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

by John Mole

  “A CRUcial VOTE for BORis YELtsin. ALL day THERE have BEEN DEMonSTRATions HERE in RED Square...”

  What was I going to do? The sweet blonde girl in the ski jacket smiled nervously at us. Oh why not, what the hell. Besides, I felt uniquely qualified as a vox populi since I had been even-handedly demonstrating on both sides. It all went very quickly and in a blur. The younger Russians spoke like Americans. And then he turned to me, asked me why I was demonstrating today and stuck the microphone under my nose as if he were offering me a lick of his cornet. Taking inspiration from my hat, I palatalized my laterals and vocalized my fricatives and tried to sound like a local.

  “Znachet, we cannot go back. We swim in tide of history.”

  I thought I had been rumbled. A man with an earpiece waved his hands. The sweet blonde girl was cutting her own throat with what I hoped was only her finger. Our correspondent whipped the microphone away and stared earnestly at the lens.

  “FROM MosCOW in TURmoil NOW back TO the STUDio.”

  I was told that the Beeb used my interview for the next two days. A couple of newspapers borrowed the cliché about the tide of history and used it as a photo caption. Otherwise I would have found it hard to believe that I had been in the same place as the journalists who described that day. They said that 60,000 Yeltsin supporters took to the streets and 10,000 Communists and Nationalists. That many would have filled Old Trafford, but I never saw any more than you’d have got at St Andrews for a midweek Birmingham City game. And the democrats certainly did not outnumber the Communists by six to one. It was two to one more like and possibly closer.

  That was not the first or the last time that I found it hard to match media stories with what actually goes on in Russia. The only incontrovertible fact I can report is that the knickers on both sides were the same shades of pink and beige.

  Spuds and bugs

  I met my first Russian in 1984. George Orwell’s shadow hung over us. Chernenko was the moribund President of the moribund Soviet Union. Famous Russian dissidents were in exile, Sakharov in the closed city of Gorky, Solzhenitsyn in Vermont. The Soviet Union boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics as the Americans had done to Moscow in 1980. Ronald Reagan was cranking up the Cold War with the Hollywoodesque Strategic Defense Initiative “Star Wars”. He armed what would now be called terrorists against Soviet-backed Third World governments: Unita in Angola, the Contras in Nicaragua, the Taliban in Afghanistan. James Bond was still pitted against the Russians. Russia was another world, alien, strange and threatening.

  Vladimir was a young biochemist on a six-month exchange programme. A mutual acquaintance introduced us. My wife and I were about to go on a package tour to Leningrad and Moscow and jumped at the chance to practise dealing with the enemy. We invited him round to the house for dinner. This was big news in the playground, the office and the pub. Russians were exotic. The children were excited and we were nervous.

  We hit it off. Vladimir looked more English than I did in sports jacket and flannels, except that his Pringle pullover was too clean and his flannels too pressed and his brogues too polished. He was a few years younger than us with a three-year-old daughter and a baby he had never seen, born while he was in the UK. He spoke fluent English and was delightful company, with a sense of humour tinged with pessimism and irony. He was disarmingly frank about the conditions at home, good and bad. The KGB had warned him that foreign agents would try to recruit him. He should be careful of gifts and invitations to dinner from strangers. We grew up suspicious of Russians, especially semi-diplomats like trade delegates and exchange scientists, but we refused to be browbeaten by fears dinned into us by our governments.

  The test came when we offered to take presents to Moscow for his new baby. We hadn’t bargained for letters and cassettes. Were we couriers of scientific secrets? Were we being set up? At the same time, Vladimir had similar misgivings. Was this a trap? All of us made the same conscious decision: sod it, we were not going to be bullied by propaganda.

