‘Resurrection’ Explores New Russian Culture

“Resurrection, The Struggle for a New Russia” by David Remnick (Random House, 398 pages, $25.95)

Moscow used to be the capital of socialist utopia. Today, it’s more like Chicago under Al Capone, or maybe San Francisco during the Gold Rush, a wide-open frontier town.

Ruppies cruise in BMWs and send their kids to English boarding schools. Mobsters gun each other down in the streets. Shady bankers in Italian suits employ private armies of security guards. The mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, runs the city as if he were a Slavic Richard Daley.

This place where the almighty ruble is king has an able chronicler in David Remnick, New Yorker staff writer and author of “Resurrection,” a worthy successor to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lenin’s Tomb,” an account of the Gorbachev years.

Who better, after all, than a New Yorker to understand Moscow, with its air of lawlessness and big money? Remnick paints a telling portrait of the new Russia’s culture of excess and graft in all its florid detail. There are lots of pungent, wisecracking descriptions, like this one of Russian media: “Television, radio and the newspapers,” he writes, “were now filled with propaganda of a different kind: advertisements for unaffordable Western luxuries, fantastic commercials geared toward lives that hardly exist.

“One minute, you were Homo sovieticus, surrounded by the aggressive blandness of communism; the next minute, you were watching a Slavic bimbo in a bikini sucking on a maraschino cherry and telling you which casino to visit.”

And who better than a former Washington Post reporter (Remnick was the Post’s Moscow correspondent) to understand the importance of access.

Remnick has it, getting interviews with, among others, Vladimir Gusinsky, one of Russia’s emerging Rockefellers, and media-shy novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Remnick also offers much intelligent political analysis, debunking the reassurance some in the West found in President Boris Yeltsin’s re-election over Communist Gennady Zyuganov last year.

Yet despite the rather dismal portrait Remnick offers, his concluding chapter shows him to be a long-term optimist about Russia.

In the end, perhaps it’s the undeniable creative energy and vitality of the new Russian elites, soaked in excess though they may be, that provide the best foundation for Remnick’s hope that somehow, someday, things will be better in Russia.