The Rich

The rich

So, in the Soviet Union there weren’t any Rich people to speak of. There were other ways to have loads more than anyone else did; being a party big wig and living in Moscow were two of the main ones. But the western shiny, shiny richness, all of that “whoever has the most toys when he dies wins” stuff, that didn’t exist. Which means that anyone who is rich has been so for 30 years at the most, and hardly anyone who is adult now was born into wealth, though their parents may have made good so early in the kid’s life that it seems so.

  On top of this, wealth is dirty: it was officially so for 70 years, and the 1990s Kalashnikov tinged embrace of the “free market” didn’t do a great deal to clean up its image. We are at a point in 2013 where there are people with a fair amount of money who have made it honestly: it’s not like the 90s where anyone with a good car was suspected of having cheated or lied or stolen his way to success. At least this is true in Moscow: it’s unlikely to be true in East Bumblefucksky, where simply being a Muscovite is considered legal proof of theft.

 From the mid 90s to late 90s there were the new Russians, subjects of hundreds of gawking articles in the Russian and western media. They were brash, badly dressed and hated with a venom and, with their track suits, military style SUVs and gold chains they were easy to spot. But that didn’t last, and the ones with brains, which is the ones who kept the money, soon developed a look that was all polo neck jumpers and steel rimmed specs: that or classic suits bought on weekend shopping trips to Milan that left them looking pretty much the same a rich businessmen anywhere.

 It was never that easy back then to separate the reality from the perception though: a friend of mine who had a mid range Audi and was a systems admin guy at a medium sized business told me of the people at his Dacha who cursed him under their breath for being a New Russian millionaire. When you are poor it’s hard to tell who is really rich.

 I remember teaching a guy, 15 years ago, and the textbook required him to speculate on what he would do if he “had a million dollars”. We struggled as I spent 10 minutes wondering why a guy who was very clever couldn’t grasp the notion of the hypothetical before it sunk in that it wasn’t a hypothetical for him. Indeed for him a million dollars would signify bankruptcy.  Then the kids appeared.

  There are quite a few teachers here, who live by teaching the kids of the rich, some even take pride in doing so, but either way, they takes a lot of money: stupid money sometimes as the rich are happy to pay way over the odds for their kids. Half of the time this is in lieu of spending any time with those kids. As an English teacher you slot into a daily schedule that starts with school, then tennis lessons, then music lesson, then you, then swimming lessons, then German or Italian or chess and then bed.

You turn up at a flat or house in the west of the city or in the streets that run south west from the Kremlin towards the garden ring,: Ostozhenka and Prechistenka, and a mob of smoking, be-suited security men let you into a marble lined hallway. Then you walk between the rows of cameras to the lift and up to their private little hallway, where a grandma or a nanny lets you into the flat and tries to feed you, and then the kid comes in and you go and sit somewhere and listen to them talk about star wars or world of warcraft for 90 minutes, then collect your $200 and head off. If the Piano lesson hasn’t finished you can sit and chat to the nanny in a lounge the size of a tennis court about whether schools are better in London or Geneva. Or, if she’s busy you can watch FashionTV on a screen that is bigger than your own flat and leaf through the yacht catalogues on the decaffeinated coffee table and wonder just what the hell you are doing there.

 They’re mostly nice too: the kids are nice, the nanny’s and babushkas are nice, just like any other old Russian lady who is pleased her son did well for himself, and when you occasionally meet the parents they tend to be charming and courteous and well educated so that there’s no reason to feel all chippy and resentful, as you can when the rich are just abstract figures. Really the only problem is that the students are kids and kids don’t really have anything to say after they have told you about their Porsche Cayenne Turbo with its own driver and shown you their collection of Attack of the Clones action figures. Most of them don’t even really need English lessons because they have spent the last 5 summers in London or Miami and they won’t struggle to get into college or find a job at anytime in the future.

  So it is that after an initial period of fascination at what life looks like when you have a bigger bank balance than Belgium, you begin to turn down the kid teaching offers and get back to talking to adults with recognizable lives and problems and ambitions.

 The rich adults can be more interesting:  the bankers and the owners of the entire world’s zinc etc, because they at least have stories to tell and a take on Russia that is more nuanced than you are used to. But being rich and living in a country that is full of poor people this often means that they have developed a very prudent approach to sharing their deepest secrets, so that asking a fairly basic question about business can prompt them to say: “Why do you want to know that?” And the truth is that I don’t really, I just want to know how stuff works and if you won’t tell me somebody else will.

  If you are excited by money, and get all hot at the mere notion of being close to lots of it, you can do well as a teacher in Moscow. You can say good morning to some of the richest men on the planet and smile sweetly as they kiss little Vitaly before leaving for a meeting with some Kremlin bigwig. Then you can talk about it with ambitious and strangely eager young people in an overpriced bar, and listen as they tell you about sitting next to some pop star you never heard of in a club they got into because their sister’s boyfriend has a good job at Gazprom. You can do that if you want.