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

by John Mole

  I realized my mistake as I was making it, which is more mortifying than being taken by surprise. You may have seen the root of my error in the words “stepping stones”. You may already have guessed what they really were. I am not sure what gave me the first clue. It could have been the movement under my feet, the grunt, the pointy ear flicking up or the glinting oxyacetylene eye. When I recreate the scene, which I do as seldom as possible, I am minded of James Bond skipping across the backs of crocodiles. Crocodiles are different from pigs. Their skin is knobbly not slick. They swim flat and do not buck like a bronco.

  At that moment Natasha came out to see where I had got to. She was treated to the inauguration of the sport of pig surfing. For one exhilarating moment I rode the mud. Unfortunately I am no more skilful at surfing on a pig than I am on a surf board and the outcome was equally inevitable.

  Everyone was very kind. After a hose-down to get the worst off, I went inside for a hot shower. Vasily lent me underwear, a work shirt, dungarees and rubber boots. Everyone clapped when I went back into the kitchen.

  “O! Kolkhoznikl Welcome to Russia!”

  We left before the women came back to give us dinner, piling into the bus and crowding over the drive wheel to ford the farmyard. We passed them still stooping over their potatoes in the gathering dusk. There was no sign of Ivan the steeplejack and rabbits browsed with impunity along the verge. My Russian shirt was as itchy as hell.

  Caviar for the particular

  Misha went back to his day job in Rome. With typical generosity he lent me his apartment in Moscow. It was about fifteen minutes’ walk from a metro station on the Green line going north. The way home was through a street market, across a park, past a cinema and into a development of brick-built apartment blocks. It was a solid middleclass residential area, civil servants, academics and professional people, a couple of rungs below the luxury riverside and hilltop pads of the nomenklatura and the new rich.

  The ground-floor entrance had an intercom system, long perished, and a lock operated by a number pad. 1812 was the code. The staircase was dirty and badly lit. Cleaning and maintenance were done by the person who couldn’t stand it any longer. We went three days without a light bulb, feeling our way in the pitch dark and striking a match to see our keyholes. My neighbour Alexei cracked first. The windows on the half landings were broken and covered in sacking to stop birds coming in. The stone steps were worn with chunks missing in the middle, so it was advisable to hug the wall when going down. The predominant smell was cat shit, as owners kept the litter outside their front doors. There were other smells too: mouldering concrete, tonight’s dinners, and cabbage of course - or perhaps drains, they are easily confused.

  In Britain, if you buy your own council house, you replace the standard-issue plywood door with nail-studded mahogany, a swirly bull’s-eye porthole and wrought-iron fitments. The Russian equivalent is a bullet-proof steel door with reinforced hinges and an array of locks. Misha’s door was covered in plastic imitation leather, but the others in our block were raw steel. They were massive things, crudely welded and stained with the cutting torch, but with an attractive shot-silk patina.

  Ordinary Russians gasped when I invited them in for the first time. Although they tried not to show it, they were overawed. Glum-faced, as is polite before the first drink, they sat on the white leather sofa in slippered feet and conducted a surreptitious survey.

  The standard Russian flat was dark, small and pokey. A kitchen with plain white tiles or distempered walls looked like an English kitchen of the 1940s. Sometimes there was room for two or three people to eat round a small table. Off a corridor were one or two small bedrooms and a living room crammed with furniture. A record player, a television set and these days a computer. The main difference between Russian and British homes lay in the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in all the rooms and corridors. Every surface was covered in bric-a-brac, ornaments and souvenirs on doilies and mats. The apartments felt stuffed, like the bijou residences of empty nesters when they sell the family house but can’t bear to get rid of the junk of decades. On a winter’s evening in a snowstorm at 20 below they are wonderfully cosy, but I always felt like I was visiting Granny.

  Misha did away with all this. He demolished the walls and made an open-plan living room with a raised dining platform and a galley kitchen behind a divider. The bedroom, bathroom and toilet led straight off the living room. On top of these conveniences under the ceiling were a washing machine and drier, accessible by a handy step ladder. There was a small alcove for a hall, just room enough for two to take off their shoes.

