Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  With all these historic currents swirling around us, Danny and I left our housekeeper, Susan, with the kids and boarded Yugoslav Airlines in early July, bound for Moscow. The flight seemed interminable, covering twenty hours with stops in Singapore, Belgrade, and Dubai. With some trepidation and a great deal of wide-eyed excitement, we finally landed at Sheremetyevo Airport on a bright, warm morning and made our way to the gate, where we spotted the familiar face of Matthew Hurd. In his usual perfunctory manner, wasting little time on niceties, he rushed us to collect our luggage, then led us to his car parked at the curb outside.

  We had reservations at the Pekin Hotel on Sadovaya Street in downtown Moscow, and Matthew zipped his cheap compact car through traffic, snaking through busy streets and allowing us an all-too-brief look at the pillars of this gorgeous, if somewhat foreboding, city which glistened in the morning sun. After checking into our room, Matthew brusquely said we had no time to lounge around after the long flight, that we were due at the SovAustralTechnicka office.

  After jumping back in his car, he wound his way to a single-level brick apartment building that had been converted into office space. The address: 25 Chekhova Street.

  Entering the front door and slip-sliding on a slick, overbuffed linoleum floor, we followed Matthew to a large, airless room in which a solitary man dressed in a gray business suit sat in a squeaky chair shuffling through some papers on a desk before him. He looked up, gave Danny and me the once-over and allowed a thin smile.

  ‘Yvonne, Danny,’ Matthew said, guiding us closer to the man with his arm, ‘Grigory Miasnikov.’

  ‘Ah, the famous Mr Miasnikov,’ I said, shaking his hand. As I did, something made me want to pull my hand back, something that told me I’d probably be better off if I’d never met him.

  Fifty-one years old, he was short and squat, about five foot seven, with a lantern jaw and a potbelly that hung over his belt buckle. Thin silver-rimmed glasses magnified a pair of small, darting eyes. Undeniably, he had presence. His hair was glossy silver, with not a strand out of place, and wound around his head with a kind of swashbuckling sweep. Unlike most other Russians, he was rather pale in complexion, more European, as if a Pole or Hungarian. I had a nickname for him: the ‘White Russian.’

  Though Miasnikov was to us a stranger, as we went with him over the following two weeks to business meetings all around Moscow with the directors of the four joint ventures he had enlisted for Video Technology, the other businessmen seemed to know him all too well. A strange pantomime began to play out whenever Grigory would appear in their offices; no matter what they were doing or to whom they were speaking, they would stop and wait for him to tell them something. When he did, it was in a hushed, nearly inaudible voice. Then they would nod and hop to some chore or another.

  ‘Do they have to kiss his ring, too?’ I whispered to Danny during one such vignette.

  From what Matthew had told us, these men were respected businessmen, yet it was entirely plausible to believe Grigory had brought them in as underlings, nabobs, yes-men to do his bidding. Could Grigory have been making money from every deal we made in Russia? Could SovAustralTechnicka itself have been an umbrella for all the joint ventures?

  Those were things Danny and I cared not to think much about. We simply let Matthew and Grigory handle the little details of the JVs. Still, we couldn’t help but wonder at times during that trip if Miasnikov was so powerful that he could possibly make things difficult for us, if he so chose.

  We had several meetings with him at 25 Chekhova Street over the next two weeks in order to review and finalise contracts for deals with the joint ventures. None of these deals were certified with anything more than a handshake, which in Russia, we learned, was a sign of mutual respect and an unbreakable bond. And with each meeting, Grigory seemed to have a tighter grip around the others’ throats.

  At one meeting, Danny and I were in Grigory’s office making small talk when Grigory heard one of the others say something in the hallway. We couldn’t even hear a voice out there, but evidently Grigory had ears like a dog because he bolted out of his chair, ran out, grabbed this man by the collar, and half-spit, half-shouted at him, getting an inch from his face. It was a frightening sight, yet when he was through, he walked calmly back into the office, sat down, and picked up right where he had left off in the conversation, as if nothing had interrupted him.

