by John Mole
Less than an hour later the printer began to stutter dense paragraphs of gibberish.
“Oleg! You could shoe a flea!”
Like excited cryptographers we chanted out the names that took our fancy as they rose from the rollers. The thrill wore off by the second page. It was obvious that even after the computer had done its first cull of the unpronounceable, there would be thousands of names, hundreds of pages. I would have given up the whole idea and gone home to bed, but I was with Russians. Although they didn’t especially believe in the idea, now they had started they would stick to it with dogged tenacity. Oleg broke open a fresh ream of paper - coarse, brownish, unbleached stuff with wood shavings embedded in it that today would be so environmentally correct but then seemed more appropriate to an outside toilet than the IT hub of a nascent multinational. Olga refilled the samovar, made a plate of kolbasa sandwiches and went to bed on the sofa in the living room. Oleg and Misha sat up on the bed and I took the chair. We shared out the sheets as they emerged and crossed out names, at first with much deliberation and then more cursorily. We just about kept up with the printer. And still they came, surely more trade marks than there were companies in those early days of the free market.
The night wore on. From time to time lids grew heavy, a pen slipped from the fingers, a head dropped. If we didn’t snort into wakefulness, one of the others would poke us in the ribs. We stuck to our task like Stalin’s commissars, purging names until dawn. Our work was not over when the printer at last fell silent. We swapped our sheaves and went through them again, me crossing out their Russian suggestions and they deleting my English candidates. When Olga got up she found us in the kitchen, fast asleep, our heads on the table. But we had our list. Two hundred plump and juicy names ready for the signwriters and the neon-lighters. AMMO and MAMA, MOOMOO and MOKKA, KOMA and KOKO. Now all we had to do was register them and wait for the money to roll in. This was a Big One.
Luck was with us. Finding someone in City Hall was easy. I was walking along Tverskaya, suited up with white shirt and naff tie covered in currency symbols, on my way back from the Central Bank where I had discussed agricultural finance with a deputy director, who knew even less than I did. 13 Tverskaya is City Hall, a great pink-brick block of a building with two tiers of classical columns stuck on the front. Some of my friends are rude about it but, coming from Birmingham where we have the Parthenon at the top of New Street, I am partial to neoclassical kitsch. At the main door of the building a trio of men in the same uniform as me were waggling bits of paper at the bored policeman in his kiosk. Quite apart from our registration project I was curious for a peek inside the building, so I tagged on behind as he waved us through into the cavernous vestibule, where a buxom false-redhead dressed like a massage-parlour receptionist was waiting for us - or rather, as I imagine a massage-parlour receptionist would be dressed. She took us up in the lift to the official reception rooms on the second floor.
Too late to turn back, I stood in line with the other suits and waited to be ejected by the bouncer with the guest list. I had stumbled into a reception for foreign bankers. Luzhkov was schmoozing them for municipal finance. They had spent the day listening to presentations and this was their reward. It was my naff tie that did it. I was waved through into a ballroom, all glossy parquet and gilt and mirrors and violent crimson wallpaper. In the far corner a youthful string trio dressed for the nineteenth century sawed away at Rimsky-Korsakov, although judiciously avoiding the “Flight of the Bumblebee”. I joined thirty or so clones mingling with our hosts around a circular buffet table and its handsome bowl of truly excellent caviar.
I have been to enough bankers’ dos around the world to know how to blend in. The secret is to look serious, say little and respond to any comment with “Hmm, the dollar.” Then people think you are powerful and burdened with financial secrets. I did not feel bad about gate crashing, since several of the others seemed as flaky as I was and a couple were definitely lightweights, the way they nattered on about bond rates and yields, trying to impress.
These days the Russians would have been indistinguishable from the rest of us, unless it was by the superiority of their tailoring. Then, most men over 30 remained sartorially Soviet in light grey suits, shiny shirts and pastel shoes. An exception was Stepan Gavrilovich, who generously heaped my plate with second helpings of the Caspian’s finest. He sported an aspirational Marks & Spencer-style double-vented pinstripe complete with matching tie and hankie. He had the Mediterranean looks of a Georgian and was young enough to think he needed to tint his hair grey at the temples. He spoke the excellent English taught in Russia, finished off by Voice of America.
Nervous about being rumbled, I went on the conversational offensive and asked what he did. He said that he was an adviser and asked what I did. I said I was an adviser. I could not avoid the business-card ritual. He crossed out the telephone number on his and wrote in a new one. Otherwise it asserted that he was Head of the Development Section in the mayor’s office. We were saved from further exploration of our credentials by the grand entrance of Mayor Luzhkov and his entourage.
Since 1992 Yuri Luzhkov has run Moscow like a Tsarist Governor General. He makes his own laws. If he doesn’t like those of the national parliament and courts, he ignores them. City Hall is an entrepreneurial investor with a stake in every real-estate, industrial and media business in Moscow. It has been the prime mover behind the renovation, restructuring and rebuilding of the city. Many have made fortunes by working with it, not least the richest woman in Russia, who happens to be Luzhkov’s wife Yelena. Cronyism and corruption are rife, from the top down to the humblest restaurant inspector.