  If the layout wasn’t revolutionary enough, the furnishings took the breath away, from Russian lungs at least. White leather sofa and armchairs. Smoked-glass dining table with gold legs and matching chairs with red cushions. Crystal chandelier. Spotlights. Italian standard lamp with foot-operated switch that evinced cries of wonder. The bed was a king-size mattress on a carpet-covered platform. Navy-blue sheets. The walls and doors of the fitted wardrobes were covered in mirror tiles. The wall beside the bed was entirely papered with an alpine forest scene. When the sun shone in the morning it was like being in bed on the balcony of a Swiss chalet, bathed in light and icy glitter. At night, with greenish-yellow streetlights irradiating the scene, it became a post-Chernobyl forest, glowing in the dark.

  “Your friend has connections. Be careful,” said Flor from research.

  “See how Russians have taste when they get the chance? By no means,” said Afanasy.

  Women were even more impressed than men.

  “This is so international... so elegant... so sophisticated,” said Natasha as she stroked the nylon carpeting on the walls.

  “Is your apartment in London like this?” asked Olga.

  “Oh yes, I have carpet on the ceiling as well. And a transparent armchair with real fish inside it.”

  I didn’t use the kitchen much. My Russian friends were extraordinarily hospitable at their apartments or their dachas. If I needed to shop I used the local street market for fresh stuff like fruit and vegetables. Much of it was grown in the seller’s allotment or dacha and was reasonably priced. The big covered markets were dominated by Caucasians who imported produce from the south. Their stuff was expensive, out of reach of people living on ordinary salaries. The best bread was from the state-owned bakery where you queued up at a hatch for bricks of delicious black bread, which is in fact brown. It had a delicious tang and nuttiness. For the rest I usually went to the supermarket at the Irish House. Sunday breakfast was Irish rashers and listening to the BBC World Service like a true expat - or should it be expaddy?

  Out of guilt and parsimoniousness I sometimes shopped in Russian shops, the gastronom and the produkti, for specialities like sour cream and smoked fish. And for less lovely things like tinned sprats in tomato sauce, known as unmarked graves, a disgusting mess of eyes and bones that I found curiously addictive. But it was such a drag to queue three times, once at the counter to discover the price from a surly assistant, then remember it while you queued at the kasse to pay, and finally lining up again at the counter with the receipt to get your shopping.

  I did my best to live up to the apartment’s sophistication. I got in caviar from a covered market next to the Circus, a half-kilo jam jar, about five dollars’ worth, expensive by Russian standards but I always bought the best Beluga. You had to be careful you were not getting counterfeit, but Misha introduced me to a dealer he trusted. I laid in a dozen cases of 1982 Chablis from a kiosk next to Dynamo stadium at an outrageous foreigner’s price of a dollar a bottle. At another kiosk I found a dozen boxes of Romeo y Julieta half coronas at three dollars a box. So after a hard day at the potato business I could relax in style, a step up from my usual Happy Hour of a pint of lager, a Hamlet and a packet of pork scratchings.

  I found that the caviar went best on black bread, but a couple of spoonfuls on tagliatelle is nice, with a bit of cream, and it goes surprisingly well on a fried egg. A word to the wise:
it doesn’t go at all with baked beans. Too salty.

  It was illegal to take caviar out of the country unless you bought it at the special airport shop at special prices. Bags were X-rayed on departure for little round tins. You got round this by decanting it into sandwich bags and squashing it flat between your shirts. It freezes well, so we stocked up the freezer, except for one shipment that ended up in the Sunlight Shirt Laundry in Camberwell. Alas, all good things...

  Over the years the caviar trade tightened up and you had to pay five bucks for a little blue tin. The decent wine got diverted to posh new restaurants and a more visionary entrepreneur than I snapped up Moscow’s entire stock of R&Js, which remained unreplenished with the decline of barter trade with Cuba.