  We couldn’t figure out if this was the ‘Grigory Show,’ meant for our benefit, to prove how in-charge he was, or whether he was truly a psychopath. If he had a hidden agenda, he would drop no clues to that effect, ever. Certainly, he wanted to ingratiate himself to us, and he did, charmingly, even obsequiously. He even opened up to us a bit about himself, though again we had no way of knowing what was true and what was designed to impress us. For example, though he never delineated his own religious persuasion, he stressed to us that his wife was a Jew. He said he had been divorced twice, and this wife was just eighteen—which piqued Danny’s curiosity considerably, but just seemed plain sick to me. He said he had two young children, one of whom, a ten-year-old son, lived with him in Moscow. A twelve-year-old daughter lived with his first wife somewhere on the edges of Moscow.

  THE MANY LIVES OF GRIGORY MIASNIKOV

  Never did Miasnikov fill in the gaps of his professional background, which no one seemed to know. He did not mention the ten-year ‘disappearance’ it was suggested he’d had. Even so, it seemed highly unlikely he was simply a Russian businessman. Unbeknownst to the Weinstocks, Miasnikov’s father had been a Soviet diplomat, possibly during the reign of the ‘Butcher of the Ukraine,’ Nikita Kruschev, at the height of the Cold War. His son, Grigory Miasnikov, was born in the then-enslaved republic of Tadjikistan but lived from ages eleven to fifteen in England, and by the time he was an adult, he had learned to speak five languages fluently, including perfect English.

  Clearly, this was a man of myriad skills, an unusually high intellect, and vicious streak—all traits commonly sought out by Russian intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Could Miasnikov, then, have been KGB? Could he have been one of those agents about to be turned loose to sell his services? Could he have been an active operative, tracking the Weinstocks’ shipments for military hardware and software? Could he have been playing both ends against the middle until he could decide if he wanted to stay clean or go for a quick money kill? Would the impending breakup of the KGB force his hand to the latter?

  Years later, Yvonne would be told by a high-ranking Russian intelligence source that, in 1989, Grigory Miasnikov was in fact a lieutenant colonel in the Russian army, working undercover. Having wangled his way into the position of general director of SovAustralTechnicka, he had access to and could have compiled a sheaf of information about all those goods being trafficked through and out of Russia. He could easily have been able to reroute some goods back to the army, or to even arrange for gangs along the travel routes to intercept entire shipments.

  If any of these scenarios were true, how then did Matthew Hurd fit in? Was he an innocent, naive dupe? Was he recruited by Miasnikov at the 1980 Olympics and indoctrinated as a foreign operative? Or, given his excesses for knocking back bottle after bottle of vodka and chasing anything in a skirt, was he being blackmailed to use his entrée with the Weinstocks to entrench Grigory in the fold of a bustling global barter trade business?

  Whatever Grigory’s game, and Matthew’s, Yvonne and Danny were in over their heads, playing a game far more perilous than they could have known. Meanwhile, Grigory Miasnikov kept them pacified, using his considerable, unctuous charm.

  Herding us into his old white Mercedes, which he considered a status symbol, Grigory made it his business to play tour guide for us. He took us to a drab suburban area to meet his first wife, Olga, and daughter.

  I could easily sense Grigory’s distaste there, as if it was beneath his station. Or maybe it was that he felt he was not far removed from this depressing place where the people were grateful for anything they had. In Olga�
�s sparsely furnished apartment, for example, the kitchen shelves were bare save for what were seemingly her most prized belongings: the cardboard cups and cheap plastic toys she had gotten from the McDonald’s in Moscow. That McDonald’s, in fact, was the most popular restaurant in Moscow. We drove past it a few times, and always the line to get in stretched for blocks.

  But then, given the Russians’ tastes in dining, a Big Mac was a filet mignon by comparison. Danny and I one night had dinner at the house of a couple to whom Matthew had introduced us.

