The Oligarchs, page 21
Gusinsky grew up “on the street,” as he later put it. “I am a product of the street. I was born in the street and learned to defend myself in the street.”
After studying mathematics in high school, he felt the sting of prejudice again when he tried to enroll in the theoretical physics department at the Moscow Physics-Engineering Institute. It was a prestigious school that prepared specialists for the Soviet military-industrial complex. Jews were unwanted. “I really knew mathematics and physics well. I was absolutely confident. Everybody was telling me: they don’t take Jews there.” Gusinsky said he ignored their advice. He applied—and was rejected. He was offended, and angry.
Gusinsky enrolled instead at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas because his mother had studied there. Gusinsky was a bad student at the school that students fondly called Kerosinka. “I was not interested,” he acknowledged. “I took offense at everyone, almost against the whole world.” Gusinsky did not finish his studies at Gubkin. By his own account he dabbled in the black market, working as a fartzovschik —daring young traders who dealt in imported jeans and audiocassettes and changed money for foreign tourists. Gusinsky recalled that he couldn’t get the hang of being a so-called speculator. “I bought several pairs of jeans, then I tried to sell them and it turned out I sold them cheaper than I bought them,” he told me ruefully. Gusinsky often joked that he was not cut out to be a street trader. However, in later years, he showed a knack for entrepreneurship that far overshadowed his lack of skills as a jeans trader.
Having failed his classes at the institute, Gusinsky went into the army in 1973, where he was trained as a junior sergeant in the chemical intelligence troops. These units would enter the battle zone after a chemical or biological weapons attack. But Gusinsky’s strongest memory of the army was that he had to stand his ground. “I had perfect relations with everybody in the army except for complete idiots and scoundrels,” he recalled. “I only lost several teeth in the army, so nothing horrible was going on—these were the usual fistfights; it happens. In two years in the army, I learned only one thing, the ability to fight for myself.”
After the military, he was adrift back in Moscow. A friend urged him to enroll in another prestigious school, the State Institute for the Study of Theatrical Arts. Gusinsky replied that he had not read Stanislavsky or Shakespeare or Molière. But with two months before the entrance exams, he decided to try. He spent nights poring over books. His friend reassured him, “Piece of cake—you’ll make it,” but Gusinsky feared that Jews were not welcome at the institute; the theater, like film, was under strict Communist Party control.
The oral exams were given by a renowned director, Boris Ravenskikh, chief stage director of Moscow’s Maly Theater. At the time of the exams, Gusinsky, still thin as a rail and angry at the world, came before Ravenskikh for the required interview. Behind Gusinsky was Valery Belyakovich, another drama student.
Ravenskikh asked Gusinsky, “Why are you going to study stage directing?”
“I want to understand life,” he replied. “A lot in this life surprises me.”
“What surprises you most?” Ravenskikh asked.
“Lack of communication between people,” Gusinsky responded. “People have lost the ability to understand each other.”2
Ravenskikh immediately took an interest in the intense young man, who was the only one in the class with no drama experience. “He believed very much in the idea that a stage director is a person with life experience,” Gusinsky recalled. “He was selecting people by intuition. And he told me, ‘I’ll take you.’”
But Gusinsky again felt touched by anti-Semitism. Ravenskikh was warned by a party official: “What are you doing? Out of fifteen people for this year, you are taking three Jews!” According to Gusinsky, Ravenskikh did not like to be pressured. Ravenskikh stubbornly insisted that he remain in the class.
At the institute, Gusinsky was always brimming with jokes and running in a dozen directions. Despite shortages everywhere, Gusinsky found scarce white paint to spruce up the theater at the institute. He found a pair of speakers and wired up a sound system. He put his hands on a tape recorder when his class needed one. He brought scarce or banned LPs to his friends. “He gave me a record of Krokus, it was Polish!” Belyakovich recalled. “It was banned—a very expensive gift, because it was impossible to get even a Polish LP. I had no other LPs.” At the lunch hour at the institute, Gusinsky often took five friends, packed them into his tiny car—he was the only one with a car—and they dashed away from the campus for a break.
