The wild east: life in the high-rise jungle of urban post-communism is not for the faint-hearted. Richard Swift takes the measure of a new capitalism—that's all shock and no therapy

New Internationalist, April, 2004 by Richard Swift

Overt political motivation is here too. It is widely believed that the bombings that killed dozens in Moscow apartment buildings before the second brutal Chechen war--a war that cemented Vladamir Putin's strongman image--were the work not of Chechen terrorists but of some murky department of the Russian security service. (5) Then there is the Ukrainian journalist--a thorn in the side of the Kuchma regime--whose head turned up in the woods outside Kiev.

For most of the population this is simply theatre to be observed with a shake of the head or a shrug of the shoulders. Proof of the failure of society to free itself from the iron grip of the state. Proof that nothing ever changes.

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I though of different ways to take the measure of post-communist life in a market economy. What would the Rand Corporation do for instance? Ah-hah, I thought ... a focus group. So I got together a group of Armenian students for a discussion. They were just entering their teens when the old system came apart. Now they were university students and finding it very tough. On the positive side, they said that they had more freedom to speak their minds now and that life was more interesting. They all felt their access to the internet was very important for democracy.

But education was very expensive and depended on a massive family effort. All lived at home. They recalled the days of free education when students could travel anywhere in the communist world. They worried for Armenia. They worried about jobs: that many must now go to Russia for work. They worried too that foreigners were buying up essential services--the Italians had the water, the Russians the electricity. They especially worried about the growing gap between rich and poor. They wondered why they couldn't have the best of both worlds: the new freedoms but also the equality and the guaranteed security of the old system. Good question.

(1) Stephen F Cohen, Failed Crusade, Norton, New York, 2001. (2) Joseph A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper, New York, 1975. (3) 2003 World Development Indicators, World Bank, Washington. (4) Human Rights Watch, 2003. (5) Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, Pluto, London, 2002.