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

  I Was a Potato Oligarch

  For Nuala, who is still amused.

  And for Vladimir, Alex and Malcolm, who made the Big Idea possible.

  With grateful thanks to Pippa Roberts and Neil McFarland, who turned sketches into pictures.

  And to Nick Brealey, Sally Lansdell, Angie Tainsh and Victoria Fedorowicz, who made a book out ofa script.

  I Was a Potato Oligarch

  Travels and Travails in the New Russia

  John Mole

  First published by

  Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2008

  3-5 Spafield Street

  Clerkenwell, London

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  Tel: +44 (0)20 7239 0360

  Fax: +44 (0)20 7239 0370

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  Boston

  MA 02116, USA

  Tel: (888) BREALEY

  Fax: (617) 523 3708

  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  www.johnmole.com

  © John Mole 2008

  The right of John Mole to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Illustrations by the author, Pippa Roberts & Neil McFarland.

  ISBN: 978-1-85788-509-5

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd on

  Forest Stewardship Council certified paper.

  Contents

  This is the Big One

  Refugees in their own country

  The New Russia?

  Biznismyen

  I sell sea shells

  When you live in an asylum you join in the madness

  This is Russia, Mister John

  Caviar for the particular

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

  Mixed feelings about the tutu

  We swim in tide of history

  Spuds and bugs

  A sweet lie is better than a bitter truth

  Gather in the mushrooms

  If you don’t grease you don’t travel

  The Czar of Cheese

  Do the fish go to Florida?

  The goats are guarding the cabbage

  Am I coconut?

  Free jazz

  Goodness has no smell

  The Devil’s balls

  How to avoid vampires

  Gorky Park

  We must pay now

  It turned out as it usually does

  I hope our little Russians will be happy here

  This is the Big One

  I had my Russian Big One in a sauna on a missile base outside Moscow. When I have a great idea that is certain to make us rich I say to the family, “This is the Big One.” There have been many Big Ones over the years, all of which have shrunk into Little Ones.

  That afternoon I was with my friend Misha, suffering fifteen minutes of torture in the hot room before going back to the main purpose of the afternoon, a pigeon and mushroom hotpot and a litre of vodka. We had already worked through several varieties of smoked sturgeon, a wild boar sausage and a dish of fresh vegetables, flown in from the south by military aircraft. The base commander had a sideline in hiring out planes to the Chechen traders who monopolized the city markets.

  “So, John, what do you think of our poor Russia?”

  “I love it, Meesh. I’ve never known anything like it. It’s revolution. Anything is possible. Everything is changing. There’s such energy.”

  “It is frenzy of fear. For you change is always good. For us change is always bad. To an optimist bedbugs smell like cognac. To a pessimist cognac smells like bedbugs.”

  “Whatever. I wish I could get stuck in. It’s so exciting.”

  He picked up a bucket of ice-cold water. I knew what he was going to do with it and I was keen to say something that would make him stop. I don’t like saunas. I don’t like the heat, the burning lungs, the eyes stinging with sweat, the hot wood on my bottom. I don’t like staccato conversation made inane by the stewing of brains. I don’t like macho men daring each other to pour water on the stove. And I especially don’t like them pouring it over my head.

  “Misha, wait. I have an idea for a business. It’s a brilliant idea.”

  It worked. He put the bucket down on his knee. I had to keep talking long enough for him to forget the water.

  “What’s Russia famous for?”

  “Znachet, caviar.” Znachet was a verbal tic, the equivalent of I mean or I guess.

  “Close.”

  “Vodka.”

  “Not what I’m thinking of.”

  “Tchaikovsky. Dostoevsky.”

  “Get back to food.”

  “Cabbage.”

  “Closer. What goes with cabbage?”

  “Cabbage soup and kasha, food for Russia.” Kasha is buckwheat porridge, like semolina or American grits. The word alone was enough to start my stomach heaving.

  “Potatoes. Russia grows a third of the world’s potatoes”

  “I must tell you there are already many people in potato growing business. Znachet, most of population.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of growing them. I was thinking of selling them.”

  “Sell potatoes to Russians? Why not snow to Eskimos? You don’t go to Tula with your samovar.”

  “The British answer to McDonald’s and Pizza Hut is baked potatoes. In their skin with cheese or baked beans or salad or stew. Potatoes are just a base for the filling. It’s one of my favourites.”

  “You are half Irish.”

  “Cut the stereotypes. You know who eats the most potatoes in Europe?”

  “Germany.”

  “Portugal. They eat as many per head as Russians”

  “Znachet, no Russian will go out for a potato. They can have that at home.”

  “They can have chopped meat on a bun at home too. Russians don’t go to McDonald’s for the food, they go for a slice of the West. Let’s open a baked potato restaurant. A taste of Britain. Tradition, sophistication, elegance, bobbies outside the door, servers in bowler hats, cricket bats on the wall...

