I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia

by John Mole

  Outside in Red Square, Misha was scathing. “The cause of all our troubles.”

  “So you’re not an old Communist.”

  “Znachet, of course I am Communist. We are all Communists. What else do we know? Do you think New Russians came down from the moon? Every year the wolf sheds his hair but remains grey. This does not mean we are stupid. See the flag there on Kremlin? Russian flag. We have Russian Independence Day now on June 12. Independence from who? From ourselves? It is a nonsense. We must change. Moscow was not built in a day. I will show you where I found my liberation. It is nice walk.”

  As we left Red Square, Misha pointed out his favourite sights: the window of the apartment where Stalin died, the red stars on top of the Kremlin towers made of Siberian rubies, the manhole padlocked against homeless children who lived in the sewers. We turned sharp left along the Kremlin wall down the Alexander Garden, to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was a square of granite in front of an altar with a bronze helmet and banner. In the centre of the square a flame flickered out of a five-pointed star.

  “Please, take hands out of pockets. This is sacred to all Russians. On day of their wedding couples come for their photograph here. You know the biggest feast day in Russia?”

  “First of May? Revolution Day?”

  “Victory Day. The defeat of Fascism in Great Patriotic War. It was the greatest thing Russia did for the world. Not Lenin.”

  “I think we gave you some help.”

  “We fought from Moscow to the Elbe. Two thousand kilometres. You came from English Channel. Six hundred kilometres. We lost twenty million dead. One fifth of population. How many did you lose?”

  I pondered the flame while he bought us ice creams from a vendor. I pondered the icy blob of invisible bacilli.

  “Should we eat ice cream here?”

  “Eat for the dead.”

  As we walked on, I managed to flick mine from the cone into the gutter while Misha pointed out the Manezh, a great classical riding academy that was now an exhibition hall.

  “The Communists used it as garage for the ZILs of the nomenklatura,” he said. “Now they sell Mercedes and Chryslers.”

  Past the Manezh he pointed over the road to another classical building, the imposing Lenin Library, fronted with columns and topped with statues. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it was ceremonially renamed the Russian State Library, but His name was still over the door and on its metro station. We crossed the road. Misha ran up the marble steps and patted the plinth of Dostoevsky on the way to the library entrance. This was puzzling. How had Misha found liberation in a library? Books are my escape hatch, but I did not associate Misha with the parallel universes of literature.

  Misha had a reader’s card and it was the work of a moment and a passport to get a day pass for me. Inside the hall was an impressive staircase going up to a vast landing lit by crystal chandeliers and full of card-index cabinets. It was reassuringly like every other great library: the lovely musty smell, floor polish, whispered conversations of readers and the loud voices librarians permit themselves. Misha knocked a knuckle on the side of a catalogue.

  “This was big lie. Harmless books and propaganda.”

  He led the way to another landing and down a wide circular staircase to the bowels of the library, all too literally. An unpleasant stench floated up the stairwell: stale piss, fresh shit, bad drains and the sort of disinfectant that brings out the aroma like lemon juice on strawberries. I held my breath, which prevented me asking where we were going, other than the obvious. Before we reached the toilets Misha pushed open a dark-painted door stating “no entry - staff only” in gold letters.

  “In old days policeman sat here. This is real library. If we are stopped, you are from British Library. Look important.”

  We walked down long, cream-painted corridors and through swinging fire doors to a small lobby with narrower corridors leading off.

  “Here was another guard. He examined all my papers. I needed special clearance from library, from university, from ministry and from KGB. It was one year to get these papers.”

  Twenty yards down one of the corridors Misha flung open a door, switched on the light and stood aside to let me pass. It was like an interrogation cell. Peeling green walls, a neon centre light, a metal table. The door had a spy hatch. It was warm and fusty, but I shuddered.

  “Znachet, this is where I make my PhD.”

  “You said it was in business management.”

  “Of course. Very dangerous science. They locked you in. You pushed button to go out. They took very long to come. I bring in piss bottle just in case.”

