ZHUKOVKA, USSR - If you thought perestroika was a real revolution, take a closer look at the faces. Who, exactly, are the insurgents poundinCommon tedom has it that the onset of market relations has created terror among the old Soviet ruling elite. Looking at it close up, you might expect to see some serious turmoil and massive personnel turnover at the top.
If you thought so, you might wrong. Despite some celebrated exceptions, the shift to marker relanons in the cook has not been acompanied by waves of formerly suppressed 'entrepreneurs' moving into positions of economic power or political influence.
Rather, the illusion of social upheaval has been largely generated by a frantic changing of labeis, cards, re-orientation histories and privatisation of scale within the nomenklatura elite itself.
Probably the best place to test Zhukovka. The list of residents n this sprawling dacha village arely 30 kilometres from the heart of Moscow, reads like a who's who the old social revolution is taking place, where eise would you leel its reverberations if not in this citadel of old-fashioned At the centre of Zhukovka is run by the Soviet Council of Ministers, comprising dozens of lovely country homes occupied by the currently-powerful.
In several areas around this compound are private dachas ranging in grandeur from the humble mated corager television star Vladimir F to considerably more imposing homes luminaries of the old elite, such artist llya Glazunov, musician Dimitri Shostakovich and Sergo Mikoyan, scion of the old CISU family The place is a real village, in than Become a Socialist Outlook handsome two-storied brick physicist Andrei Sakharov sits few doors down from a some What more garish one owned by former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's daughter, Galina, and her currently-imprisoned husband Yuri Churbanov. respondent Hedrick Smith curate description of Zhukovka in his 1976 book, The Russians.
His central remark about the place was that, had you stood ›y the village store any mom ing in the carly 1970s, you would eventually have seen 'everybody' Brezhnev, Kosygin and other top leaders ould have raced past in thei mousines headed for Moscon Alexander Solzhertsyn, then staying at the villa of the musician Rostropovich, would have come by for groceries, as would Stalin's retired henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov. And so on Little has outwardly changed in 20 years. Most of the same peoplc, or their children, still occupy the same dachas. One tiny and recent ad ustment that instead official bla on Friday evenings, these days most of the denizens deliver themselves in private cars.
Big cars bearing the distinc number plates of US, German and Japanese busihrough the whirring electronic omplex. Perhaps they are izing up dachas they soon ex pect to be permitted to buy, or maybe they closing ness deals with the inhabitants.
In any case, they are the only threaten the serenity. security and self-assurance of the old elite in their summer quarters. One Sunday in August 1 was wher Volvo came streaking by, then screeched to a halt. Out got an old friend, Andrei, who was until recently a career functionary for the Young Communist League. Today, he says, he is an joint business venture, and doing very well. He invited me to a party at the dacha of some friends up the road There too was another old acquaintance, Volodya, grandson of the late CPSU ideologist Mikhail Suslov. The last time I'd seen Volodya he was an official at the party news pete me de These days, he me, works for a commercial bank.
Seated to my left I found son of Andrei Sakharov be good friends). Díma gave me his card. It reads. Sakharov, US-Soviet trade consultants'. So he's some kind of capitalist too. in the conversation came when Andrei lokingly asked me if 1 was still a communist. Consternation all round when 1 answered 'yes'.
Warm and witty
Don't get me wrong. These , witty, warm and charmno any Noth American ope class That's predithe hidren of the old elite they are the best-educated, most widely travelled, best-connected, most self-confident rep resentatives of their society. The transformation natural, process to them. less confusion on this point. They often appear to be looking respond to the noble, untainted entrepreneurial type - like the heroes of those elevating ideological fables you diways find between the covers of Reader's Digest. Hence they scan the ranks of political prisoners drifting back from For search for budding young Henry Fords among the swarming street hustlers. And they come to grief.
Reader's Digest
In July Reader's Digest launched its Russian language edition in Moscow. It had taken the company's executives less than a year, an incredibly short time, to come over to the Soviet Union, recognise their own kind, and cut a deal.
Reader's Digest parachuted in just one employee of its own, Konstantin Galskoy, a former Radio Frer Europe/Radio Liberty, to oversee the whole Soviet operation.
No danger that all those nomenklatura chefs will spoil the purity of the magazine's traditional broth, however. The first Kussian editon or Kelder s Digest carries a profile of Nor nan schwarzkops, nero o Operation Desert Storm, an artide about the retiring US ambassador to Moscow, a rightving polemic entitled Myth: and a story about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
I trust 1 haven't digressed. The point is, no insurgents are anging at the gates in Zhukor a or any other bastion of the ol elite. st changes are takir ace, but few of them are like