POWER PLAY: Tale of Russian Politics Is Told In Prison Slang

You can bet your life that the framers of Western foreign policy have never heard such key Russian words as tufta and khalyava.


But within these words lies the key to understanding Russian political and social behavior - including the population's alienation from the state and its craving for a strong hand; the tolerance of extraordinary bureaucratic corruption and lawlessness; the fear of brutal violence, but the ease with which they let it be visited on others. In a nutshell, these words are the framework for the Russian-Soviet Art of Survival. Its significance has been lost on all foreign policies toward Russia, and the oversight has doomed every one of them to failure.


Tufta, in Russian prison and labor camp slang, means "counterfeit" or "a swindle involving selling poor-quality goods." Khalyava, in the same jargon, means "satisfying demands on someone else's account."


The sense of tufta is as follows: In Soviet camps there was a daily work quota that prisoners had to fulfill to get their ration of bread and soup. The sizes of the rations varied over the years, but they were never proportionate to the physical output of the prisoners, who cut wood, dug trenches or worked in uranium mines. When a prisoner didn't do the work he should have, his ration was reduced or taken away. In order to survive, a prisoner had to be able to produce the appearance of work so that, on paper, it came out that he had cut down 10 trees, for instance, when he'd really only cut down three. Getting food for this unfinished work was said to be "getting khalyava."


"Only those who thoroughly mastered the science of tufta and khalyava survived the camps," Lev Razgon, the famous Russian writer who spent 17 years in the Stalinist gulag, told me.


Tufta and khalyava could not have survived in the Stalinist gulag without a social contract between the prisoners and the camp commanders. The prisoners bribed the commanders, who in their turn bribed their superiors. The gulag thus was the place where a virtual Soviet planned economy - based on bribes and cooked figures - was built. In post Stalinist years, the system evolved into what was expressed by the truism: "The authorities pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."


Millions of Soviet people who outlived the camps brought the gulag science back to society. Its rules made up the Art of Soviet Survival, which was passed from generation to generation with mother's milk. This art was absolutely necessary for survival in the Soviet police state.


The fall of the Soviet Union was marked by the closing of the political camps and the declaration of political freedoms. But reform's hardships only increased the need for the Art of Survival. Those who may have an alternative to this system have only just been born. This Soviet survival instinct is responsible for the quick attitude shifts of various politicians and also explains the lighting-fast rise of the "firm-handed" Prime Minister Putin. It also explains the overwhelming support for the brutal and violent war in Chechnya. In short, the only way for reform to happen in Russia in a legal and timely fashion is to send all of us Soviet people to the moon. Why the West can't understand this will be the theme of next week's column.


Yevgenia Albats is an independent, Moscow-based political analyst and journalist.