Issue #20/101, October 12 - 26, 2000   

Middle Crass

By Matt Taibbi

Think hard now: have you ever met anyone who wanted to be middle class? Whose dream in life was to be able to just barely make his SUV payments and to work in a cubicle all his life? Who fantasizes about becoming a dot-com... middle-income earner?

No, of course not. These days, if an American is middle-class, chances are he feels he’s only middle-class temporarily, or by mistake. What he really wants, and secretly feels he deserves, is to be rich. Only the most squalid and insipid spirit would want it any other way; you’ve got a lot of problems if your big goal in life is to be nothing more than the bearer of a perfectly typical consumer profile.

The readers of business publications like Business Week don’t want to be middle class more than anyone else. In fact, the consumers of financial media tend to be upper middle-class already, if anything. Which begs the question: if their readers aren’t middle class and don’t want to be, why do they like reading so much about other people who are?

The publication last week of a massive two-part feature report by Business Week writers Paul Starobin and Olga Kravchenko marked the triumphant return of one of the ugliest and most condescending genres of Russia-reporting, the so-called “Tracking the elusive middle-class” story. There is a long and storied tradition behind these dumb ethnocentrist reports. A few years back, Andrew Kramer wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle which identified a Moscow family as being part of the new middle class on the basis of the fact that they were able to afford not one, but two VCRs. Virtually every big-league reporter in town has done at least one such report since then, usually finding the middle class anywhere where crowds of Russians listen to Brittany Spears or correctly identify a bagel with cream cheese as food. To watch these articles come out over the years, one senses a peculiar logic at work which will eventually discover the Russian middle class in fat, sexually unreceptive young Russian women who watch “E.R.” in translation, or in Russian men who wear baseball caps backwards, identify themselves as members of American fraternities, and prefer beer to vodka.

We are not there yet, thank God. But thanks to Starobin and Kravchenko, we’re now pretty damned close. Their “Russia’s Middle Class” article represents a major advance of this particular reporting disease on virtually every front.

First and foremost, the style they write in is an extreme amplification, almost a grotesquerie, of the already-revolting “elusive middle class” format other reporters have used before them. It has always been a distinctive feature of these stories that reporters approached their would-be middle-class subjects they way Marlon Perkins did in Mutual Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”—from a distance, preferably from a moving helicopter, making contact only after the subject has been shot and tagged as he races across the savannah in unsuccessful pursuit of his shitty two-room Khruschevka apartment.

You can almost hear the reporter’s airborne conversation with his ray-ban wearing assistant Jim: “Look! Down there! A member of the new middle class!” “You’re right, Marlon. Let’s get a closer look.” The helicopter descends; the camera catches the end of the dart-rifle poking out of the copter window; the owner of a small bread cooperative in Saransk races across the street, his frightened white herd-animal eyes now obscured by the copter shadow, now not...

The Business Week lead, a classic “elusive middle class” lead, begins as follows:

‘Irina Lyakhnovskaya is a go-getter. Her hometown of Samara in central Russia straddles the Volga River and is surrounded by miles of fertile grassland and the Zhigulevskiye Mountains. In 1996, she started a tourist company, with seed capital supplied by herself and three friends, that specializes in arranging hunting and fishing trips for visitors from Finland and Norway. She drives a Russian-made Lada that she purchased new, for $3,500, two years ago, and she spends weekends at a country dacha that has an apple orchard she harvests to make her own wine. Last year she took vacations in Hungary and Romania, and this year she plans to get to Britain. In a country where the average factory worker is lucky to make $150 a month, she makes as much as $500.’

The writers here couldn’t have followed the nature-show format any more faithfully. In the first graph, you get the animal’s habitat (grassland, mountains), its genus (“go-getter”), its diet (seed, the spoils of hunting and fishing, apples, wine) and its territorial range (Hungary, Romania, hopefully Britain).

