December. James Steel
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was a prime example of such flexibility. Sometimes he lived the part of a supporter of the regime and enjoyed the intellectual trickery of misleading them so much that he felt he had lost touch with what he really believed in. Only at odd moments of solitude, like this, would he call to mind the feelings that drove him. He suddenly felt the whole weight of the coup resting on his shoulders—he had a moment of self-consciousness like an out-of-body experience.
What the hell did he think he was doing?
He was trying to overthrow the government of Russia. No one had done that since the Bolsheviks in 1917. He could be on the brink of a major civil war. Even after the Bolshevik victory, it had taken two years of vicious fighting that had raged across the whole country and taken millions of lives. Was he about to inflict the same on his beloved Mother Russia?
Sergey had the capacity to dream great dreams, but the flipside of this was that he was prone to moments of black doubt, when the grand scale of his ideas seemed to crush him.
He was really just a small-town boy from Voronezh, a decaying industrial town, smack bang in the middle of the steppe. As a child he had a phenomenally high IQ and was very sensitive. He had watched everything intently, noticed things quickly and made connections unprompted. His mother felt unnerved by how closely he watched her when he was a baby, how fast he put two and two together.
He used to watch his father playing chess with mates from the steel mill in the kitchen of their tiny workers’ flat. Once, as a two year old, he had been given jumbled up chess pieces in a box to play with whilst his mother peeled some potatoes. When she turned round she found that he had set all the pieces out accurately on the board and had begun moving them correctly: pawns forward and back, knights two forward, one to the side, and bishops diagonally. She stared at him, disconcerted. He had looked up, smiled at her sweetly and carried on as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
At primary school he ate up the curriculum. His teachers were very pleased with him, but then aged eight he became very frustrated; he would look at his classmates sitting quietly, looking around with vacant and content expressions or stumbling to learn things that he took in at a glance, and he would be suddenly filled with anger against them. They seemed such hateful dullards to him.
‘Do you even think? Is there anything going on in your heads?’ he would shout at them in his mind.
He fell into sudden rages and would rush at quiet, slow boys in his class and attack them for no reason, beating and kicking them. He was suspended from the nursery section of School 17 several times that year until he had had enough wallopings from his teachers and his father to know better.
After that he gave up trying to solve the problem of life and took to flippancy as a way of displacing the boredom and frustration in his head. He became the class clown, winding his teachers up, coasting through school, underachieving and driving his parents mad. But underneath his easy wit and idiotic banter, he felt the pressure of existence keenly; subconsciously he questioned why he existed and found no answers.
The lack of a solution distressed him. As a boy he would jump onto the slow-moving flatbed trains grinding through the points outside his family’s concrete apartment block on the edge of town, and let himself be carried out onto the steppe. Then he would jump off and walk miles out into the endless, flat grassland, forgetting about how and when to get home and sleeping out under the stars.
He watched the sunset over the steppe, a painting of vast colours being shifted across the heavens by an unseen hand. The shades heaved and convulsed: yellow to orange to pink to red to purple to black.
The whole scene was watched by the earth in utter silence; it lay flat and quiescent, overawed by the majesty of the spectacle unfolding above it. And he too lay on his back on the warm summer earth, spreading out his arms and drawing breath up from the land under him, startled by the beauty of being alive.
To him, this landscape came together with the Russian character to form the Russian soul. It became for him the embodiment of great strength and yet, at the same time, great tenderness.
In reading Life and Fate—Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian nation centred around the battle of Stalingrad—he experienced a moment of revelation: ‘The earth was vast, even the great forests had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever. And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.’
He realised that the never-ending nature of the terrain was the same as the vastness of life, and this created both a sense of great freedom because it existed, but also of a great corresponding sadness because life will end and it will all be gone. He struggled to reconcile the tension between these forces.
He wondered at the wisdom that he could learn from observing natural phenomena: the flight of birds, the slow graceful gestures of trees and the stately progress of clouds across the sky. He felt that all these things were words in the conversation that nature was having with him in his life.
However, with such passionate experiences came the pain of unrequited love. He might love life but it did not feel the need to explain itself to him. He waited patiently, as a child waits on a parent to tell him how things work.
But all he got was silence.
He would go out onto the steppe and stare up angrily at the sky, but it just looked back at him with a gaze as empty and content as that of a Buddha and resolutely refused to answer his questions.
Sergey felt this absence of communication as a physical force, pressing in on his skull. It was the same as when he swam down deep in the local swimming pool, where the silence was heavy, and he could look up and see the surface shimmering a long way above his head.
He could feel the water pressing in on him from all sides; the walls of his head bulging in under it. He knew then that he had to swim desperately to the surface far above him to escape the pain. But the faster he swam the faster he ran out of breath and so the more desperately he kicked out. The feeling culminated in a fear of inactivity and created a terrified energy within him.
From his early teens onwards, this found an outlet in two ways. Literature was his first love. He discovered that other great human minds had confronted and wrestled with the same issues that he did and had left traces of their battles behind them. So he hunted meaning in literature furiously, frantically ripping through books like a starving man looking for food between the pages, all the while marvelling at the power of writing to gather and pin meaning onto a piece of paper. When he came across insights he shivered and thought to himself: This is black bread—black bread for my soul.
Books piled up in his room, all with significant passages underlined, pages folded and with thoughts that had spun off from the writing scribbled in the margins and on the blank pages at the back.
The second outlet for his skills was on his mother’s market stall. She was a chelnoki, a market trader, who allowed people to survive both the incompetencies of the Soviet system and then the anarchy of its collapse in the 1990s. From her Sergey learned how to lie, to cheat and to bribe the police and other authorities that variously sought to regulate and profit from their activities. He started out by selling underwear off the back of a lorry, then graduated to buying second-hand Mercedes in West Germany, driving them back home through long days and nights, and then selling them on for a huge mark-up.
From this he went on to buying companies. He understood accounts instinctively and loved the challenge of ripping through a balance sheet, diagnosing faults and then taking on the cold-blooded risks necessary to win in the bare-knuckle capitalism of the Yeltsin era. From humble beginnings his business empire gradually expanded from automotive parts, to mines, to food preparation, and then into more glamorous sectors like media.
However, at times of inner crisis, like now, he had to turn back to literature to steady himself. He needed books as his touchstone.
He pulled the greatest book ever written out of the Louis Vuitton briefcase at his feet: Life and Fate. His battered copy had been heavily annotated.
He turned to the section where Sokolov and Madyarov were arguing about the true nature of what freedom meant in Russia. Sokolov was in full