientation, by which I mean we are against political dictatorship, against great power, chauvinistic tendencies, and for national self-determination of large and small nations.”

As the August coup unfolded, Aprel quickly issued a statement condemning the conspirators. The board of directors of the Writers’ Union, unable to decide whether to oppose the coup or not, said nothing. As the tanks left town, Aprel members, led by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, stormed into the mansion that houses the writers’ union and took over, electing a new secretariat. A week later, they held a rump meeting of the union’s board of directors and elected themselves the new management, declaring that the old union leaders had forfeited their positions by failing to oppose the coup.

A few days after that, at the meeting where Fatherland sold its newspapers, the nationalists struck back, passing a resolution invalidating the “illegal” actions taken by Aprel, and casting themselves, rather happily, as the aggrieved victims of an undemocratic putsch. By mid-November, a formal schism had taken place, with the old Aprel group constituting itself as the new Union of Russian Writers, and the conservative nationalists still in control of the old Russian branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Unlike the Communist Party, outlawed by Yeltsin, the nationalist writers came through the debacle of the August coup unscathed.

All of this might be dismissed as the parlor politics of a bunch of scribblers if it did not reflect a division that has helped govern the course of Russia for nearly 300 years, ever since Peter the Great returned from a trip to Holland determined to introduce Western ways to his Asiatic empire. He began the process by personally, brutally, shaving the long beards off the chins of his protesting noblemen. In the 19th Century, the two clashing schools of thought divided formally enough to receive names. Slavophiles looked inward to find Russia’s strength and believed in preserving the ancient traditions of religious orthodoxy, rural life and a strong, autocratic state. Westernizers looked outward, to Europe, wishing to import European technology, the latest economic models and democratic politics. The differences were submerged to a great degree under the enforced conformity of the communist era. Now they have re-emerged more clearly than ever before.

The conservative Russian nationalists of the post-communist era may differ on important issues. Some, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, espouse the centrality of traditional Russian spirituality and faith; others are atheists. Some, such as Col. Viktor Alksnis, a leader of the union faction in the old Supreme Soviet, advocate a market economy, albeit a market economy achieved at the command of a Chilean-style authoritarian government; others favor a Stalinist, collectivized, command economy. Nearly all conservative Russian nationalists, however, bemoan the nation’s present financial dependence on the West and the penetration of rock music and American films into Russian culture. Nearly all of them believe in the importance of a strong, perhaps autocratic, central government able to maintain a formidable army and protect the interests of Russians living in what were, until recently, peripheral Soviet republics.

The conservative nationalists published what amounted to a manifesto in late July, written by Alexander Prokhanov, one of the leaders of the Russian branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and signed by several men who, a month later, took part in the coup attempt. “An enormous and unprecedented misfortune has occurred,” it began. “Our Homeland, our country, and our great state, given to us for safekeeping by history, nature and our glorious forefathers, are perishing, breaking up, and sinking into nonexistence.” Prokhanov struck all of the nationalist themes, from religion to the prestige of the army, in calling on the people to rise up, “come to our senses and repulse the destroyers of the Homeland!” That, in essence, is what the plotters of August, if they had any idea besides saving their own jobs, were trying to do.

By that time, though, Yeltsin and his allies in the movement called Democratic Russia had managed to build the framework of another kind of Russian nationalism, a nationalism that inherits the Westernizing tradition. Yeltsin’s nationalism differs from Prokhanov’s so fundamentally that its adherents use a different word to describe their nationality. To Prokhanov, a Russian is a Russky , a word derived from the word Rus , the name of the first Slavic kingdom, founded in the 9th Century. It has a connotation of race and ethnicity. After the coup failed, a writer from the Aprel group or a Yeltsin supporter from Democratic Russia might more frequently describe himself as a Rossiyanin , based on a more contemporary word for Russia and implying that one can be an equal and worthy citizen of Russia without being ethnically Russian. Yeltsin, recognizing that he had to try to build a new form of Russian nationalism, quickly appropriated some of the requisite trappings. The old, pre-revolutionary Russian tricolor of white, red and blue flapped in the breeze over his headquarters. Orthodox clerics were invited to give invocations before his rallies.

