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

  A woman appeared, wiping her hands on a tea towel, Oleg’s wife Olga. She was older than Oleg, mid-40s, the northern type of Russian, big boned, blonde hair, blue eyes slightly slant, swathed in fluffy lilac cashmere and pungent scent. She was shy and embarrassed. I was the first foreigner in her flat.

  Olga led us straight to the table in the living room. It was loaded with zakuska, cold hors d’oeuvres, several different kinds of ham, sausage, smoked sturgeon and salmon, salads, black caviar and red caviar, cheese, potatoes, little pies and flans. Vodka, Moldovan white wine and watery fruit juice were on offer, but I was expected to join the others in a glass of Italian Amaretto, the sophisticated Muscovite’s choice at the time. It was like liquid marzipan, so I tossed it back like medicine. This was ill-mannered since I did not wait for the toast of welcome, and ill-advised because Oleg immediately refilled my glass with the horrible stuff.

  Oleg was a subeditor at Izvestia and freelanced for the Moscow Business Times. The rest of his name was Josef Santana and he was the grandson of one of the thousands of Spanish communists who fled to Odessa at the end of the Spanish civil war. His looks and his name were his only Hispanic legacy. After marrying a Russian girl, his grandfather went to South America when Stalin’s pact with Hitler extinguished his last hopes for European Communism. Oleg spent his spare time learning Spanish and trying to track down his grandparents’ birth and marriage certificates, which he hoped would give him Spanish citizenship and a passport to the West.

  Olga was notionally employed by the economic planning department of the ministry of transport and spent her working day selling cashmere sweaters at her pitch in front of the Belaruskaya railway station. She worked for a “shuttler”, a woman who shuttled between Moscow and Istanbul or Dubai buying stuff to sell in the street.

  Their son Petya came in. He wore a startlingly white trenchcoat and carried a satellite phone, like a car battery with a handset on top. He could have modelled for a Hero of the USSR poster in front of a combine harvester. Chiselled good looks, cheerful, blond, muscular, his mother’s son, not a gene of Oleg to be seen; from which I concluded that he was the fruit of a previous marriage. As 80 per cent of Russian marriages end in divorce, it was a reasonable assumption. He was a student at an engineering school, where his uncle was a lecturer in motorway repair. Confident of excellent grades because of his family connec tion, Petya spent his time selling satellite phones for an American company.

  “You all have second jobs,” I said.

  “Znachet, these are first jobs,” said Misha. “How else do we survive? In Soviet times we said ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’. Now nobody pretends. Ten dollars a month is good salary. Many people have not received salary for six months. And when they do it is worth nothing. Inflation is 100 per cent a month. If you get roubles you turn them immediately into dollars. Dollar is our currency now.”

  “God help them if they have pensions,” said Oleg.

  “How do people live? Those who can’t get dollars?”

  “They get food parcels from America and Europe. We are refugees in our own country,” said Olga.

  “We have no country, Mama,” said Petya. “We were citizens of the Soviet Union. It does not exist now.”

  “Russia is our country,” said Misha.

  “And the Russians in the republics? Their homeland became a foreign country.”

  We tucked in. This time I waited for the toasts. In private or public they followed the same pattern: Welcome - The Ladies - Friends - Peace - Prosperity. The food was delicious and I managed to swap the Amaretto for vodka. The others drank fruit juice. Alcohol consumption in Russia is famous and is blamed for the low male life expectancy, but the young professional middle classes and scientists I mixed with hardly drank anything. Women did not drink at all. If you were driving it was automatically assumed that you would be on fruit juice all night. So some people must be getting more than their ration. Foreign businessmen complain that their Russian hosts deliberately get them drunk. We Brits don’t need much encouragement and we make the mistake of drinking between toasts. For once I didn’t, so by London standards it was a sober evening.

  After dinner Oleg and Misha took me to Red Square. It was deserted. The rain had stopped and it was a clear, moonlit night. The last time I was here it was the Heart of the Evil Empire. And now? The alien, sinister, threatening mystique had evaporated along with the Soviet Union. The red ruby stars on the towers and spires looked pretty. St Basil’s was a fairytale confection. The Kremlin walls were quaint. At midnight soldiers marched a silly goosestep to Lenin’s tomb and replaced the two standing guard at the door.