Gusinsky “was always taking us to theaters; he had connections everywhere,” Belyakovich remembered. “In those days it was hard to get tickets; it was always difficult.” It was practically impossible to get into Moscow’s famous Lenkom Theater, but Gusinsky managed to do it for a preview of Yunona and Avos, a hugely popular rock musical that blazed new trails in the theater at the time because it lacked ideology. Gusinsky told his classmates to show up at the Lenkom at 10:30 A.M. and instructed them to wait for him outside until he gave the signal: “And then I whistle, and you follow me!”
Soon Gusinsky had them inside for a rehearsal right behind the director. The first part of Gusinsky’s last name means goose in Russian, and that was his nickname. “He was swimming like this all the time,” Belyakovich said, “and we would ask him, ‘Gus, can you get us tickets for this?’ And he would say, ‘Wait,’ he had a lot of acquaintances. He was different because of his communicativeness and networks. But bringing twelve people in was very top class! He introduced us as stage directors, claiming that we had to be there.”
His teacher, Ravenskikh, left an impression on Gusinsky. Ravenskikh refused to be pushed around and was willing to experiment even within the regimented, ideological realm of Soviet theater. Ravenskikh once was ordered to stage Brezhnev’s sugary ghost-written war memoir, Malaya Zemlya, at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. The book describes Brezhnev’s role in a 1943 battle in which the Eighteenth Army captured and held a piece of land, Malaya Zemlya, on the Black Sea for 225 days. The role of the battle was played up after Brezhnev came to power, but Brezhnev had done nothing out of the ordinary. Ravenskikh went to the scene of the battle to ponder his assignment. He did not want to do it, but refusing would be risky. He then returned to Moscow and declared that he could not do the play and would not: Brezhnev’s role had been overstated.
Under Ravenskikh’s tutelage at the institute, students pushed the boundaries of what was permissible. They could breathe more freely at the institute than on the formal stage. Gusinsky and his class read and staged a part of Nicholai Erdman’s play The Suicide, a black comedy about an ordinary Soviet citizen who is driven by despair to attempt suicide but is finally too cowardly to carry it out. The play had been banned in 1932 and was never officially staged in the Soviet Union.
For graduation, students were required to stage a play in a real theater, not at the institute. Moscow was the center of theatrical life, yet it was nearly impossible for students to stage their diploma plays in the capital, and it was quite common to look for a stage in the provinces. For his diploma work, the equivalent of his graduate thesis, Gusinsky went to Tula, a hardscrabble industrial town south of Moscow. At the Tula State Dramatic Theater during the 1979–1980 winter season, the ever enthusiastic, ever thin, ever emotional Gusinsky staged Tartuffe, by Jean-Baptist Molière, the seventeenth-century French playwright. The show was billed as a comedy, an experimental one-act play by students. Importantly, it borrowed fragments from a work on Molière by the twentieth-century Russian writer and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, which Bulgakov wrote in the second half of 1929.3 As Gusinsky was well aware, Bulgakov had focused on the relationship between the artist and power, between Molière and Louis XIV. The tense relationship between artist and dictator was one that Bulgakov knew well through his own great heartache and pain in the early Stalin years. His play about Molière was rehearsed for four years—but banned after only seven performances.
By 1979 Bulgakov was no longer totally prohibited but was still informally proscribed. Gusinsky’s performance in Tula gained a popular following in part because it also was slightly beyond what was usually permitted by the authorities. The audience entered the theater to guitar music or a band. Alexander Minkin, a lively, bearded drama critic who later became a well-known Moscow journalist, had studied at the theater institute at the same time as Gusinsky. Minkin concentrated on theory and criticism, while Gusinsky’s training was practical as a stage director. Minkin told me that Gusinsky implored him to come to Tula to see the premiere—to take an elektrichka, a commuter train, four hours to Tula!—but he refused. “I thought in advance that it was going to be horrible, it was going to be rubbish,” Minkin recalled. “I didn’t think he was a good director.” Moreover, he added, “Moliere is always very boring. He is a classic, but a boring one. That is why I believed neither in Gusinsky nor in the fact that he could stage Moliere.”4
But Minkin changed his mind and went to Tula, and Gusinsky’s production turned out to be a popular hit. “I laughed so much, my stomach ached,” Minkin recalled. “It was done with such taste, with such humor!” According to the Moscow News, the house was full every night, and Tula youth talked about nothing other than Tartuffe.5 Gusinsky was the heart and soul of his company, working with them late at night, driving them home in his car, bringing them gifts of sausage from Moscow.
