The Oligarchs (42 page)

Luzhkov took notice. His parents had told him the story of the cathedral, he recalled, and he had seen photographs of it and heard legends of great craftsmen who worked on the original structure.
⁷
According to Mokrousov, Luzhkov personally signed an order turning over to the Obschina the 6.7 hectares of land on which the cathedral had once stood, so that they could build a small chapel. At the time, the chapel seemed like a modest but practical goal. The Mokrousovs then discovered that the land was occupied by a Chechen used-car dealer. In a daring gambit, Valentina went to the dealer and demanded payment for use of the land. To her utter surprise, he immediately paid her 3.5 million rubles, the equivalent of several thousand dollars, in cash. With this money, the Obschina erected a fence and commissioned some blueprints, but their dream was still elusive. Yeltsin put reconstruction of the cathedral on a list of big projects to be built in the new Russia—someday.

In 1994 a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church patriarchate took Valentina aside. “Soon everything will be fine for you,” he told her. “Soon the cathedral will begin to be built.”

“And who, can I ask, is going to do it?” she inquired.

“Yuri Mikhailovich is taking this job upon himself. He is serious. Luzhkov is not Yeltsin. If he says he will do it, he will.”

On February 23, 1994, the Moscow architecture council approved a new, enlarged plan to reconstruct the cathedral. It was far more ambitious than anything Mokrousov had ever dreamed of—a full-fledged reconstruction, not just a model or a small chapel.

Mokrousov's grassroots campaign was overtaken by a far more powerful force: Luzhkov. Mokrousov and his wife were privately somewhat bitter that their own hard work, painstaking years of standing on street corners seeking signatures and donations, had been abruptly tossed aside. They resigned from the Obschina, which was
soon abolished by a formal notification from the patriarchate, and the land for the cathedral was taken back by the city. Luzhkov took over the financial side of rebuilding the cathedral too. In September, an official Moscow city fund for reconstruction of the cathedral was announced, and on January 7, 1995, the cornerstone was laid. Luzhkov said he wanted to complete the new cathedral's shell in time for the commemoration of Moscow's 850th anniversary in 1997. Yeltsin granted a federal tax break for contributions to the effort.

What occurred in the next year was nothing short of remarkable for a city where, in Soviet times, ambitious building projects had often languished, unfinished, for many years, a city struggling with unmet needs in housing, health care, schooling, and roads. Luzhkov sent into battle an army of 2,500 construction workers who labored around the clock, pouring a mountain of concrete to meet blueprints that were fresh off the drawing boards. The workers were forced to pause several times, waiting for the designers to finish the plans. The poured concrete was warmed with electric heaters in winter to keep it from freezing. Luzhkov agreed to a method of construction that would use 10 million bricks instead of 40 million. Twice or three times a week, Luzhkov arrived on the site, promising the workers an endless supply of
kvas,
the sweet Russian soft drink made from fermented bread.

A forest of construction cranes rose by the Moscow River, as well as a chorus of doubts. Would it not be better, critics asked, to rebuild one hundred smaller churches, which were also destroyed by the Communists, or ten new hospitals? Wasn't the symbolism of the cathedral a throwback to the age of Russian imperialism? Why such a brazen, mammoth structure at a time of so many other troubles and desperate needs? Luzhkov did not heed these complaints. He built.

On the outside, the cathedral, 335 feet high, resembled the original, but inside, in addition to the chapels, it was a modern headquarters for the patriarchate, with garages, elevators, conference rooms, video systems, modern ventilation, and cafes. In place of the swimming pool built over the original building site, a gigantic gray, granitecovered base stretched for a city block, housing the Church of the Transfiguration and a museum of the history of the cathedral. The southern side held a massive twelve-hundred-seat Hall of Church Councils, five refectories, and a kitchen capable of feeding fifteen hundred people.
⁸

