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

by John Mole

  I outlined the plan. He said he would personally procure as many potatoes as I wanted. Russia had over 180 varieties of potato, so surely one would be perfect for us. He declaimed the names like poetry: Ariadna, Kalinka, Talovsky, Orgonyok. We smiled at each other across the tea glasses, already basking in mutual profit and success. I handed him a colour photo of a Jackets potato, a perfect Estima, with a smooth, glistening skin, opened like a flower, cradling a succulent sauce of mince and red peppers and kidney beans. He took it in both hands and contemplated the marvel in silence, broken only by the fizzing of his papiros.

  “You will not a find such a potato in the whole of Russia,” he said.

  “But I’ve seen them. In the market. Lovely stuff”

  “They are from Hungary.”

  McDonald’s sourced as much they could from Russia, to the extent of advising and investing in farms. I supposed they had a surplus of potatoes that they would be happy to dispose of at premium prices. I went to see Dave, their technical director, a very pleasant and helpful chap, at their production facility in Solntsevo.

  I took Petya, Olga’s son, with me. He was deeply shocked that we had to wear white coats and hair nets. He put me on notice that if I wanted him or his friends to work at Jackets they would refuse hair nets. They were Russians. They were men. He calmed down when I said they could wear baseball hats.

  I put a deal to Dave. We would buy the biggest and best potatoes from McDonald’s at whatever multiple of the market price he wished. It would be a tiny fraction of the amount they used for fries. Dave countered with his deal. He would buy all the potatoes we produced and did not use at whatever multiple of the market price we wished. This was chilling. It meant that not even McDonald’s had cracked it. What hope had we got?

  The quest for a bakeable potato took me and Natasha fifty miles north of Moscow to the town of Dmitrov. We went in her old Niva, a boxy four-wheel drive. In Russia a 4x4 is actually useful. Off-road does not mean the supermarket car park and the gravel drive. Once you leave the city centre and the motorways, off-road is the same as on-road: snow, mud, ruts and potholes. The Niva was built for utility rather than comfort. But it starts at 30 below and has a road clearance that makes it look permanently jacked up.

  We set off after breakfast on a lovely late autumn morning. The road criss-crossed the Moscow Canal through grassy rolling countryside past birch woods and pretty gingerbread houses. Natasha was dressed for the country in an urban pastiche of peasant costume: dainty ankle boots, a white frilly blouse and a flowery patterned skirt, which she hitched up onto her thighs to drive. We had arranged to visit Lavrenty Nikolaevitch, who grew potatoes on his hundred-acre farm. Our plan was to buy him first-generation seed potatoes from the Netherlands. In return, he would give us first option on his crop. He would be protected from a slump in prices, while we would build a business plan on firm foundations.

  We got to Dmitrov in the middle of the morning and went to the Tourist Hotel, where we had arranged to meet Lavrenty. Judging from the standard of interior decoration and services such as toilets, it catered for tourists with low expectations of their holiday. Lavrenty was about the same age as me and as unenviably gaunt as I am unenviably plump. All his features - nose, chin, ears, fingers - were long and pointed. Guessing his occupation, you would put him down as undertaker or icon painter and certainly not jolly farmer.

  The Union laid on lunch for us in the bleak Soviet dining room. I was now used to having the same meal at any time of day from dawn to midnight: lots of salads and hors d’oeuvres, meat and potatoes, pudding, cake, tea, washed down with vodka, wine, beer and watery fruit juice. So I did justice to the spread at an hour when at home I would be looking forward to a cup of tea and a HobNob. Not my companions, though. I was eating for three. Natasha picked at her food as usual while Lavrenty pushed scraps round his plate.

  “The white killer,” he said, passing the salt, and I discovered why he looked half starved. He was a food faddist. We got the lecture on salt, sugar, red meat, refined flour, yeast, vinegar, eggs, green vegetables, root vegetables, fruit, you name it. And the man was a farmer. He regarded everything he grew as a threat to humanity. I’ve met people making cluster bombs for a living who were more in love with their job. When we got up from the table I felt like a bag of toxic waste. On the way out he said something to the manager that only made sense later on: “Please, you may turn the music back on now.”

