The Soviet Republic of Brooklyn

The beaches of Brighton are resounding with the cries of women’s titties and backsides yearning to be free. “Enough”, they are screaming. “After thousands of years of freezing on the desolate wastes of Kazakhstan and the Crimean steppes, we are demanding our right to be exposed to the clear sunshine!”

Who can argue with such a plaintive plea? Certainly not this writer. Women of Brooklyn, I will fight to the death for your right to expose your breasts and backsides on Brighton Beach until they turn crimson with sunstroke!

This backended behavior is not the only manifestation of the Russian invasion of Brooklyn. Even as the U.S. Coast Guard maintains a vigilant surveillance of New York Harbor to deter illicit infiltration of our national territory by undocumented extranationals the denizens of the former Soviet republics are streaming in by the front door, waving authentic visas procured by means of Byzantine processes the mechanics of which are only comprehensible to a few initiated operators.

No matter. They are here and it is a good thing for Brooklyn. That borough, which for years suffered a serious hemorrhage of entrepreneurial talent with the exodus of its Italian and Jewish inhabitants for points east, is undergoing a transformation which is changing not only its ethnic composition but also its patterns of living. Brighton Beach, which only a couple of decades previously was a blighted and moribund appendage of Coney Island, with grandmotherly bubbies and zadies pushing walkers down Brighton Beach Avenue on their way to the Cheap Jack’s 99¢ Store, is being transformed into a fashionable version of South Beach, replete with Italian designer boutiques and elegant outdoor cafés terraces on the boardwalk facing out over New York Harbor.

Where the capital which is financing this Cinderella makeover is coming from is of indeterminate provenance, but maybe the city fathers/mothers of other blighted cities like Detroit or Cleveland do well to initiate a research as to how their fair cities might learn from the Brighton Beach renaissance. Certainly, some of the investment revitalizing the quarter is the result of the classic capitalist formula involving the conservation of accumulated earnings derived from honest labor. There are probably a few suckers around who still adhere to that shopworn philosophy. But as the old saw goes, “Nobody ever got rich from working”.

No, the Russians are too worldly wise and cynical to adhere to such a quaint formula. They didn’t survive centuries and millennia of serfdom and decades of communism by following the rules. One is reminded of the first classic Brooklyn Russian scam of the 1980’s and 1990’s, wherein some Soviet-era genius realized the perfectly obvious fact that there is no fundamental difference between heating oil and diesel fuel, except for the fact that the U.S. government didn’t collect excise taxes on sales of the former. Very simple. They bought heating oil and sold it in gas stations for diesel fuel, collecting the taxes and not passing them along to the G.

This racket, totally elegant in its simplicity, lasted for many years, generating hundreds of millions for the Russian mob until somebody who was being investigated for something else entirely happened to blurt it out to investigators, believing that since everybody else in the world already knew it, the cops must have known about it too.

There are so many of these scams going on that there is not enough bandwidth in cyberspace to consider them all in this article. My physician, who is a Russian woman, recounted to me the story of her girlfriend, who is a home healthcare aide in Brighton Beach. This lady qualified for a subprime mortgage and got title to a luxury condo, which she promptly took a second mortgage out on to finance a Mercedes Benz. So, you got a healthcare aide making $8 an hour living in a beachfront condo and driving a Mercedes.

A strategy like that is evidently not meant to endure over the long run (she is probably moonlighting as a massage therapist to bring in a little extra pin money), but it is probably calculated to get her a more desirable mate, and anyway, this is what she came to America to achieve. It’s definitely preferable to a life of quiet desperation in some dreary industrial city in the Ural Mountains. Meanwhile, as untold millions of Americans subsist in shabby little one-horse towns and trailer parks in flyover country, these sophisticated foreigners are flooding in and enjoying their lunch. A promenade on the boardwalk, filled with beautifully coiffed, elegant Russian women and their burly boyfriends wearing expensive track suits and sporting kilos of gold chains, will indicate to the casual observer that this is not a convention of the Better Business Bureau. But as the great American writer Louis L’Amour once opined in one of his western stories, America was not exclusively constructed on the sweat of honest labor.