  I confess I was nervous when the stony-faced customs officer took the letters and tapes into a back room for twenty minutes. When he came back he had a grin on his face. Still, Vladimir did not risk foreigners going to his flat. His neighbours were scandalized by his going abroad and he had relatives in the army who disapproved. He asked colleagues from his laboratory to pick up the things. Our anxieties might have been laughable, but there was no mistaking the fear of the two young men who came to the lobby of the Intourist Hotel. They snatched the bags from us and ran out without a word. We felt sorry for them and sorry for all of us. It all sounds risible now, but in those days it seemed serious.

  After we came back from Russia we had strange phone calls and clicks on the line. They were probably more to do with the incompetence of British Telecom than surveillance, but we thought they might have been more sinister. Mail we received from Vladimir was definitely opened, but who had done the tampering we had no idea. Over the years we exchanged Christmas cards and I sent him my books. In Moscow I got in touch and he invited me for dinner. I was to meet him at his Institute.

  The Institute was a ten-minute walk from Gagarin Square. The first man in space stood on top of a flare-shaped silver column, reaching for the stars. Since his day Russian science had fallen on hard times. The Institute was run down, weeds growing in the cracks, peeling paint, post-Patriotic-War functional and not changed much since. The lobby led to a cascade of marble steps going up to a landing. A lady of the same vintage as the guard swabbed them with a rag tied on a stick, refreshing it every now and then in a bucket of filthy water. Halfway through she stopped for a rest, leaning on the mop and looking at her threadbare slippers. Water plink-plonked down the steps. A grandiose clock over the door had stopped at ten past nine.

  Time had been better to Vladimir. He looked exactly as he had when we’d last met in London a decade before. We asked how the other was: Not so bad and Normalna were the verdicts. He took me on a tour. The landing was decorated with mug shots of professors dating back to the foundation of the Institute in 1935. Even the more recent looked like people from another time, stern faced, some in military uniform.

  “You know Oparin, of course,” said Vladimir. “Darwin of the twentieth century.”

  He showed me the great man’s laboratory. Like all the other labs it was a disappointment. It had a couple of wooden tables, a few test tubes and other bits and pieces out of a decent chemistry set.

  “He developed the primal soup theory of the origin of life. He was a big friend of Salvador Dali.”

  I tried to infuse the shabby little room with the surreal mysteries of the universe. All I could think was that it could have done with a bit of a dust.

  “It has not changed since he died in 1980. We do not have the money to change anything. When the Soviet Union collapsed our funding collapsed.”

  “Bang goes the origin of the universe. What were you researching?”

  “My life has been dedicated to one little bug. A virus, to be precise.”

  As we walked down the dingy corridors, footsteps echoing, I had a nagging feeling of something missing. At last I put my finger on it. “Where are the scientists, Vlad?”

  “In Germany. The minute you have a doctorate they open the door. German science will soon be the best in Europe again and all with Russian brains. Except the Jews who go to Israel so they can go to California. Everyone is looking for a Jewish great-grandmother in the family. 30,000 scientists have left the country.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “I have offers. Do I want my girls to be Americans? What about my old folks?”

  “You’ve still got the doorman and the cleaning lady.”

  “They would go too if they had the chance. We have some students and some old professors. They are lucky to earn fifty dollars a month. We have a double doc who makes pies in the afternoon for her mother to sell.”

  “How will you survive?”

  “We try to make business for the Institute. We must make
our knowledge pay for us. I do not make pies yet. I try to think how we can use this building.”

  “How about a baked potato restaurant? We’ll call it Spuds and Bugs.”

  “Why not? We rent our basement to a biznismyen for his clothes from Vietnam.”

  My entrepreneurial mind was buzzing. Today’s Special-Primal Soup.

  Vladimir lived in the salubrious southwest, at the end of the red line. The apartment was light and airy. His beautiful wife was a physicist in another institute. Although we had never met, it was an emotional reunion, a sign that times had changed for the better since we brought letters from our Evil Empire to theirs. Their pretty daughters tried out their English and politely ran away to their bedroom to collapse into laughter at my Russian. A pedigree spaniel completed the household.

