(3 of 3)
Artyom's hands are stained from time spent changing tires and tinkering with car engines. On some nights, at home in his two-room apartment, while his wife and young son sleep, he scrubs his hands clean, sits at the kitchen table and writes. He is a compulsive autodidact, a proletarian committed to becoming, as he puts it, a "man of culture." After high school, he studied in a few vocational institutes, then served two years in the army in then Soviet Turkmenistan. Occasionally he went on missions into Afghanistan to evacuate wounded. "The worst time of my life," he says.
Artyom has just completed his first short novel, about a tormented young Russian obsessed with death and honor. He hopes to have it published. Over tea, his wife Katya says she hates it. "It's like a textbook for young fascists," she chides. Artyom raises his eyebrows in mock surprise, then laughs.
It is inevitable that the young, the children of perestroika and Boris Yeltsin's revolution, will decide Russia's future. The notion reassures. But Russia's youth are also being shaped by the instability and sense of fear that grip a nation trying to shake off its past. At Lubyanka Square, in the shadow of the former KGB headquarters, Artyom picks up a young man dressed in loose, faded jeans and an American baseball jacket. He is Russian, a waiter in a Moscow hotel, and a talker.
As Artyom adopts his passenger's obscenity-laden street jargon, the conversation develops into a diatribe against non-Russians who, the youth ! claims, degrade the city. Held out for special scorn are the dark-skinned races of the Caucasus region. "They're all criminals, mafiosi," comes the blithe assertion. Artyom nods. "They're not cultured."
Westerners do not escape the young man's bitterness. They flaunt their wealth, he complains, and plunder the country. "For Westerners, coming to Russia is like going to the zoo to see how the animals live," Artyom says later. "They stare and laugh and shake their heads in disgust. Some Russians resent it."
Three years ago, Artyom referred only half in jest to the Soviets lining up at the U.S. embassy for visas as "enemies of the people." Now the West lures him. He is working hard, driving long hours to save money for the trip. He wants to "test himself" for a few years abroad and then return home. "This country is dying," he says, "but it will come back to life. It has a future."
Artyom is standing beside the taxi, smoking a cigarette. "I am Russian," he declares, swinging his arm out in an arc that encompasses Moscow. "This is what I know." Then he flicks his cigarette to the ground, folds himself into the driver's seat and heads off to find another passenger, and another conversation.