A champion for the bourgeoisie: reinventing virtue and citizenship in Boris Akunin's novels

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Leon Aron

Enormous gains in personal freedom included the ability to leave the country and to return. Newspaper, magazine and book publishers were freed from prepublication censorship, placing late 19th-century Russian periodicals and books among the most raucously polemical in the world. The number of books printed and sold skyrocketed. Russian culture reached its apogee in the music of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky; the books by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev; and the theater of Stanislavsky.

After the assassination of the czar-liberator Alexander II in 1881, the boundaries of self-government were tightened and liberties cut back, again, very much like the change that followed the transfer of power from Yeltsin to Putin. Still, major newspapers continued to be exempt from pre-publication censorship, intense political and social debates went on, and civil society would never again be terrorized by the state into complete subjugation. (2)

Meanwhile, Russian capitalism grew by leaps and bounds. Banks and saving-and-loan associations mushroomed. Foreign investments poured in. The economy expanded rapidly and became one of the world's fastest-growing. Cities burgeoned as former serfs became workers. Thousands of miles of railroads were laid, including the Trans-Siberian railroad, which for the first time connected European Russia to the Far East. Large capitalist farms made Russia Europe's main producer of grain.

The vulgar displays of wealth by the nouveau riches all but replaced the discreet enjoyment of power and privilege of the old nobility--just like the outrageously expensive boutiques, restaurants and gyms for the "new Russians" supplanted the secret food and clothing depots, drug stores and "cafeterias" savored by the Soviet nomenklatura amid the squalor and poverty of the USSR. Almost every day, thousands became the victims of crooked banking and stock schemes. Part and parcel of the Russian state for centuries, corruption (which everywhere attends a transition from a state-dominated economy to an early capitalist system) became brazen.

As is always the case after a revolution, exhaustion and disillusion set in. The liberals were bitterly disappointed in freedom's inability to deliver wealth quickly and equitably. Liberal ideals were badly damaged, and everyone doubted that Russia could ever become part of what the Russians then called "Europe" (what the Russians now call the "civilized world"). The old ethical canon, enforced by state repression, was gone; the new mores were shocking. There commenced a desperate search for something to replace them both. As Chekhov observed, "It is as though we were all in love, fell out of love and now are looking for something new to enchant us."

It is in relation to this search for "something new", as fateful in the Fandorin-Chekhov time as it is today, that the stunning popularity of Grigoriy Chkhartishvili's hero acquires an importance that extends far beyond the literary realm.

Intelligentsia Contra Individualism