The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 37 FOUR CENTURIES AND THREE DECADES RUSSIAN THINKING BY JUST I N L I F F LANDER Conversations in Moscow with Russians of different social strata paint a vivid picture of a country grappling with the meaning of the past quarter-century's upheavals. Justin Lifflander has lived in Russia for nearly 30 years. After stints as a contractor at the U.S. embassy in Mos- cow and the INF treaty inspection facility in Votkinsk, he spent 20 years as a salesman for Hewlett-Packard in Russia and four years as an editor at The Moscow Times daily news- paper. He is married to a Russian and received Russian citizenship in 2000. He is the author of How Not to Become a Spy: A Memoir of Love at the End of the Cold War (2014). A t first it seemed tome as if he was wearing X-ray glasses. Having purchased a fur hat from Sasha, the teenage fartsovchik (black mar- keteer) working the Oktyabrskaya subway station inMoscow that day in 1986, I earned the right to chat with him inmy broken Russian. As he scanned the passers-by in search of potential clientele, I couldn’t figure out how he was able to spot the foreigners. “Look carefully,” he explained. “The facial features, the shoes, the wrist watches, the eye glasses. …” I began to understand how he chose who should be offered his znachki (pins) or money changing services. ON RUSSIA Thirty years later my fartsovchik is probably a successful oligarch. He and his countrymen no longer think they are “covered in chocolate”—a phrase going back to the Soviet era meaning “fortunate, lucky, living well”—as they build the socialist paradise while the West rots on the garbage heap of history. Living and working in Russia for the past three decades, I’ve become acquainted with people from a broad range of social strata—from government ministers to migrant workers. I turned to them to collect and distill their insights on how Russian thinking has changed since the end of the USSR. The Evolution of Homo Rusicus My friend Mikhailovich is a middle-aged entrepreneur who moved to Moscow from Kyiv as a young man. He believes that the factors contributing to an individual’s mentality are both experiential and hereditary. “Look at the past 400 years. The Romanov dynasty started in 1613 and lasted 300 years,” Mikhailovich says. “The com- munists were in power for 74 years, and we’ve been free of them for 25 years. It is not a coincidence that 75 percent of the population are content to live under authoritarian rule; 24 percent think like communists—either thieves or despis- OF FOCUS