Gusinsky had been lucky in Tula; the authorities allowed him to stage a play that was slightly off-key to the trained ear of the Soviet propagandist. Moreover, Gusinsky had added sonnets from Shakespeare, including a strongly antiauthoritarian sonnet at the close.
“It was not against Soviet power, it was about a rebellion of a man, an artist, against any power,” Gusinsky remembered. “And it was not anti-Soviet; it was just that they are all crazy, all our fucking Soviet power, all those Communists—they believe that anything going beyond certain boundaries is aimed against them.” Gusinsky took his play to Kiev, where it was closed down by the party city committee for being anti-Soviet after a few performances. The party bosses wrote a complaint to the Central Committee in Moscow. “It was probably then that I learned that I could not march in formation,” Gusinsky recalled, referring to the rigid conformity demanded by the party.
Gusinsky “stubbornly wanted to stage the next play in Moscow,” Minkin told me. “Year after year, he went and bowed from the waist to everybody—to the Culture Ministry of the USSR, to the Culture Ministry of the Russian Republic, to the Cultural Department of Moscow. He went everywhere, including all the theaters. He asked them to give him a stage. He asked head directors, theatrical leaders—nothing. And every week he hoped, because someone had promised him something. And he waited, waited, and waited. And another six months passed, and nothing again. He started anew, and he was given some promise anew, and he waited again. But that was horrible. He wasn’t doing anything! There was energy in him like an atomic bomb, but there was no way out.”
The Moscow theater world was crowded and competitive, and it would have been painstakingly difficult for Gusinsky to break into it under any circumstances. He had good connections, having studied under Ravenskikh and the renowned Yuri Lyubimov, director of the Taganka Theater. But he still could not break down the barriers and get a play to the stage in Moscow. Gusinsky believed the reason was anti-Semitism, and perhaps his lack of talent. “I am a Jew. It was prohibited. Plus, in fact, I was not a very talented stage director.”
Through the early 1980s, Gusinsky searched in vain for a place in the theater. His quest was a long and frustrating one. “Many times he told me, ‘This is my last attempt,’” Minkin remembered. “‘If they deceive me once more, if they don’t let me stage a play, I will go into business. I won’t take it any longer.’”
He found work organizing public events such as concerts and sports. As stage director for Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games in 1986, he organized the opening and closing ceremony, setting up performances at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses for the foreign participants. He enjoyed good connections with the Komsomol and the KGB. But when I asked him about it years later, he said it was dreary. “I was simply earning money,” he said.
Minkin was more blunt. “That was shit,” he recalled of the events Gusinsky organized. “For a theater director to be involved in that was horrible. Is this real work for a director—to stage how girls walk and throw those stupid sticks? No, that’s impossible.” Minkin recalled that Gusinsky was still dreaming of a break into the theater at the beginning of perestroika, hoping that changes in the political mood might leave him an opening. But one day his organizing of public events took a turn for the worse because of a stretch of black ribbon.
In the early days of perestroika, Gusinsky organized a Day of the Theater, sponsored by the Komsomol city committee. On the broad main avenue in Moscow then known as Kalininsky Prospekt, Gusinsky set up a string of small outdoor cafés with special themes: one for writers, one for artists, one for musicians. “All was well because this was a day of culture, and I took very earnestly everything that Gorbachev was saying—here, it started, freedom came.” But one thing had not changed: the party tightly controlled public space, especially open squares and buildings. Kalininsky Prospekt was a special street, the route that party leaders and others took to the Kremlin. Some of the artists who were helping Gusinsky decided to change the way Kalininsky Prospekt looked, and they laced the trees with black ribbon. It was a harmless gesture, but some low-level KGB men took offense. Gorbachev might see it as his limousine sped toward the Kremlin! They hauled Gusinsky before the Komsomol city committee and accused him of anti-Soviet activity. As he had many times before, Gusinsky got his back up. He lashed out. He argued with the Komsomol chiefs as they demanded he change this, change that, hew to the party line. And they insisted that he apologize to everyone in the Gorkom, the city Communist Party committee.
