Sergei is 46 now, careworn and fastidious, a little stooped, his voice filtered through bluish cigarette smoke. But the photo still made him grin. So much caviar, I said. In those days, I thought money was everything. Plenty of people still think that way in Dagestan.
Life here is lived by the post-communist equation that money dishonestly acquired equals power.
The legal economy is a shell. Regional cognac and carpet factories are at a standstill. No one yet knows who will move in. But everyone knows that a new elite is forming in the Soviet ruins. Dagestan is a strip of land in Russia, east of Chechnya and west of the Caspian Sea.