But the democratic variant of Russian nationalism is a new and fragile plant that may not survive the winter, even if the commonwealth that Yeltsin is sponsoring proves to be durable. Little that Yeltsin has done since the coup suggests that he has any answers to the problems of economic decline, and the commonwealth will not answer the new threat posed by national minorities within Russia. He seems to be groping as badly as Gorbachev ever did for an economic program that works, producing a lot of decrees but no more meat in the grocery stores. In early November, he stumbled badly in his first secession crisis, sending troops to impose Moscow’s will on an autonomous republic within Russia called Chechen-Ingush, only to withdraw them a few days later because the Russian parliament refused to support him.

In fact, the Yeltsin-style nationalists can be quite effete. His deputy minister of foreign affairs, for instance, is a 35-year-old academic specialist in ancient Greece named Fyodor Shelov-Koveryayev, who says he wants to make Russia more like it was before 1917 and believes in solving secession crises through referenda. He is in charge of Russia’s relations with the other republics of the former Soviet Union, a situation that is unlikely to strike fear in the hearts of republic and ethnic leaders who are now calculating exactly how far they can push Yeltsin. Inside Russia are numerous enclaves of non-Russian people, such as Chechen and Ingush, whose forebears were annexed by czars beginning with Ivan the Terrible in the 16th Century. If Yeltsin cannot find a way to keep them from seeking independence, the prospects for fragmentation are enormous and frightening to many Russians.

Paradoxically, the conservative nationalists may have grown stronger in the aftermath of the coup. While the Communist Party existed, there was a barrier between the nationalist intellectuals and conservative forces in the military, industry and police. All of those people had to belong to the party, and the party was, officially at least, an anti-nationalist organization, obedient to the line handed down by a Politburo dominated by Gorbachev. When he abolished the Communist Party after the coup, Yeltsin in effect freed all of the forces of reaction to gravitate to the conservative nationalist camp. Free of the burden of actually governing, they attack Yeltsin for everything from brokers’ profits to the declining power and prestige of the army. All they need is a widely popular leader to become a formidable opposition force.

IF RUSSIAN POLITICIANS WERE growth stocks, the best performer of 1991 would not be Yeltsin but a 45-year-old Moscow lawyer, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader of the new Liberal Democratic Party. Zhirinovsky, with no background in Communist Party or electoral politics, entered the race for president of Russia as a complete unknown in the spring of 1991. In the three-week campaign period, he became a genuine phenomenon and eventually finished in third place, drawing more than 6 million votes, or 7% of the total, and trailing only Yeltsin and the former prime minister, Ryzhkov, who had the support of what was left of the party apparatus. He was, as a racetrack handicapper might say, an impressive, fast-closing third.

Zhirinovsky and his party work out of a few rooms in a walk-up, communal apartment on a muddy side street in central Moscow, in a neighborhood slated for redevelopment. The leader’s office is still papered in someone’s old pink wallpaper, partly obscured by a large map of the Soviet Union on which he and his followers have carefully drawn dozens of tiny flags to mark cities and villages that now boast a Liberal Democratic Party branch. Zhirinovsky is a slightly beefy, pale, blue-eyed man who seems uncomfortable in the confines of a shirt and tie. He keeps his collar and cuffs unbuttoned underneath his suit coat.

He routinely accuses journalists who describe him as a fascist or an anti-Semite of slander, paid by unnamed forces arrayed against him. In fact, it’s not necessary to describe him as such. He does that himself, as soon as he begins talking. “We are a moderate party of the right, similar to your Republican Party,” he said in an interview. “You have (Louisiana’s David) Duke as the leader of one of its factions, right? His views are closest to ours.

“No Russian journalist has ever slandered me. The slanderers are in the new yellow press, where 70% of the staffs are Jewish. They purposely distort us, they pay dollars to journalists to call Zhirinovsky a fascist, an anti-Semite, an anti-Muslim.”

He was shown a cartoon that accompanied a recent interview he gave to a sympathetic newspaper, Puls Tushina. It showed Gorbachev and Yeltsin, arm-in-arm, trampling on the helpless people. On the bottom of Gorbachev’s shoe was a five-point Communist star and on the bottom of Yeltsin’s a six-point Star of David. Zhirinovsky put his glasses on and examined it.

“It means Gorbachev represents communism and Yeltsin represents the Jews,” he said equably. “Yeltsin relies on Democratic Russia. Its leaders are basically Zionists: (Yuri) Afanasyev (a historian and reform leader), nephew of Trotsky. A Jew. Gleb Yakunin. Jew. (Yakunin is, in fact, a Russian Orthodox priest and political activist.) The majority of the new political parties, unfortunately, are headed by Jews. And a Russian Jew is against Russia, because there was anti-Semitism in our country and still is. But we (the Liberal Democrats) are not anti-Semitic.”

