The snow in the Siberian village of Bulanovka was so deep we had to abandon our car at the bottom of the road and walk to the dacha by the edge of the forest. The gates into the snowbound garden, so rich in summer with berries and vegetables, had almost disappeared under a waist-high drift with the texture of white sugar. At the back of the five-roomed building the snow reached as high as a hardboard square used to replace a broken window pane. This is where the thieves entered the dacha last September, taking away the television, refrigerator, kitchen table, chairs, dishes, cutlery, bed clothes and wall shelving, along with jars of fruit and sacks of potatoes and carrots.
Many people from the nearby city of Krasnoyarsk, such as the family with whom I was staying as a guest, maintain dachas in the forested countryside to grow fruit and vegetables in the summer. The thieves had robbed theirs and almost all the other summer homes in Bulanovka on one single night just before the autumn snows came. The handful of permanent villagers saw or heard nothing, they said. It was a sad discovery for the family, who had come to regard the village as a sanctuary from Krasnoyarsk, where like most residents they have made their apartment into something of a fortress; the corridor leading to their flat and that of their immediate neighbour is sealed off with a metal door, and the apartment itself equipped with double doors and a spy-hole.
Many of the crime victims in the provincial capital of Krasnoyarsk region - a vast territory of tundra and permafrost four-and-a-half times the size of France - are commersants. These new businesspeople often find themselves at the mercy of criminals who sometimes use brutal methods against their victims' families to enforce collection of debts or protection money. This was a possible motive in the horrific crime which happened at apartment block 16 on Railway Road, on the February night I arrived to stay in block 22 nearby. The head of a 10-year-old boy, Vladimir Dyuvanov, was found by a scavenger in a rubbish container. The news left my hosts speechless with horror. The head was taken away by detectives in a cardboard box and displayed on television, propped up on a table with the eyes open and the hair parted neatly. The body has yet to be found.
The most shocking thing was the lack of reaction in the neighbourhood next day. There was no yellow police ribbon to seal off the scene, no combing of the area by detectives, no curious crowds, no meeting of worried neighbours, no counselling of children. People walked by the container, dogs poked their noses in, and children played nearby as if nothing had happened, so inured are Siberian people to news of violent crime.
Child murder is uncommon but parents constantly worry about their children. Every school in Krasnoyarsk has a baton-wielding security guard, paid for by parents who contribute three or four roubles a month to have someone protect their kids and to stop thieves stealing their coats and hats.
On average, one homicide a day takes place in the city of a million people, a police major told me. Forty killings alone were committed by a father and son over a period of years, before they were caught. Police believe 15 assassinations were ordered by one prominent industrialist engaged in vicious wars over the region's rich natural resources.
Paid killers come cheap. "If you owe someone money it's easier to have them killed than to pay it back," I was told. Recently a businessman asked his partner to buy him out for 80,000 roubles. His associate had him killed instead, for 6,000 roubles, to avoid paying what was due. This individual was caught but people say the laws are too weak to be effective. "Things will not get better so long as most criminals go unpunished," said a retired personnel manager. "Those extortionists who break the law are fined the maximum amount if they are apprehended, but it's nothing to them, no more than the cost of five dinners in a restaurant."
Krasnoyarsk has been associated with crime throughout its history. It was founded in 1628 by Cossack settlers and became a place of exile for Russians. Many were political outcasts, like the Decembrists in 1825, the Polish revolutionaries of 1831, and the Marxists of the 1890s who included Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. But common lawbreakers were also dispatched to Krasnoyarsk's prisons in such great numbers that 100 years ago almost a quarter of the inhabitants were classified as criminals. In Soviet times it became the heart of the Gulag, the notorious prison camp system made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Today in the turmoil of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the criminals who dominate life in this part of Siberia. Things are so bad that Governor Alexander Lebed described Krasnoyarsk in January as "a kind of test ground where it is being decided who is going to rule Russia". In an atmosphere of fear, private detective agencies have begun to flourish. Posters at bus stops advertise the services of armed men from security companies such as Okrana (Security) or Uragan (Hurricane). They find their clients among the nouveau riche, the successful entrepreneurs and the managers of state enterprises who now control vast sums of money and who have built mansions for themselves among the wooden izbas on the edge of town.
We drove one day along a snow-covered cul-de-sac in the Udatchny suburb to see the palatial redbrick home of Anatoly Bykov, director of the Krasnoyarsk aluminium plant. The house is one of five surrounded by a high wall with spiked metal gates and a watchtower from which an armed man in silhouette observed us - a sentry of the new gulag for the rich. "Don't take a photograph please," said my companion nervously, recalling how a friend was threatened by an armed guard for simply parking nearby.
Said to be the shadow master of Krasnoyarsk, Bykov has a private security fleet of 16 cars, and sweeps through town in an armoured Mercedes with sirens screaming. His ostentatious wealth has become such a source of scandal that the Kremlin recently sent a team of intelligence agents led by Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Kolesnikov to investigate corruption at the aluminium plant, a huge money-making complex set in the snowy plains outside the city spewing smoke from 37 tall chimneys. They are also investigating other industrial enterprises run as baronies by former communist bosses.
