The Oligarchs by David Hoffman

mother was so busy working—she took two, then three jobs—that she gave the boys “total freedom to secretly indulge our passion for dangerous games.” Luzhkov was left to the “risky, reckless mood of the courtyard.” They often disassembled artillery shells from the war front that they found on railway cars nearby. They would take out the gunpowder, make a fuse with a trail in the dirt, and set off a small firecrackerlike explosion. Once Luzhkov had an idea: Why not set off the whole shell? He set the fuse and ran. A huge explosion followed, shattering windows. The police arrived, but the courtyard had its rules. No one gave him away. “The courtyard was as silent as the grave to the authorities,” Luzhkov remembered.
    Later Luzhkov enrolled at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, one of the premier training grounds for the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union. In the high-ceilinged halls and laboratories of the institute, the Gubkin students learned mechanical engineering, oil and gas geology, mining and refining from one hundred professors, including two prestigious academicians. Although the requisite Marxist-Leninist training was present, the curriculum was heavily weighted toward technical
training. Overall, the school played a critical role—turning out specialists—and each student was given a very specific training over five years to fit into a given place in industry when they finished. 4
    Luzhkov graduated in 1958. He expected to go into the oil industry but was assigned to plastics. He protested loudly, to no avail. Nonetheless, Luzhkov did well. Plastics and petrochemicals came into greater demand in the 1960s, and he moved up the ranks. In 1974 he was appointed director of a design bureau in the Ministry of the Chemical Industry, and later he became director of Khimavtomatika, a maker of specialized equipment for chemical factories with twenty thousand workers. It was the largest single enterprise in the ministry and was divided between scientific research and factory work. It was here, as a top Soviet industrial manager, that Luzhkov took his first, tentative steps away from socialism, and it was a painful departure, seared into his memory.
    In 1980, at the end of the Brezhnev period, Luzhkov proposed a somewhat unorthodox idea, that the science half of his enterprise be put on a very elementary self-financing scheme. “Self-financing” was a watchword of earlier attempts to reform the centrally planned economy, and it often went hand in glove with the growing independence of factory managers. Roughly speaking, it allowed factories to retain their own earnings. Luzhkov suggested selling the research results at Khimavtomatika as a commodity; when they developed a scientific process, they could peddle it and keep the profits. Luzhkov’s proposal went to the top decisionmaking body of the ministry, the collegium, a group of senior managers who sat around a horseshoe-shaped table while an audience of 150 less senior workers looked on. Standing at a podium, Luzhkov outlined his plans. His idea was immediately and dramatically shot down by a representative of the Communist Party, who declared that Luzhkov wanted to violate the precepts of Marx and Engels. The party man opened up a volume of Marx and read aloud: science was the product of human thinking and could not be evaluated in monetary terms! Luzhkov was violating Marx!
    That was the end of the idea. Luzhkov’s minister had no desire to fight the party. What had been a modest step away from socialism had turned into a political hot potato. Luzhkov’s idea was buried and forgotten. But he had marked himself as a man willing to experiment. 5
    At the beginning of perestroika, Luzhkov was fifty years old, but nothing at the time marked him as a political leader. By the same age,
both Gorbachev and Yeltsin held high-ranking party posts. 6 Luzhkov had joined the party in 1968, but his preoccupation was