  “What on earth were you studying?”

  “I make first thesis in Soviet Union on small business management.”

  “Dangerous stuff.”

  “You laugh. It was a big risk for me. I could not tell nobody about my work. When I defended my thesis they locked the door. Only me and professors. They knew nothing about management so I had no problems. The next day I applied for posting to international organizations. I was not foreign ministry or nomenklatura, but they wanted someone who knew what Americans were talking about. It was my liberation. It started here.”

  “What were you reading?”

  “BusinessWeek, Management Today, Fortune. Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence was my bible.”

  “Did you research private Russian companies?”

  “And be killed by mafia? Only my professor knew what I was doing and he was afraid for me. It was a hard work. But times are different. We are out of jail now. We should make money.”

  Biznismyen

  Everyone in Russia wanted to make money, whether to survive or get rich. For the poorest, the pensioners, the jobless, the unpaid, it was scarcely more than begging. In Yekaterinburg we bought up one old babushka’s entire stock, a left shoe. For the rest it seemed like the explosion of pent-up desire. They sold necessities and also the luxury, the aspirational, the quirky, the worthless and the useless, bought and sold for the pleasure of trading that had been denied for three generations. Shoppers thronged in stadiums and squares, stations, streets and subways. For every seller there were ten people inspecting the merchandise. Nobody wanted roubles. You paid with dollars or Marlboro.

  “Znachet, someone should make thesis. Oldest profession in world is not whore, it is shop assistant.”

  A lot of this activity was making public what had been going on in secret for years. In the Time of Stagnation things were rationed by scarcity. Everyone carried a string bag, a “just in case”, for when they came across something - anything - to buy. Window shopping was meaningless; there was nothing in the windows. Instead, you spent your shopping time in queues. Companies provided shops for their employees and stocked them with stuff they made or grew themselves, the surpluses traded with other companies. The black market in goods and favours flourished, from getting a dacha to a university place. Sweeteners, grease, bribes oiled the system. But it was always private, overtly frowned on. Biznismyen was a term of abuse.

  The same thing was happening on a larger scale in industry. Raw materials, industrial goods, inventories were bought for a song or appropriated or simply stolen and then exported or sold on. Licences for oil and gas and minerals and forests were shared out and traded. Managers colluded with politicians and party members to hive off the going concerns among the vast conglomerates and leave the rest to be shored up by the state. Government monopolies became private monopolies defended by political patronage or murder. Assets went not to the highest bidder but to the better armed. The boardroom battle was not a figure of speech. The ownership of major industries such as aluminium was decided by shootouts and assassinations. Entire towns are still owned by gangsters who run the local industry, police and courts.

  Times had changed from when Misha was locked in the bowels of the Lenin Library to read BusinessWeek. We had a gig at the graduate business school of Moscow University: a big, airy auditorium with a hundred students in pressed jeans an
d clean trainers and neat haircuts eager to take notes. For the first time there were women in the audience. They all spoke English, which was good and bad- it was not as disjointed as with consecutive translation, but I had to talk for twice as long. I hoped I could think of enough to say. More troubling was that I wasn’t sure what level to pitch it at. These kids grew up under Communism, what did they know? What did they teach in a Russian business school? My MBA was about how to be a middle manager in an American multinational. Was it the same here?

  They sat through my talk politely, although not many took notes. Obviously my advice on international cross-cultural management was over their heads. I guessed from their diffident questions that they were not sure how to deal with a real live Western international banker-entrepreneur. At the samovar afterwards I made an effort to be affable without being patronizing.

  “So what do you want to do when you graduate?” I asked a shy-looking, fresh-faced young lad.

  “Mmm, I am trying to buy a company in Britain. It’s better than setting up something from scratch, don’t you think?”

  “Er, how are you going to do this?”

  “Mmm, perhaps I shall buy a company on the London Stock Exchange.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Why not. It is a free market, no?”

