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

by John Mole

  A sweet lie is better than a bitter truth

  Vladimir was more conscientious in helping me with my potatoes than I was with his Bioreactor. He used his contacts at the Academy of Sciences to introduce me to a plant research institute in the town of Zelenograd, twenty-five miles northeast of Moscow. It was built in the 1950s as Russia’s Silicon Valley and was a closed city. During the Soviet era you wouldn’t find it on a map. It is now a commuter suburb of Moscow and easy to get to on the train.

  I was picked up by my host, Professor Mishkin. We drove through the original town, an attractive place beside a river, and then through bleak and shabby high-rises to the institute on the edge of a collective farm. I imagine the idea was to transfer the research seamlessly into the fields, but there seemed an unbridgeable gap between the desolate fields and rundown buildings outside and the Eden inside.

  Professor Mishkin was a very serious person. Solemn when we shook hands, as is conventional, she remained morose for the rest of our meeting. Perhaps her social skills were focused on talking to plants. Or she was uncomfortable showing off state secrets to a foreigner, spying on strategic vegetables. She showed me her lettuce. Tasked with inventing a device to grow fresh salad on the Mir space station, she had rigged up a slow-moving conveyor belt about two feet long inside a box equipped with a low-voltage red light. The conveyor was loaded with pellets of fibre soaked in hydroponic jelly, each holding a lettuce seed. The cosmo-naut would simply switch on and in ten days young, fresh lettuce floated into the cosmos. Slapped in a sandwich with reconstituted salad cream, lovely.

  Very interesting - but I was here for the potatoes. The reason Russian potatoes were misshapen leathery footballs was because the farmers could not afford proper seed. They used the leftovers from the previous year’s crop. Through the generations these collected diseases and genetic defects from their earlier incarnations in the field. The modern way is to grow virgin potatoes from little green shoots that come out of the eyes. You weed out the imperfect tubers and grow another generation. You select these and then grow a third generation, which you sell to farmers. It takes three years. One of the tricks of the trade is knowing when to harvest them. The only way you know they are ready is to pull a plant up out of the soil and have a look, which is wasteful.

  At Zelenograd they had perfected a different system. They took the tiniest little cutting from the tip of a green sprout, hardly visible to the naked eye. They put the cuttings into cabinets with artificial light and growing medium. The result was fragile little plantlets that they stuck into porous material over plastic gutters flowing with hydroponic fluid under artificial light. From these they grew the first generation of tubers. They were not at the mercy of the Russian winter and could grow all through the year. They had three crops, so the whole process took one year instead of three.

  The real trick was installing everything two metres off the ground. They could turn off the fluid and lower the gutters, leaving the tubers dangling in the air. They harvested their spuds like fruit, plucking them overhead. They picked the ones that were ready, put back the guttering and left the rest for the next day. It was wonderful to see, so sensible and ludicrous. For 300 dollars cash down I signed a contract for enough seed to grow 5000 tons of lovely bakers. Now all I had to do was find the farmers to grow them. And the dry, ventilated sheds to store them. And the people to sort them and wash them and bag them.

  Professor Mishkin said the European agency for the technology was available. We drafted a letter of intent. When I went back to the UK I called up the leading seed-potato growers in Scotland and Ireland and the Netherlands and described the system. They had a good laugh, so I didn’t take on the agency. Pity. The Russians set up a company, grew to be world leaders and recently licensed McCain, the world’s largest potato merchant. Another Big One slipped through the fingers.

  Word got round the Union about the Western expyert at head office. I was invited to a collective farm, a kol-khoz, near Mtsensk, to advise them on how to regenerate their area with restaurants. I had no hesitation in accepting in the interests of seeing more of the country.

  Mtsensk is 300 kilometres southwest of Moscow in the Oryol Oblast, four hours on the daytime express from Kurskaya station. No one else wanted to go, so for once I did not have a minder, trusted to look after myself between being put on the train by Natasha in Moscow and met at the other end by my host. From the train there wasn’t much to note about the countryside. Flat and grassy bits alternated with birch forest and the occasional river.