At the same time, economic growth and standard of living outstrip the rest of Russia. Ailing privatized industries like the ZIL auto plant have been renationalized and revitalized. Municipal services have been improved, low-cost housing built and pensions restored. The combination of free-market economics, cronyism, directiveness and demagoguery smacks more of Tammany Hall than any Russian precedent. Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, Luzhkov has been re-elected three times and is the longest-serving democratically elected politician in Russia. He founded the Fatherland party and was in the running for President until Yeltsin anointed Vladimir Putin as his successor.
Charisma is an overused word for a rare quality, but Luzhkov has it. He is little and bald, but his presence filled the room, as it has filled the city for the past fifteen years. He was bright and energetic with a charming smile that you felt could turn into a glower in an instant. He glad-handed the room, starting with me.
“Bank?” he asked. He had the uncanny ability of charismatic short men to give the impression that they are looking down on you. I chickened out of saying “Jackets Baked Potatoes”.
“Private placements?” I stuttered, and this was translated by a minder.
“Is this good for Moscow?”
“Hmm, the dollar.” He shook my hand, shrunk back to size and moved on. Stepan, who had left me to face the great man alone, slipped back to my side and refilled my glass with the excellent vodka.
“Impressive person,” I said, star-struck.
“He does not drink and he does not smoke,” said Stepan, lighting up a Marlboro. “Can you trust such a Russian?” He smiled and I didn’t know whether to take him seriously. “Now, let us discuss what I can do for you.”
“Well, as it happens...”
He thought our scheme was brilliant. He said such innovative thinking was just what Moscow needed. Better still, he knew just the right person in City Hall. We should discuss it further. He had a very crowded agenda, but a lunch the day after tomorrow had been cancelled. He suggested the Exchange American steakhouse at the new Radisson Hotel. The Exchange was way out of my budget, but surely just one of our new trade marks was worth more than a foreign-currency lunch. I was lucky to get a table. Russian restaurants still clung to traditional values of terrible food and worse service and there were few Western establishments.
The Radisson opened in 1991 on the far bank of the Moskva river near the Kiev railway station. There was a good view of the wedding-cake Stalinism of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, further downstream, the radiator-grille facade of the Russian parliament, the White House. Not that the Radisson was better. It looked like a multi-storey car park with windows. Although I was only ten minutes late, Stepan was waiting for me in the lobby. Punctuality is not one of the many Russian virtues, from which I deduced either that he was keen or that he had got the time wrong. I dislike tipping before you sit down, or indeed any time, so the maître d’ showed us to what I immediately judged was the worst table in the room, and I should know, I am an habitué. But Stepan was not daunted. He rubbed his hands and flicked out his cuffs, looked round at our fellow suits and admired the orange napkins origamied into scallops.
The waiter brought menus. I gulped at the prices and Stepan slavered over the choices. I had a mixed salad and a hamburger. He had Maine lobster and a fifty-dollar filet mignon. We had Margaritas while the white cooled and the red breathed.
“You see, John, how Russia changes. We do not change very often but when we do, kabam.”
He smiled, showing off a gold canine. I have gold teeth too and am embarrassed by them, but Stepan flashed his, a sign of affluence in a country where you still saw false teeth made of steel.
“Why is it like that? Why do things carry on and on and then suddenly crack apart?” I asked.
“For you changing is always for the better. For us changing is always for the worse. When things are bad we think not ‘How can we make it better?’ but ‘Let’s do nothing in case we make it worse’.”
“Pessimism.”
“Not pessimism, John, experience. You see, with you change comes from the bottom, from the people. With us change comes from the top. It is imposed on us. Like Gorbachev’s. The people did not ask for them.”
“Is that why you all hate him?”
“You know the joke about the old British colony that decides to change from driving on the left to driving on the right? So people will get used to the idea, they decree that cars will start immediately, trucks next week and buses the week after. This was Gorbachev. You cannot be half a virgin. You cannot have half a revolution. His Perestroika made wreckage and confusion. There were food queues in the cities and food rotting on the farms. He wanted multi-party democracy with the Communist Party in charge. The Republics were to be independent as long as they took orders from the Kremlin. Nuclear disarmament with the Americans went ahead, but who did the weapons belong to? Russia? Ukraine? Belarus? The Baltic states wanted independence, so why not Chechnya? And if Chechnya why not Siberia? It was a big mess.”
The first course came. Stepan relished his lobster while I picked at my salad, wishing I hadn’t been so stingy. I tasted the wine, a Chablis, which was excellent - and so it should have been at the price.
“Surely the biggest changes in Russia have come from people in the street?”
“Mobs change nothing. They riot when things become intolerable. They riot to resist change.”
I nodded to the White House, which we might have been able to see from a better table.
“This mob of yours saved the day at the White House.” This was after the attempted coup against Gorbachev when Yeltsin bravely stood on a tank.
“Ah, the White House. That was a triumph. We stopped the tanks, didn’t we?”
“Were you there?”
“Of course. Three days at the barricades. Democracy and freedom, John. Let’s drink to that.”
At least 100,000 people had been at the White House on those fateful August days. Many more claimed they had been.