  The next chore was a tour of the town before lunch. Mercifully, there was not a lot to see. The historical centre is the Kreml or Kremlin, which means fortress. It was a wall and moat surrounding two pretty onion-domed cathedrals. The domes are glossy black and the walls brilliant white, stylishly monochrome against the clear blue sky. Close by was a plaque marking the closest the Wehrmacht had got to Moscow.

  We followed Lavrenty out of town and into the country-side. Hedgerows and woods and flower-flecked fields and ponds with ducks were like a folk memory of the English countryside before the Common Agricultural Policy stripped it and raped it yellow. We turned down a corduroy track made of logs and up to a new and spacious wooden house with a wide veranda and fretwork round the eaves.

  Lavrenty’s wife Irene came out to greet us: a buxom, freckled redhead in a headscarf and apron with apple cheeks, brawny arms, meaty hands and tree-trunk legs. No need to guess her occupation, “farmer’s wife” sprang instantly to mind. She was younger than Lavrenty and clearly impervious to his dietary lectures. In her presence Lavrenty brightened up as if he tapped into her energy and cheerfulness. She invited us in, but I asked if we could have the farm tour first. It looks professional and gets it over with.

  Compared with other farms I had seen this was certainly well equipped. Lavrenty owned a pick-up, a tractor and various bits of machinery for digging and scraping and pushing stuff around and loading things onto other things. He told us what they were, but as I don’t know their names in English let alone Russian I was none the wiser. There was a purpose-built shed for potatoes, also empty. This I did know something about. I had been swatting up on the Idaho Potato Board technical leaflets on the subject, so I looked serious and asked intelligent questions about capacity and air circulation and ventilation and damp proofing. He had financed it with Union grants, proof that money was making its way from the state budget to where it was needed.

  I asked to inspect the potato fields. We strolled down a grassy track to a pretty meadow surrounded on three sides by forest. With a theatrical sweep of the arm, Lavrenty presented his potato plantation. It was crowded with wild flowers and buzzing with bees and the last butterflies of the season. Natasha took advantage of her outfit to skip through the grass and pick flowers and toss her tousled hair over her shoulder. It was sweet but worrying. I was familiar enough with modern farming to know that wildlife must be exterminated and I asked searching questions about weedkillers and insecticides. Lavrenty was embarrassed and evasive. Union grants and loans did not cover these essentials, which were expensive and in short supply.

  With the frown of an expert I popped the key question: Where was the irrigation? Lavrenty took me by the arm and marched me to a concrete culvert beside the road that ran the length of his field.

  “The ditch never runs dry. It comes from the river.”

  “How does the water get from the ditch to the field?”

  “By pump.”

  “Can we see it?”

  “It is an underwater pump.”

  “I’d still like to see it.”

  He gave me the cheerless little smile I have sometimes witnessed and often given in a poker game, when a player folds his cards and with them his stake for the night. Without a word he steered me to a square pit full of water, fed by the stream. Pipes snaked out of it with fitments on the ends for connection to sprayers. I peered into the water.

  “Where’s the pump, Lavrenty?”

  He also peered into the pit, looking puzzled like a man contemplating an empty parking space where all that is left of his
car is a few shards of side window glass. He sighed.

  “I know. The municipality will not give me the permission. The water goes to Andrei’s farm for his fishing.”

  “Isn’t it your water first?”

  “Andrei is the Deputy Mayor. What can I do?”

  We men walked back to the house subdued. Natasha skipped in the field beside us, oblivious of the dark cloud over our heads. Without weedkiller, fertilizer and irrigation he didn’t have a hope of growing a bakeable potato. I burbled on about how lovely the farm was and what a good job he was making of it, but we both knew that his undersized, insect-eaten crop would be good only for street markets.

