Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “For a democrat, Mrs. Liddell, you seem very keen on trying to impose your will on mine.”

  “A democrat shouldn’t compromise on the essence of democracy; a free marketeer shouldn’t compromise on the fundamentals of such an economy. These are extraordinary times. They’ll only become ordinary after we’ve laid the foundations of democracy and the free market.”

  Irk had been in Sabirzhan’s office since breakfast, blinds down and door locked. He’d waded through reams of correspondence, all written or annotated in Sabirzhan’s neat handwriting, and found nothing. If he never saw that copperplate again, Irk thought, it would still be too soon.

  Stretching his arms and blinking his eyes, he walked along the corridor to Lev’s office. Galina leapt up from her desk the moment she saw him. “You can’t go in there, Juku.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s with the American woman who’s come to do the privatizing.”

  Irk understood perfectly. Negotiations were doubtless at a delicate stage, and of all the reasons to keep the murders secret, this was one of the most important.

  Profit and loss, shareholder rebels, corporate raiders, bankruptcy—these were all alien concepts for Lev, and they made him afraid. The prospect of an annual shareholders’ meeting whose scope included the election of directors, the appointment of the auditing committee and the company’s reorganization or liquidation was particularly unnerving. One man, one vote, he said. Alice tried to reassure him: the meeting needed to be attended by half of all shares; directors would be elected by a simple majority for a two-year term, at the end of which they could seek reelection as long as they were still alive; reorganization or liquidation needed seventy-five percent approval. It was one share one vote, she explained. One man one vote, he argued; one man one vote, even when she explained that under that system he’d have no more power than the humblest of his workers.

  In the old days, Lev hadn’t needed to know—and consequently wasn’t interested in—anything other than what would help Red October meet centrally imposed schedules. Everything else had already been settled at levels high above him, in the upper echelons of central programming. Gosplan set the plan, Gostsen the prices, Gossnab distributed supplies, Gostrud decided labor and salary policy, Gostekhnika directed research and technology. The disillusioned referred bitterly to Gostsirk, the state circus that specialized in bureaucracy gone crazy.

  This was why Lev knew nothing about marketing, finances, product quality, customer service or investor management—because such notions had never applied to him. A director’s status and power were measured by how many employees he had under his direction. He didn’t have to please legions of shareholders or consumers, to look nervously over his shoulder at the competition, or keep up on current market trends and product innovations. He’d never had to learn the language of the market.

  They broke for lunch. Alice picked at the food Lev had laid out, discovering with unexpected pleasure the way vodka brought out certain flavors in sausage, dill cucumbers and pickled mushrooms; flavors that she’d never known they possessed.

  “Vodka’s a wonderful drink,” Lev said. “It’s good with food, before food or after food. Whatever anyone tells you, Mrs. Liddell, remember this: there’s no such thing as Russian cuisine, just things that happen to go well with vodka.”

  Alice rang Arkin from a spare office and relayed the gist of the morning’s debate.

  “He won’t budge,” Arkin said when she’d finished. “You’ll have to go with what he wants. Most of it, at any rate.”

  “No way. Majority insider control, no foreign ownership—what’s that going to achieve, Kolya, except to swap one makeshift system for another?”

  “It’ll get property out of state hands.”

  “And into the hands of Lev and a thousand others like him. Where’s the difference?”

  “The difference is political. A new class of investor, a new kind of stakeholder. That’s what we need most of all right now. If this is the price we have to pay, then it’s worth it, it’s a necessary evil.”

  Alice thought of the men in Washington, in New York, in Paris and Brussels and Geneva and London and Frankfurt, all wanting a piece of the pie. They had made their help contingent on Russia treading an approved path. She felt the pin press into her palm again.

  “Just for now, just to get it through. We haven’t got the time otherwise,” Arkin said. “You know how fast things change; it’ll all be different in six months’ time. Don’t sweat the foreign exclusion on this one. There are still plenty of ways into the market: joint ventures, trade agreements, consultancies, all that. Remember, the last time property rights were transferred wholesale in Russia was after 1917, and the Bolsheviks enforced that at gunpoint. We’ve neither the means nor the will to do that. It’s this or nothing, Alice; and if it’s nothing, then your work here’s done, you can get the next plane out.”

