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Russia’s “Post-Bling” Generation: Lebedev’s Blow for the Common Man

Russia's "Post-Bling" Generation: Lebedev's Blow for the Common Man

Of all the things to envy about Alexander Lebedev – his billions, his international media empire, his mansion on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace – what most Russians are really jealous of is that it was he and not them who knocked out Sergei Polonsky.

Sergei who?

Now internationally ridiculed as the man who split open his own trousers after being sent tumbling out of his chair by Lebedev’s sneaky punch, Polonsky is more than a mere random recipient of the oligarch’s trademark unpredictable streak.

Well before his beating made this week’s youtube rounds, businessman Polonsky gained notoriety in 2008 as a modern day Masha Antoinettova for saying that anyone who doesn’t have a billion dollars is a loser. “Those who don’t have a billion can go to hell”.

Polonsky’s comment came to epitomise the atmosphere of excess, entitlement and contempt for ordinary people that seems to characterise Russia’s elite in the era of High Putinism.

Even as the gaudy conspicuous consumption appears to have subsided from early 90s levels, levels of snobbery and social stratification have continued to skyrocket as status becomes expressed in other, more subtle but no less painful ways.

Gone are the caricature oligarchs of yore: the buzz-cut, barely literate bruiser wearing a burgundy blazer, drinking Chivas for breakfast and using rare paintings as gift-wrap for presents, with a wife who “looks like she just held up a Neiman Marcus at gunpoint” (and probably had). Today’s moneyed class prefer low-key gear with subtle designer labels few ordinary people have even heard of. They eat macrobiotically optimised lunches, love microbreweries, and don’t mind “flying to Berlin for a day to see a play by a Québécois playwright”.

In other words, they have gone from simply loathsome to completely, existentially, viscerally intolerable.

With oligarchs 1.0, you were outraged that a bunch of boorish thugs with nothing going for them except pure menace had millions and you were poor. But at least you were still more educated and cultured than them.

These days, you don’t even have that consolation.

The “post-bling” generation are richer than you, but also better read, more tasteful, fun, cooler, and erudite; just better than you.

Shteyngart writes: “The Snob editorial staff introduces me to another interesting feature of Moscow’s creative elite: the rise of the Russian house-husband, with his advanced degree in some irrelevant humanistic field, who can grill a spectacular mutton kebab while wearing a Snoopy hoodie. “Is this Russia’s missing middle class?” I ask Masha. “This is the weirdo class,” she tells me”.

See? They’re even capable of fake-laughing at themselves, even as they really-laugh at you, the true weirdo, with your $500 state salary (less than a house husband’s monthly organic mutton allowance!) and a truly irrelevant degree (ie. medicine or teaching), frumpily conferred on you years ago in some square, distant, irrelevant place called the USSR (you really should’ve thought about applying to the states!)

They have officially taken everything. First your wealth, and now your dignity.

And They’ve been rubbing your nose in it for years, stepping all over your dreams in their Gucci hightops camouflaging as Converse All Stars. You loser. Should’ve had more ambition, sovok!

Polonsky was one of those assholes.

And Lebedev (literally!) exposed him for the cowardly asshole he is:

“Now he’s showing his ripped trousers, which is rather difficult to comment on. He got it in the face, but he holds up trousers with a hole in the backside. Strange.”

As one livejournal commenter wrote, They should all be given the same medicine. The whimpering, runny-nosed boy so easily revealed by Levedev’s fist under Polonsky’s cocky, powerful facade shattered the myth that an overview of privatisation would be impossible.

The only problem is that Lebedev, who is already a billionaire oligarch, has been shown to be, on top of it all, a handsome, witty and vigorous man, one even capable delivering a cathartic comeuppance on behalf of Russia’s hapless and impotent everyman.

In other words, one of Them.

 

Author

Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin was born in Murmansk, Russia and grew up there and in Britain. He graduated from Harvard University with a thesis on American democracy promotion in Russia. Vadim's articles about Russia have appeared in The Nation, Dissent Magazine, and The Moscow Times. He is currently researching a comparative study of post-Soviet and post-Apartheid nostalgia.
Areas of Focus:
USSR; US-Russia Relations; Culture and Society; Media; Civil Society; Politics; Espionage; Oligarchs

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