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

by John Mole

  He came with four hangers-on, whose cards announced various complicated job titles in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Trade Mission, but their clothes looked too sharp for Min of Ag types. I never saw or heard of them again and they may have been minders from the Embassy. The New Russia was only three years old and habits die hard. I studied their cards not so much to divine their status but to learn their names and patronymics, by which we addressed each other for the rest of the meeting; except that I, to my disappointment, remained Mister Mole and not John Genrivitch.

  We all shook hands and stared stony faced at one another as we muttered orchen priadna, pleased to meet you. It is thought inane to smile on first meeting. They sat down in a solemn row, hands folded across their stomachs. I knew not to start my dog-and-pony with a joke as I would with Americans, as this is considered boorish. They were stock still and expressionless through the video and my cogent analysis of why the project would be good for farmers, consumers and international peace. I made much of the support from the British government through the Know-How Fund. The clincher was that a modest restaurant with fifty seats would need 100 tons of potatoes, 30 tons of dairy products and 10 tons of meat a year. In the UK to get 100 tons of acceptable bakers you needed to grow 400 tons. Many small farms would be required to supply us.

  When I finished, the men from the Farmers’ Union stood up and made for the door. The professor shook hands last.

  “Hmmm. This is impossible in present conditions. Our farmers are not prepared. We do not have the infrastructure. We do not have the legal framework for franchising. You cannot find premises like this in Moscow. We do not have the finance for the business or the farmers. All the equipment would have to be imported at very great cost. The difficulties are insurmountable. Hmmm.”

  Misha closed the door and we locked in a comradely embrace.

  “Yesss! He bought it.”

  Sure enough, the professor phoned Misha from the airport that evening. We should go to Moscow at our earliest convenience and discuss “a possible cooperation”.

  This is Russia, Mister John

  I was given a desk on the fourth floor of the Farmers’ Union headquarters. Having braved the ferocious doorkeepers, short and round Mother Russias in knitted tea-cosy hats, you were bathed in the atmosphere of bureaucracy, a semisolid gas of recycled superheated air, sweet tobacco, acrid disinfectant, eggy effluvium, paper and body odour. I shared the office with Afanasy, who was to be the Jackets project coordinator, and Natasha, our assistant and interpreter.

  Afanasy was in his 50s. He was bald, tanned and wore gold-rimmed glasses and the kind of spivvish grey suits with broad pinstripes affected by louche Tory MPs. Despite his urbane appearance, his passion was fishing. Many years before he had been attached to the Russian delegation to the UN and spoke English with a thick Brighton Beach accent. He was so good at coordinating the project that he had coordinated it all away to other people. At every question I asked he shook his head.

  “Jarn, I am only de coordinator. By no means. You gotta ask somebody else...” By no means was a verbal tic like Misha’s znachet.

  Natasha was in her late 20s. She came to work dressed for cocktail parties in shimmering dresses with gossamer sleeves and sparkly high heels, or for left-wing dinner parties in shawls and layers of ethnic skirts. She spent the first half hour of the day cross-legged on her chair in meditation, hands down on the desk. I asked if she was a Buddhist. Astralist, she said. I didn’t take it further in case an involuntary smirk blighted our relationship.

  My first task was to identify suppliers of raw materials. I caused consternation when I suggested we should visit some farmers to find out at first hand what they could supply and what support they needed. Many practical difficulties were put in my way,

  “By no means. Dere’s no point. Dey don’t know whad-day need,” rasped Afanasy.

  “How do we know this if we don’t ask them?”

  “Jarn, I know farmers,” he said, carefully inserting a Dunhill into an amber cigarette holder. “Dey don’ unnerstand.”

  “So what do we base our plan on?”

  “Regional directors will make reports.”

  “I’d rather see for myself.”

  “You waste your time. By no means. Dey give you false information to screw more money outa de Union. Dese peasants are money-grubbin’ sons-o-bitches. Stay away from ‘em.”

  “The farms are in countryside,” revealed Natasha, as if this were an affront to nature. “How will you find them? How will you get to them? Dzhorn, it is not practical.”

