Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

a prefabricated construction office built of American aluminum siding and Finnish plywood in the heart of Moscow. He stirred slowly in his chair, staring straight ahead, as if seeing something far beyond the realm of all the eyes gathered here and fixed upon his tonsured square head.

      All along the tables that spread out to the mayor’s left and right big men sat stiffly. Early that morning they had stuffed themselves into dark suits. Now they wore faces of worry. The mayor folded his large, knuckly hands before him like a tent. The assembled understood: He was ready. Water was poured and cigarettes were stubbed out as the chatter subsided. The subject at hand – and the venue of this debate – was an important site, a new rehabilitation center for the city’s veterans wounded on the battlefields of Chechnya. Russia’s second campaign to defeat the Chechen fighters had entered its second year. The mayor was eager to show his compassion for the boys maimed in their service to the Motherland. The rehab center, an aide tugged me aside to whisper, was “especially close to the mayor’s heart.”

      Yuri Luzhkov stood no more than five feet five inches, but he made his presence known. His outsize head was made even larger by the absence of hair and his large, piercing blue eyes. The mayor may have the build, and sartorial sense, of a head-banging enforcer in a James Cagney film, but he spoke softly and slowly. It was as if he had learned to rely on a lilting, unexpected cadence to disarm his interlocutors and draw them in. On this morning he sported a dark blue windbreaker and, even indoors, his trademark workman’s leather cap. He was more than ready, once his minions came to order, to hold court.

      It did not take much. The mayor called upon the engineers, and one by one they stood, with a slight bow, as Russian schoolchildren have recited their lessons for centuries, to report the status of their work. “The plan will be completed ahead of schedule,” one boasted. “At least ten days ahead of schedule,” he quickly added.

      “We have all the permits in order,” assured another.

      “The windows have all arrived and been fitted,” said a third.

      Then came the debate. A structural engineer, a man too far into his fifties to be so nervous in this setting, confessed, “We aren’t sure, just yet, quite how to proceed with the tiles or the linoleum for the flooring surface.” A whisper rippled through the construction trailer. “We checked with the engineers from the building institutes, and they have tested the tiles,” he hastened to add. “The tiles will last in terms of the pressure per square meter, and the longevity equivalency tests seem to have confirmed their preliminary findings. But the linoleum still has not been ruled out. We were” – and here, a long pause–“waiting to consult with you.”

      The mayor sat still, taking in the parade of reports. In a corner of the room, I noticed a luminary of his inner circle, Shamil Tarpishchev, once Boris Yeltsin’s tennis coach, who fell from favor in a scandal involving the National Sports Foundation. Luzhkov, then Yeltsin’s bitter rival, had sheltered Tarpishchev, taking him under his wing as his adviser on sport. All the same, allegations of underworld associations continued to dog Tarpishchev but the truth of the matter remained unknown.¹

      Once the last of the speakers resumed his seat, the mayor gathered in his large hands and, massaging his knuckles, launched a barrage of questions. How much would the tiles cost to cover the requisite area? How much would the linoleum cost? Would there be wheelchairs? How many? Had both surfaces been tested for these wheelchairs? He demanded statistics. Numbers were proffered. He asked for samples. Samples were produced. He wondered, Was the factory Russian? Or foreign? On it went. To his every question the mayor received a prompt answer.

      And so it came to pass that Yuri Luzhkov, who on this chilly day could rightly claim a place among the most powerful men in all Russia, spent nearly an hour probing the virtues of linoleum versus tile. To the untrained eye, it was an inordinately detailed discussion of construction material. But to anyone who lived in the Russian capital in the final years of the twentieth century, it was a pageant of power intended to impress. For in a moment, once the mayor announced his decision – linoleum won out – the voice vote was unanimous. “Da, da, da,” rang out the chorus.

      LUZHKOV HAS BEEN CALLED many things. A populist and an opportunist, Russia’s fattest oligarch, and a true khozyain, an autocratic boss in the patrimonial mold of the tsarist days of old.² Many of the sobriquets rang true. But one thing about Luzhkov always stood out: the need to make his mark. In the great Soviet tradition, Luzhkov was a builder. He had worked for decades in the Soviet chemical industry before taking over the Moscow city government in the early 1990s. Reelected in 1996 with more than 90 percent of the vote, Luzhkov would serve on into the new century. Muscovites adored him. As the decade after the Soviet fall closed, Yeltsin’s political and physical prowess faded ignobly away, Putin rose, and Luzhkov was stymied in his desire to rule Russia. But the mayor had succeeded in remaking his city, “the city of Moscow, the capital of our Motherland,” as he liked to call it, in his image.

      “MOSCOW IS NOT RUSSIA.” It is the refrain of Westerners and Russians alike who have ventured into the Russian outback and returned to tell of its miseries. But what, then, is Moscow? In the years after the Soviet collapse, when so many of its denizens mistook license for liberty, the city grew infamous for the Babylon of its nightclubs and the upheaval of its unbridled free market. Yet it remains Russia’s heart, the grandest reflection, however warped, of its troubles and riches. With its wretched masses and gluttonous elite, Moscow is home to more than ten million, a population greater than that of many countries in Europe. Yet in its first post-Soviet decade no one so dominated the city as its boisterous mayor.

      Lenin may have promised the Russian people a New Jerusalem, but Luzhkov set out to build it. In the mayor’s mind, the messianic destiny loomed large. For centuries Russians have harbored a vision of themselves as a chosen people and of Moscow as the Third Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, with its cult of martyrdom, is only partly to blame. There is also the bloodline: In 1472, when Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, wed the sole heiress to the throne of Byzantium, the niece of Constantine XI, Moscow claimed its right as the heir of Constantinople.

      Zoë Paleologue took the name Sophia, and the Muscovites adopted the rituals and trappings of Byzantine power. Ivan III became the first Russian leader to call himself “tsar” – the Russified Caesar – and borrow the double-headed eagle as well.³ In Constantinople, the emblem made only rare appearances. In the land of the northern Slavs, however, the two-headed eagle was featured prominently. The Muscovites were eager to parade their imperial inheritance.⁴ It was only natural that Luzhkov set himself the task of restoring the symbols of the foundation myth. Yeltsin kept the red stars atop the Kremlin towers, but the mayor returned the gilded eagles to their perch. He also ordered that the Resurrection Gate, a fairy-tale entrance to Red Square of red and white brick, rise again. Stalin, eager to make room for the parade of missiles and tanks on Revolution Day, had leveled the seventeenth-century gateway. Once Yeltsin canceled the pageant, Luzhkov took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch. Like so many other pre-Bolshevik edifices, the gate was duplicated, exactly. Luzhkov now had a style, joked the head of the city’s Museum of Architecture: “Reconstructivism.”

      The mayor liked the myth of the Third Rome. The Orthodox elder Filofei, a monk in Pskov in the late Middle Ages, was among the first to raise the notion. At some time in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century Filofei sent the grand prince in Moscow a stern warning: “Perceive, pious Tsar, how all the Christian realms have converged into yours alone. Two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be.”⁵ “… and a fourth there shall not be.” Moscow would be the third and last Rome, completing a holy trinity. Even Byzantium had not made such a claim. How could the mayor not rejoice in the imperial inheritance? The myth entitled Moscow to the glory not only of Constantine’s capital – with its shimmering churches of gold told of in medieval Russian chronicles – but also of Rome, and even Jerusalem as well. “We are the New Jerusalem,” Luzhkov would purr on occasion. And he