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Issue #18/99, September 14 - 28, 2000   smlogo.gif

Moscow Babylon

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Pulitzer prize story

SERFDOM TAKES ITS TOLL
The eXile (Russia)
Cubicles and WAP phones sweep through Russia. Grueling American-style corporate culture ravages young people.

By MARK AMES

MOSCOW—Katya had it all. The beautiful daughter of a wealthy businessman and his academic wife, she was one of Russia’s golden youth, the privileged elite of an impoverished society.

She took her vacations in Rome and Paris. She cavorted with foreigners as a tour guide in Moscow’s Kremlin and museums. She went to rave parties, regularly consumed ecstasy and cocaine, and later, developed an impressive heroin habit. She was experiencing life as only a Hollywood star might, enjoying every minute, pushing pleasure’s limits, and feeling every delightful sensation that hard drugs and casual sex can offer.

But that changed last year after Katya graduated from a prestigious law school and took a job with the Moscow office of Schlifkin Kaplan, a respected New York law firm.

Now, there is little time for joy or pleasure. As an associate at Schlifkin Kaplan, Katya works 14-hour days that begin at eight in the morning and end no earlier than ten at night. Often, she is called in to work weekends. The grueling schedule and demands have left her with no energy to go to clubs or parties, and a body that is quickly aging. And sagging.

“I’m always deprived of sleep,” she says. “What I want most is to catch up on my sleep and be left alone.”

What’s more, there is no thought of dabbling in casual drug use or sex. She rents a one-bedroom apartment in the center of town, decorated in IKEA and Turkish furniture, making her one of the privileged few of her generation. But her single-American woman’s life, so common across the Atlantic, is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

“I can’t afford to spend a weekend doing coke or heroin and crashing, and I don’t have the energy for sex,” she explains. “I watch videos and pass out on the couch.”

And the devastation shows. In the past six months, she has put on ten kilograms, mostly in her buttocks and cheeks. She cut her hair short, and her calves have swelled in size. A photograph of Katya and her friends from the law institute stands on her IKEA dresser, revealing an entirely different person, a young, chiseled face full of life and energy. Now, her stressed eyes bear unmistakable wrinkles, while her face has become formless and fleshy.

“I used to be able to have casual sex without any problems,” she said wistfully. “Now, I don’t even know why, but even the thought of it seems wrong. I don’t have sex at all anymore. I don’t have time, and I’m afraid of the consequences.”

Employment in soul-draining Western-style firms has exploded to devastating levels over the past few years in Russia, an alarming trend which even the economic crisis has not been able to dent. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its state-protected work culture of low-effort and low-pay, little can be done to stop the flood of American-style jobs and their attendant devastating effects on the individual. Soviet-era jobs, which allowed their employees so much time to have fun and engage in loose sex and binge drinking, cannot compete with the American-style office juggernauts and their metabolism-breaking levels of sky-high productivity.

Local firms are also synthesizing American-work-habit office cultures, complete with cubicles, stress, and overtime.

American corporate culture and work ethics, known on the street as “office serfdom” or “cubicle slavery,” have become so predominant in the post-Soviet era that it lures hundreds if not thousands of new victims every month, spreading from Siberia to the Baltic Sea, and is threatening to make inroads into small provincial towns. As company heads learn that well-educated young people can be worked to the breaking point in exchange for the promise of being able to afford a few unnecessary consumer goods, this trend is bound to only worsen.

Furthermore, as prostitution becomes increasingly frowned upon with the growing influence of puritanical American cultural values, young Russian women are bound to “turn to the cubicle,” and find themselves trapped forever.

“Home theater is easy to get now,” Katya says. “It’s a lot easier than being happy or having casual sex and taking cocaine.”

Igor, a 26-year-old brand manager for a Western multinational consumer products company, began his soul-crushing descent into American corporate culture in 1998 because he was attracted by the promise of a good salary and stability. “It’s a bizarre situation,” he says. “I could have just continued what I was doing, snorting up speedballs and going to clubs, talking all night with crazy friends, making music and borrowing off of my parents or rich friends. It was the best time of my life. But then I started to feel bad about myself, reading all those articles and seeing all those stories on TV about how bad my lifestyle was, how I was nobody if I didn’t work and make money and buy things.

“Well, here I am.”

Igor describes himself as “boring now” but realizes he has few options. “When you jump into the modern workforce, it becomes an addiction. You’re afraid of making one mistake, you’re afraid of what life would be like if suddenly you lost that one pleasure, your salary, and the consumer goods it buys. So you never leave the world of office serfdom again.

“I don’t have any fun, but I can’t imagine a life without stability, without a salary and benefits.”

The number of Russian cubicle serfs has more than quintupled in the past six years, authorities say. They estimate that Russia now has almost three million cubicle slaves working in American-style offices and parroting American-style work ethics, including 500,000 in Moscow alone who cannot remember the last time that they enjoyed their lives. And the number is rising exponentially, threatening to become as widespread as agricultural serfdom once was.

Because of the cubicle slavery epidemic, Russia is suffering from one of the world’s fastest-growing rates of “office ass,” a disease that has devastated young American women over the past decade, and is now spreading across the East. The number of new “office ass” cases in Russia last year jumped by an astonishing 350 percent, and 90 percent of the new cases were English-speaking young Russian women who caught the disease working overtime. Interestingly, nearly all of those women also cut their hair short.