  I had first tasted Russian caviar in the Time of Stagnation. We were on a package trip to Moscow and St Petersburg, or Leningrad as it was then, in the middle of winter. Traders lurked outside the hotel. In those days it was a risky business, unless they had good connections and paid a percentage of their takings to the police. It also felt risky to be one of their customers. There were stories of Westerners being arrested for changing money and selling jeans. In those days you suspected everything was a trap, but with his open face and lovely smile it was hard to believe that Yuri was working for the KGB. I strolled over the road from the hotel to look at the frozen Neva. He came up beside me. I ignored him. He stared down at the ice like a tourist and not a tout.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I have no dollars and no jeans.”

  “You are very deprived. I have dollars and I have jeans. Do you have caviar?”

  “No. No caviar either.”

  He put a jam jar on top of the wall in front of me. It looked like the blackberry and damson jam my mother used to make, black and viscous, sealed with a circle of greaseproof paper and a rubber band.

  “Caviar,” he said, “to the general.”

  “I’m not a general.”

  “General means the general public, not a military rank. It is Shakespeare. Hamlet, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Are you Russian? How do you know Shakespeare?”

  “All Russians know Shakespeare. And Robbie Burns. And Jack London. I have been to English special school. And this is real Beluga. Caviar for the particular.”

  “I said I have no dollars and no jeans.”

  “You Westerners are so materialistic. Your civilization will collapse. It is a present from Yuri. Taste it.”

  He popped off the rubber band and the disc of paper and produced a wooden spoon from an ice-cream tub. He cleaned it on the crust of frozen snow on top of the wall and handed it to me. “Be my guest.”

  I had eaten caviar before, in Iran, but by the mocha spoonful. I loaded the wooden spoon and licked it off. It was real caviar. It was also true that Yuri didn’t want dollars or jeans. He wanted my Y-fronts.

  “Have you seen the Russian underwear?” he asked.

  “I have not had the pleasure.”

  “Thick, black and baggy. They itch until they have been washed ten times. Only the kids want jeans. The big guys in town go to their girlfriends in the afternoon, they want to walk round in Y-fronts. Wolsey, yes?”

  “How about Marks & Spencer’s?”

  I was constipated for a fortnight through eating caviar with a dessert spoon at every meal. Which was fortunate, as I had only the one pair of black baggies Yuri threw in with the deal. I washed them every night, but that was OK because the radiators were so hot.

  The front door of Misha’s building opened onto a square. Later on in winter the trees were bare and it was deserted, except for a huddled figure bustling home, a driver scraping his windows clear, a few dog owners loitering round yellow patches in the snow. There were Alsatians and Dobermans and mongrel guard dogs, second line of defence after the steel doors, but there were also lapdogs, poodles and chihuahuas and dachshunds and ratty crossbreeds, all lovely to their owners but an embarrassment to men on the other end of dainty leads.

  When it was warm enough, women in headscarves sat on benches outside the doors to gossip and keep an eye on passers-by. Men tinkered with decrepit cars. Children played on swings and slides in the sandy enclosure. There were garages at one side of the square where furtive young men in black leather jackets and jeans loaded and unloaded sacks and boxes from unmarked vans. Walk too close and they stared at you, blank-faced and threatening.

  Apart from Alexei, an old man habitually dressed in a three-piece dark suit and embroidered Siberian socks with whom I shared a landing, I spoke to nobody. The rest of my fellow residents plodded past each other with hardly a grunted greeting. It has been said that this attitude to others - not interacting, not looking, not speaking - was a legacy of Soviet times when strangers were not trusted. I was ignored, never greeted, never challenged, yet I must have stuck out a mile.

  Gradually I became less conspicuous. It had nothing to do with physical characteristics. Moscow was an imperial capital and the streets still teemed with exotic physiognomies: tall flat-faced Mongols, creased-eyed Tatars, swarthy Caucasians, every sort of Germanic, Latin, Balkan, Finnish, Uzbek, Kirghiz, Chinese, Japanese.

