when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and
hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we
can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables
with the utmost savagery and merciless energy ... so as to secure for
ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.... We must
teach these [clergy] a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even
to think of any resistance for several decades.Under both Lenin and Yeltsin, it was a small elite with close ties to the
Kremlin who controlled these acquisitions and identified the
beneficiaries. In part because of the abuses of power perpetrated during
Soviet times, there is an enormous cynicism among contemporary
Russian leadership that resounds like an echo from communism’s earliest
days. Today, it manifests as capitalism in its most primitive and
rapacious form. In the chaos following the privatization cum fire sale of
the Soviet Union’s most valuable assets, one ambitious and well-
connected young man named Roman Abramovich effectively acquired
the vast Far Eastern autonomous region of Chukotka, along with its
staggeringly lucrative oilfields. By the time he was thirty, Abramovich
had become one of the richest men in the world, which he remains to this
day (he resigned as governor in 2008). But he is only one example. In
2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians.^4
This statistic is all the more remarkable when you consider that most
major fortunes are either inherited or built systematically, over the course
of a lifetime. Russia’s oligarchs, on the other hand, became
multibillionaires virtually overnight, many while still in their thirties.
Throughout the early 1990s, state-owned companies collapsed and
shriveled, one after another, like deflating balloons, and among them was
the company that was Sobolonye’s sole reason for being. An elderly
huntress and former tree faller who now goes by the name of Baba Liuda