  Mtsensk will be known to opera lovers from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich, about a merchant’s wife who sleeps with a farm hand, poisons her father-in-law and murders her husband. She is sentenced to Siberia, but kills herself on the way. When Stalin came to see it he ordered it suppressed on the grounds of sex and violence. Nevertheless, anyone who goes to Mtsensk hoping that the opera reflects the raciness of life there will be disappointed. The work is based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, who used Mtsensk as shorthand for quintessentially provincial, which, on the surface at least, it remains to this day. It would be like going to Rouen for excitement after reading Madame Bovary. For book lovers, the estate of the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Turgenev, famous for the novel Fathers and Sons, is 10 kilometres to the north. Unfortunately it was closed on the day I was there.

  I was met off the train by Evgenia, my interpreter. She brought the apologies of the kolkhoz director, who had been called away on other business. She was about 50. Her hair, dyed pecan red, looked as if it had ten years at most before it gave up and fell out. I used to mock Western cosmetics, all that pseudo science and animal testing. Then I went to Eastern Europe, where women over 40 look like survivors of chemical warfare. Evgenia covered up most of the damage with a bright green knitted woolly hat, the same colour as her ankle-length padded coat. It was like walking round with a gooseberry promotion. She kept her outfit on and buttoned up all day, indoors or out, whatever the temperature. I kept telling her to take it offinside so she would feel the benefit, but she ignored me.

  Evgenia introduced me to our driver, Vitaly, a broken reed of a man with the hollow chest and inward concentration of an emphysematic. He wasted none of his breath on conversation. He led us to a little white Lada and I was treated to a tour of the town. There wasn’t much to see. In 1943 Oryol Oblast was part of the battlefield of Kursk, the biggest tank battle in history. Every building was flattened. In a hundred years or so tourists will come to gawp at the gems of Soviet architecture that replaced them, but meanwhile, since our tastes have not yet been formed in this direction, there is nothing to look at but monumentally dull public buildings and jerry-built apartment blocks.

  We went to the Soviet-style Mtsensk Hotel for a Soviet-style lunch. Evgenia taught English to 12 year olds, which I agreed was an appropriate qualification for delivering a lecture to an audience of aspiring biznismyen. Her small talk was out of an English conversation course. When we strayed from her script I had a horrible feeling that she didn’t understand anything I was saying. She looked blank and jumped up and said she had to make a phone call. When she returned we went back to the module. I regretted not having a written text of my presentation to give her but, as I improvise around my overheads, it probably wouldn’t have done her much good.

  After lunch we drove through the autumnal countryside to the farm. A kolkhoz is a massive enterprise, a small town surrounded by agribusiness from production to processing. The employees live in multi-storey housing developments with all the amenities of a town - shops, cinema, hotel, sports facilities. We were in a sanatorium hotel on the edge of the surrounding forest. It was a pleasant enough place, all varnished wood and rough plaster. My audience of administrators were tired, middleaged men in tired, middleaged suits going through the motions, so I felt quite at home. Charged with reviving the fortunes of the farm with business initiatives, I was the foreign expyert who would tell them how to do it. Or rather I told Evgenia, who told them how to do it.r />
  In the event I could have saved my breath on the first stage. My fears about her competence were fully justified. Her credibility as an interpreter depended on the audience not knowing English or the speaker not knowing Russian. I knew enough to realize that what she was telling them bore only an occasional resemblance to what I was saying. To test her I threw in whole sentences of gibberish. She steamed ahead with her own text without turning a desiccated hair. Lord knows where she got it, probably a hotchpotch of stuff from other expyerts she had worked for. The overheads, which were in Russian, kept us both going more or less in the right direction, but between these landmarks she beat her own path.