  In Soviet days scientists were among the élite of society. They were respected, well paid, went to good schools and hospitals, enjoyed cruises and foreign junkets in the guise of conferences. I could have been visiting a professional middleclass family anywhere in Europe, even to the roast pork stuffed with prunes, a favourite among the intelligentzia of South London too. Over tea and cake we reverted to depression about the state of the former Soviet Union.

  “People are saying Russia is besieged. We are undermined by foreign and domestic enemies. According to Marxist theory, Russia is ripe for revolution.”

  “Marx was often wrong. That was your problem in the first place. Think positive, Vladimir.”

  “I am a scientist. Positive thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality.”

  We eased the pain with another glass of Georgian red wine. Several Georgian reds lay claim to be Stalin’s favourite. Thankfully this wasn’t one of them. He liked medium sweet, which you may add to his catalogue of deficiencies.

  The conversation segued seamlessly from politics to effluent. A few years ago the Institute was given a defence contract to develop technology for purifying air in closed environments. Human beings exude a cocktail of about eighty toxic substances. The scientists came up with the idea of using bacteria. The principle was not new: bacteria have been used to clean up water contamination since the beginning of the twentieth century. But cleaning air is a lot more difficult. They solved the problem with a device they called a Bioreactor, essentially a can full of specially selected bacteria that eat up the toxins. They were not told what it was for. It could have been for the Mir space station or, more likely, for nuclear submarines that spend months under water. Perhaps as you read this there are Bioreactors keeping the air sweet for submariners under the Arctic ice, what is left of it.

  At the Institute they thought no more about it until one of the researchers met a director of a furniture factory. The fumes from the paint shop were outside the legal limit. The Institute scaled up the Bioreactor. It worked better than anyone had anticipated, clearing up over 95 per cent of the fumes. In the next four years they installed twenty Bioreactors in factories all over Russia.

  “What keeps them in the can, Vladimir? Why don’t they escape?”

  “It is the only life they know. Outside they would perish. The Bioreactor is a living society, tiny little citizens going about their business. They find their place at the top or the bottom, the edge or the middle, and dedicate themselves to staying alive. They feed on carbon and oxygen and water like us. They are born and grow up and reproduce and die. They have different characters, different roles, different places in the hierarchy from the refined eaters on top down to the hearty munchers at the bottom. They feed and defecate, thrive in the right conditions, get listless if there is not enough to eat, get fat and lazy if there is too much. It is a good thing that they do not have the capability to ask why they are doing this.”

  “If they did, would they behave any differently?”

  “You can get used to anything - even hell. Tell me, John, is there anything like our Bioreactor in the West?”

  “Dunno, Vlad, I’ll find out.”

  This was polite but insincere. The idea that Russians could have environmental technology, what a joke! Everybody knew that Russians couldn’t care less about the environment. Territories the size of European countries were wasteland. The quality of air and water in the cities was lamentable. Russians put men in space, but the rest of their technology was crude or copied from the West. In any case, I had weightier matters on my mind.

  “You don’t know anyone who grows a good potato, do you?”

  “Dunno, John, I’ll find out.”

  Vladimir’s apartment was a haven of normality. However busy the family were, I was always made to feel welcome. I was full of admiration for the way in which they coped with their changing and uncertain world. Professors in other institutes were making themselves rich by selling patent rights or services to foreign companies. Western patent agents came trawling, especially in defence-related science, but Vladimir held fast to his personal integrity. In one of the darker moments, when there was no more money for developing the Bioreactor, I offered him a thousand dollars to tide him over. He blanched.

  “I am not like the others. I don’t want to be like them.”

  “It’s not a bribe, Vlad, it’s an investment. We’ll make it official.”

  “It is against the law. The Institute must surrender dollars and apply for a rouble grant.”

  “Take it unofficially.”

  “It is the slippery slope. Gold is tested by man, man is tested by gold.”