The vast majority of the latest cubicle-serfdom Russians are less than 30 years old. “An entire generation will become boring, predictable, stressed, and unhappy,” warns Dr. Vadim Yorkovsky, a leading Russian sociologist.

“Nobody was expecting it to spread so quickly,” he says. “Most of those who took American-style office jobs haven’t become flabby and boring yet, but they are miserable and unpleasant to be around. They will all need to go on heavy drug and casual sex binges in the next few years. They will need to take some risks and live a little, but few if any will.”

In some regions, such as the Baltic seaport of Kaliningrad, as many as 70 percent of cubicle-slaves have large asses, he says. Moreover, they tend to eat at the city’s mushrooming overpriced ethnic restaurants, and talk only about work or consumer items, and engage in little or no true recreational activity. “They’ve almost lost the battle.”

At the current spiraling rate of increase, as many as 10 million young Russian women could be back-heavy and boring by the year 2005, according to Dr. Yorkovsky. Another 10 million young Russian men will have very stupid-sounding American accents when they speak “ze English,” work grueling hours, cease to enjoy their lives, and try hard to fit in. They will increasingly give up heavy drinking, smoking, and public displays of mirth in favor of a measured, moderate existence and careful habits.

This, in turn, would contribute to the demographic catastrophe that is causing a steady decline in the population. By the year 2050, Russia’s population could fall below 100 million, compared to its current population of 146 million, some analysts say. American-style work culture has so successfully atomized and dehumanized young Russians that they are becoming as afraid of human contact as their counterparts in the United States.

“Now that I work so hard,” says Katya, “I am no longer attractive and have no time to meet men, nor the energy. I would like to become a prostitute and worry about simple things like diseases, but I fear it is too late. I am an office serf, and I cannot break the cycle of consumption and work that it has imposed upon me. I no longer feel confident.”

Many men in Russia, rather than wasting time having to wine and dine boring fellow female office slaves, prefer to spend their nights with prostitutes. Since they too have so little time and so little to talk about, a prostitute guarantees them a return on their time/cash investment.

“I am no longer charming or interesting,” admits Igor. “Ever since I quit drugs and going out to clubs, all I can think about are expanding markets for my brand, improving distribution, direct-marketing ideas, merchandising, and the like. For me, a prostitute is the only way I can guarantee that I will get laid. Other than that, I am happy to have a cellphone with WAP capabilities.”

On the mean streets of Moscow’s gleaming new office-building-lined skyline, most cubicle slaves are aware of the office ass threat. “In the place where I work, in our ‘office,’ they say there are three girls who have it,” Katya says.

At the age of 23, her ass is lumpy, her voice is man-like, and she is recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Sauce from a Jack’s pizza is stuck to the corner of her mouth as she talks.

After taking the one-hour public transport ride to work, Katya is ready for another day. She mousses her cropped hair, applies her lipstick, fixes her designer horn-rimmed glasses, glances into a mirror to adjust her designer business suit, and walks into the Western-style office building, where she will earn as little as 300 rubles, (about $21) an hour.

A quarter-gram of heroin costs only 250 rubles—life back in the junkie days was easy. An Anne Klein business suit, essential to an office slave’s life, costs up to $500. The office serfs have a lot of expenses. They have to pay their taxes. And they have to maintain a pricey Western-style appearance that takes up a large percentage of their take-home pay.

“If I don’t try to appear Western and wear new clothes and cut my hair short like the other women, the boss will give you a talk and people will frown upon you, and you won’t get the promotion you need to break out of the cycle of work-and-consume,” Katya explains.

“Someday, maybe I’ll get allowed into Club XIII,” says Igor. “I’ve bought myself leather pants and wrap-around sunglasses. I know other office slaves who do that. But I’m not sure I’ll go all the way and take ecstasy or heroin, and I know I no longer have the gall to try to hit up a girl for a one-night stand. It just isn’t right.”

The corporate culture at Igor’s company has made him feel “like a cog in a wheel,” no longer an individual, but rather, a graph of upward struggle and productivity. “How can I imagine myself having fun after two years of this?”

Lyuda worked for three years at a Big Five accounting firm, but quit a couple of months after they instituted an even more dehumanizing feature into the office culture: open-plan work space. In this new Third Millennium evolution of the office plantation, cubicles have given way to totally open office spaces. No employee has a dedicated office, desk, computer, or cubicle. Firm directors can monitor them at all times, and nothing is private. Workers sit at any available desk and work on any free computer hooked up to a central server, regardless of one’s rank within the firm.

“I could no longer fool myself into believing that I was bettering myself, that I mattered,” said Lyuda. “I realized that I was indistinguishable from the office furniture, as replaceable and insignificant. Everything they taught us about the Soviet Union’s dehumanizing effect has only come true in American-adapted offices.”

But the withdrawal from work was six months of torture. “Every night you’re dreaming of being a loser and unemployed for life,” Lyuda recalls. “All day you’re thinking about it, 24 hours a day. You can’t think of anything else but the fact that you have no health benefits, no stock options, no pension plan, and no possibility of buying the latest DVD or the upcoming HDTV. You feel terrible about yourself. You feel your life is over.”

“I try not to think,” Katya says. “I try to go on working. We have to work.”

 

[Note To Readers: I am entering this article into the Pulitzer Prize competition, for I believe it fits in the long and venerable tradition of “harrowing tales of young adults devastated by sobriety and work” journalism. Wish me well!]



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