  And that was the bottom line, thought Alice. For all that Lev teased and parried with her, it was Arkin, her ally, who’d found her weak spot as surely as if he’d taken the stiletto knife of which he was so proud and plunged it straight through her ribs.

  Sabirzhan’s apartment was south of Kropotkinskaya, near the river in a district studded with foreign embassies fluttering bright flags from Africa and Asia. Irk checked the front door for KGB tradecraft: the strand of hair across the lintel, an item on the other side of the door that would be pushed out of position by someone coming in. It was a moment before he remembered that it didn’t matter; of course he’d be searching a suspect’s apartment, that was to be expected.

  The place was almost preternaturally tidy, scored through with the yawning absences that mark a man living alone. Sketching the apartment’s layout on his notepad—he’d have brought a Polaroid camera if Petrovka’s allocation hadn’t all been sold on the black market by enterprising young detectives—Irk set to work.

  A filing cabinet in the study yielded up the names of Sabirzhan’s informers at Red October, and then some. There were almost two hundred of them, and each was awarded a dossier; some held only a couple of sheets of paper, others bulged with material. It was classic KGB stuff: records of payments made; transcripts of telephone calls; copies of informers’ reports complete with grammar and spelling mistakes, all corrected by Sabirzhan as though he were a schoolmaster; and sexual peccadilloes desiccated by official prose. “Attempted intimacy with female employee Natasha R——, at our request, and was rebuffed.” Our, Irk thought; us, the KGB, the power. There was a file for German Kullam, of course. Irk didn’t recognize any of the other names, but he noted them down anyway. Should he tell Lev? Only if it proved germane to the murder inquiry, he thought, and chided himself for the ingenuity with which he achieved irresolution.

  The workers; it always came back to the workers. “For thirty, forty years, we had a factory sanatorium by the Black Sea,” Lev said. “We sent thousands of workers and their families there every year for their summer holidays. Now, even if they could afford it, they couldn’t go there. It’s Ukrainian territory, it belongs to someone else. Some of my staff go to their allotments, but that’s a matter of survival, not fun. This distillery is my life, Mrs. Liddell.”

  “You’re a vor. You’re a parliamentary deputy.”

  “I’d give the latter up before this, any day of the week. I know every inch of this place. There are five thousand workers here, and I know most of them by name. I don’t like employing outsiders; I want my people to work here, I want to keep the factory a family business. Administrative procedures are nowhere near as effective in controlling people as peer pressure from their family and friends. That’s why I only take people by recommendation. I don’t have any problems filling vacancies; they’re snapped up in no time. I reward my people, Mrs. Liddell. I try to keep them fed. Red October owns two farms outside Moscow, and we sell the fruits and vegetables at subsidized prices. I’m proud of the apartments, the school, the orphanage, the sports complex, the cultural palace. How can
I let outsiders take a stake in my company? How can anyone know better than me how to run operations here? Who knows the suppliers, the customers, the officials as well as I do? I make all the decisions. If I have to sack people, Mrs. Liddell, I’ll become a caricature of the evil capitalists they warned us about in school.”

  “You must at least consider the possibility of dismissals. There are ways you can hoard labor while reducing wages—pay freezes, direct cuts, delays in payments, reduced working hours, temporary layoffs with minimum pay, unpaid leaves of absence. In economic terms…”

  “That’s all you Westerners think about, isn’t it? Economic terms.” He’d snapped again; Alice was getting better at testing the boundaries, but she still couldn’t tell when to pull back—or perhaps she should simply accept that she couldn’t cross difficult turf without setting him off. “Well, this is Russia, and economics aren’t enough. Have you been listening to me? I can’t dismiss a man in his fifties or a woman with two children. I don’t throw people out in the cold when they become old or tired. The workers wouldn’t stand for dismissals, and I’ve neither the authority nor the power to implement such changes against their will.”