Marlon Perkins, when he tagged a wildebeest, was never, of course, interested in the individual wildebeest. He was interested in the animal as a typical example of the whole species. He’d poke a stick in its turds and say, “These are the typical turds of a wildebeest.” “Elusive middle class” writers are the same way. They’re never interested in the individual person. They want to descend from sky, tag the beast, reduce it to a cultural stereotype, then throw back the cage door and send it back out into the wild. The Business Week reporters reduce their subject animal to the broadest possible stereotype in the very second paragraph—just moments after descending from their copter:

‘Lyakhnovskaya, 38, embodies a major shift in Russia’s economic landscape. Boosted by a resurgent national economy and by its own bootstraps, a middle class is taking root in the former land of the proletariat. They’re concentrated in the big western metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But millions of others, like Lyakhnovskaya, are sprinkled across Russia in provincial cities from Samara and Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River, to Perm and Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, to Vladivostok in the Far East.’

These, folks, are the typical turds of the new middle-class Russian. If you concentrate hard enough, you can see the stick.

No one ever accused reporters of being particularly caring people. There’s no law which says you have to be particularly interested in the individuals you write about; nor is there a law which bars the making of generalizations about a society on the basis of a meeting with one member of that society. But common decency dictates that reporters should try to avoid being as abject about their work as Starobin and Kravchenko are in their article. Ask yourself honestly: would you like to see yourself described in the way “middle-class” Irina is described in this piece? See yourself “sprinkled across Russia” in the millions, and irreversibly shackled to a crude anticommunist rhetorical line before you’ve even had a chance to open your mouth?

No, of course you wouldn’t. You’d want to be described as a peculiar individual, which of course you are. But these kinds of reporters don’t see individuals. They only see, in human form, varying degrees of proof of a point they’ve already decided to make. Mssr. Starobin sure as hell didn’t go to Samara to discover that there wasn’t a middle class. He went there to find it, and once Irina helped him, he jumped right back in the copter. She might have whipped off dozens of Oscar Wilde-style epigrams and derived pi to 3,000 places before his very eyes, and he wouldn’t have noticed—so long as he already knew that she made 500 bucks and dreamed of flying to Britain.

These “elusive middle class” stories always share three distinct features—a sort of creepy propagandistic trinity. On the one hand, there is always a disturbingly overt and undisguised loathing for poor people. On the other, there is a revolting worship of Western materialistic values, a gross celebration of the Western way as the only true path to happiness. And last but not least, there is always an overabundance of gleeful anticommunist rhetoric, which buttresses the entire structure of the article.

This piece has all three components in plenty. Take, for instance, this passage:

‘Families in the center of the new class enjoy what most citizens can only regard as a dream lifestyle. They can afford to own a foreign car, as opposed to a more breakdown-prone Lada. They can escape to a country dacha that, unlike the makeshift shacks typically kept by poorer people, has indoor plumbing and heating. They can afford private medical care in an emergency, whereas those below are confined to the abysmal care meted out by public clinics. Such an existence breeds what analysts view as a distinguishing psychological feature of the sturdiest members of the new middle class—a sense of empowerment.’

Owning a foreign car—a “dream lifestyle”? Imagine the spiritual bankruptcy of a person whose heartfelt dreams include owning a foreign car! Then there is the phrase about the “makeshift shacks” kept by poorer people. You can almost see Starobin’s nose scrunching at the thought of ever visiting such people. Poor people are not even people in this article, not even subjects worth being tagged, but something lower—like insects. This comes out later in the piece as well.

But the passage about medical care is the most revolting of all. Rather than condemn a society where poor people can’t afford basic medical care (when, incidentally, they once could, under a more just system), Business Week chooses to applaud the members of the new class for feeling “empowered” by their ability to pay to keep themselves alive. This is the kind of rhetoric that sends mobs of unemployed people reaching for their pitchforks.