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Zhirinovsky and his appeal as simply a manifestation of anti-Semitism. He plays to more central fears and the wounded pride of many Russians. Zhirinovsky was born not in Russia but in Alma Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, a Central Asian republic that has declared its sovereignty. When he calls it “idiotism” that his birthplace, and his grandmother’s burial place, might be considered a foreign country for a Russian; when he insists that it was the Russians who brought cities and subways and industry to distant, undeveloped places such as Kazakhstan, he strikes a responsive chord among the millions of Russians who live in republics--or have relatives who do--where they have become an alien minority. When he attacks Yeltsin for appointing “non-professionals” to run the police and KGB and bemoans the fact that Vadim Bakatin, one of the new leaders of what was once the greatest intelligence organization in the world, now must humble himself and receive advice and criticism from former dissidents and enemies of the state, he strikes another chord.

Zhirinovsky’s prescriptions for Russia’s ailments are all simple remedies that encourage his countrymen to blame other people for their problems. Yeltsin, for instance, has decided there is no other choice for the economy than to suffer the pain of letting the market determine prices. Zhirinovsky advocates freezing prices “while we deal with the national question.” He then talks about alleged truckloads of food and other goods leaving Russia every day, suggesting that Russia’s shortages would end if it simply stopped feeding the ungrateful republics.

Zhirinovsky boasts that when he comes to power, he will deal decisively with the breakaway Baltic states, and within two months “force them to submit to central power. This will be done,” he maintains, “purely economically. Not one Russian soldier will die. I will take all the union property, the ports and the factories built by the Soviet Union, and give it to the Russians living there. All deliveries will stop. If we tomorrow cut off deliveries of oil, coal, wood, metal, then their economies will be paralyzed. Everything will stop. We won’t need to send tanks anywhere.”

He would deal with the other restive republics as Stalin did, by cutting deals with Germany for spheres of influence. In his office, he stood up and pointed to the world map on the wall, his finger describing grand arcs. “Here, in the southern and eastern Ukraine, Crimea, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, the population is Russian. They would rejoin Russia. That leaves western Ukraine, where they want to be independent. We’ll deal with that through Germany. Neo-Nazism is growing in Germany. The Nazis will want western Poland. We’ll close our eyes while Germany takes it and the Czech republic. Then the Poles will want to move eastward into western Ukraine, and the western Ukrainians will turn to Russia for protection. We won’t let the Poles have it. We’re ready to agree with America--here’s its area, north and south, including Latin America. Germany--here’s its, down to Africa. Here’s Russia--” with a flick of his wrist he took in nearly all of Eurasia. “And here’s Japan’s, including Southeast Asia. If we agree, then all the problems of Russia will be resolved positively for you.”

To many Russians, the thought of Zhirinovsky in power, armed with nuclear weapons, is awful to contemplate, and they dismiss him as too clownish, too hysterical, too bigoted ever to become a major factor in Russian politics. At the same time, many of the same Russians acknowledge that their country has entered a highly unstable transitional era. Some, looking for a historical analogy, refer to the months between February and November, 1917, when a weak and ineffective provisional government held power from the fall of the czar to the Bolshevik coup d’etat. Others point to Weimar Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before Hitler came to power. If Zhirinovsky or someone like him were to run for president of Russia in some future election and put together the support that Zhirinovsky, Ryzhkov and other conservative candidates commanded against Yeltsin in the June, 1991, election, that candidate could have something approaching the plurality Hitler received when he became chancellor of Germany in 1933.

“Before the June (1991) election, Zhirinovsky’s popularity was growing like this,” said a Moscow pollster, Alexei Levinson, drawing a steeply rising curve against the wall with his index finger. We were walking and talking in the pedestrian underpass that links Red Square with what was once called Gorky Street and is now Tverskoi Bulvar. All around us were signs of decay that, only a few years ago, would not conceivably have been tolerated so close to the central shrines of the Soviet empire. Old women sat slumped against the walls, begging. Hustlers tried to peddle ersatz Soviet military watches or 3-month-old copies of Rolling Stone to passers-by.

“Since last spring, we have not asked a poll question about Zhirinovksy. He may have lost popularity with some of the things he said. But he shows the potential of someone who can put together that coalition.” Levinson frowned and shook his head. “History does not repeat itself in detail. But I don’t think you can just lightly dismiss the idea that this is Germany in 1932.”