  Another test of diplomacy was waiting for us at the house. Irene clucked and shooed us into the kitchen like chickens at roosting time. On the table was a seventeen-course meal. Most of it originated from the forest and fields and the kitchen garden, which Irene managed with considerably more success than her husband did the rest of the farm. Wild mushrooms and berries and roots, tame vegetables and herbs, rabbit and pigeon from the woods and fowl from the henhouse, home-smoked perch from the river, delicious pies with pastry light as meringue, with creamy horseradish and tangy sour cream, smetdna - not to be confused, as I often did, with the differently stressed composer Smetána. To drink were the usual watery fruit juice and a fragrant, caraway-flavoured vodka, which their neighbour illegally distilled from Lavrenty’s potatoes.

  “No salt, no chemicals,” said Lavrenty as we sat down, but even this did not induce him to eat anything but boiled potato.

  I dug in with a heart as heavy as my stomach. It was only in part because I had finished a slap-up meal just two hours before. This meal was a celebration, prepared for days in advance in honour of our new business relationship. The future of his farm depended on it. When we got to the toast to friendship and cooperation I couldn’t look Lavrenty in the eye. The message had not got through to Irene. She piled my plate and talked of what great things Russians and English could do together when they set their mind to it. I complimented her on the farm and her cooking and how farmers like them were pioneers in the resurgence of free Russia, blah blah - remember I was on my second vodka session of the day and it wasn’t even tea time.

  “But we are not farmers,” she said. “I am a nurse. Lavrenty is professor of the accordion.”

  Their story emerged in anecdotes and asides as the day melted into dusk. Lengthening shadows, swirling flocks of roosting birds and the cold orange sun were a suitably elegiac backdrop to the tale.

  Lavrenty was the son of two famous accordionists who sometimes played for Stalin. He made his public debut at the age of six before the Father of the People, whom Lavrenty remembered as kind and jolly, beating time on his knee and singing along with the choruses of the patriotic songs. With his parentage and patronage, Lavrenty passed painlessly from Special Musical Primary School through to the Conservatory, where he specialized, like his parents, in the traditional repertoire of the Russian accordion, the bayan. This has buttons as opposed to the keys of the Western piano accordion and gives a different sound. He dedicated himself to the works of T. I. Sotnikov, his first tutor and old family friend, who incorporated Russian folk tradition in simple, stirring, optimistic revolutionary themes approved by the Soviet Union of Composers. Sotnikov wrote the very first concerto for bayan and symphony orchestra, premiered and alas derniered in 1937. He died in the same year as Stalin, after which his slender reputation withered into a stick from which it has never regrown.

  I had the impression that Lavrenty’s talent did not flower naturally but was hothoused in other people’s expectations. He claimed it was by choice that he took a position in a Musical Secondary School in the provinces and not the prestigious Conservatory. He said that the battle for the bayan against the interloping piano accordion, with its tangos and jazz, had to be fought among the young and impressionable. He defended the wholesome repertoire of composers like Sotnikov against the decadence of caco-phonists like Prokofiev and Shostakovich and Schnittke, who had the gall to write a concerto for bayan.

  Lavrenty settled down, married a colleague, fathered an unmusical daughter. He kept alive the spark of promise his parents had wished on him by entering contests. In 1966 the Soviet Union had ended its self-imposed isolation and stunned the Western world with victories in international accordion contests. Competition to represent the Motherland was intense. In addition to prestige came foreign travel and currency allowances. The focus of the musical year was the playoffs in Moscow. They were rigged, of course. Contacts, influence, favouritism, a gift or two, a clean sheet with the Union of Composers, ideological soundness - these were what counted for the short list. You also had to be Russian. If you were a Tatar or Cossack or Gypsy forget it, however good you were.

  Over the years Lavrenty worked his way up through long lists and short lists to the 1986 final in the Kremlin Theatre. From twelve players six would be chosen to go to Klingenthal in East Germany. Or rather, had already been chosen by the Accordion Committee of the Union of Composers. Lavrenty was one of them.

