The Oligarchs by David Hoffman Page B

later recalled of his impressions of the new businessmen, “but all of them were energetic, independent, and interested. One was offering to produce useful goods out of waste garbage. Another found consumer demand at a place where the state structures had no field of activity at all. Ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity—we saw so much of it in our room.”
    Luzhkov’s young, stern aide was Yelena Baturina, whom he married after his first wife died of cancer in 1988. Baturina recalled how the people who came to the room were so different from the bureaucrats who worked in the Mossovet building, and how shocked the bureaucrats were to find the ragged entrepreneurs in their halls. “We were constantly transferred from room to room,” she told me, “because neighbors complained that bearded, dirty people were sitting in the corridors and actually spoiled the image of the building!” 9
    Viktor Loshak, the Moscow News journalist who had been watching
the drama unfold, recalled that Luzhkov had to defend the pioneering cooperative businessmen against bureaucrats who wanted to crush them. One group of bureaucrats were the fierce, large women who were official guardians of public health and safety. The bureaucrats had no idea that a new economy was being born in front of their eyes; they were supposed to uphold the dictates of the old system. “They resisted every microscopic step of the cooperative movement,” Loshak told me.
    â€œI was waiting for the first meeting of this commission. I remember the first woman who was going to be in private business—she was a theater specialist by profession. She had two or three children. She wanted to bake cakes for people for holidays, as a business.
    â€œAnd Luzhkov said, ‘Great!’ And two or three others said ‘Okay.’ Then the opposite side started looking for reasons why they could refuse her. ‘What is the size of your apartment?’ they asked. And it turns out the apartment is big enough. ‘Do you have a medical certificate ?’ She had a certificate. ‘Will you be able to go on taking care of your children?’ And it turned out her mother was in the same block of flats and could help.
    â€œThen this bitch from the sanitary epidemiological service asked, ‘Do you have secondary industrial ventilation in your apartment?’ And this woman didn’t even know what that woman was taking about. Nobody knew what it was, and I didn’t know what it was. And that woman from the sanitary epidemiological service found some point number 3, article number 8, that when making cakes for sale there must be that industrial ventilation.
    â€œThen Luzhkov said, ‘Go—you know where! I’m chairman of this commission and this woman will start her business!’” Luzhkov won the vote and moved on to the next person, who wanted to open a bicycle repair shop. 10
    One evening in those early weeks, a party boss came and insisted that Luzhkov move “this entire public out of here.” Luzhkov explained that the whole point was to let off the steam of public discontent. “The wave is rolling already,” Luzhkov told the party man. “If we don’t cope, we will find ourselves under this wave.” At the same time, Luzhkov privately feared he was being set up for failure, that the cooperatives were going to be crushed and he would be blamed. “The future cooperators were eager to start business, but they were fearful of the future and they wanted to receive some kind of
support from me. I cheered them up the way I knew how, but my heart was filled with anxiety and worry.” 11
    Valery Saikin, chairman of the executive committee and Luzhkov’s boss, told Luzhkov that the nascent private businessmen were subversive and fretted that they might come and demonstrate openly against the party chieftains. “Objectively, they are against the state economy. Against