Luzhkov devoted attention to every detail. By one account, it was
calculated that less gold could be used to gild the cathedral's domes—just twenty kilos instead of the original 312.6 kilos—by spraying a fine layer of golden lacquer that included only microscopic particles of gold between a layer of titanium nitrate, as a base, and a graphite overlay. Luzhkov, wanting to check whether this would look real, supposedly went to the patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, Alexy II, with two samples, one the cheaper version and one real gold leaf. Without disclosing which sample was real, he asked the patriarch to choose which one looked better. The patriarch choose the cheaper variant, which was used.
⁹

After years of lassitude and shortages, and despite criticism and economic chaos all around him, Luzhkov's reconstruction of the cathedral made a powerful, symbolic statement at the dawn of the new Russia. The structure itself was an imposing castle by the Moscow River, with a fairy-tale look that shimmered from a distance. As a religious shrine and architectural monument, the cathedral was unquestionably a potent symbol. But I think it had a broader message as well. The reconstruction was an antidote to all the uncertainty and doubt of those first tumultuous years of change. Luzhkov's message was, It can be done.

But how? Six years after it was begun, the project, originally estimated between $150 million and $300 million, had cost $700 million. Luzhkov and Yeltsin offered only vague explanations about how the cathedral was financed, but the riddle was partly answered on January 6, 1996, when a large marble plaque was erected outside the lower cathedral. In gold leaf, the plaque declared: “These were the first to contribute selflessly,” and then listed well-known and lesser-known bastions of finance and industry. Among the first on the list was Alexander Smolensky's Stolichny Bank of Savings, which donated fifty-three kilos of gold for the cupolas of the cathedral. The natural gas monopoly Gazprom donated 10 billion rubles for marble to clad the walls. Inkombank gave $1.5 million and two dozen icons. The Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange donated $1 million. In the next four years, the lists of donors grew, and new tablets were erected. The donors included the biggest Moscow utilities and city-affiliated businesses, such as the telephone and electric companies, prominent banks, restaurants, retailers, food traders, oil exporters, a famous chocolate company, and dozens of other factories and firms, powerhouses of the new capitalism and the new Moscow.

The donors were not entirely altruistic. The truth was that their contributions were as much a tribute to Luzhkov as to the cathedral. Luzhkov created a political machine in which power and property—his own formidable rule and his control over Moscow's enormous resources—were leveraged into rebuilding the city. In Luzhkov's realm, the laws of the market and the law of the land were not nearly as strong as the hand of the mayor. When Luzhkov made demands, businesses leaped to attention; without Luzhkov's support, they could not survive. The financiers, traders, industrialists, and restaurateurs all paid up, and were rewarded in return. As soon as Smolensky contributed the gold ingots, the patriarchate deposited its accounts in Stolichny Bank of Savings. Mikhail Ogorodnikov, spokesman for the city's cathedral rebuilding fund, explained: “Luzhkov was able to understand and combine this wish for economic freedom with economic diktat. Eighty percent of the money for the cathedral was donated by banks and corporations. How is it possible to make them work for the city? Luzhkov got them to understand: if you do nothing for the city, you will not find it comfortable here, you will not survive without the support of the city.” Unlike others who tried to coax Russia's new rich to give money, Luzhkov was more direct. Ogorodnikov described Luzhkov's approach this way: “You live in this city. You are making money in this city. Pay the city its due. Otherwise, you will not be here.”
¹⁰

What Luzhkov reconstructed was not just the cathedral that Stalin demolished, not just a gleaming symbol of post-Soviet Russian renaissance. The cathedral was also a concrete demonstration of a new model of capitalism that Luzhkov muscled onto the Russian stage in the 1990s, a model that mixed public and private interests, blended power and money, spawned corruption and massive new public works, all with one central figure, Luzhkov, at the helm.

The Luzhkov model—Moscow Inc.—was not what the reformers had in mind. Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar were dreaming of building a Western-style model of capitalism, with underlying principles of competition and openness and a separation of business and the state, and they wanted to leave it to the market to choose the winners and losers. By contrast, Luzhkov intended to choose the winners and losers himself. Instead of a Western approach, his model was more in the inscrutable traditions of the East, centered on the whims of a potentate rather than profit and loss. Luzhkov's model was called, by
some, “state capitalism” because the city itself became a major participant in business. Luzhkov did not object to the label “state capitalism.” Critics also called it “crony capitalism” because it benefited Luzhkov's pals.