Business Week’s hatred of the poor is expressed more clearly farther down in the article:

‘There can be no better news for Russia than the emergence of a middle class. Such a cadre of stakeholders is this troubled country’s best hope for building a stable, civilized, prosperous society. Above them, in income if not manners, are Russia’s notorious oligarchs, who have plundered the nation. Below them are Russia’s working poor. Although these lower-income citizens are extremely resourceful, they are in no position to assert their interests against an overweening state or to create the sturdy civic institutions that Russia so badly needs.’

It takes a writer of some ability to suffuse a single word with as much condescension as these writers have put into the word “resoursceful”, when describing “these lower-income citizens” (even the terms they use when describing the poor are impersonal and sanitary, implying a set of rubber gloves to protect them from germs!). Beyond that, they’re simply wrong. Russia’s working poor, as they’ve proven several times in this century, are very much in a position to assert their interests. It sure as hell wasn’t the “middle class” which tossed Gorbachev out of office. It was the miners and workers whose mass strikes crippled the state. You didn’t see the “middle class” sitting on the train tracks in 1998. But these are factual issues, which are secondary offenses in the scheme of the Business Week piece. The really offensive part of the article is its slavish tone, its arrogant sense of righteousness, its meanness—all of which are captured in the very next passage:

‘If such a thrust is going to come at all, it will likely be spearheaded by the new middle class. And despite the best efforts of the old Soviet regime to annihilate the very idea of a middle class, the dream of attaining just such a status is the central animating vision for its legions of strugglers. ``Everyone wants to be middle-class,’’ says Leokadia Drobizheva, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.’

Yeah, okay, the Soviets wanted to annihilate the bourgeoisie, but as far as producing citizens with middle incomes, a small amount of spending money, job stability, and benefits... well, forget that, that’s a different argument entirely. But this phrase, “central animating vision for legions of strugglers”—well, this is just plain snobbery. This is the kind of language you’d expect a 19th-century English lady to use when describing the poor over tea at a meeting of her local relief society. “We must do something about those poor legions of strugglers,” she says, sip sip. Only people who do not struggle and don’t plan to would ever call whole populations “legions of strugglers.”

But that isn’t enough for the Business Week reporters. From there, they have to go to some hack talking head in Moscow, who tells them that “everyone wants to be middle class”! Again, this is just plain bullshit! What everyone wants is to be rich. If these reporters were writing about Americans, they would never dare run a quote like that. It’s only in Business Week, where Russians are considered a lower order of animal, that this kind of passage is possible. You would never find an article in Business Week celebrating, say, Russians’ urge to be a richer and more powerful country than America. Instead, they are to be commended and cheered on only when they have extremely limited ambitions, particularly when those ambitions involve buying foreign cars and saving up enough money to visit some dreary Western Mecca like Britain.

Over and over again, Starobin and Kravchenko pound home the idea that Russia’s progress is to be measured in terms of its ability to Westernize. In the second part of its “Elusive middle class” report-published under the vile headline “So far, the mobility is all upward”— they even state explicitly that in order to be middle class, a Russian must first achieve a certain level of Westernization.

“The ability to speak English is a must,” they write. Later on, they cite investment by Coca-Cola, plus an improved rating by Standard and Poor’s, as evidence of improvement of life in Samara. And of course no article celebrating Russia’s new transformation would be complete without mention of that ultimate beacon of wonderfulness, the new Ikea store in Moscow:

‘Back in March, traffic backed up for two miles as some 40,000 middle-class Muscovites, in their Ladas, Volgas, Volkswagens, and Skodas, attended the opening of Russia’s first IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings store, in a suburb just outside the city.’

Well, this is paradise, isn’t it? Domestic cars, clogging traffic hand in hand alongside foreign cars, their middle-class drivers beating down the entrances of a Swedish chain store to buy cheap panel furniture. This is the Business Week vision of cultural diversity— Volkswagens next to Skodas. Russia, you sure are on your way. Incidentally, Khimki is not a suburb. It is a shithole. A minor distinction, maybe, but probably a necessary one to make when writing for an audience that might otherwise imagine a Russian version of Newton or Englewood Cliffs.