  There was no harm done. Most of the audience weren’t listening and those who were would have twisted and filtered and adapted my ideas to their Russian perceptions. Evgenia was just saving them the bother. The best I could do was pace around and wave my arms in the hope that brio would infect them with entrepreneurial enthusiasm. This had no apparent effect. To a man they looked stolidly down at the floor and asked no questions at the end. Their leader stood up, thanked me and shook my hand. They filed meekly out, pulling cigarette packets out of pockets.

  I didn’t have the heart to complain about the interpretation. Evgenia was desperate for the work. She had an unemployed husband and a student son to feed. The school had not paid its teachers for three months. Teachers subsisted on fees in kind brought in by the children - a loaf of bread, a bunch of onions, a jar of vegetables. I think she kept her coat on all day because it was the only decent thing she had to wear. I gave her ten dollars and she burst into tears. If my audience got the wrong end of the stick, so what? They wouldn’t have known what to do with the right end.

  I was surprised to be left to my own devices for the rest of the afternoon before Vitaly took me back for the evening train. The director had not delegated a minder. Evgenia was full of apologies. She had to go back to her school. The dinner ladies were baking pizza for the staff and if she wasn’t there she wouldn’t get her ration. I promised to stay quietly in the hotel lobby. There is a fine line between hospitality and surveillance and I felt unusually liberated.

  As soon as everyone had gone I went out for a walk. It was a lovely, warm and sunny afternoon and I left my hat and coat behind. A footpath led from the back of the hotel across farmland to a forest about half a mile away. It was muddy from recent rain, but there was enough of a grass verge to keep my shoes dry. To my inexpert eye the uncultivated fields looked abandoned rather than deliberately fallow. They were covered in dense weeds and shoulder-high thistles. Hay had been cut but left uncollected in mounds. Abandoned sheds were missing windows and doors and roofs. The newest built were in the worst condition, from which I surmised that they had been looted before they were neglected.

  The path continued into the forest, kept open by mushroom and berry hunters. I will leave you the chore of depicting for yourself a wood in autumn, with words like dappled, rich, warm, moist, ripe, rustle and so on. Put me in the picture, scuffing happily through the leaves until, as Raymond Chandler advises, when things slow down, bring in a man with a gun.

  I don’t know who was more surprised: me to see a man in camouflage toting a shotgun in a lonely Russian forest, or him to see a man in a pinstriped banker’s suit, white shirt, stripy tie and loafers. As he had the gun, I bet my bowels turned to water before his. When in doubt, bluff it out is a motto that has stood me in good stead, so I did.

  “Zdravstvitye” we said to each other as we approached. If this had been England we would have given each other a little nod and passed by like well-brought-up members of the Ramblers’ Association. No such luck. He blocked the path, cradled his gun and looked me up and down, as I did him. I took comfort from the fact that he resembled a genuine hunter and not a psychopath on the loose. He wore a green felt hat with a little peak and dangling earflaps, green camouflage jacket and trousers tucked into lace-up paratrooper’s boots, a loaded cartridge belt and a brown canvas game bag. The best thing was that his gun was broken and, as far as I could see, unloaded.

  “Sind Sie Deutsch?” he asked.

  “Nyet. Anglichanin” I replied, to his evident disappointment. However, I do speak reasonable German and could explain more fluently than in my Russian that I was a foreign expyert come to enlighten the kolkhozniks of the neighbourhood and not a fugitive bank manager.

  “Come, my friend, let us pass the time of day together,” he said and as he was the one with the gun, unloaded or not, I graciously accepted his invitation to step off the trail into a little clearing furnished with a convenient fallen log.

  He was about my age, with nice brown unmurderous eyes. From his weather-beaten face he obviously spent a lot of time in the open. Fresh air and sunshine had done little to cheer him up. His facial expressions and body language said glum, exceptionally so, even by Russian standards. But he seemed harmless, I hoped. He emptied his game bag onto the log between us - a heel of bread, a jar of pickled cucumbers, a greaseproof-paper parcel, a clasp knife, two small tin cups and an old-fashioned medicine bottle of ominously clear, brownish and slightly viscous liquid. He uncorked the bottle and filled the cups. I sniffed mine and was instantly transported to the moment in my childhood when we finally tracked down the smell in my bedroom to a dead mouse behind the skirting board.