  Apparently, they were so thrilled to have foreigners in their home that they put out a lavish spread which included pieces of stale rye bread, Beluga caviar, which is actually quite cheap in Russia, and butter. You were to spread a half-inch-thick mound of butter on the rye bread and top it off with a layer of caviar. This combination looked and tasted repulsive, but if you didn’t eat it heartily while everybody made toasts with vodka to everyone else, you would offend all of them. I was so sickened from shoving that mound of butter and caviar into my mouth for hours that, to this day, I cannot eat caviar. Most else about that night are merely vague outlines because I put away so much vodka, I apparently became the entertainment for the evening, though I can’t recall just what it is I did.

  I do recall that one of the Russians looked at me incredulously and asked, ‘Do all Australian women drink like you?’

  ‘I hope not,’ I was able to say, ‘or the country is in big trouble.’

  Danny, who was not much of a drinker, gave it a shot, but after one glass, he fell asleep under a table and lay there for two hours curled up in the fetal position. Danny almost had to be carried to Matthew’s car for the trip back to the Pekin Hotel.

  Less raucous were the wonderful hours I spent during the trip with another friend of Matthew’s, a vivacious woman doctor named Natasha Amankwa. One day, she and I sat on some steps in Red Square near Lenin’s Tomb and watched the parade of Russian life pass by. You could sense optimism among the people that by summer’s end they’d be experiencing something unheard of, something of which they’d only dreamed. And yet, during those two weeks, I could also see the toll Communism had taken, on Jews in particular. Grigory had told us that the sight of any foreigners in the homes of Jewish people would arouse suspicion among the authorities who were always wary that Jews would defect, and that we had probably been watched by the KGB the night we went to that house party. On one Shabbas, Danny and I went to a synagogue located in downtown Moscow, surely one of the most beautiful synagogues I have ever been to. As soon as we sat down in the front pew for the service, Danny tapped me lightly on the arm and nodded to the rear wall behind us. I took a look and saw a group of men standing at the rear wall, their gaze hard on us.

  ‘Goddamn KGB,’ Danny said quietly under his breath.

  To give Grigory due credit, for all his psychotic tendencies and air of foreboding, being with him eased the awkwardness Danny and I had being total novices to Russian culture and, more centrally, Russian business culture. He provided the essential tutorials that allowed us to follow the unique Russian protocols and make our meetings productive. We learned to anticipate that while these joint-venture people would possess very high expectations and would make serious demands, it was they who would be intimidated by us. They would, Grigory instructed, try to convince us they had the necessary credentials and experience when in fact they did not.

  ‘Don’t overestimate them,’ he would say. ‘Pay them respect, but don’t be afraid to show them who is the boss’—though at times it was an open question whether he meant us or him.

  Indeed, I had anticipated that being a woman would put me at a disadvantage. Instead, having dealt exclusively with men, they were at a loss to know how rude and demanding they could be with me.

  Another bit of helpful advice from Grigory’s playbook was that Russians always conducted business over endless rounds of vodka. To be sure, I had no objections to acceding to that custom and would leave meetings pleasantly numb from Absolut. But neither Danny nor I would leave drunk, since, as Grigory had pointed out, drinking wasn’t merely a business tradition; it was a business ploy to get their opposite numbers to say yes to, well, just about anything, without realising to what they’re agreeing. We avoided that, I’m sure, to their great shock.

  Before we left Russia, Grigory was able to arrange for us a private tour of the Kremlin, which for Westerners had for decades carried the same kind of darkly mythic properties as the Sphinx or Stonehenge. In fact, it was off-limits to most foreigners. However, Grigory not only got us in, he was able to take us into the two mausoleum-like rooms where the crown jewels of the Czar and Czarina are displayed. Our eyes lit up seeing the Romanovs’ shimmering gems under glass.

  More relevant to Danny and me was what for us were the real Russian jewels, such things as steel, copper, tin—even fertiliser. We returned to Melbourne feeling like conquering generals, with deals on the table in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  It was, we decided, time to live large—not realising, and not wanting to know, what the consequences might be.

