From A Russian Tragedy by Alex Shoumatoff, The Walrus Magazine, Canada, June 2007

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One afternoon Grigorov took us out to the suburb of Butovo, where my great-uncle and twelve of Grigorov’s immediate family members were shot, along with 20,000 others, during the Great Terror of the 1930s — a minor footnote to the millions that Stalin killed. Uncle Nika had been sympathetic to the revolution’s goal of eliminating the gross injustices and inequalities in tsarist society and hadn’t left with the rest of the family. He stayed and designed coal-fired power plants for the Soviets’ industrialization program and was rewarded for his patriotism by being executed. We filled a plastic bag with dirt from the ditches that the victims had dug for their own bodies to bury in the family plot on Long Island, next to his brother and sister.

We lit candles in memory of our slaughtered ancestors before the icons in the small log church that had been built for the grievers of what happened here. On the neighbouring property a magnificent new church with a gleaming bronze onion dome was nearly finished. Its patrons and parishioners were the New Russians who had McDachads in the vicinity. Some were probably the grandsons of the nkvd, Stalin’s secret police, who carried out the purge. My ancestral homeland is a very brutal place.

Another Muscovite survivor who is quick on his feet is Paul Voytinsky (“Uncle Pasha”), my fixer, who takes care of visiting foreigners. You can rent Pasha’s centrally located apartment and use his computer and Internet service. Pasha got me the contact numbers for demographers and other social scientists I needed to see when I got back to Moscow. He has his own website, UnclePasha.com, and one of the services he offers is “Russian Misery Tourism.”

“The art of suffering, of experiencing and inflicting it, has been developing for centuries and brought to perfection in this land of intrigue, murder, and slavery, of brutal revolutions followed by merciless suppressions,” Uncle Pasha hypes in an email with the black humour that is outdoing itself in Russia these days. “For a lover of misery, there is no place better than Russia. And here it is of the purest, most uncompromising quality . . . . You will see a whole population of sick, malnourished, chain-smoking alcoholics . . . ugly prostitutes oozing with disease . . . heartburn-inducing food from bus-station eating establishments . . . toilets that consist of [only] a hole in the floor . . . . For a small extra fee we will arrange for your money and documents to be stolen. If you prefer, we’ll treat you to the memorable thrill of a knife point robbery . . . . Our offer is not for everyone, but if the pyramids make you yawn, you’ve been to luxury resorts, you’ve tried ecotourism, done sex in Thailand and drugs in Amsterdam . . .

“Maybe,” Uncle Pasha writes, “you should consider one of our Russian misery tours.”

While I was setting up this trip, Pasha and I exchanged a flurry of these kinds of emails. I complimented him on his black humour, which gives Gary Shteyngart (whose Absurdistan I took along to read on the plane) a run for his money.

“If only it was humour,” Pasha replied. I told him that last summer I saw how grim things are for the average Russian, and Pasha answered, “To appreciate what’s happening you need to see the dynamics. Things are very much on the rise but of course the static picture a visitor sees merely tells you what things are, and they are sort of on the shitty side, but not the trend.”
 

“But a population that’s losing half a million a year, a life expectancy of only 58 for guys, [tens of thousands of] villages abandoned in the last five years — this is not looking good,” I typed, and Pasha fired back. “Right. But look at the profile of those who die. Sorry for being so positive, but we are having a selection process happening. In the last years a few of my alcoholic and troublemaker neighbours indeed vanished . . . . Looks bad at first but from another perspective the population is going through self-cleansing. I’m afraid the trend is nothing to get excited about for a connoisseur of decay . . . . The fact that a place is derelict means that someone is lurking around to buy it cheap and to pour money into it. I’ve seen this happen in Tver and Kaluga, the only two rural regions of which I have good knowledge/feel. I’ve seen these places, which are some of the poorest, shift into economic boom in three to four years. But the impression that things are bad and getting worse can easily be created if that is what the client wants. Too bad I’ll be out with a film crew visiting Jewish communities in western Ukraine that persist no matter what.”

Why was Pasha now singing a more upbeat song than the come-on for his misery tour, I wondered. Could things have improved so dramatically in only twelve months? My own little misery tour suggests that Pasha could be on the money: things do seem to be looking up somewhat. Some of the oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are in exile or behind bars. Moscow has a palpable new vitality, and its streets are safe. In 1993, you couldn’t go out after dark. The streets belonged to the hooligani. Now they belong to bevies of smartly dressed career girls.
 

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