The 90s, such as if they were recent, become the subject of the memories of old people. So I wanted to remember something from that post-revolutionary life. There is no doubt that a revolution took place in 1991: the old life collapsed, the rules of the game radically changed, power and property were in other hands.
In the "Internationale" it is sung about the long-awaited revolution: "Who was nothing, he will become everything." This is a free quote from the Gospel parable about the winegrowers: the first will be the last, and the last - the first. This is exactly what happens in any revolution. This happened in the 90s.
Among my readers (especially from "Tomorrow") there is always someone who, at the words of a revolution, is indignant: "What kind of revolution? It was a wrong, bad revolution, a counter-revolution!"
In fact, there are no good and correct revolutions. In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated April 23, 1885, Engels wrote:
He was very right.
The story turned out to be extremely ironic in relation to many Soviet intellectuals: how they called for the revolution, how they waited, how they hated the omnipotence of the CPSU, the 6th article of the Constitution and the 5th paragraph of the Soviet questionnaires, how they dreamed of freedom of speech and departure! And now they are often the first and were thrown into the trash of life: the research institutes, editorial offices and departments were closed, where it was so free (as it turned out later) to scold the system, while working as much as possible and for pleasure. Their cozy little world - collapsed, and they were on the rubble or even under the rubble. This phenomenon was noticed by S. G. Kara-Murza. He spoke several times on various occasions and in different books: his former colleagues-chemists were eager to end Soviet life. Then he reasonably drew their attention to the fact that they live precisely thanks to the Soviet power and on its content,and whether anti-Soviet authorities will support them is a big question. But people who were not stupid just didn't understand what he was talking about. The main thing is to overthrow tyranny. It was these phenomena that made S. G. Kara-Murzu talk about the "eclipse of reason" - the central idea of all his writings.
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The irony of history was also in the fact that those who were immeasurably less revolutionary and even apolitical survived the revolution easier and even more successfully. This was our family, my saleswomen, and many others.
I personally have never been a revolutionary. I was inquisitive and quite well-read, but at the same time completely apolitical person. It seemed to me, like all people of all professions and occupations known to me, that a lot should be changed in Soviet life. I thought that it would be necessary to allow private initiative, small business, remove many bureaucratic obstacles - in fact, since the beginning of the 80s, the majority thought so. But for this, it seemed to me, it was absolutely not necessary either to abolish the Soviet power, or to prohibit the CPSU, or to introduce a multiparty system. Useful changes could have been made from above, as at first it seemed what Gorbachev would do. Privatization, i.e. looting state property, I could not imagine. To such an extent I could not that at first I did not even notice privatization, so much it did not fit in my mind.
And now, instead of overdue reforms, a revolution happened.
A revolution is always destruction. The old life is falling, like a dilapidated building, which they did not manage or did not want to repair in time or at least prop up. A revolution is not a creative process at all. The creation of a new life begins after the revolution, at a stage that in French history was called the Restoration. The name, of course, is conditional: nothing in the world can be restored, how twice to enter the same river. Today we have just barely embarked on a creative stage, and before that we were experiencing a protracted stage of revolutionary destruction.
Let's go back, however, to the 90s. An extremely curious question: how did the people in the ruins behave? Who blew the bubbles, who scrambled? And who even felt that this was his time, his chance? After all, every time, as Vasily Grossman said in his book Life and Fate, has its own sons, loved by the time, and their stepsons, rejected by time. In a revolution, they often change places.
According to my observations, two opposite types were most successful in the 90s.
Type one
Authentic specialists, mainly natural and technical. Unfortunately, these have found a place for themselves most often abroad. The revolution turned out to be a powerful centrifuge that brutally separated those who were simply listed as scientists and specialists from those who really knew something and were able to. At the same time, I wanted to work in my specialty.
There are a lot of such friends among our acquaintances and my husband. Here is the son of the head of the department where my husband studied. He left for America, now he is, one might say, a world figure - the head of an important institute in Germany. In general, many of the "Phystechs" have left, and are very well organized - to varying degrees, of course. Here's one detail: they were genuine specialists. It is a pity that their skills and talents are not used here.
Well, those who were just listed - occupied those niches that they could do: in trade, home services. These are myriads of research institute employees, who were without counting during the Soviet era.
Many young machine tool engineers, children of my parents' friends, left for China: then such specialists were needed there. Not geniuses, not creators of breakthrough trends - just normal qualified engineers.
And here are my childhood friends from the Yegoryevsky yard. They worked at a machine-building plant, traveled as machine tool adjusters to Germany and Bulgaria - accompanied the machines that were sold there. They were never seven spans in the forehead - just normal workers. The machine tool industry was the first to bent and they lost their position. I remember that it was really bad, I attracted them to work as drivers when I worked in an Italian company as its Moscow representative. So the brothers turned over, and then got a job almost in their specialty: their friend organized the assembly production of chandeliers, and they went to him as a kind of craftsmen.
Many scientists have successfully gone into business because they were not stupid people, and science was not something for them that they could not live without. And they made substantial money. From scratch. But here we are already moving on to the second type of successful people.
Second type
These are people with no inner connection. Ready to do, in principle, anything.