  7

  MELBOURNE AND RUSSIA,

  1989–JANUARY 5, 1992

  While we were making handsome money from our deals, Danny and I never really knew exactly how much we had in the bank at any given time. This was partly because we happened to have three banks in three different countries on two different continents, but also because current deals were always leveraged against future deals. It was never what had happened—the credo was what was going to happen; everything was invested on the next deal.

  Given that reality, we were pushing our luck from the start, within a system that worked in reverse from normal mercantile trading. We were making shipments before getting paid, at the mercy of people we didn’t know from Adam. Had we been smarter, we would have had someone we knew on the ground when those ships would be loaded, someone from the West, who could inspect the goods and prevent any tampering. We assumed, however, that nothing would ever go awry with any of our deals, and the money would keep rolling in. We were even brave—or misguided—enough to move into a bigger house, simply because the beautiful home we had built in Elsternwick had only five bedrooms, and Danny was upset that his den had to be converted into a nursery for Melanie. We thought nothing of buying a seven-bedroom home on Cole Street in Brighton, just four doors down the block from the house I had refused to live in when I married Danny.

  This was our Xanadu, a half-acre of land with a tennis court and swimming pool. The house had a library, a den, and an ocean view. The price tag: $1 million. It would have been far beyond our means but for the splash we had made in the barter trade game. Using our pending deals—which were worth an aggregate of $23 million—we could borrow $700,000 from Chase Manhattan Bank. We showed them the contracts, and, bingo, we were approved. It mattered little that the mortgage was about $9000 per month as long as we had those deals, we kept telling ourselves.

  Even the aforementioned COCOM laws prohibiting international trade of items that might have military applications couldn’t slow us down. We were hardly arms dealers, but Australian customs inspectors became suspicious when we tried to ship a state-of-the-art photocopying machine to Russia; they stopped the shipment and confiscated the machine. Danny and I were livid, and we raised such a ruckus with the customs agency that the local newspaper ran a story about it. Apparently, this so embarrassed the Australian government that, after six days, the copier was returned to us, although they were real bastards about giving it back. Is it any wonder we felt so heady? It seemed to us that we were immune from harm.

  By mid-1991, the Iron Curtain had come down, and the demand within Russia to join the brave new world of capitalist trading opened up even more avenues for us. All told, we had now established eleven joint ventures, stretching beyond Moscow all the way to the continent’s once-forbidding eastern coast of Siberia and Vladivostok, an area that was a virtual treasure trove of natural-resource goods. In Vladivostok, the j
oint venture was called Far East Trading Company, or, as they liked to be called, Vostok. Its director, a shadowy businessman named Mikhail Rud, cornered the market on fertiliser. While this might not seem so enviable, the fact is that good quality fertiliser—as oxymoronic as that sounds—can fetch a small fortune by itself in resource-poor countries like Taiwan. Agents from that country constantly peppered the Video Technology office with requests for shipments.

  Once we had Vostok on board, we immediately put together a fertiliser deal for a cool $1.6 million. With our profits after expenses (read: bribes), we would fulfill Rud’s wish list of black-market-saleable goods, which we would obtain at wholesale prices from free-market outlets worldwide. We would never even have to physically touch these items; they would be drop-shipped to Vostok. Neat, clean, simple, and very lucrative. For example, Rud’s list on this deal looked like this:

  1. Automobile crane, ‘KATO’ 40-ton capacity (with spare parts). Quantity: 10

  2. Land Cruiser w/5 doors (with spare parts). Quantity: 10

  3. Toyota Van, 15 seats (with spare parts). Quantity: 10

  4. Toyota Carina II passenger car, European Variant diesel engine (with spare parts). Quantity: 10

  5. Clothing (except fur, leather, coats): men’s, women’s, and children’s shirts, trousers, socks, pullovers, dresses, underwear.

  6. Shoes: men’s, women’s, children’s, sport and leather.

  7. Bathroom and kitchen equipment.

  8. Furniture (kitchen and room).

  9. Sport bags, purses, cases, and briefcases.

  10. Telefaxes.

  11. Telephones.

  12. Xerox machines.

  13. Electrical typing devices (3-4 languages: English, German, and Cyrillic [Russian])