  “Not exactly free. You need money.” I tried to let him down gently.

  “I have money.”

  “You need quite a lot of money.”

  “I have two million dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Mmm, I import computer parts from Taiwan and assemble them here. I have a workshop with twenty people.”

  “Er, I’d be happy to help. I’ll give you my card.”

  “It’s OK. I am talking to Kleinworts.”

  I was stunned. My cup shook under the samovar.

  “He has computers, I have mobile phones,” said a suave, dark-haired southerner. “It’s a bad idea to invest abroad. The returns are so much better here. You can put up a mast for a thousand dollars.”

  “Ah, but the risk is greater,” I said, struggling to play the part of Western know-all.

  “My company is offshore in Cyprus. It’s safe enough. Price Waterhouse did it for me”.

  I looked closely round the room. The jeans were designer, the shirts silk, the sweaters cashmere, the Rolexes genuine, the shoes definitely out of my budget.

  “Tell me, how many other millionaire entrepreneurs are here?”

  The fresh-faced lad looked round. “Mmm, I can see four. Most us have our own businesses.” “Why are you here?”

  “To practise our English. You have nothing new to tell us”.

  “Oh, thanks. I mean at business school.”

  “We must learn to do business properly, in the right way.”

  The eldest was 24. They were in computers, building materials, mobile phones, pirate Nintendo games, Doc Martens shoes, high-value chemicals. They came from well-connected middleclass families, otherwise they would not have got into a prestigious school. Their parents were scientists and diplomats and engineers and administrators, whose world collapsed with the USSR. It embarrassed some of them to be supporting their parents, living like Americans, making so much money. Biznismyen in Russian means spiv, street trader, black marketeer. They came to the school for respectability.

  ICBM went on tour to St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Minsk, company towns and isolated cities that until recently were known only by a number. We went by night sleeper whenever possible. It was a pleasant way to travel. The carriages were warm and the bed firm. Put the centre light out and the little yellow reading lamps made candlelight. A smuggled bottle of vodka, forbidden to take on board, a couple of bottles of cola and the essential Russian accessory for any train journey, a roast chicken. Misha bought me Russian citizens’ tickets, which were cheaper than foreigners’, so I was under strict instructions to say nothing and act drunk until we were safely locked in our compartment.

  “But I don’t mind paying,” I said. “It’s not much.”

  “Znachet, we have our principles,” said Misha, deadpan. “And we are working for the good of Russia.”

  “But what if we get caught?”

  Oleg tapped the carton of Marlboros in his bag. He gave the cigarettes to the attendant anyway, which ensured that we had extra pillows, a constant supply of fresh tea and a blind eye to the vodka.

  As instructed, I sat catatonically through the preliminaries: checking the tickets, paying for the bedding, sipping tea brought in tall glasses and filigreed metal holders. I peered through the window as the train got under way through desolate cityscapes, with snowflakes swarming in circles round the white street lights and battering like moths at windows of yellow light in the buildings. Soon we were in the endless Russian birch forest, white trunks and branches startled in our light.

  Every train had its own character. To St Petersburg they left every half an hour starting at ten with the most luxurious, the Red Arrow, and ending at two with the cheapest and most uncomfortable. In the early trains the first-class compartments converted into two single beds with clean sheets and blankets and had young, efficient attendants ready at any hour to serve piping-hot tea from their electric samovar. The compartments in the last train had four bunks, rags for bedding, as often as not no heating, all the light bulbs except one broken or stolen, and old slags for attendants who spent the journey huddled over an oil stove in their cubicle guarding the precious inventory of tea. The passengers were different, too. After midnight they were down-at-heel with patched felt boots and luggage made of old blankets and string. On the early trains the men were fat and sleek with camel overcoats slung around their shoulders and the women were dressed in fur from head to toe. Their luggage would not have been out of place on the carousels at Zurich and Cannes. Among them were exquisitely beautiful young women on the arms of sheepish foreign men spending their per diems on per noctems with valutnaya, foreign-currency whores.