  Over the years, strictures about acceptable music were relaxed. Deviants like Prokofiev and Shostakovich were rehabilitated. Gershwin was allowed. In the 1980s one of the star composers was a woman and a Tatar, Sofia Gubaidulina. But Lavrenty was too set in his mind and his ways to adapt and he stuck to the old Soviet repertoire. Like countless others in every sphere of life from Leonid Brezhnev down, he stagnated until Gorbachev and Glasnost and Perestroika swept away the old certainties. There was a revolution in the Accordion Committee and the old guard was ousted. Two months before the concert in the Kremlin Theatre the Berlin Wall fell. The organizers of the Klingenthal delegation were instructed not to include any Soviet works, unless they were by former dissidents.

  Lavrenty was in shock. Since the afternoon he had played for Stalin his career had meandered through mediocrity and failure. Klingenthal was his last chance to put things right. His wife had already spent the prize money and the per diem. His daughter had put in an order for a Sony Walkman. He had time to learn new pieces, but when he put a score on the stand the ghosts of his parents stood on either side and jogged his arms to make him play wrong notes. The ghost of T. I. Sotnikov, who had taught him and fought for him and written the music that fed his family, sat in the corner with his hands over his ears.

  Lavrenty walked onto the vast stage of the Kremlin Theatre with the calm of despair. In the spotlights he could see no one, only infinite darkness. He donned his accordion, walked up to the microphone and announced that he was not going to play the modern works he was down for in the programme, but an arrangement for single instrument of the Concerto for Bayan by T. I. Sotnikov. Out in the bottomless pit he heard a collective intake of breath.

  He played like he had never played before. All the promise and expectation of his childhood finally came to fruition. Under his fingers the Russia of his youth in the 1960s melded with the Russia of Sotnikov’s youth in the 1920s, full of energy and hope for the world. Lavrenty held the final triumphant chord five times longer than was scored until every last drop of emotion was drained from him. He floated in a dark and silent sea - until a tumultuous wave of applause from the audience lifted him up and brought him triumphantly back to earth. The standing ovation lasted five minutes. The audience was with him: he had played for them all, for their youth, for their Russia. The judges had no choice. They feared for their safety if they denied Lavrenty a ticket to Klingenthal. They also feared for their jobs if he played reactionary Soviet music.

  Lavrenty solved their problem. Summoned to the stage to receive first prize by popular acclaim, he was nowhere to be found. He was lost for six months. With the first snows of winter he turned up at the hospital in Dmitrov, half dead from starvation and exposure. He had no memory of where he had been or how he had lived. He was diagnosed as mentally ill and sent to a sanatorium on a collective farm, where the patients worked as part of their therapy. His wife divorced him, his daughter
disowned him. He renounced all music, which was why he had asked for the piped music to be turned off in the restaurant that morning.

  Irene was a nurse at the sanatorium. It was easy to see why Lavrenty would fall in love with Irene, but not why the affection was reciprocated. It was a classic case of the attraction of opposites. Their chance to make a life together occurred when collective farms were obliged to hand over land to private farmers. Preference went to people already employed by the farms. This was interpreted liberally by the implementing bureaucrats to include themselves, many of whom knew less about farming than I did and used the grants to build nice dachas and fence in their land, like Deputy Mayor Andrei. Irene was technically a member of the cooperative that ran the farm and put in an application jointly with Lavrenty. And here they were, finishing each other’s sentences, swapping little smiles, being funny about each other, telling themselves how lucky they were.

  I excused myself to go to the lavatory and on the way back slipped onto the veranda to watch the sun go down behind the forest. In a film at this point the sound of a distant accordion would waft through the rustlings and chirpings and cawings of dusk. It didn’t, thank God. I detest the accordion.

  Mixed feelings about the tutu

  I should not like to leave you with a false impression of my competence in Russian. My conversations were not as crisp and coherent as they have been reported. I was diligent with Teach Yourself Russian and practised on strangers in the street, but even when I got the words right first time I mixed up the vowels and put the stresses in the wrong place. People I talked to had a permanent air of puzzlement. For someone in my business the similarity between kartoshka (potato) and kartochka (business card) was a frequent source of confusion at first meetings. I looked for a language teacher and answered an advertisement in the Moscow Times. Anna: Russian Conversation and/or Ballet Lessons.