  I scoured the dictionary for the meanings of the grace words Jarn and Dzhorn until I twigged they were my name.

  I asked the advice of Flor Ivanovitch, the director of the research department. He was a round-faced young man with pale-blue eyes, thinning fair hair and a penchant for mustard - mustard tweed jacket, mustard trousers, mustard shirt, mustard tie. He also thought that field research was an odd thing to do. He gave me more reasons it would be difficult.

  “John, we are embarrassed to let a foreigner see conditions in countryside. And they are frightened you will hear bad things about the Union.”

  “But the Union is the farmers’ organization. We represent them. We serve their interests.”

  “Theoretically this is true. Unfortunately, most of the people in this building are seconded from the Ministry of Agriculture. They have spent their whole lives fighting farmers. They hate the countryside.”

  “Don’t they go to dachas at the weekend?”

  “Dachniks look down on country people. Uncultured, they say, and dishonest. And the country people resent the dachniks because they have money and cars and are arrogant.”

  “Jeez, Flor. How am I supposed to get things done?” “This is Russia, Mister John.”

  I did what you do in Russia to get things done - I went straight to the top man. After hanging round the professor’s anteroom for an hour or so, chatting up his secretary and watching a Mexican soap with her, I was summoned in. The corner office was light and airy with windows on two sides and blond-wood panelling. It was dominated by a massive desk heaped with books and papers. Another table held a computer and two televisions. Two brown leather sofas at right angles were for visitors. The host’s leather throne was in front of them. The rest of the office was cluttered with agricultural gifts and souvenirs.

  The nerve centre and the real sign of the professor’s status was a row of six telephones, all different colours. They weren’t just for show; this is how a Russian chief executive runs his empire. “He has the power of the telephone” doesn’t mean he has a telephone that always works, although that is already a sign of superior status. It means he can pick it up and give an order and the person on the other end will carry it out. That is a sign of real power.

  I had five minutes to make my petition. He thought it was a novel idea, but he picked up the phone and with one call to Afanasy it was arranged. Afanasy swallowed his misgivings with good grace and found the closest farmer to Moscow who would be willing to suffer the intrusion of a foreigner.

  In Russia it is eccentric to do anything on your own. For business you must travel in a delegation, for leisure you must travel in a group. So Afanasy, Natasha and two other men I had never met climbed into a bright yellow minibus one damp Monday morning. We were in holiday mood, the novelty of our mission and the break from the tedium of a day in the office infecting even Afanasy with cheerfulness.

  Our driver, Igor, wore a tweed overcoat, long scarf, gauntlets and a leather hunting hat with the untied earflaps dangling. I feared for the heating in the minibus, but I needn’t have worried. He must have learned his driving behind a tractor and this was his uniform. He complained that the bus was foreign junk, made in Latvia, and that they ought to have given us a decent Russian one. I made the mistake of taking him seriously until he grinned. Russian humour can be as deadpan as English. Latvia had been independent for only two years and Russian troops were still on its soil. />
  We took the Leningrad motorway out of town and after an hour or so turned onto a potholed asphalt road. For another two hours we jolted in the drizzle through uninterrupted forest. Apart from a few tractors and trailers and a long truck loaded with logs, there was no traffic. An occasional pedestrian plodded along with a shopping bag. Where on earth were they going? We were in the middle of nowhere. The asphalt stopped at a junction in a clearing with a choice of three dirt roads. There were no signs or landmarks and Igor had no map, but he confidently chose the one least travelled. When Afanasy asked him if he was sure, he tapped the side of his lumpy nose. The road was sandy mud and the side windows were soon stuccoed, but it was less bumpy.

  What we could see of the colours outside was exquisite. Russian forests are not just row after row of birches, but vast arboretums of different trees. Not that I can tell you what they were. My arboreal education stopped in the school cadet force with the pines and bushy-topped trees we were taught to use as landmarks when aiming our antiquated rifles.