  “... warm beer, rain, football hooligans...”

  “... pictures of the Queen...”

  “... and Fatcher...”

  I would rather have a blown-up colour photo of a salmonella bug in my restaurant than Her, but I let the comment pass. I wiped my sweaty face on my sodden sheet. At least in a Russian sauna you are spared nudity. Some men tie their sheet over their shoulder like a toga. Some tie it over their breasts like a woman coming out of the shower. Others tuck it under their bellies like Sumo wrestlers. I favour Death of Socrates, under the breasts and over the belly. I had to keep talking.

  “Everything is natural. Cheese and butter and sour cream and salad. And for the hot sauces we take a Russian stew and jazz it up with curry. Traditional English.”

  “Znachet, where is the gimmick? Where is the difference?”

  “The staff could smile at the customers. That would be a Unique Selling Proposition.” Russians smile a lot but not in front of strangers.
r />   “The customers will think they are idiots.”

  “Here’s the gimmick. You’ll love this, Misha. We’ll make it a franchise operation. Individuals. Mom and Pop. Cooperatives. Anyone. You’re in the small-business business, you tell me how it works.”

  “In Russia it will be very difficult”

  “You get paid to tell people how easy it is. Put your money where your mouth is. Pull this off and you can keep yourself in conferences for years. You might even get rich.”

  “On potatoes?”

  “It’s not potatoes, Misha, it’s the value added. The concept. The image. We’re dealing in aspirations. We’re dealing in dreams.”

  “Russians have had enough of dreams and aspirations. We had seventy years of them.”

  “I don’t mean the Russians. I mean the do-gooders in the West. The Eurocrats. The Bureaucrats. Brussels. The British Know-How Fund. Soros. We’ll have grants and subsidies coming out of our ears. Think of the feasibility studies. I sniff per diems in this, Misha. Per diems. So what do you think?”

  “Znachet, not a snowball’s chance.”

  He scowled into the bucket of water and tossed it onto the stove, where it exploded into steam. I hate that, but I had avoided the douche. And he liked the idea. If Russians tell you something is a good idea you might as well forget it. They’re not taking it seriously. You want them to say it will be very, very difficult, full of insurmountable risks and problems. Then you know they are really considering it. Pessimism is not just a Russian attitude, it is a deeply ingrained conviction of how the world works.

  “The beauty is we don’t have to worry about raw materials. In a baked potato restaurant all we have to do is pick the potatoes out of the fields. They go straight in the oven and we serve them. We don’t even peel them.”

  The words in italics are chiselled into my conscience, along with all the other stupidities that make me bite my pillow in the middle of the night. If only I could have eaten them there and then.

  How did I get here? I was down on my luck. My investments and business capers had flopped. My latest novel was submerged in rejection slips. Newspaper editors didn’t return my calls, not even those from the back pages of the appointments sections. My only book still in print, Mind Your Manners about how to manage cross-cultural difference in Europe, was doing well, selling several thousand copies a year, but with a royalty of about a pound a book it hardly covered the mortgage. What could I do? Go out to work? When I resigned from a bank to be a writer I made a solemn vow: Never Again. I had no professional qualifications and no marketable skills. There was always management consulting, but I’d rather go minicabbing.

  Fate stepped in. I wangled a press pass to a conference on private enterprise in Eastern Europe to gather material about emerging business cultures in the new democracies. The tables and graphs in the document pack were lies. The speeches were dull. I needed an anecdote, a human interest story. Little did I know I was about to start my own.

  Among the double-breasted bankers, single-breasted salesmen and academics in sports jackets that hadn’t been buttoned over their breasts since they were assistant lecturers, one block-headed man stood out in jeans and boots and a brown leather jacket. I hadn’t seen his like since I bought caviar outside the Aurora hotel in St Petersburg in the days of the dying Chernenko. It wasn’t so much the clothes but the street corner stance, the way he sized up the rest of us, looking for a way in. I walked up to him and squinted at his name tag. Right first time, a Russian with an international company. I offered him my coffee.

  “Znachet, what is your profession?” he asked.

  “I write about business cultures.”

  He squinted at my name tag and his eyes opened wide. “You are John Mole? The John Mole?”

  There’s John Mole the poet and John Mole the Catholic apologist, John Mole the bassist and John Mole the expert on structural weakness in suspension bridges. So I can’t claim the definite article.

  “A John Mole, certainly.”

  He beamed a gold-glinting smile and seized my hand. “Very fine! We use your book in our training”

  “What? Where?”

  “In Russia.”

  To my knowledge there was no Russian edition. “Which part do you use?”

  “The whole thing. It is required reading in our syllabus”

  “Who publishes it?”

  “Mr Xerox.”