  Our lectures were alleviated by hasty tourism, a whirl of onion domes and icons, museums and palaces and galleries and metro stations, vast halls of gilded fixtures and fittings. I preferred writers’ house museums, in the irrational hope that genius might rub off. Pushkin’s razor, Dostoevsky’s hat, Pasternak’s pipe, Chekhov’s foot warmer, Tolstoy’s eiderdown, Bulgakov’s graffitied walls, Gogol’s wash basin, Yevtushenko’s bootscraper, Gorky’s pen - all are jumbled together in the bric-a-brac of memory with stuff I can no longer attribute: a vulgar staircase, a truckle bed, a stuffed bear holding out a tray for visiting cards.

  The evenings melt into a mishmash of skipping ballerinas, jigging puppets, singing boyars, tumbling midgets, clod-hopping bears. I stocked up with matrioshka nested dolls and lacquer boxes, painted eggs and spoons that when you get home you don’t know what to do with, except keep them away from food and children in case the paint is poisonous. But tourism seemed irrelevant compared with the history that was being made outside the museums.

  I sell sea shells

  When I was 16 I had recurrent nightmares about a mushroom cloud on a crimson horizon. The dread of nuclear annihilation pervaded our lives. In 1962 our fear focused on the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK’s navy blockaded Khrushchev’s ships delivering missiles to Castro’s Cuba. For twenty-four hours we lived under the real threat of a worldwide nuclear war. On that night I first got tipsy on beer. Bitter, fizzy, intoxicating not so much with alcohol but with excitement, a self-induced euphoria mixed with the fear of imminent death. So when ICBM was invited to give a lecture followed by a sauna at a satellite research institute on a missile base, the prospect of infiltrating Russia’s defence system was irresistible.

  On a crisp autumn day we took the Dmitrov motorway north for about 100 miles. We were met at a checkpoint and escorted down side roads to an unmarked, rusty gate with an unobtrusive sentry box. There were three more checkpoints on the way in. At the third, our documents were taken away and ten minutes later brought back b
y a senior officer with brass pips on his greatcoat and a gold badge on his red cap band. He held up my passport and asked me to get out of the car. A spectrum of fates flashed through my mind, from an intimate body search to a stint in the Gulag.

  “You are the first foreigner I have seen here,” he said. “Welcome.” We solemnly shook hands.

  The road was lined with blank billboards, so we caught only glimpses of autumnal trees. Underground silos were scattered through the forest, but there was no sign of the missiles that had terrorized my youth. One man was allowed into the forest, a holy man called Grigori. He wore furs and had long black hair and a long black beard and lived in a hut. The guards knew him and left him alone. He might have tried to ride a rocket on its last journey, perched on the point and flying up to heaven. Would he have thought God had finally sent for him? There is not much to cling to on a nose cone, so he would have fallen off into the inferno of the launch pad.

  The bunker where we did our turn was a dismal place, unlined concrete and unshaded neon, a pedestrian underpass. All of the audience had at least one PhD and many had two or three. They listened with barely concealed intolerance to my unscientific theories on cultural difference and then asked questions about technical licensing agreements with Japan and the US. When it was clear that I didn’t have the wherewithal even to bullshit, they filed out in small groups. Only one stayed to the end, a round little man, even littler if he took off his high-heeled Chelsea boots. He looked in his late 40s, although he could have been younger. Thanks to climate, poor diet, cigarettes, cheap vodka and insecurity, Russian male life expectancy is in the upper 50s, fifteen years less than in the rest of Europe. They age to match. A grey sweatshirt with a Juventus monogram was at odds with this man’s unhealthy pallor. His brow was permanently puckered. Every few minutes his scalp twitched and his forehead cleared for an instant, as if he was trying to make his ears go back, like a dog pleading for love. This made his eyes slant and for a split second he had the face of a Tatar. His name was Andrei Denisovich. He waited until Misha and Oleg were busy packing up the projector and took me to one side.