  A beautiful woman in a fur hat came up to us. She offered us postcards. She said she was a schoolteacher and lived with her invalid mother. We bought cards and she offered us a map of Moscow. We bought the map and then she offered to come back to our hotel and sleep with us. Misha gave her five dollars and we wished her good night.

  The New Russia?

  I CBM had a staff of two, Misha and Oleg. The world headquarters was the alcove in Olga and Oleg’s bedroom where they kept the computer. We planned our mission. Oleg perched on the dressing table, Misha sprawled on the bed, I had the honour of the bedroom chair.

  ICBM’s primary activity was selling management training courses in Rome to managers of Russian companies. The companies paid 15,000 dollars. Training was provided free under a European aid programme. The trainees received a 5000-dollar cashback to take home. After travel and accommodation were paid for, the rest was profit to ICBM. Not a bad little business if you could find the punters - which is where I came in. The lecture tour of the world-famous international management guru John Mole targeted companies in privatization. Izvestia and the Moscow Business Times would advertise extensively before and give glowing reports after, thanks to Oleg.

  “Znachet, the Small Business Adviser will make welcome and introduction. He will keep it short. Half an hour. Professor John Mole the savant from England and America will make presentation. Two hours. Then Chairman of ICBM will conclude.”

  “Two hours! That’s too long.”

  “It is really one hour. We have a consecutive interpretation.” This meant that we took it in turns to speak.

  “Do we have an interpreter?”

  “Of course. This is quality status project. We have European grants for administrator, interpreter, seminar chairman, main speaker, audiovisual expert and driver.”

  “I know who the main speaker is, but who are the others?”

  “That is Misha, Misha, Misha, Oleg and Oleg,” said Oleg, counting off the jobs on his fingers.

  “They are expensive but very good and Brussels can afford it,” said Misha. It was nice to hear that some of the aid was ending up in the pockets of Russians instead of Western consultants and the luxury hotels they stayed in.

  “What do I get out of it?” I asked.

  “All expenses. Half receipts on the door. For public presentations this will be in roubles, very sorry. But for the company presentations you will receive five dollars for every person who comes.”

  “You’re charging them ten dollars to listen to me? That’s a week’s salary.”

  “Their companies pay twenty dollars”

  “Twenty dollars! That’s criminal! ... Hey, why don’t I get ten dollars?”

  “They get a cashback for themselves of ten dollars.”

  “You’re bribing them to come. With their own company’s money.”

  “They will not come. They will take cashback and send their deputies.”

  “This is absurd.”

  “This is Russia.”

  “The New Russia”

  “No. Same old Russia in new clothes.”

  Our first gig was at the Central Russian House of Knowledge, a greystone mansion near Lubyanka Square. It had been built by one of the great aristocratic families of St Petersburg, the Chertkovs. After the Revolution it became a public lecture hall for the enlightenment of the people
. Grainy pictures of previous lecturers adorned the staircase wall. Cocktail Molotov, Park Gorky, Ballet Kirov and many other famous names had trod the boards.

  “You know Kirov?” asked Misha. “Stalin had him killed because he was too popular. He was famous for affairs with ballerinas. Stalin named the ballet company after him. It was his joke”

  We had a poster outside in the street and puffs in Izvestia and the Moscow Business Times. How to Make Successful Business in Europe. Tickets were a thousand roubles, about fifty pence. We sold only two, but Misha told me not to worry. By four o’clock they would be queuing round the block. When we got there our room on the first floor was occupied. Two hundred people, mainly men in army uniforms, listened to a little man in a grey polyester suit lecturing too close to the mike on strategies for dealing with retirement.

  “Poor bastards,” said Misha. “With their pensions they’ll spend their retirement selling doughnuts on the street.”

  The lavatories were so disgusting that I was cured for ever of having to take half a dozen leaks before I get on the podium. I hung round the landing outside our room adjusting my tie and patting my hair under a massive mural of Lenin reading a ticker tape. He looked like a Belgian dentist checking his stocks. At last the army trooped out, each with a black plastic briefcase and looking gloomy. They called each other tavarish, comrade, which boded ill for adjustment to civilian life under capitalism.