  An honour. My work circulated in samizdat, clandestine copies of suppressed literature. In the old days it was Doctor Zhivago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Now it was books with titles like How to Read the Financial Pages and Principles of Marketing. Nice for me, but I felt a pang of nostalgia.

  “Don’t let my publisher hear that. He’ll sue.”

  He laughed. “In Russia? Let him try.”

  We exchanged cards. His title was Small Business Consultant and he was based in Rome. By the end of the coffee break we were Misha and John. We went back into the auditorium together, sat at the back and filled our minds with privatization in the Polish retail industry, share coupons in the Czech Republic and the private bus network in Bulgaria. It was like meditation, purging the mind of the cares of life and filling it with sublime vacuousness. We queued together for quiche.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “You will come to Russia and make lectures. We will organize it.”

  “Who is we?” I asked.

  “Znachet, our group. We have training and investment and marketing consultancy.” He gave me another business card that proclaimed ICBM - International Consultancy and Business Management, with addresses in Moscow, London, Rome and New York.

  “I thought you were with...”

  “ICBM is private business.”

  “How much will you pay?”

  “Don’t worry. We will make you millionaire.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Znachet, a rouble millionaire.” “It’s a start.”

  We shook hands with many expressions of goodwill and expectations for future cooperation and other international trade mission sentiments. I worked the room separately for the rest of the lunch break, took an afternoon nap in the back row and slipped away at tea time to catch the half-price early showing at the Ritzy. Misha had disappeared too. I put the idea of a lecture tour of Russia on a par with “let’s do lunch”. So I was surprised three days later to be faxed a formal invitation from ICBM to make a five-week tour of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, all expenses paid plus 50 per cent of the engagement fees. It beat minicabbing.

  Refugees in their own country

  The flight to Moscow was full. Ruddy oil men, City money launderers, scrubbed Mormon missionaries, fleshy Russian bankers, pofaced lawyers, earnest human rights watchers, sad Russians abandoning children in English schools, self-important journalists, introverted scientists poring over papers, solemn Eurocrats, excited exchange students, fact-finding MPs, air-mile-clocking businessmen, boozing, reading, talking, laptopping. I felt at home in this airship of fools kept aloft by the hope of gain in the chaos of Yeltsin’s Russia.

  At the airport Misha picked me out of the maul. He seemed as relieved to see me as I was to see him. We had fixed up my visit in one casual meeting in London and a couple of faxes and neither of us was sure the other was serious. Not that we were effusive. Russians are as inhibited as Brits in public displays. While he fetched the car I practised my Russian on the leather-jacketed toughs touting taxis in the blizzard outside. Nyet.

  Misha’s car was a silver Volvo estate with stickers witnessing a career in Switzerland before promotion to serious winters. It had all the basics, while bits of wire and string took care of incidentals like door handles. After reassuring each other of the satisfactoriness of my journey, conversation lapsed on the motorway into town. I resorted to the banker’s ploy of asking how the rouble was doing. While he rabbited on about budgets and inflation and the price of petrol, I gawped out of the window. Potholes, black slush, massive trucks belching diesel, ramshackle ho
ardings, overhead cables, a general air of impermanence and improvisation and large-scale tawdriness - it reminded me of America.

  We arrived at an apartment complex near Dynamo stadium. Unpointed red brick, metal doors, graffiti, cars from a wrecker’s yard; broken paths, old grass, mud ponds, scuttering leaves; dark figures trudging through the dusk, pointy-headed in ski hats, round-shouldered in anoraks; chill wind and phlegmy gobs of rain; no street lights, the odd bare bulb in a doorway. Misha hefted my bag on his shoulder and punched a number into the keypad on the door. I followed him into the lobby with my briefcase and slide projector, the asset of our enterprise.

  It was like a squat. Broken lamps, peeling paint, dilapidated concrete staircase. Cats had crapped in some dark corner. We squeezed into a phone booth of a lift without a light and rattled in darkness to the sixth floor. The door to the flat was a slab of raw steel with spot-welded hinges and a keyhole burned out with an oxy torch. Set in the middle was an ornate brass door knocker.

  “Znachet, they break down wooden doors with axes,” said Misha, hammering the knocker like a bailiff.

  The door swung open and inside was light and warmth and tobacco and cabbage and wax and struggling lemon freshener. I stuck out my hand to a thin man in black sweater, black jeans and black-rimmed spectacles, who said he was Oleg. Misha pushed me inside before I could commit the Russian sin of stepping on the threshold or shaking hands over it, but I took my shoes off without being prompted. I was rewarded with a pair of fleecy pink slippers. Compulsory slipper wearing is a great leveller. Whether you’re in a designer cocktail dress or Savile Row suit or Armani casuals, it’s hard to stand on ceremony in fluffy slippers.