On one of my first reporting trips to Vladmir Putin’s Russia — of which there’d be so many that they’d blend into residence — my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em.
What struck me most, at that moment, was how little difference it made whether his allegation was true, an urban legend, or something that had occurred only once or twice. All you needed for it to matter was for it to be plausible. The moment you lived in a society where someone could conceive of an EMT van used as an Über-Uber, you lived in a society where ambulances no longer received the right of way.
One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic.
Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it. Now that Russia has begun to export this Weltanschauung around the world, in the form of nationalist populism embodied here by Donald Trump, I am increasingly tempted to look at my years there for pointers on what to expect in America.
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It was a comfortable illusion. But it fell apart as soon as anyone needed anything from the state or encountered it in any way — especially in the form of the police, who became the practical face of the problem. A traffic stop, a lost passport, even an altercation with a konsierzhka (Russia’s doormen, traditionally elderly women endowed with the superpowers of snooping and snitching):
Any of this could feel like swallowing the red pill and waking up outside the Matrix. Suddenly, you were in the world of institutionalized sadism alleviated only by bribery. When you needed to solve a problem involving the state, you used the same ruchnoe upravlenie (“manual control”) as Putin exercised over the country itself: You asked friends of friends. When the director of photography on a TV show I had written suffered a brutal street attack that put him in a coma, the assault was suddenly refiled as a minor misdemeanor 24 hours later: The attacker had evidently paid off the police. Racing against time, his film-industry friends found a personal connection to a higher-ranking officer — and, just like that, the case was re-refiled. Another friend had an apartment stolen from her through a phony sale facilitated by a crooked bank employee; the police would be useless had she not found someone to call the daughter of the bank’s CEO. Moscow, in that sense, was a very small town. But what about the Russians more than a handshake removed from generals and bank CEOs — that is, most of them?
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This, perhaps, was why the Muscovites around me were furiously building as many intermediaries between themselves and the state as they could, effectively privatizing government functions but only for their own benefit.
Media managers established private medical clinics; frustrated university students, disgusted with ever-worsening “official” education, organized private student circles, online lecture courses, and educational start-ups. Tidy, modern, for-profit “document centers” proliferated, offering the functions of, say, the DMV without the rudeness and corruption (though, ironically, the only way they could function was by moving this corruption up a few levels). I was beginning to understand why so many Russians who called themselves “liberal” were, in fact, anarcho-libertarians in the Western sense, distrusting the government to perform even the simplest jobs. Even the protest leader Alexei Navalny, whose quixotic campaign for the mayor of Moscow in 2013 briefly regalvanized the movement, ran on a promise to, among other things, privatize the police force. In that sense, the Russian anti-Putinists and Donald Trump have more in common than either side would care to admit (though there are many, many things Trump would privatize before the police forces that helped elect him).
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Trust, on the other hand, is trust. It’s either there or it isn’t.
Regardless of how strict or liberal a society’s rule book is, the people either agree to Tinkerbell it into existence or they do not. A wailing ambulance contains either someone who needs help or someone taking you for a sucker. Post-Soviet Russia is a spectacular modern case of what happens when that basic trust between the individual and the institution, any institution, breaks down. And it may now — we shall see — provide some useful lessons for the brave new world the U.S. has just entered.
Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America