"ingeniously, the particular structure of the regime (and its particular corruptions and enticements) allowed Moscow’s elites to build for themselves a kind of scale model of an idealized Western society atop Moscow’s rough basis — what one friend of mine hadtermed “Copenhagen in the middle of Karachi.” This scale model is what you see every time a Western publication goes gaga over the urbanist wonders of the renovated Gorky Park, profiles the latest batch of Russian fashion’s “It” girls, or applauds Moscow’s restaurant renaissance.
As long as I picked the right routes and stuck to them, it was possible to keep up a near-complete facsimile of my New York life...
A traffic stop, a lost passport, even an altercation with a konsierzhka (Russia’s doormen, traditionally elderly women endowed with the superpowers of snooping and snitching): Any of this could feel like swallowing the red pill and waking up outside the Matrix. Suddenly, you were in the world of institutionalized sadism alleviated only by bribery...
I was beginning to understand why so many Russians who called themselves “liberal” were, in fact, anarcho-libertarians in the Western sense, distrusting the government to perform even the simplest jobs. Even the protest leader Alexei Navalny, whose quixotic campaign for the mayor of Moscow in 2013 briefly regalvanized the movement, ran on a promise to, among other things, privatize the police force. In that sense, the Russian anti-Putinists and Donald Trump have more in common than either side would care to admit...
That was the genius of the system. It didn’t need a giant security apparatus. It needed only you, the citizen, to be implicated just enough to have something to lose but not desperate enough that you’d be tempted to lose it.
FB: "There is a Russian word, ponyatiya, which literally means “things that are understood” — i.e., unwritten rules. Like many phenomena of modern Russian life, it comes from prison culture. And to live by the ponyatiya means not only to stay within the lines but also not to acknowledge the lines’ existence out loud: a version of the wrestling world’s kayfabe. And, just like with wrestling, this pretense takes as much effort, if not more, as the real thing."
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