What’s it like to belong to the last generation that ever grew up in
a nation that no longer exists? Ask Alfred Kokh. Now a
mathematician, philanthropist, economist, and entrepreneur, Kokh served
as the USSR’s first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and as
head of Russia’s State Property Committee. A runaway bestseller upon
its publication in Russia two years ago, his book A Crate of
Vodka — whose English translation, by Antonina W. Bouis, is
being released this month — is a wry, unscathing look back. It
takes the form of a dialogue between Kokh and his coauthor, the
journalist Igor Svinarenko; each of its twenty chapters represents
another conversation over another bottle of vodka, shared as the pair
discuss being young in an era that Kokh will revisit during his
lecture, “Twenty Years that Shook Russia,” in 223 Moses Hall on
the UC Berkeley campus on April 30, sponsored by the Institute of
Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
He considers the year 1984 a worthwhile point of comparison. Just as
during “all the years of stagnation” that surrounded it, in 1984
Russians appreciated small pleasures because such pleasures were all
they could get. “Numerous books were accessible — Faulkner,
Salinger, Fitzgerald, Hemingway,” Kokh remembers. “And what great
science fiction! Lem, Asimov, Bradbury, the Strugatsky brothers, and
H.G. Wells. You could read and lose yourself.” Reflecting on an era
when personal space was scarce and many neighbors typically shared a
single toilet, he adds: “When you realize where the bar was — and
it was very low — then a [cheap Russian-made] Vostok watch
made you as happy as a Rolex.”
Nonetheless, “we sensed that it was changing.” Watching a 1984 TV
broadcast of the Moscow rock band Mashina Vremeni, whose name means
“Time Machine” and whose biggest influence was the Beatles, “I had a
sense that the finale was sneaking up … that the machine was running
down.” Until then, Kokh had believed “that I would have to be a secret
dissident all my life” in a family where his father was a devoted
career Communist — “though, really, what he wanted with the
Communists I don’t know. They screwed him when he was six.”
Currently working with the Atlantic Council toward improving
Western-Russian relations, Kokh funds an annual Russian prize in
mathematics as well as the work of independent filmmakers and
organizations that fund pediatric heart surgery and youth wrestling
competitions. The underground spirit that inspired him twenty-plus
years ago is worth reviving now, he avows: “During the stagnation
period we had the official line, which was later destroyed by the
alternative culture. And now the official line is appearing again. So
we will have to develop an alternative culture again — show the
young people how it’s done.” 4 p.m., free. ISEEES.Berkeley.edu