  My first step was to wear a hat. Only Westerners walked around bare-headed on a cold day. I bought a Santa’s helper ski hat with a long tassel and a snowflake motif to wear with a long grey padded anorak. The key to anonymity was not so much the clothes as the demeanour. I developed the Moscow trudge, plastic bag in each hand, head down, looking neither right nor left. I knew I had succeeded when people came up to ask directions.

  The only person in the square who greeted me was Yefrem, a bomzhi or homeless man, who lived in a cubbyhole under the stairs down to the basement area of the block next to mine. He was in his 40s and shaggy. Hair and beard and scarf and fur hat and greatcoat and disgusting boots were all moulting. Beady black eyes and a strawberry nose peeped out from the pelt. Our residents’ association paid him a pittance to paint out the graffiti on the estate. There were a dozen blocks of flats and four squares, so there was plenty to do. Graffiti was a new phenomenon, a by-product of Glasnost that freed artistic expression. Not only did Russians learn graffiti from the West but they wrote half of it in English.

  Yefrem’s work gave him an extensive vocabulary that he practised on me. He lay in wait, and when he saw me beetling across the courtyard in the morning and trudging back in the evening, he popped up to greet me.

  “Can’t buy me love.”

  “Hello, Yefrem”.

  “Fook Livairpool.”

  “Good thinking, Yefrem.”

  “Make lyorve and vore.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He was a graffiti audiobook for the visually impaired. Why did he recite his phrases to me? Partly to improve his pronunciation. I gave up correcting him because he only repeated the same mistakes over and over again. Partly out of hospitality, to make me feel at home. Partly because he was drunk or crackers or both.

  At a rough estimate there are about 50,000 bomzhi in Moscow and 4 million in Russia. Bomzhi is an acronym for “without fixed place of residence”. In English “of no fixed abode” means you don’t have an address. In Russian it means much more. Every Russian over the age of 14 has an internal passport, the equivalent of a European identity card. It contains the name, date and place of birth, military service, marital status and names of children under 14. It also carries a registered address, still known as a propiska, although the official name was changed to registration in 1991. The propiska entitles the holder to education, health services and welfare benefits. In 1998 the Constitutional Court of Russia declared the propiska unlawful and Moscow’s Mayor Luzhkov declared that he was ignoring it.

  Economic migrants, refugees and any outsiders find it very difficult to get a propiska, especially if they cannot afford the necessary fees and bribes. You lose it by losing your apartment, moving to another city or going to jail. Repatriation from former Soviet republics and the wars in the Caucasus have created
hundreds of thousands of internal refugees without right of work or residence. Once a bomzhi it is very difficult to stop being one. A bomzhi has neither a home nor the right to one nor any access to emergency shelters, hostels and so on. In Moscow and other places they stretch the rules by giving emergency shelter in winter to people who have lost their propiska, but not to those who were never entitled to one. A few charities struggle to help them, but generally they are hounded and despised. Smaller cities like Vladimir solve their bomzhi problem by rounding them up and carting them to the municipal rubbish dump, a symbolic as well as practical solution.

  Yefrem was lucky. He was a bomzhi but he was our bomzhi. He had a place to live and a livelihood.

  You will not find such a potato in the whole of Russia

  The bedrock of our project was that there would be no problem with the supply of raw material in the biggest potato-producing country in the world. Russians eat nearly 20 million tons of potatoes a year.

  Mustard Flor from research introduced me to Basil Iurivitch, the president of Russian Potatoes. His office was in the Agriculture Ministry. He had been director of the Soviet Potato Board until it was hived off as a konzern, an independent company owned by producers and research centres. Its main function, as in the old days, seemed to be filing and collating the reports that lined his dingy eyrie. With his job Basil held on to his chunky greyblue suit, Druzhba papiros cigarettes, the picture of Lenin behind the desk.