  He invited me to see the Bioreactor in action at the All Union Shoe Works in an industrial suburb. Overwhelmed by economic conditions and Asian imports, only one floor of the six in the building was in operation. It was a big shed lit by grimy windows and harsh neon. Machines cut up plastic and fabrics into bits stuck together by the hands of men and women standing at long benches. They beavered in silence as we watched and relapsed into dilatoriness and chatter as we left. The shoes were for the kind of people who made them, a new pair at the beginning of winter, patched and glued to last the summer before they disintegrated beyond repair. They looked comfortably wide for my flat feet and I asked if they had a factory outlet. The director took one look at my brogues and thrust into my hands a pair of black 1970s stub toes from the end of the line. They fitted a treat and rounded off my Russian wardrobe.

  “I wish you enjoyment, tavarish” said Vladimir, who was shod by Church’s when he went to England for conferences.

  The fumes from glue and hot plastic were sucked up by hoods and along ducting to the Bioreactor on the floor above. I tried hard to admire it, but all I could see was a bolted-together big blue can three metres high, shaped like the cylinder in the airing cupboard at home.

  I met the Director of the Institute and two other laboratory heads to discuss ways of commercializing the Bioreactor in Western Europe. My advice, based on nothing but wishful thinking, was not to sell the technology outright but to license it in return for a share of the profits. The ideal partner would be strong in engineering and marketing but not have its own R&D. I speculated about what the agreement would contain and how the company would be structured. The upshot was that I was formally invited to investigate joint ventures with foreign companies. We signed a protokol appointing me as their agent.

  That night, in Vladimir’s kitchen, we worked out a proposal for me to present to engineering companies when I was back in Britain. There were facts and figures and drawings and reports on existing plants in Russia. I didn’t like to say that the chances of a British company taking Russian environmental technology seriously were slim. There was a deep-seated aversion to innovations “not invented here”. And there was a practical hurdle to cross.

  “Vladimir, how do we get the bugs into England?”

  “We freeze dry them like Nescafe. A bucket should be enough. We mix them with water and they come alive.”

  “They’re still bacteria. How do we get a bucket of dry bugs through customs?”

  “It is only a small bucket. If you like we can make it smaller and send it through
the mail.”

  “That’s not the point. You can’t just send bugs and germs across borders in your luggage or in the mail.”

  “Scientists do it all the time. This is how laboratories cooperate. You dip blotting paper into a test tube and put it in a envelope with a stamp. At the other end you take out the blotting paper and put it in a dish with some water. Very nice bacteria grow.”

  “But what if it’s deadly germs like smallpox or anthrax?”

  “The same. You will never stop these things at borders. You must stop them at the source.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  I decided to prove him wrong the next time I went back to London. We filled an old medicine bottle with flour and water and sealed it with the metal cap of a wine bottle. On his computer we printed a label marked with a skull and crossbones. In English and Russian we wrote “Danger. Russian Bacteria. Harmful if inhaled or swallowed.” At Heathrow I went to the Red Channel. I took the bottle out of my briefcase and showed it to the Customs officer. He looked hard at the label.

  “Wossis then?”

  “Like it says. Live bacteria. From a Russian laboratory.”

  “How much is it werf?”

  “Five thousand roubles.”

  “Ow much is that?”

  “About seven pounds fifty.”

  “Gowon,” he said crossly and waved me on.

  “Sorry, officer, I want to declare this. It’s Russian bacteria.”

  “Ow much did yew say it was werf?”

  “About seven pounds fifty.”

  “Stop wasting my time.”

  “Are you sure it’s not banned or anything?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I want to speak to your senior officer.”

  He gave a big sigh and went to fetch his superior. We went through the same dialogue again. I refused to go away until they had gone through all the manuals of Her Majesty’s Customs, Board of Trade, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. They were right. There was nothing to prevent me taking my bottle into the country. In the next few days I phoned everyone I could think of who might be interested - the police, local authorities, Ministry of Defence, anybody. They all suggested I call the others.