Owen Matthews
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The 20 hectares in question had never in actuality been considered part of the village or used by the villagers. So essentially Stepanov was buying an unusual, but very Russian, financial instrument — an option to pursue a speculative legal claim, in this case to a chunk of land worth, on paper at least, $60 million.
Why didn’t Nikolina Gora itself pursue its claim to the land, you may ask? Very simple. In the legal mire that is Russian property title, winning a case requires not only a great deal of money for the bribing of clerks, judges and other petty officials. It also requires what Russians coyly describe as an ‘administrative resource’ or, more simply, powerful friends in the local bureaucracy. For a deal of this scale to be pursued successfully, it is routine to offer a person or persons close to the powers-that-be a substantial cut of the proceeds in return for encouragement to local judges to do the right thing. The Russian term for this is otkat, or kickback. And since the other party in this case is the state, no one loses — everyone benefits from carving yet another little slice off a very plump joint known as state land.
The Nikolina Gora committee, unusually for a Russian volunteer body, seems to have had no intention of profiting from the deal. The best proof of this is that, had profit been their motive, they would not have signed over the claim to the land so easily. Rather, their priority was to regularise the affairs of the village and its traditional land. All are professional people with their own lives and jobs; the village committee was a burdensome sideline.
So all would have been well with the privatisation had not the Nikolina Gora residents whose dachas adjoin the disputed 20 hectares become upset that the woodland was about to be sold off and filled with new dachas. One of them, Gennady Kostrov, a sometime art gallery owner and advertising executive, decided to oppose the deal. Kostrov insists that his motive is simply righteous indignation at what he calls ‘a crooked deal’. However, committee members claim that Kostrov was motivated by baser motives — that he is fishing for what is known in Russian as otstupniye, which translates as ‘moneys paid in order to withdraw’ and frequently refers to a pay-off made to inconveniently noisy lobbyists who threaten to block a business deal.
Kostrov financed a media campaign of unprecedented scale, launched last summer. A professionally designed website accused the village committee of engaging in illegal machinations aimed at stealing $60 million. Ostensibly the site represents the interests of ordinary residents, though only five members of the co-operative (out of more than 300) actually put their names to it. Nevertheless, the site, ranis.ru, is publicised on large hoardings paid for by Kostrov along the Rublevo–Uspenskoye highway which runs through some of Russia’s most expensive suburban real estate to Nikolina Gora.
Other, nastier elements of what Russians call ‘black PR’ were also brought into play, though Kostrov denies involvement with them. Articles began appearing in Russia’s shockingly corrupt newspapers. This sort of paid-for coverage is so common that it has a slang term to describe it — dzhinsa, from the word dzins (jeans), in memory of the days when denim peddlers were the media’s first advertisers. A specially printed newspaper was also produced and distributed in Nikolina Gora and neighbouring villages — homeland of Russia’s wealthy new elite — with a similar message to the website. The village committee’s chairman, the great viola virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, came in for special vilification. Gangs of students were hired, dressed in anti-Bashmet T-shirts and equipped with inflatable axes, and sent forth in the guise of ecology activists to protest outside Bashmet’s concerts. They handed out leaflets claiming that due to Bashmet’s schemes, swaths of virgin forest would soon be razed. Such crowds can easily be rented via the internet; the going rate is $12 per person, per hour, plus food and transport. Hence a two-hour, 100-person demo can be organised for a very reasonable $2,400 or so, plus the cost of T-shirts and placards. This practice of renting crowds is known as massovka, the term for film or theatrical extras.
The campaign could be said to have worked, insofar as earlier this year Kostrov was duly offered 0.7 of a hectare — about $2 million worth of land — as his ostupniye. That would have been a decent return on his investment which, if it included the website, the media coverage and advertising placards, might have cost about $100,000. Yet Kostrov told me that he had refused the offer. ‘They are trying to buy my conscience and my soul,’ he said with great indignation. This refusal seems to have complicated matters. Two members of the village committee, who requested anonymity, say that among Kostrov’s backers were senior officers of the FSB, successor to the KGB — known colloquially as ‘the grown-ups’ — who had been hoping for a slice of the action. The grown-ups became frustrated that Kostrov was holding out for more, and have apparently threatened to withdraw their support unless he settles.
Meanwhile, Nikolina Gora residents, all descendants of Russia’s Stalin-era intellectual elite, have been working their own contacts with vigour. Powerful men who admire Bashmet as a musician have offered to help with their own ‘administrative resources’. There has been talk of putting Kostrov on the European Union’s visa blacklist, a particularly devastating move since there is no due process or appeal involved; the subjective opinion of a single European embassy’s visa officers is sufficient to stymie his travel plans for the rest of his life. Kostrov himself complained in an emotional speech at the co-operative’s last general meeting that he had been ‘threatened by bandits’ who promised to ‘tear my balls off’. It may be that Kostrov himself has unleashed forces of which he is no longer in control. With so much money at stake, there are plenty of ruthless men willing to cast aside the usual niceties of Nikolina Gora life in pursuit of a far larger fortune than the sliver offered to Kostrov.
The sad point is this: in a society like Russia where there is no rule of law, the only defence against powerful enemies is to appeal not to the law, but privately to the law’s supposed enforcers. Courts and the police are simply tools to silence people who are too weak or too poor to overturn or defy them; property title is conditional on having sufficient cash and friends to defend it. As in the depths of the sea, the spinier and more difficult to swallow you are, the less chance you have of being devoured by larger predators. The only defence of tiny minnows, however, is to hope not to be noticed. Students of history will recognise this system as ‘bastard feudalism’, where the protection of the law is non-existent and protection is available only through membership of a vertically integrated patronage system.
Nikolina Gora, with its rather Chekhovian atmosphere of fecklessness and intellectualism, may have appeared a rather plump minnow, ready to be swallowed. It turns out, however, that Russian intellectuals can be spikier than they appear.
Owen Matthews is Moscow bureau chief of Newsweek.
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