  “Oh, come on. You said it yourself: nothing gets done in this place without your say-so.”

  “Only as long as my say-so doesn’t contradict the wishes of the majority. The manager is expected to be authoritarian, assertive, even inspirational—but he’s also expected to understand and work with grass-roots feeling. An enterprise is a democratic institution. Everyone’s entitled to have his or her voice heard, and even the humblest employees feel free to speak to the boss. If the manager stands up for his workers’ interests, and if he exercises his authority with firmness and frankness, then he can count on the loyalty of his workforce.”

  “The more democratic he is, the more dictatorial they let him be?”

  He smiled. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  She saw that this was his own benevolent dictatorship, strong but fair, a place that worked despite itself. Red October was a microcosm of Russia, in every way; and it would change just as the country was changing, Alice was sure of that. She wondered how much he was telling her about himself when he talked about Russia.

  Alice left Lev with a final offer that he said he’d consider. Insider control—management and workers combined—would be set at fifty-one percent, at a multiple of the defined enterprise value; twenty-nine per cent would be offered to outside investors; and the remaining twenty percent would remain with the state.

  At first glance, it looked as though they’d reached more or less a midpoint between their two positions, but Alice knew better. She’d conceded foreign exclusion and inside ownership. It was Lev who’d won this round, even before he’d agreed to anything. She felt drained, bitter and resentful—at Arkin, for making her negotiate with her hands tied, and at herself, for being weak enough to submit to that. When she gathered her notes up, she saw that they were speckled with blood, though she hardly remembered using the pin.

  Lev shook her hand warmly when she left. She shied instinctively from his smile, wanting to believe that it was strictly crocodile, but when she looked again, it seemed perfectly genuine.

  There were books on Sabirzhan’s shelves and rugs on the walls, but little sign of personal taste; it could have been a museum, a library, a hotel room. Only in the living room did Irk find anything that smacked remotely of humanity: a photograph album, and even that was crammed on top of a bookcase as though best forgotten. Irk took it down and leafed through it.

  There were pictures in black and white, Sabirzhan’s parents perhaps, their clothes and the lack of spontaneity in their poses dating them as accurately as tree rings. There were some of Sabirzhan graduating from KGB academy, even then half a pace away from his colleagues. After that came Sabirzhan shaking hands with Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, looking in the last two instances as though it was only his touch that was preventing the doddering geriatrics from falling over altogether.

  The children were near the end. They covered nine pages in all, four or five pictures to a page, and each child probably appearing twice. Twenty different children, give or take; a lot of favorites for one man to have. Some had been taken at the orphanage or the school—Irk recognized the backgrounds—others at Moscow landmarks such as Victory Park, where Vladimir Kullam squinted into a pale sun, or the Chaliapin House. What struck Irk most, however, was the uniformity of the expressions. None of the children were smiling; most looked like they’d rather be somewhere else.

  The last photograph in the album showed Sabirzhan himself, sitting upright with a girl of about eleven or twelve on his lap. He was smiling for the camera; she was in profile, staring away from the lens. In the context of the album, it was an unremarkable snapshot, and Irk had to look again before he saw two things. Firstly, the girl was Raisa Rustanova. Secondly, she was pushing down with both arms as she tried to wriggle off Sabirzhan, whose forearm was tensed around her waist with the effort of restraining her.

  Children know, Irk thought; children always know.

  Alice walked the streets to clear her head, and saw that the economic outlook was not universally gloomy, at least not on the main shopping drag of Tverskaya. There were three kinds of sausage in the shops: thirty-five-ounce sticks of the rubbery, boiled flesh-colored kind, smoked salami and pale link ones. There were eggs, frozen chickens, butter, cottage cheese, smoked and canned fish, red caviar, soft rose meringues in boxes and long beige strips of pastila candies. No one was asking for ration coupons. Bookshops unable to cram their wares onto shelves spilled them onto the sidewalk, spreading the books across rugs. Alice rifled excitedly through the editions, finding Agatha Christie and James Bond, computer manuals and analyses of the USSR’s collapse, translations of Smith, Keynes, Hayek and Galbraith, Bibles, books on yoga and meditation, Sakharov’s autobiography—everything, in fact, apart from Marx and Lenin.

