by Jamey Gambrell

The rise of democratic reforms and a capitalist economy in Russia has produced wealthy individuals who have begun the practice of Western-style philanthropy—but the government may have other plans for how they spend their money.

Prologue
At the end of perestroika and the beginning of the Yeltsin era, get-rich-quick schemes scurried around Moscow like cockroaches, disappearing into the cracks and crevices of the decaying system with equal alacrity when exposed to the light of investigation. Some were harmless, small fry stuff, like buying VCRs on trips abroad, and selling them back at home at the black market ruble rate. Others, like the infamous MMM pyramid scheme run by the notorious entrepreneur Sergei Mavrodi, enriched a few and deprived many ordinary citizens of their life savings. There were also the sudden Central Bank currency reforms which had much the same effect, at least for anyone outside the loop of aspiring capitalists and bankers capable of turning ruble fortunes into foreign currency and placing it in foreign accounts on a moment’s notice.

The English word “sponsor” was the word of the day. “New Russians,” as the newly prosperous businessmen were called, were already making enough money to be looking around for interesting things to spend it on. Young, unofficial artists, writers and performers were some of the first recipients of their largesse. Cultural figures who had been part of the established Soviet system found the new situation distasteful: in Soviet times such “charity” or “patronage” was considered a demeaning, manipulative capitalist practice and was forbidden—after all, the state was supposed to take care of the citizen’s every need, both material and spiritual.

During this time—the early 1990s—the culture of Russia’s pre-revolutionary “Silver Age” aroused intense interest among the Russian intelligentsia. It represented a time when the arts flourished and many Russians traveled abroad regularly, seeing themselves as Europeans. Interest in the art, manners and mores of the Silver Age became a symbolic way of reconnecting with the interrupted flow of national history and forging a revised, non-Communist identity. There were many exhibitions of the World of Art group, the once forbidden Russian avant-garde; and works by writers like Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova were published with the censor’s cuts restored.

Historically, charity in Russia had been the prerogative of the aristocracy; it was only at the turn of the 20th century, with the rise of wealthy industrialists, that other classes began to engage in patronage of the arts and support of the poor. Like the post-Soviet intelligentsia, the “New Russians,” for all their conspicuous consumption and the legendary vulgarity of their tastes (they were the butt of many jokes making the rounds at the time), were looking for non-Communist models of social status. Dozens of books and articles appeared on the lives of the great Russian art patrons, people like Pavel Tretiakov, who donated his
art collection and the Tretiakov Gallery to Moscow; and Morozov and Shchukin who amassed prescient collections of European and Russian avant-garde painters that now hang in the Hermitage and other Russian museums. Exhibitions and publications detailed the history of impresarios like Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes made Russian art and dance the envy of the West (and had an indelible effect on the development of American ballet, for example).

New Russians began to collect Russian art, both historical and, to a lesser extent, contemporary. The Russian Orthodox church also benefited: businessmen gave money to restore long-abandoned churches, and at one point in the early ‘90s, the nightly news almost inevitably contained footage of Orthodox priests blessing some newly opened business. The focus of most of this activity was attention-getting prestige. But if patronage and sponsorship revolved around reviving lost cultural heritage, the obvious needs of an increasingly impoverished population and the growing dysfunction of the state led many to branch out or evolve into areas of charitable social welfare—aid to orphanages, sick children and the handicapped, etc.

The motivations behind much of it were, undoubtedly, genuine, but the very helter-skelter, hustling nature of Russia at that time led, unsurprisingly, to abuses that gave a bad name to even pristine charitable impulses. “Informal” and “charitable” organizations began to multiply under the aegis of more established, official institutions (since the legislation for unaffiliated organizations was lacking altogether or insufficient); they often had the right to create commercial subsidiaries, whose proceeds were supposed to go to supporting “non-commercial” cultural or charitable activities. Needless to say, in the regulatory and legislative void of newly independent Russia this was often not the case.

Scandals associated with abuses of nonprofit and charitable organizations also began to sprout like proverbial mushrooms. Particularly notable among them, and extensively covered by the press at the time, was the National Sport Fund, which received permission to import and sell liquor, tobacco and other coveted consumer goods without being subject to the usual taxes. But that was only the most prominent tip of a very large iceberg. Numerous organizations calling themselves “foundations” or “funds” (the word is the same in Russian and English) were covers or umbrellas for shady business activities, money laundering, currency operations, and so on. Despite much truly selfless work to assuage long-standing ills, what was most visible to the public at large was the graft and corruption associated with “charity,” “foundations,” “non-profit organizations,” and the less common “philanthropy.” In Russian, the distinction between charity and philanthropy is not firmly embedded in the public mind—or in the language. The word blagotvoritel’nost’—most often translated as “charity,” literally means “creating good deeds”—and has been used almost interchangeably with “philanthropy.” Given the natural cultural distrust of wealth after 70 years of Soviet propaganda, and numerous scandals, polls showed that the public at large associated the concept of a “charitable” or “philanthropic” foundation with shady money machinations.

However, despite rampant corruption, or, at best, inconsistency and lack of transparency in charitable activities, there was a genuine democratic pathos to a great deal of this activity. One of the first privately owned and truly independent Russian newspapers, Kommersant, which was the brainchild of Vladimir Yakovlev, son of the Moscow News editor Egor Yakovlev, began publication in early 1990 with the express aim of creating a Russian “business middle class” that didn’t yet exist, by writing for it as though it did. The aspiration to live in a “normal country,” often expressed at the time, was so strong in Moscow and the re-named St. Petersburg, that many believed, in a sort of Soviet version of Pascal’s “leap of faith,” that if the country simply pretended that it was “normal,” it would, in fact, become so. In other words, if the outward trappings of a democratic society and middle class were imitated in sufficient detail, the moral and institutional content would magically appear to fill the void left by 70 years of deeply cynical centralized dictates and a planned economy. And one of the key features of democracy and a successful market economy was a civil society that included charity and philanthropy.

Next page: Given the natural cultural distrust of wealth after 70 years of Soviet propaganda, polls showed that the public associated the concept of a “charitable” or “philanthropic” foundation with shady money machinations.

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