Friedman's Space

A significant part of modern mass culture works according to a pattern professionals call “Mill 3”: people who are not well off sell to the very poor their fantasies about the lives of the rich, very rich, and fabulously rich. Sometimes this scheme is varied with some bright detail—for example, an average person shows the yellow press their little home in Rublyovka, or hands over to the media some accidentally overheard clue about the oligarchic way of life (like the famous phrase “How nicely Chukotka’s capital has turned out,” which oligarchs utter when arriving in London). This mechanism is quite logical—and even, in its own way, beautiful. Yet it has one dangerous feature: very often the rich themselves want to learn how they live, studying reflections on the subject written by people who are not exactly poor, but close enough to that condition. That’s the only way to explain the Babylonian architecture of Rublyovka mansions and the terrifying number of “Maybachs” stuck in Moscow traffic jams. So does there really exist a reliable and scientifically credible way to peek into the world of the super-rich? We give a confident affirmative answer to that question. But the story will have to begin far away—by going back to the 1990s. It was then that Chingiz Karataev, an energetic figure of the era of primitive accumulation (besides business he was also interested in space epics by the Strugatskys), had an unexpected thought—that the proverb found in almost all languages, “money sticks to money,” has the most literal meaning possible.