  She took a wide arc through the back streets until she found herself outside the old KGB headquarters: Lubyanka. What she saw there stopped her dead. A line of people stretched for half a mile or more, starting outside the Children’s World toy shop, continuing over the traffic mound where Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s statue had been so unceremoniously toppled in August (the decision to build the toy shop here in the first place had apparently been in tribute to Iron Feliks himself, who in true Russian style had combined the founding of the secret police with chairing a commission on children’s welfare), and snaking all the way down the hill, past the Bolshoi and into Red Square.

  Even by Soviet standards, it was too long to be a line of shoppers. Alice went closer, and saw they were traders, sellers. They were offering pens, brassieres, coats, shoes, kettles, perfume, vodka, food. They cradled their wares to their chests, or laid them out on filthy newspapers and upside-down wooden crates. It wasn’t aesthetic; nor was it seemly or civilized. But newborn infants aren’t beauties when they first appear; only the parents can see what a gorgeous person will, in time, grow of that crumpled red creature. It was shabby and messy and amateur, but it was there.

  Russia’s nascent merchants came in all shapes and sizes: a young woman with glasses rubbed shoulders with an old man in a Red Army overcoat; two old women wearing headscarves chatted in low voices. Alice made for the nearest person, a middle-aged man holding a pair of women’s pink shoes.

  “How much do you want for the shoes?” she asked.

  “Whatever you’ll give me. I’m a teacher, I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

  “You’ll never make any money that way,” she said. “It’s up to you to set a price. Decide what you think is fair and add a bit more. A buyer will start lower than what he thinks is fair. You haggle back and forth for a while and meet in the middle.”

  The teacher looked down at her feet. “Anyway, they’re not your size.”

  Alice smiled at him and walked away, ecstatic. She knew that market economies always start from trade. When supply is limited and
demand great, entrepreneurs concentrate on selling goods with high markups—clothes, perfumes, electronics, liquor—and they do so in big, rich cities. Only when the market is reasonably saturated do they move upstream, from small-scale consumer production to heavier industrial manufacturing. That the traders were here at all confirmed Alice’s view that men and women are natural, instinctive capitalists, and that—regardless of what Lev had said back at the distillery—Russians are no different from anybody else. The planned economy may have held back their inherent entrepreneurial ability, but it hadn’t managed to quench their innate human desire and drive to take risks, accumulate capital and better themselves. These people would be the driving force for change in Russia, she’d have bet her house on it—until she remembered that she lived in a hotel.

  24

  Wednesday, January 15, 1992

  Irk’s car was still being repaired, and available squad vehicles were becoming rarer than teetotalers, so he took the metro again. Moscow had become a city of posters, he realized as he walked to the station; posters plastered everywhere, everywhere, on lampposts, trees, telephone booths, walls, shopwindows, even the metro itself, which the Party had boasted would never carry a single piece of capitalist advertising—but here they were, placards of a city trying to pull itself up by its bootstraps, shrieking about crash courses in economics and banking and computers and foreign languages, or selling apartments and dachas and cars, no time wasters and no rubles, serious dollar buyers only.

  There were two staircases leading to the platform. Like everyone else going down, Irk ignored the “no entry” sign and headed for the staircase reserved for passengers ascending from the platform. This should by rights have caused a bottleneck, with the downward flow colliding with people coming the other way—but of course all the passengers coming up were using the staircase reserved for those coming down, again simply because it was marked “no entry.” It was exquisitely Russian, he thought; superbly communal, breaking regulations purely because they were there, and flipping the system on its head while still making it work. A million minor contradictions somehow produced overall order. The biggest contradiction of all was when there was no contradiction, surely?