This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
I was about 10 years old and I was coming home from music school on a bus. I was wearing a coat the color of the ocean. It was a hand-me-down, but it was warm. I was still cold in it, though, because I was hungry. I was always hungry.
At one of the stops, a woman got on carrying a bunch of big sacks. She sat down and started talking to me. She was a foreigner. She had come to our town to bring aid to orphans. I told her I wasn’t an orphan, but she gave me a sack anyway.
It was huge. Getting off the bus, I tripped and dropped it. Barley spilled all over the ground. I got down on my hands and knees and began shoving grain, dirt and snow into the sack. A man approached and stood over me. He picked up the sack. Determined not to let him take it, I clung to the sack with all my might. “I’ll carry this for you,” he said.
I led him through the snowy courtyards to my building. I was scared he would try to break into our apartment. But I wanted this sack. We went up the stairs, past walls covered in curses and burn marks, stepping on used syringes that snapped under our feet. He rang the doorbell. To my relief, my mother opened the door. The man put the bag down and left.
“Mama!” I told her excitedly, “There’s pearl barley in there! But I fell! I spilled it! But I picked it up! I’m sorry! It’s mixed with snow.”
My mother looked at the dirt mixed with the grain.
“It’s OK,” she said. “We’ll pick through it.”
We poured the barley onto newspapers and put it into plastic bags, grain by grain. Then we soaked it and washed out the snow and the dirt. We ate it at the end of a day marked by terror and joy.
This was my Russia in the 1990s. It was a Russia intent on survival, where food was the most precious commodity. People worked two or three jobs to get by. My mother was a teacher and janitor in two schools — and she barely made ends meet. Criminal gangs shot each other in the streets. There was a constant fear of tomorrow because of what the unknown could do to you and your loved ones. This was my childhood.
Russia’s transition from a command economy to a market economy wreaked havoc on the country. In 1992, the year I turned 5, price controls for goods were canceled. Inflation reached approximately 2,500 percent and the cost of basic food items rose 26-fold. Many enterprises shut down, others stopped paying their workers. The privatization schemes that were supposed to give Russians shares in formerly state-owned factories, farms and mines led to the transfer of all of these industries into the hands of a small group of oligarchs.
“The Russian famine is neither internationally recognized nor publicized for the very good reason that Russia was making a transition to capitalism and it is this process which gave rise to the famine,” wrote the economist Utsa Patnaik in her 2007 book “The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays.” She attributes Russia’s four million additional deaths between 1990 and 1996 to the transition from communism to capitalism.
Afraid of losing control of the country, the democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, abandoned democracy. In 1993, in violation of the Constitution, he dissolved the parliament. When its members resisted, he called on the army to shell the parliament building. Four months later, a new constitution that concentrated power in the hands of the president was approved.
The next year, Yeltsin ordered the army into the southern republic of Chechnya to prevent the region from breaking away from Russia. The ensuing conflict went on for nearly two years and caused the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians.
In 1996, despite having an approval rating of 8 percent, Yeltsin won re-election. His victory over the Communist Party candidate was thanks to the active support of Russia’s television channels, which were owned by oligarchs. These men also sponsored Yeltsin’s campaign; they didn’t want the source of their wealth to be questioned.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, when I was 12 years old, Yeltsin stepped down from the presidency, and Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister, became the acting president. Three months later, Putin won his first presidential election. He had essentially been appointed to the post, but Russians did not mourn the death of their nascent democracy.
Over the course of the 1990s, “democracy” had become a kind of curse word for many Russians. It was synonymous with poverty, crime, chaos and fear.
Putin was lucky. The price of oil, Russia’s most important export, began increasing as soon as he came into power, and it continued to rise for the next 15 years. The crime rate went down; the standard of living went up. Putin’s government offered the people stability in exchange for their political indifference and eventually, their liberties. This tacit agreement is what led Russia into its current war.
Now there is no more stability. Men are drafted to fight in Ukraine, and they return to Russia in coffins. Political dissent has been crushed. There is no independent press. Repressions have become routine. Prices are rising, the value of the ruble is falling and people are once again asking the question that I remember from my childhood: Can we afford meat?
I tell my mother that we need to be done with Putin.
But she says she is afraid that without him, our lives will be like they were in the ’90s. “Don’t you remember?” she asks me. I do.
Her fear of the past is greater than her fear of the present. This fear is what has kept Putin in power. He uses it wisely. And it is strangling our future.
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