Read Eight Pieces of Empire for Free Online Page A

with a bulldozer and kill all the inhabitants? Or is it better to move some of the bricks gradually, fixthe beams one by one, rebuild the fireplace while keeping a kettle of soup on a little stove nearby?”
    Valery’s voice trailed off, and his glibness took on a paler hue. His eyes remained fixed and steely, but his lips turned up at a slightly weaker angle.
    The tears of a KGB man.
    * Those with a grasp of Russian phonology will appreciate the onomatopoeic sound of “Sh-che-MYAK-in.” It emits a grating melody akin to the yap of a small dog or an old woman’s scold.

A BIGAMIST BANDIT AND A BUTTON MAKER
    L eading a life of crime isn’t easy.” Vova laughed slightly at his self-evaluation. It was part justification, and part plea for sympathy.
    We were just emerging from a brief and thankfully bloodless altercation with two men on a small bridge near the Kirov Theater. They had been walking toward us and slowed as Vova and I approached. It was just after dusk on a foggy evening. The combination of darkness and mist produced a disorienting effect, reducing real visibility to a few yards. Vova and the two men recognized each others’ faces with difficulty. Once they did, all three pranced like nervous cats circling for a scrap. There was a long pause while menacing glances were exchanged, followed by a string of profanities uttered in quick, quiet succession. One of the men spit forcefully into the ground and muttered something to the other. Then the pair swaggered on into the gloom, as if they’d just benevolently granted us a stay of execution.
    “Da,” whispered Vladimir Kovannikov, aka Vova. “Vsyo-taki ne legko vesti zhizn prestupnosti.…”
    “Living a life of crime really isn’t easy … but it beats being a slave.…”
    This was, in a way, the mantra of the Vor v Zakone, or at least the modified modern version of the “Thief in Law” credo that dominated the late Soviet criminal underground. Vova was my guide in trying to discover what it really meant.
• • •
    WE MET IN 1987 during my first visit to the USSR as a student at Leningrad State University. Vova was then “officially” working as a factory laborer in a clothing button factory. But with the Soviet economy already teetering, he’d taken to supplementing his wages by becoming a private entrepreneur—a capitalist—which was an economic crime against the state. At first it was harmless if still illegal stuff, such as buying name-brand wristwatches from tourists along Nevsky Prospekt and then hawking them to fellow Soviets for a markup.
    That was the story of our first encounter: My roommate Jared was walking along Nevsky Prospekt when a lanky, loud, gregarious kid with a big head of frizzy hair going off in all directions, as if he used lye for a hair conditioner, approached and tried, in broken German, to buy Jared’s Timex.
    “Spasibo,” Jared had curtly replied when offered a week’s worth of prorated ruble wages for the timepiece. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
    The offer was then doubled, but Jared still turned it down. Jared explained he wasn’t interested in selling his wristwatch. Over the semester, we would often run into Vova on Nevsky Prospekt, and we gradually became acquaintances.
    When he wasn’t using his gutter German to score watches from surprised Swiss tourists, Vova gave us impromptu tours of what passed for Leningrad’s underground hippie scene, and in between shifts at the clothing button factory (aptly named the “Button Factory”) where he worked, he took us on expeditions to little-known former czarist castles and even organized shish kebab cookouts in the Russian woods for his two new American friends. Petty street black marketers like Vova were reviled as slime by many Russians of the time. Yet while some of my Russian “intelligentsia” friends ended up having ulterior motives in pursuing my “friendship,” Vova never asked me for a dime or even a small favor.
    A couple of years later, Soviet