  I set up the projector, adjusted the screen, fiddled with my notes, took a deep breath. We were in the aptly name Hall of Mirrors. Not only the walls but the pillars and the ceiling were mirrored. When I nodded my head, seventeen other John Moles nodded their heads. It looked like the only audience I was going to get. As the seconds dragged on to four o’clock, I went over to where Misha and Oleg were quietly arguing.

  “Shall we wait for our two ticket holders to show up?”

  “Znachet, they’re here. Oleg and I bought them to get the ice moving.”

  “Oh great. Let’s go home.”

  “We can’t. We have camera crew. National network. You will be famous all over Russia.”

  “I hope they don’t want audience reaction shots.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Oleg, “ The first pancake is always a blob”

  Misha went out into the street to round up a studio audience. He came back with a few dispirited men in anoraks and ski hats, a woman in a red coat with her head entirely swathed like the Invisible Man in a white woolly scarf, a couple of stragglers from the previous lecture with red-banded army hats pushed back on their heads like halos, a cleaning lady in grey overalls still fingering the ten rouble note Misha had slipped her. To make up the front row we had half a dozen characters from War and Peace, a hussar with a red jacket over one shoulder, a pretty girl in ball gown and wig, a count in a blue uniform with medals and stars, a bishop with a tall black hat. They were all replicated by the mirrors into a vast green room of extras for a Brechtian epic.

  “They launch a book here afterwards,” whispered Misha, “about Tsar Nicholas.”

  “How can I keep a straight face?”

  “Think of your dead mother.”

  “My mother’s not dead.”

  “Even better.”

  The crew from Channel Three arrived. They wanted excerpts of the presentation and an interview. Television crews the world over seem to treat everything you say as pretentious garbage while the big black eye peers into your face for your innermost misgivings. How to Make Successful Business in Europe? If I knew, I wouldn’t have to be doing this.

  While I was nervous, Misha was magisterial. He delivered a fifteen-minute monologue to the camera on the need for international management education and ICBM’s mission to deliver it.

  The rest of the event was excruciating. I went into my routine, pausing at the end of each sentence for Misha to translate. I am not an inspiring public speaker at the best of times, but delivered in staccato bursts I was even more stilted than usual. It must have been worse for any poor devil who understood English, since they had to listen to it twice. While Misha spoke to the camera I looked down at the gloomy faces staring at the backs of the heads in front and wondered what on earth all this meant to them. Might as well talk about business on the moon. I reassured myself that this was the conventional demeanour of a Soviet audience at a lecture. Speeches were not meant to inform or entertain, but to reinforce the status of the speaker and the right of the audience to be included in the group. The event itself was an opportunity for private meditation or sleep. This is how I rationalized it over the desultory applause and the rush for the exit.

  “How did it go?” I asked at the end, hoarse and perspiring with excessive adrenaline.

  “Great,” said Misha. “They will put it out nationwide. Minsk to Vladivostok, Archangel to Odessa. ICBM is launched, my friend.”

  One of the audience, an undernourished little man in a tired dark suit, pallid shirt and washed-out red tie introduced himself as the manager of the building. Mine was the last lecture at the House of Knowledge. Tomorrow the builders moved in to renovate it. The rumour was that Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, would take it back for receptions and dinners. I was moved. I felt I had made a fitting contribution to the history of the place. From the Dawn of Communism to the Dusk of Free Market Capitalism. The Fathers of the Revolution must have turned in their niches in the Kremlin wall.

  I needed a drink. Oleg was putting the stuff in the car. Misha was schmoozing the television crew and slipping them dollar bills. Under the mural of Lenin catching up on the news stood two weedy youths dressed up as Tsarist Cossacks guarding the entrance to the book launch. They refused anyone not wearing a tie. This included a few soon-to-be-retired Red Army officers still hanging around with plastic briefcases and podgy necks liberated by unbuttoned collars. I breezed through the clash of Red and White Armies. Book launches mean booze. The refreshment in question was demi-sec shampanskoe, a sweet and fruity alcopop, not to be confused with champagne after which it is named. The bouquet is like the sweet cider I used to puke up on the doorstep when I came home from teenage parties, but it was nectar after my trying afternoon.

