After finishing graduate school, I returned to the Soviet Union in November 1991. I had been waiting on a job in the business sector to come through in Moscow, but the failed August coup against Soviet President Gorbachev made the company jittery. I pivoted to journalism, a career I had begun in Indiana in 1987.

With a laptop, three-month visa and a couple of verbal agreements with U.S. publications, I headed to Russia to work as an international correspondent. In retrospect, my decision to move to Moscow was the start to charting my own life. I left behind my American-fashioned self — amiable third son who stuck close to mom in a family of competitive older brothers and a dominating dad — to find my way in a turbulent land, come what may. I rented a room in a Russian family’s apartment, took public transportation everywhere and shopped like a Russian. I wrote back to my parents in November 1991 about the chaotic food situation: “I stop, stoop and buy whatever I find on street corners to take home or to the office: bread, eggs, apples, dried fruit, persimmons, mandarin oranges.”

I found lots of work. The Kendallville News-Sun, the daily Indiana newspaper I had worked for in 1987, published my articles as well as a Washington, DC-based air and space publication. I hooked on with Sports Illustrated through a college connection. Yes, the same magazine that had featured Soviet baseball. It was a dream gig as I had been reading the magazine since I was a boy. I first did logistics for Sports Illustrated journalists flying into Moscow in advance of the Barcelona Olympics – arranging transportation and interviews, and translating – and then started doing research on the amazing stories percolating in sports. This all coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Suddenly in place of one monolithic USSR attending the Barcelona Olympics there would be numerous teams, some competing for newly independent countries and others under the banner of the Unified Team. No more hammer and sickle or Soviet national anthem. Each of these teams had a story to tell, they all spoke Russian, and I was on the ground. My timing was perfect. 

With payment for just one news story, I could pay the monthly rent for my centrally located Moscow apartment and still have money left over to buy groceries in the Western-style supermarkets that were cropping up monthly. Not so much stopping and stooping anymore. The dollar was king as the ruble plummeted. During the three years I lived in Moscow, the ruble’s value on the street went from 40 to $1 to 4,000 to $1. My bank account grew, while the lives of Russians around me collapsed. 

That included Zhenya. Like most Soviet citizens, Zhenya was unprepared for the collapse of the only government he had ever known. There were no instructions on how to start in the new system. When I met him again in 1991, he was scrambling to find his way in a society in upheaval.  

Zhenya had been a prized student in the Department of Geography at Leningrad State University, with a talent for mapmaking, which was done manually in those days. I got a hint of his cartography skills when I received his letters. His hand-written script on the envelopes he sent me was impeccably detailed, with numbers and letters crafted and aligned as if done on a typewriter. But the need to earn money to support a family made education superfluous. In 1990, he had married a fellow student, and they had their first child in December 1991. In January 1992, the government of newly independent Russia freed prices on an array of food products. The advent of democracy that Zhenya had been campaigning for at the metro station in 1989 had only made life harder. He dropped out of school. Desperate for income, in 1990 he asked me in a letter if I could find him work in the U.S. “I love any work, no matter how dirty. I’ll wash dishes, sweep floors,” he wrote. “I have to earn money for my family.”

For a period of months in 1992 he lived on trains going from Poland, where he bought cheap cigarettes, to Moscow and Leningrad, where he peddled them on street corners. His dormitory room was crowded with his wife and new-born baby, so he eventually sent them to live with his wife’s parents in Crimea while he tried to make a living as a solo money exchanger on the streets of Moscow. 

The currency exchange work was dangerous. Whenever Zhenya headed out the door, a leather bag slung over his shoulder and calculator in his pocket, he risked ending up in jail. That’s because Article 88 of the Soviet Criminal code, which forbade currency trading and punished offenders with a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, remained on the books. To complicate matters further, in the vacuum left by the collapse of authoritarian rule, organized crime had cornered the currency market in Russia’s big cities. At public gathering spots, like metro stations, Zhenya encountered groups of burly men, usually former athletes or criminals, who, besides demanding protection money from fruit and flower merchants, fixed the rate for all hard currency transactions. As a solo player in a business controlled by organized crime, Zhenya was exposed and vulnerable. “I have to work in fear because I am not defended by the government,” he told me. “I constantly feel I could fall into the hands of the mafia or criminal element.” 

The spark that had energized Zhenya in the late 1980s to engage in politics was fading, smothered by the never-ending battle to make ends meet. He went from political idealist to economic scavenger. Politics was a subject to be taken up after a day of scrambling, and it elicited a negative response. “All the politicians are just out to better their own position at the expense of the people,” said Zhenya.

***

With the gift of perspective, I see that my friendship with Zhenya gave me a front-row seat to the spectacle of a person navigating hardship. Zhenya rarely complained about his personal predicament. He sacrificed, and he adjusted. He directed his energy — the same energy that had propelled him to catch a frisbee and campaign for reform candidates — towards survival. Amazing to me was his willingness to accept his reduced position in life. In 1992, Zhenya, who as a teenager was the head of the Young Communist League in his university class, described himself as living off the scraps of foreigners. American visitors were especially good customers because, as Zhenya said, “What’s a ten dollar bill to them? They could lose it and not even notice it.” But $10 to him meant over 1,000 rubles, enough to feed his family for weeks. “We have a saying here in Russia: ‘From the threads of the rich, a poor man can make a shirt for himself,'” he told me. 

In those days, I was that rich man. A story I wrote on Zhenya for The Kendallville News-Sun in June 1992 carried the headline: “Russian Currency Trader Just Getting By.” I made $200 for writing it, more than my monthly rent of $170.

Zhenya was part of saga engulfing millions of people across the former Soviet Union. They were suddenly adrift, forced to rely on their own means and efforts after being provided for by the state for decades. For a foreign observer like me, Russia in transition was a bewildering — and exhilarating — spectacle to observe. In a journal entry from 1995, I captured Russia’s compromised position in front of the world: “It was as if the country, stripped of the heavy furs of Soviet secrecy, superstition and mistrust, had emerged from its depleted wardrobe clad only in underclothes. With no recourse to the protective layers of the past, Russia, uncertain of her welcome in the wider world, had no choice but to be exposed as bystanders gawked.” 

Go to Part V

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