  We had a closer acquaintance with the bushy tops when the engine coughed into silence and the smell of petrol filled the bus. We got out. The glistening road ran straight to vanishing points in either direction. There was nothing to be heard but whispering leaves and pattering rain and the creaking of the cooling engine and Igor cursing all Latvians and their mothers as he tinkered under the bonnet. The rest of us huddled under a tree and smoked in silence, city dwellers cowed by the immensity of nature and the prospect of a long, wet walk. Coming from England, where the countryside is suburbia spread thin, the vast emptiness was unnerving. And this was only 100 miles from Moscow. It was inconceivable that there should be any other human being, let alone habitation, within 50 miles.

  “Trouble, comrades?” asked a man in the trees behind us. We started as one and spun round to see a man in the Russian version of a Barbour outfit, brown oilskins and khaki bush hat. He was in his 50s with a grainy outdoors-man’s face and a thick black moustache. A shotgun lolling in the crook of his elbow and a bulging game bag, with a russet wing and a furry paw peeping from under the flap, established his credentials. He strolled to the back of the bus where Igor was unloading the brimming toolbox without which no Russian driver leaves home.

  Igor took out a pile of empty fertilizer bags and laid them on the mud under the bus. He lay down on his back and inched his way underneath with a pair of pliers and some wire.

  “Fuel line bust,” he said. “It drips petrol but I don’t think we’ve lost much.”

  “Shall I hold your cigarette for you, brother?” asked the hunter. Igor handed it to him and he stubbed it out in the mud.

  We introduced ourselves. His name was Ivan and he was by profession a steeplejack, a word out of reach of their English and my Russian, but by way of mime we got there in the end via tree surgeon, mountaineer and helicopter pilot. He had a dacha nearby. He quizzed me about steeple-jacking in England. I was eloquent about the population of steeplejacks, their pay and conditions, their climbing techniques, the ratio of new build to demolition and so on. I made it all up, but when foreigners take an interest it seems churlish to say you haven’t the foggiest. In return I asked him about the rural economy in the area and he probably made up his answers too. The natural desire to please accounts for much of the misinformation in feasibility studies and travel books, doubtless including this one. When I asked him what he thought of the political situation and the economy, he shrugged.

  “We live in our Russia. They live in theirs,” he said.

  Igor emerged from under the bus, donned his gauntlets and, after some dry coughs from him and the engine, both lit up and we were on our way. Ivan came with us, his aura of cordite and wet leaves adding to the fug of cigarette smoke and body odour we had been fermenting since Moscow.

  He took us back to the crossroads with the asphalt road and after half an hour or so we broke out of the trees into a flat, grassy plain. The mud changed from sandy to black. Ivan said it had belonged to the kolkhoz, the state collective farm, until they were obliged to hand it over to private farmers two years before. Afanasy said they were probably glad to get rid of it.

  Ivan got out here, where he had parked his truck. We wished each other well with much handshaking and fraternal greetings to the steeplejacks of England, which I take this opportunity to pass on.

  We passed a field where two women poked around in the mud. Although a novice to farming, I recognized a heap of little brown potatoes. There was no cart or vehicle or other mechanical aid in sight. Ahead we saw a house and its outbuildings and the tracery of a fence silhouetted against a vast, lowering sky. By now the track was a river of thin slush about a foot deep. Through the gate in the fence it widened into a lake of thicker mud, which was the farmyard.

  Igor knew he should not stop. He changed down and revved the engine and headed for a shed where two men were working on the roof with a welding machine. We fish-tailed towards the incandescent blue light of the welder, a beacon in the sludge that covered the windscreen. We slithered, stalled and stuck fast in the morass.

  Afanasy opened the sliding door. We were twenty yards away from solid ground. The mud came up to the sill. A pig swam away like a dolphin, arching and plunging, arching and plunging. One of the men on the roof climbed down and waded towards us, the mud up to the knees of his tall rubber boots. Short and beefy with bandy legs and bandy arms, he wore a short leather jacket and a matching Lenin cap the colour of the mud, a true son of the soil.

  While Igor flogged the starter motor we crowded in the doorway to make our introductions. Our host’s name was Vasily. His round, pink, featureless face was enlivened by startling blue eyes.

  My banker’s suit and Clarks brogues were certainly no match for the conditions. I feared I might have to be carried piggyback to the shore, a piquant introduction to my official duties as international consultant to the Union. Vasily said he had a spare pair of boots that we could take it in turns to use.