Anything - it is not at all necessary to rob and kill; those who robbed and killed were generally few in percentage terms. In this sense, our last revolution, in comparison with the October 1917, was, praise to heaven, quite velvety. The life of these militants of privatization was bright, but short: at each cemetery there is an alley of victims of the revolution of 1991; the typical age at which they fell on their "arrows" is about 28 years. And those who managed to grab large chunks of the former state property and who became so-called oligarchs were very few. I was not familiar with either one or the other. The bulk are ordinary average people who have not taken anything away, but have lost a lot.
Not only with the bandits - I personally did not know anyone who climbed to the very top, became a minister, a State Duma deputy or an oligarch. I observed the stratum to which I myself belonged - the middle Moscow intelligentsia: my husband is a researcher, engineer-physicist, I am a translator. Straight heroes of Yuri Trifonov. I also write about them.
I noticed a long time ago: luck at that revolutionary time often smiled at those who “were nothing”. He did not have a reinforced concrete idea of himself and did not strive to do what was written in the diploma, or what he was used to. Such people looked at the surrounding life (at the ruins) with an open mind and could often see some kind of opportunity. There is always a possibility: you just need to be able to see it; this is something like mysterious pictures, where in the mixing of lines you need to make out three wolves or a fisherman and a fish. I remember that even in my preschool childhood I loved to look at and solve such pictures; they were placed in "Murzilka" and "Merry Pictures". Business opportunities are very similar to these pictures.
But those who knew exactly who he was - were horrified by the loss of their place and status, and therefore did not see any opportunities, or rather, they firmly knew that there were none. And the poor fellow began to survive. This is an ugly, vile, demoralizing word that came into use at that time. I noticed that a person should think about himself that he is surviving - this is, as Napoleon said, “the beginning of the end”. Such a person ceases to see even fairly obvious possibilities. This is a kind of panic, but not acute, but, so to speak, chronic, sluggish. But, like any panic, it makes it impossible to think, navigate and make the right decisions.
I remember a very impressive story told to me by the mother of my son's classmate. There lived a young woman, the daughter of a prominent party leader. Candidate of Science, Senior Researcher, Moscow State University. She had everything: an apartment, a great place that seemed eternal and unshakable, a husband, a little daughter, whom she was going to raise in a scientific way. And then - the collapse. The salary was zero, dad died, nothing is clear. The husband, by the way, did not share her panic: he began to "bomb" in his "Zhigul", as many did then. This especially humiliated her: she - and suddenly the wife of a taxi driver. I got depressed. A friend of mine, a doctor, not a psychiatrist, but always fond of psychiatry, tried to conduct psychotherapeutic conversations with her. But where there! The poor fellow got into a real psychiatric hospital.
At the same time, women adapted better than men: they “understood about themselves” less and were ready to do what at the moment leads to earnings. In addition, we had an incredible number of women engineers who were burdened by their profession. So they threw off their boring status, like uncomfortable clothes, and did what they thought and even liked.
At that time in Tula, I met a middle-aged woman who at the time of our acquaintance was working as a cleaner in a bank. She said that in her former life she had worked as a design engineer for twenty years. I got ready to say something condolently, as it turned out that my interlocutor feels quite well, and her position is even better than before. “It used to be so difficult, responsibly, you are always afraid to make a mistake, you get nervous, but now you take it away and that's the end of it.”
Often people found interesting opportunities who looked at things humorously and were ready to play different, sometimes unexpected, roles in the comedy of life. When I started my business, I remember, I stood on the stairs of the underground passage and handed out leaflets inviting to our office. Lord, what picturesque opuschentsi we gave tea and welcomed in every possible way! But the fact is the fact: this is how we found the first sellers of our product. And then people came to us from closed enterprises, from scientific research institutes, from offices where they did not pay salaries for months, and just from where. When I told one woman how I was catching the first saleswomen in the environment, she sighed with condolence: "What have people been driven to!" And to me personally, all this seemed new, funny and promising.
A humorous look at things in those days (and in any) is a huge help in life. A serious, full of drama sense of self - did not roll. All businesses of that time were a little comedy of life. Most of these businesses did not last long, but some still live today, while others have grown and gained fame. But if they have not grown, they regularly feed their creators, and thanks for that.
These are the people who turned out to be the beloved sons of that revolutionary time. They are characterized by ingenuity, now called creativity: after all, you need to come up with a business. They are not afraid to “go there, I don’t know where”, to act without any instructions and a clear understanding of what all this will lead to. They are ready to change their lives and change themselves.
Today this type is considered very valuable: innovator, leader, start-up - well, you know what is customary to say about this. Today, children are taught in schools: you will not work in a certain specialty, you will change many jobs and professions in your life. A profession for life is the last century. Vaughn and German Gref teaches: specialists are not needed, but "energetic people" are needed. Is the revolution preparing again? Yes, it seems not … But this is the prevailing point of view today.
In fact, different people are needed. In the era of scrapping - there is a demand for lively startups, those "who were nobody." But life is gradually entering the shores, and specialists are needed. And they are not. But these are no longer memories, but unpretentious modernity.