The Business Week writers’ mania for brand-name dropping as a means of providing evidence of social progress doesn’t stop with Ikea. Not once but twice do the writers point to the appearance of “Dolby-sound” movie theaters as evidence of the emergence of a middle class. About Moscow they write: “There are at least ten Dolby-sound movie complexes.”

Not ten movie-complexes, but ten Dolby-sound movie complexes. Considering that they’re writing about a country where huge chunks of the population don’t have enough money to eat, much less go to the movies, this is a striking detail to include. Then there is the second “Dolby-sound” passage, about Samara:

‘Samara is, as Americans would say, a nice place to raise a family. In the heart of the city is a mile-long beach and riverfront promenade graced by ashberry trees, ice cream stands, and outdoor cafes. Pensioners in bathing suits bat around a volleyball on the beach. Young men and women in business dress stroll the walkway alongside mothers with baby carriages. Up the road is the town’s new entertainment center, a mall featuring a Dolby-sound multiplex cinema, a billiards hall, a video arcade, and a children’s play area.’

Samara, a nice place to raise a family. Uh-huh. I dare Paul Starobin to raise his kids there. I fucking dare him! (See box) It’ll never happen in a million years, I guarantee you. This recalls the time that Carol J. Williams of the L.A. Times called the Nizhni Novgorod region “prosperous”, when it was obvious that she wouldn’t even get out of the plane there unless she had a surgical mask on. But this kind of disingenuous argumentation is all over the Business Week article; they tell you over and over how wonderful the lives of these middle class Russians are, whereas in reality you know they’d find a way to shoot themselves in the head twice if they ever found themselves in similar straits.

Business Week wasn’t the only publication to go searching for the middle class in recent weeks. The Moscow Times, continuing its reversion to its dumb old ways, also did such a piece a few weeks ago, one that was virtually identical to the Business Week piece. The articles were so similar, in fact, that it is hard to escape the suspicion that Business Week simply stole the Times story wholesale. Written by Anna Raff and published on September 26, the Times piece actually exceeds the Business Week version in its brand-name worship. Here’s an example:

“The middle-class Russian in 2000 is 32 years old, smokes, holds a university degree, takes vacations abroad and can smell the difference between Christian Dior and Kenzo perfumes, according to the survey, released late last week.”

If you boil down all of these articles, what they all come down to is the following assertion: [insert country name here] will achieve all it needs to achieve as a society once it has enough people in the population who have a little more money than they need to survive, and plenty of consumer choices— choices which include foreign products. That’s really what it comes down to.

More than that, though, these articles reveal how Western reporters view their own society. In their attempts to show how much progress Russians have made towards paradise, they reveal just how bankrupt the Western lifestyle ideal really is. The vision of the world as presented by Business Week is one where everyone is happy once they have their choice of economy car, a place to go on a low-cost vacation, a Dolby-sound movie theater, an arcade, a “play area” for children, a furniture store... If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that they were describing the benefits of living under Soviet communism. Remember, Russia once had more movie theaters than any country in the world. And they had plenty of “play areas.”

The only difference, was, they were free.

Lacking a positive ideal to promote, the Business Week reporters ended their first piece by blasting the old Soviet ideal—which, in case you hadn’t noticed, has been dead a long time:

‘Russia remains a laggard among post-Soviet empire nations in building a middle class. But it can’t be forgotten that Russia was ground zero for the Bolshevik Revolution, for the doomed project of building a classless society. Lenin, the lawyer who led that cause, was a man of bourgeois origins, a native, in fact, of the Samara region who came to despise his own roots. He still lies entombed in a mausoleum on Red Square, but an emptier symbol is hard to imagine. For all around him, Russians have resumed their quest, frozen in time, for a middle-class society. And slowly, with no doubt more stumbles to come, they are getting there.’

Can I imagine an emptier symbol than Lenin’s tomb? How about an Ikea store? For my money (and it’s all about money, after all), I’ll take Ikea. And the empty articles which attend it.

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