  Meanwhile, Igor got the engine going and gunned it alternately in third and reverse, digging us deeper in a fountain of mud. Then Vasily had the idea of us all playing sardines in the back over the drive wheel to increase the purchase. It worked. In clouds of smoke and mud we slithered to the edge of the viscous lake and solid ground.

  It stopped raining. The sky was lightening and the breeze turned from humid to crisp. In the flickering glare of the welder I made a tour of inspection, venturing as far as was amenable to my leather uppers, skipping over cowpats and pigpats and casting a townie’s eye over the establishment. The house had two storeys and a pitched roof and was made entirely of wood. It looked American, except that the wood was genuine and not metal siding. The outbuildings had a more Irish feel, ramshackle huts made of anything that came to hand: wood, brick, breeze block, corrugated iron. The welders were making a steel frame for another shed out of girders strong enough for a bomb shelter.

  Half a dozen cows shuffled in a pen made of stakes and branches. A dozen little piglets ran out of the barn, squealed and snuffled and ran back in again. We followed them. In one corner on a wooden pallet were a milking stool, metal buckets and metal milk churns that in Britain you only see now on model railways. In another corner, protected from the pigs by wire mesh, was a heap of potatoes, little brown knobbly things. There was not much else to see. A trailer, a plough-looking thing, a beat-up Niva. It all seemed very primitive. Was this the future of Russian agriculture? It felt more like the past.

  Vasily invited us into the house and we sat round the kitchen table. He apologized that his wife and daughter weren’t here to wait on us. They were the women we had seen picking potatoes. He took out of the fridge a bottle of vodka, a cucumber and a plate of pickled piglet tails, which are tastier than they sound and a lot tastier than they look. He had been a brigadier at the kolkhoz, in charge of a brigade of fifty workers. He was full of confidence and authority and had a voice to match. He delivered the most innocuous comment like an order.

  �
��Eat! Drink! Welcome!”

  Two years ago Vasily had taken over twenty hectares and had just negotiated a lease on another ten. He got a Union grant to build a house and the farm gave him a tractor. I asked if he had a Farmer’s Loan from the bank.

  “I must give 30 per cent kickback to the bank manager! Borrowing is foolish! Lending is a crime! It is not the Russian way!”

  He started with a load of seed potatoes from the kolkhoz on extended credit and sold the harvest in the local market at 1000 per cent profit. He used the money to buy cows and pigs and more seeds. But now he could not afford to sell in the market. In the name of privatization city officials leased the market concessions to each other for next to nothing and charged traders exorbitant rents. As for trucking stuff to Moscow, not a hope. The markets were controlled by Chechens.

  “Money! Who wants it! The rouble! Bah!”

  “How do you pay for your new shed?”

  “I give pigs and cream to the kolkhoz! They build it for me!”

  Vasily was out of the money system. Instead of buying and selling he bartered for everything, from petrol to vodka. It was the Soviet blat, managers of enterprises traded commodities and services between themselves. Or the old system of kolkhozniks working so many days for the collective and so many days on their own plots. Or the older system of serfs owing so many days to their owner and spending the rest on their private strips. I suspected there was something more in his relationship with his old comrades at the kolkhoz than met the eye, but I knew I would never find out. As for our fact-finding mission, the only fact

  I could be certain of was that Vasily came far down the list of potential potato suppliers.

  Under the pretext of finding the lavatory, I went outside in the hope that a few deep breaths of fresh air would keep the piglet tails down. The welder was still busy, strobing the yard with sparky blue light. Dark clouds overhead made dusk while golden bright sky over the distant forest backlit the countryside. There was a timeless enchantment about it. Half-remembered evocations of Russian landscapes in Turgenev and Gogol and Tolstoy jostled for a hearing. For a moment I was no longer the foreigner in a suit with a briefcase but a guest of the land, calling to me. The soul of Russia was out there. I wanted to get closer to it, away from the buildings and the welding. In the corner where I stood on a rough planking deck were a couple of stepping stones across the mud to firm ground.