Russians are not Europeans. They are Slavs, and bound to their feudal terrains since time immemorial. Peter the Great, after achieving his grand tour of Europe early in his reign, enforced western dress and customs upon his subjects, though it was just a superficial graft of culture upon the ruling classes and the urban bourgeoisie. The peasants, or muzhiks, were totally untouched and remained that way until the revolution. Part of the resentment toward the communists was due to the fact that they confronted the common people with the realities of modern life, which they resisted.

So the Russians, though they look and appear European, are locked in a psychological world dating from the Mongols and the Tartars. They are superficially modern in that they are conversant in all aspects of popular culture, like Michael Jackson and Gianni Versace, but they have more in common with the Turkman and the Uighurs of Central Asia than they have with any Frenchman or Italian. For many years the Russian mind confounded Western military and diplomatic strategists, who couldn’t get a handle on their thinking because even though the Russians look white, they don’t think white. Now that they have invaded Brooklyn, it’s up to New Yorkers to make sense of their Rubik’s Cube of a psychology in order to learn how to deal with them.

And deal with them we must. They are very canny business people, and they strive to stay 3 or 4 moves ahead of their interlocutors in matters of culture, like a chess game. Russian business people have heavily invested in Brooklyn real estate and are rebuilding the borough in their image from one end to the other. The transformation of Brighton Beach has been stunning, with new condos springing up where previously existed shabby, antiquated residences. A few years ago I wrote a fiction story about Brighton being reborn as another South Beach, and now I am living to see my opium dream transformed into reality, complete with shady rezoning deals, just like I pictured it.

Another advantage the Russians bring with them is their linguistic and cultural connection with robust and vital elements of the Russian economic elite, which has expressed a lively interest in Brooklyn. How much of the money currently involved in revitalizing Brooklyn has its origin in the Motherland may yet be a subject of speculation, but one of the problems endemic in the accumulation of vast amounts of ill-gotten wealth is the placement of it, and Brooklyn is about as safe an investment as any emerging markets. America is right now starved for capital, our capitalist class having completely run out of steam in the generation of new wealth. Previously we have tapped the Europeans, Arabs, Japanese and Chinese for new sources of liquidity, and now the time has seemingly come for the Russians to step up to the box.

Our latest savior is 6’7” kickboxer Mikhail Prokhorov, 44, a self-made (which must mean that he stole it all himself) billionaire in the Russian mineral extraction industry. He is reputed to currently be the richest man in Russia, or at least until the wind shifts and he ends up in jail with all the previous richest guys. In the meantime, more power to him. Prokhorov is investing $200 million to buy an 80% shere of the Nets basketball team and a 45% share in Bruce Ratner’s planned new stadium in the Atlantic Fields development in downtown Brooklyn. This will basically extend Russian control of Brooklyn from one geographical pole to the other. Such an ownership, if it is approved by the NBA, would imprint Russian culture on one of the most important elements of American sports culture and imprint a Russian sensibility on the whole way we look at athletics, particularly if Prokhorov decides to import some big, brawling Russian players to enhance the team’s popularity among Russian Brooklynites and the sports viewing public back in the immense Russian market.

It could also induce resentment among Brooklyn’s Black population, who have come to regard the NBA as their own and have been hungering for a Brooklyn team for a long time. As it is Black people have expressed resentment against the Russians coming in to the borough, usurping one of its loveliest neighborhoods (though it wasn’t lovely when they arrived. As with the heating oil, they saw an opportunity that wasn’t evident to native-born Americans and they took it) and making such a success of it in so short a time.

Where this Nets thing is going, I can’t say. But Russian ownership of Brooklyn basketball, combined with the Russian people’s rather arbitrary way of looking after their own interests, could lead to some interesting points of divergence down the road.

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