  The room was eighteenth century, chandeliers in the plaster ceiling, a parquet floor, lovely pastel blues and pinks and ochres mellowed by time and tobacco smoke. My War and Peace extras loitered in a self-conscious huddle in front of an ornate marble fireplace. The rest of the guests were the seedy mixture of book launch freeloaders you find the world over, groping alternately for the drinks tray and each other and avoiding the subject of books.

  A tall, skinny, baby-faced man in his best suit and black hair plastered down like a bathing cap stood swigging shampanskoe by a small table of books between two windows. He must have been the author, wondering whose party this really was and why nobody wanted to buy a signed copy. Out of professional solidarity I went over to him. I arrived just after a blowsy middleaged woman, dressed for a gala première in a fifties lamé cocktail dress and jangling jewellery. They looked at me as if I had burst into the bedroom.

  “Congratulations,” I said and raised my glass. He gave me a nervous little nod while she graciously put out her hand for me to shake. With a little bow I brought the acrylic lace glove to within a breath of my lips, Polish style. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so reached between them for a book and flicked through the black-and-white photographs in the middle. As far as I could tell through the haze of poor-quality printing, they were pictures of smoking factories alternating with portraits of the Romanovs. The last picture was a steam locomotive with a cow catcher on the front festooned with bunting. A gravelly voice interrupted my browsing and I turned instinctively to the man. It was the woman speaking.

  “It is the history of industrialization under the Tsars. It is clear that if the Revolution of 1917 had been defeated, Russia would by now have an economy more powerful than America.”

  “Yes,” said the man. He had a high-pitched, fluting voice, as if the dubbing had got them mixed up. “L
ook at the Trans-Siberian railway. It was planned to link Paris with New York via a bridge over the Bering Strait.”

  It wasn’t my kind of book. Not enough conversation, as Alice would say. Might-have-been alternative universes are done better by science fiction. But I was still at the early stage of a stay in a foreign country when you are eager to ingratiate yourself with the natives. In any case, having gone through the ordeal myself, I have the utmost admiration for anyone who has written a book, whether it’s a history of Sanskrit literature, a Mills & Boon romance or a guide to growing runner beans.

  “How much is it?” I asked. Gratitude stole over his worried face.

  “Only two thousand roubles,” she said.

  “I’ve got no roubles. Will ten dollars do?”

  It certainly would. In no time at all I was relieved of the crisp greenback. It would have paid for twenty copies, but I took only one. Solidarity with fellow authors and all that. We exchanged little bows and I drifted back into the pool looking for another slug of shampanskoe before I rejoined Misha. Clutching my book I felt I belonged in literary Moscow. On the way out I was stopped by a chubby young woman in a red dress. She pointed at the book.

  “Those are for sale,” she said.

  “I know. I bought one.”

  “I do not think so. Where is the receipt?”

  “I bought it from the author.”

  “The author died last year.”

  I looked wildly round for the living author and his gravel-voiced companion. Not a hope. They had done a runner with the equivalent of a week’s wages. This time I forked out five dollars to the lady in red. Misha gave me a telling off for disappearing. The shampanskoe gave me a headache.

  To mark our first presentation, we called on the Father of the Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in his tomb before the Kremlin Wall in Red Square. He lay in a glass case in front of a sarcophagus in a dimly lit room decorated with scarlet zigzags, evoking the triumph of the Red Revolution or the fires of hell, depending on your point of view. This is how the travel writer Robert Byron described him in 1930, in First Russia Then Tibet. “Lenin must have been a very small man...” Fifty years later the great Colin Thubron wrote in Among the Russians: “Lenin lay there bigger than I imagined...” To me he looked about the right size. He had changed out of khaki army uniform into civvies shortly before the Great Patriotic War. His banker’s suit and white spotty tie are refreshed every three years, and he gets an annual medical.