Gusinsky erupted. He shouted that they were fools, that their parents had been fools, that they would die fools. He slammed the door and walked out. The Day of the Theater was to be held in two days. They canceled some of the events and flooded the rest with uniformed and plainclothes security men, a tactic designed to throw a wet blanket on any public event. The local KGB men wanted to lock up this impertinent young man, Gusinsky, and throw away the key, but Gusinsky told me years later they did not succeed. They “were prevented from eating me up, let’s put it this way,” he recalled. “I was not staging any more mass performances; this was the last one. But they were not given the chance to finish me off.”
The episode proved a valuable lesson for Gusinsky. He realized that he had to work on maintaining good relations with people in power, even if he despised them. At the time, he was quietly protected by a high-ranking party official, Yuri Voronov, who was deputy head of the Culture Department of the Central Committee. There was another episode too. According to a close friend, Gusinsky in this period was also caught trading hard currency, which was forbidden. No charges were ever brought against Gusinsky, the friend said, but as a result of the brush with the authorities, Gusinsky established close ties with some KGB officers. Gusinsky came to the attention of Filipp Bobkov, a deputy KGB director who headed the notorious Fifth Main Directorate, which waged war on dissidents. Bobkov, whose job included keeping tabs on the intelligentsia, may have found Gusinsky a valuable source of information about what was happening in the theater. Many years later, Bobkov became part of Gusinsky’s corporate high command. Gusinsky was learning how to cultivate friends in high places.6
The world of the early cooperatives in Moscow was wild and unpredictable. The whole idea of entrepreneurship had been labeled criminal in Soviet times, and the first businessmen were often regarded with deep suspicion, as hustlers at the edge of society, a ragtag bunch of experimenters and gamblers. In 1988 and 1989, Gusinsky fit in among them perfectly—he had the imagination and the guts. His almost instant success with the copper bracelets showed him how to make money fast, and his experience with the black ribbon scandal had pointed toward another essential ingredient of success: connections. The Communist Party was still all-pervasive; authority and power were something that had to be bought. To make money, Gusinsky realized, he needed connections. An aspiring businessman could not simply close his door and keep to himself; he needed to succor bureaucrats and politicians, to have friends in the KGB and the police. Gusinsky was an early and avid student of the nexus between wealth and power. He practiced cultivating politicians and security men, harboring them and exploiting them.
At first, the draw of power, the absolute beauty of making money by your own ingenuity and someone else’s permission slip or signature, was appallingly simple. After the bracelets bonanza, Gusinsky opened a new cooperative that made cheap figurines, copies of famous Russian artworks from molded plaster. They were covered with a microthin layer of copper, using special chemical baths. As with the bracelets, the costs were minimal, the profits fantastic, and the copies were beautiful—as long as you did not notice the plaster core. Hood ornaments for foreign-made cars were very popular too; he made a mint with imitation Jaguar hood ornaments. But to duplicate Russian art he needed protection. He wanted to formally export the fake figurines, which would mean handling hard currency, and that was another reason he needed protection. Moreover, Gusinsky’s cooperative was officially registered as part of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, of which Raisa Gorbachev was a board member. This government foundation was prohibited by Soviet law from engaging in commercial activities; if he flaunted the law, there could be trouble. Again Gusinsky found a way out by using his connections. He turned to Voronov, the Central Committee man who had protected him during the black ribbon scandal, and managed to get a letter of permission from the Soviet prime minister, Nicholai Ryzhkov, allowing him to export his fake figurines for hard currency. It is not clear precisely why the party man helped Gusinsky. But for Gusinsky, it was a fantastic mix: plaster, permission, and hard currency. Gusinsky told me it was his first big political success, and it led to more.