Government property is "being brazenly seized for a trifle", fulminated Governor Lebed. "Either there will be power and law and nothing above that, or raging crime under which there will be no Russia and we will be like cattle." Already 20 high officials have been arrested on corruption charges, including three former deputy governors of the region, one of them head of the planning office.
Inadequate socialist-era laws and old-style corruption hamper police work, as do inferior equipment and cars, and the demoralisation of the police force due to the failure of the government to pay their full salaries. The police have found ways of dealing with this. A Tajikistan fruit and vegetable import company, for example, supplies the guardians of the law in Krasnoyarsk with new Volvo cars and radio equipment on a regular basis, in return for police protection.
The non-payment of salaries over three years, and the collapse of the currency in August, has led to such dissatisfaction among the people that Governor Lebed sent a letter to Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov in early February informing him of possible social unrest in Krasnoyarsk if something was not done. People feel angry and humiliated. Workers at the synthetic rubber plant have been paid their wages in tyres and stand on the road outside trying to sell them. More than 11,500 teachers went on strike on January 13th for three days demanding back wages. Construction workers have been undercut by labourers from North Korea wearing Kim Jong Il lapel pins and working for next to nothing.
Pensioners who were once entitled to free health care, however inadequate, cannot afford to buy any medicines now, and believe they are being cheated when they do. "I got a prescription from the doctor who told me I could only take it to a certain chemist," said a retired accountant. "I went there and was charged 350 roubles, almost all my monthly pensions. I later found that in other pharmacies it was half that price." I was told of a woman who, to feed her five children, kidnapped and cooked one of the semi-wild dogs which roam the city at night. Other such tales abound: a teacher who died because he couldn't afford medicine, an ambulance arriving at an accident without drugs, a teenager committing suicide because his parents couldn't afford a computer.
The rouble's collapse in August was the most recent of a series of betrayals of the Russian people by the country's financial institutions going back to Soviet times. The banks themselves became the thieves. I met a woman who had enough savings in the Yenesei Bank last year to buy a small car but decided to withdraw everything when the bank crisis began. The cashier had the money ready to give to her, but her husband made her leave it to keep accumulating interest. Two days later all accounts were frozen. Today the savings are available - at a tenth of their former value.
The old Russian questions of "Shto delyat?" and "Kto vinovat?" ("What to do?" and "Who is to blame?") still dominate conversations around Krasnoyarsk kitchen tables. People criticise Lebed, formerly commander of Russia's 14th army, as too much of an old soldier - and potential dictator - to succeed in his job as governor, and all-Russia polls only give him 8 per cent support as a likely presidential candidate. "This country is heading for an Italian solution," sighed an airline pilot, "it will be either Sicily or Mussolini".
Few want to go back to the past, though a certain rose-tinted nostalgia exists for the Brezhnev days of relative plenty. As always in Russia there is an apt anecdote: "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Answer: "Why, in former times there was everything."
But in former times obtaining "everything" meant standing in long, quarrelsome queues and sucking up to arrogant shop managers. "We all hate it that the most vulnerable suffer the most," said a junior factory director, "but now I don't have to humiliate myself to buy cheese." Commented a shoe designer: "I like it that I can make as much money as I want and the state won't stop me." Young people seem most happy with changes in lifestyle. They have adopted many western ideas of culture and quality. They cheer on the local rugby club, Krasniy Yar, plan foreign holidays, and study to be lawyers. Most watch MTV, the US Music channel which competes with five Russian channels, and they dress and wear their hair the way the performers do.
Despite the crime wave, a commercial energy has transformed Krasnoyarsk in the last two years from a rather decrepit Soviet-style metropolis into a modern European-type city. Statues of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky dominate city squares flanked by old stone buildings, but the shabby store windows with their dingy, empty shelves have been ripped out and replaced by colourful shop-fronts. Delicatessens, boutiques, video stores, jewellers, cake shops, pet food kiosks and one-hour Kodak and Fuji film shops line the main avenues. Women sell lottery tickets at corners, and young men stop passers-by to offer hair dryers on free trial.
A Villeroy & Boch Paris Salon has opened near the Orthodox Cathedral of the Protection of the Virgin, which in Soviet times was a run-down museum. Glamorous women sweep along tiled pavements in ankle-length fur coats and wide-brimmed hats. Krasnoyarsk has still some way to go. But overnight the Siberian city, which flourished a century ago as a centre for gold prospectors, merchants and speculators, has witnessed the return of the bourgeoisie.
The day-trip to the dacha in Bulanovka provided an experience of the delights of Siberia which transcend the hardship of daily life. We piled logs into the wood-burning stove until the brick walls had warmed the dacha, and barbecued pork shashlik over a hole in the frozen ground outside. After lighting another stove in the banya, there was time for a hot sauna and a rubdown with soft snow. We left at sunset, having hidden the new refrigerator and other bits and pieces in a secret underground room.
On the long drive back to town, our car passed one of the notices which are appearing all over Russia, and which point the way forward in the never-ending debate about what is to be done. It read simply: "No one can help Russia but ourselves." "Pravilna!" said one of my companions. "Absolutely right!"