In Moscow, Luzhkov had the instincts of a populist, the organizing skills of a machine politician, and the ambitions of a builder. He borrowed from both Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley and New York's master builder Robert Moses. He did not see building—and grand architecture—as an end in itself, but as something that a politician does for people. He was not a towering designer who looked down from great monuments, but a street-level pol who understood the power of looking up at them.

Luzhkov's empire had a seamy side—corruption and his own heavy-handed style—but he was immensely popular, especially in the years of frenetic building in the mid-1990s. Muscovites twice elected him mayor by large margins, 89.6 percent in 1996 and 70 percent in 1999. He had no serious competition in 1996, but in 1999 was challenged by a well-known, liberal former prime minister, Sergei Kiriyenko. Nonetheless, Kiriyenko's campaign flopped. Muscovites seemed to approve an implicit trade-off Luzhkov represented: he would take from the new rich and give to the city. Galina Starovoitova, a progressive member of parliament from St. Petersburg who was murdered in 1998, told me once that Luzhkov won popular approbation, rather than scorn, for squeezing money out of banks and businesses. “A lot of ordinary people think these new rich, these new Russians, should share their wealth with the city,” she said, “and this is a way to cut, a little bit, their superprofits.”

The rise of Luzhkov's empire in Moscow was not inconsequential for all of Russia. It appeared in the early, inchoate years as the country was groping out of the darkness of Soviet socialism, when it was not clear how to build markets in a country that had no experience with capitalism since early in the century. Soon it became evident that not just one but several paths could be taken on the road to a market economy. One was the Chubais-Gaidar liberalism, in which market forces ruled. A second was rapacious, winner-take-all, oligarchic capitalism, which will be more fully detailed in the next chapters. The third type was Luzhkov's boss-ruled city machine.

These differing approaches did not mean that Luzhkov and Chubais politely debated each other in front of a chalkboard in an economics
classroom. It was real-time trial and error, a zigzag of thrust and retreat. Luzhkov, who rose to power somewhat by chance with Popov's departure, was not the type to waste time with theory. He was a doer, shaped by the old Soviet-era managerial experience but also animated with a contemporary alacrity, seizing on his good fortune to lead the most prosperous metropolis in the country. In the end, Luzhkov put into practice an enormous, functioning example of what he thought the new Russia should be.

 

Larisa Piyasheva had her own vision of capitalist Moscow. An ultraliberal economist, Piyasheva had been recruited by Popov in November 1991 to carry out rapid privatization of business and industry. Previously, the city had practically given away apartments to their current inhabitants. The next stage was to privatize small businesses. Piyasheva wanted to give all the stores, cafeterias, restaurants, beauty salons, auto repair garages, and shoe repair shops of Moscow to the workers, and all at once. It was called “avalanche” privatization, a simple, bold, and far-reaching idea. Piyasheva saw it as entirely free market, and also very populist. “An enterprise would be given to the employees for free,” Piyasheva told me of her plan. “They became the owners. My idea was that property should be given away. It used to be state-owned property; now it would become private property.” Like the other liberals, Piyasheva figured that eventually the good owners and the bad would be weeded out by market forces, but she did not want to waste time sorting it out at the beginning. In her “avalanche” idea, a week was all that would be needed to approve the privatization of any enterprise. Presto: the hairdressers would own the salon, the mechanics would own the garage. “Some become rich, others lose,” she said. “But this stage of competition is not under state control.”
¹¹

Piyasheva's idea never had a chance, however. One reason was that Popov, who had brought her into the city government, was growing weak politically, constantly quarreling with the Mossovet, the city council. Piyasheva's privatization plan was announced in November 1991, but barely a month later, on December 19, Popov made his first attempt to resign, saying he felt reforms were being frustrated by the city council.
¹²
He was out of office six months later.