The main course came. I tasted the red, a Côtes du Rhône, which was also excellent. The hamburger was a hamburger. Stepan savoured the steak, relishing every mouthful with half-closed eyes. The main course was cleared away and we reached for the toothpicks. While Stepan impersonated a man giving himself a root canal, I explained our scheme in detail. His job was to get the business names registered at City Hall.
“John, why must we register the names?”
“So we have something to sell. If not, the companies can simply go and register their own names without us.”
“But they will do that anyway.”
“Not if we have registered them first.”
“This means nothing. The companies will pay a bribe.”
“Surely it’s easier to pay us. In any case we will take them to court.”
“What court? A tennis court?” He laughed. “Do not look so miserable, John. I am joking. It is a wonderful idea. We will not be millionaires but we will have enough to eat?
I thought we’d had enough to eat already. The waiter came and Stepan chose a confection of meringues and expensive outof-season fruits and fresh Irish cream and Kahlua. I settled for a lemon sorbet. Not being a brandy drinker, since it gives me hot flushes, I let him order a Courvoisier Napoleon. Fortunately I had remembered to bring along a couple of tubes of Romeo y Julietas from my stash and waved away the flunkey with the humidor before Stepan noticed him. I took out the envelope with the sheets of names and handed them over.
“Oh, good names. These are very good names.” He looked at me over his snifter.
“How much will it cost to register them?”
“Nothing. Five roubles. Ten roubles. Twenty roubles. Give me five thousand roubles for the formalities.” This was about twenty dollars. Didn’t sound too bad. Compared with lunch, anyway.
“And we have to give something to the clerks,” he said.
“How much do you think?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“What! How much?”
“If you don’t grease you don’t travel. They have to eat too.”
“But not in here. A clerk doesn’t earn that in a year.”
“There is the director and the supervisor and the clerk and the checker.”
“I don’t have that much on me.”
“How much do you have?”
“Five hundred dollars. Less the tip here”
“I will start with that. Give it to me. Don’t worry, John. You will have it all back in two weeks. We make a very good partnership. I have many contacts in the city and you have so many wonderful ideas. The wolf of Tambov is your comrade. I am a poor Russian, an old Communist. We did not believe all those things we were told, but what choice did we have? We do not know the modern world. We do not know how to seize the future. You must help us, John, with your experience and your intelligence and your education. We have so much to learn, we owe you so much.”
I had a lump in my throat by the time he finished. It felt great to be making a difference. I emptied my wallet to Stepan in a haze of good feeling, good wine and good tobacco. We strolled back to Kievskaya station making plans for our next venture and took the Circle Line in different directions.
While ICBM waited to hear that Stepan had successfully registered the names, we prepared the marketing campaign. I drafted a press release for the foreign-language media and leaflets for the commercial sections of the main embassies and the business centres of the big hotels. At the end of the week I phoned Stepan, who told me that he had everything in hand. We were on an inside track, so it would not take the months or years it would normally, but the wheels of bureaucracy still ground slowly, even when liberally greased. He suggested I call again in two weeks. Meanwhile Oleg was keen to get our campaign going right away. I insisted that as we would be dealing with Western companies, which were meticulous about such things, we must have the registrations properly signed and stamped before we started selling them.
Two weeks later I called Stepan. “Not here,” said a man’s voice and the phone went dead before I could reply. I wasn’t concerned since Russian telephone manners are typically abrupt, especially in large organizations. If you are quick, you may be able to ask when the person will be back before the phone is put down, to which the standard reply is “in an hour”. Only
the tyro will take comfort from this and call back in an hour. It is an empty formula. The habits of secrecy acquired over decades of suspicion and surveillance die hard. You rarely tell anyone else where you are going or what you are up to; even if you did, they would not tell a stranger. This includes the secretary. It would be gross impertinence if she asked to see her boss’s diary.
Alarm bells started to ring, as yet faintly, when I got the same answer twice more. I consoled myself with the thought that he had moved office or fallen ill. But why didn’t he call me? There was nothing for it but to go and see him in City Hall. My heart was in my mouth when I asked for him at reception. I was very relieved when the guard looked up his name in a book and phoned his office.
“He will be down in a minute.”
I paced up and down the lobby under its enormous chandelier hoping I had not made some terrible faux pas by chasing him. Russians can be touchy if you doubt their loyalty. A little greyhaired man in his 60s in a tired grey sports jacket and knackered grey trousers came up to me.
“Mr Mole? How can I help you?”
I will gloss over the next half hour. Look up “emotion” in a thesaurus and you will get an idea of what I went through, from anger to vengefulness and all the words in between. The business card was the clincher. The genuine Stepan Gavrilovich showed me a card case full of them with the telephone numbers undeleted. He did not recognize my description of the imposter. To his knowledge there was no Registry of Business Names at City Hall. He advised me to try the Economics Ministry.
There was only one consolation. Over the coming months many new companies and shops put their names up in lights, but they used none of our selection. The Farmers’ Union thought it a bad idea to have a Russian-sounding name for our restaurant and that we should stick with Jackets. I kept one of the names for myself, TAMKO. I went to the railway station and printed up some business cards in the DIY machine for my own use.