  “Nazdarovye,” he said, “welcome to Mukhosransk.”

  “Nazdarovye, here’s to Mukhosransk,” and I downed the cup in one nose-clenching gulp.

  “How do you like it?” he asked.

  Easy-drinking firewater, full of fruity privet and deadly-nightshade flavours, aromatic on the nose with hints of last year’s acorns followed by a pond-water palate and parrot-cage finish.

  “Very nice. What is it?”

  “Samorgon.” Moonshine, as if I couldn’t tell. He unwrapped the greaseproof parcel to reveal a thick slice of something white and buttery. He cut it into cubes and handed me one on the point of his knife. It was repulsive and delicious at the same time, like the fatty rind of insufficiently fried bacon. He broke off a chunk of bread to give me, followed by a gherkin.

  “Very nice. What is it?”

  “Salo. Good for the heart.”

  Had I known that salo is raw, salted pig fat I would have asked him in what way it was good for the heart, but fortunately I remained in ignorance.

  “Do you work on the kolkhoz?” I asked.

  “I am the director of the Park of Culture and Leisure City. Luna Park.”

  “Ah,” was all I could say. I would have put him down as director of a crematorium sooner than an amusement park.

  “Now is a quiet period.”

  “The winter.”

  “No. The last two years. Nobody comes. Most rides are closed. We have no money for spare parts. The Eisk factory only takes dollars. We have the roller coaster ‘Panoramic View’. The passengers must haul the cars to the top themselves, but they are too lazy. Gyelter-Skyelter is open. It has no engine. All others are closed. Whirlwind, Ship’s Boy,

  Little Birch.”

  “They sound really exciting.”

  “Yes. We would like investment from abroad. I have written to Mr Valt Dizneh. I am waiting for his reply. We have a very good location. Moscow four hours. Will you find English capitalists to give me money for this?”

  “I’ll talk to my people.”

  “Thank you.”

  I felt that he was saying all this because it was what he expected himself to say. His heart wasn’t in it. He knew that his park was doomed and he didn’t care. He was like Evgenia and my audience, going through the motions, their purpose in life sucked out of them. I tried to cheer him up.

  “I’m sure things will get better. Russia is a great country.”

  “What do we do with her? We have tried serfdom. We have tried collectivism. Now we try anarchy. This is the Russian cycle. In the old days they said that anyone who rebelled against society was insane. They put them in mental hospitals. Now we opened the asylum doors a
nd the madmen are running the country. Before we had apartments and heating and hot water and bread and vodka. Now we live in a madhouse where everyone has the same obsession - getting money. When I was a boy this was a field. They grew carrots and turnips. Now it is rabbits and mushrooms.”

  I know which I’d rather have, but I let it pass. Never contradict a man with a gun.

  “You have plenty of time to hunt, then.”

  “The gun is my alibi. The only people who are allowed to walk alone are hunters and holy men. I have a simple life. I walk and breathe and eat and sleep and sometimes I shoot things, otherwise people would be suspicious. Anyway, it is good to kill once in a while. It is real. There is no illusion in the dead.”

  I began to get nervous again. If he reached for a cartridge on his belt it would be time to run like hell. I had no desire to be his reality check for the day. Looking back, I think my fears were unfounded. He was more likely to turn the gun on himself.

  “Well, that was very nice,” I said, brushing crumbs off my trousers. “I must go. Train to catch.”

  We stood up and shook hands in the sincere and meaningful way that you do when you know you will never see the other person again.

  “I’ll be in touch. About investors for your park.”

  “A sweet lie is better than a bitter truth. Thank you.”

  The sun was going down and a cool breeze blew up. I left him on his log staring at the ground in a gentle rain of falling leaves. For days afterwards people cracked up laughing when I said I’d been advising on restaurants in Mukhosransk. Then Flor explained that it is slang for the middle of nowhere, literally where flies go to shit.