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

by John Mole

  Afanasy was no longer the dude from Brighton Beach. From his hat to his boots he was clad in sheepskin, fleece side in. He looked like a giant shammy.

  I scrambled up the snow bank and he handed up our gear from the boot. An enormous corkscrew four foot long and a foot wide. A quiver of rods. A couple of pieces of wood nailed onto short bits of broomstick to sit on, like squat shooting sticks, that he called goat’s legs. A home-made wooden box with a leather carrying strap.

  We were beside a vast sheet of ice whose edges were lost all round in white mist. I don’t know if it was a lake or a river and I couldn’t ask because my teeth were gritted under my scarf to stop them chattering. I trod in his foot-steps across crunchy snow, deep and crisp and even, and onto the rink. Not falling over was the first challenge. I shuffled bow-legged, arms as outstretched as my clothing would allow. Around us were the huddled figures of other fishermen, scattered, one to a hole, anchorites in silent contemplation.

  The bank was lost in the mist behind us when Afanasy called a halt. He looked round with a sigh of satisfaction and opened the box. He took out two bottles of vodka and handed one to me. We unscrewed and took a swig. As always the first slug went down the gullet like a wooden stick, but was infinitely preferable to freezing air. We took a second slug, the one that goes down like a falcon, and I felt better.

  Afanasy got to work on the ice. Like the rest of his stuff the augur looked homemade, a twist of sharpened steel and an axe handle bolted horizontally across the top for turn ing. He laboured to little apparent effect when suddenly the blade bit and he was through. The ice was about a foot thick. Clear, greenish water lapped and gurgled. He gave me a rod out of the canvas bag, a metal stick with a reel soldered to the thick end. It was less than two feet long. There’s not a lot of casting and trawling to be done in a hole a foot wide. On the business end of the line was a triple hook soldered to what looked like a handleless spoon. Mormishka, he said, which I took to be the name of the lure and not an endearment. My previous experience of fishing had been periods of intense boredom punctuated by impaling wriggly things on the hook, so a permanent metal fixture was a relief.

  The next challenge was to perch on the goat’s leg. Because of my padding I couldn’t reach round to my back-side, so Afanasy had to steer me onto it like a geriatric on a commode. It was extremely uncomfortable, not because of the seat, which I couldn’t feel through the layers, but because of the need to keep my legs tense so I wouldn’t fall off. Afanasy told me to lower the hook to the bottom, raise it three inches and keep it jiggling, like a shrimp. The rod should be constantly vibrating. The first part was difficult because I couldn’t feel anything through my gloves. The second part was easy and he congratulated me on my technique. I didn’t tell him it was because I was shivering.

  He left me perched over my hole and bored his own a couple of yards away. Unable to move because of my clothes, lower body tensed on the goat leg, upper body jiggling the rod, I experienced myself solidifying. I couldn’t feel my face. My limbs had that ominous sensation just before you get cramp in bed. The best I can think of to describe the rest of my body is necrosis. I began to understand the meaning of frost-hardened and why farmers looked the way they did.

  One of the first rules of survival in extreme cold is never to drink alcohol. It opens the blood vessels and makes you colder faster. To hell with that. The third slug went down like a little bird. The saying is silent as to subsequent slugs, but each was more attractive than the last.

  “Jarn, jiggle the rod.”

  I couldn’t. I was so cold I had stopped shivering. Only the DTs would get me shaking again. Through frosted lashes I saw Afanasy yank fish after fish out of his hole, lovely silver things that flapped around on the ice in agony and died. I didn’t care. To stave off the sweet drowsiness of hypothermia I concentrated on what Afanasy was telling me about fish - their names and habits and habitats and all the different ways of catching them under the ice in rivers and lakes and the sea. It was like pinching yourself to keep awake when you’re driving, pain preferable to oblivion. All good things... and bad ones too.

  Had I been able to through the icicles, I would have wept tears of relief when Afanasy stood up. He was very kind, extricating the rod from my hands and pulling me to my feet. I stood up like a cedilla. When we walked onto the ice I was a head taller than him. When we walked off I only came up to his shoulder.

  He invited me home for hot soup and fried fish. We were only half an hour away. The heater on full blast just made me feel colder.

  Afanasy’s apartment complex had a row of wooden garages, the doors secured with arrays of locks and bars and chains. Before he drove the car in he invited me to look at his collection of fishing stuff at the back. There were rods and traps, feeders and nets, and smokers to deal with the catch. Like the augur and the rods, it was all home made. He took out of his pocket the mormishka he had just been using.

  “See dis? My Dad made it. He fed the family with it. By no means. We woulda starved. He made everythin’.”

  “Did you live in the country?”

  “Moscow. He lost a leg in the war. What job could he get? He taught me you want somethin’, you make it. My wife and daughter I feed too. Fresh fish. Through the deficits it kept us goin’. By no means. She goes on at me to make more money but what good is money? Can you eat money?”

  For once I was grateful that his apartment was over-heated. I stripped down to three layers, checked in the mirror that I hadn’t left my ears on the ice, and waited for my extremities to rejoin the rest of me. The narrow hall was crowded with fishy things and photographs. A six-foot varnished sturgeon hung from the ceiling.

  Afanasy went into the bedroom to take off his sheep and I went into the living room. I was expecting more fish. Instead, my first thought was the Massacre of the Innocents. An otherwise unremarkable room was a charnel house of little heads and limbs and torsos in various stages of dismemberment. Tots and tinies in their best dresses lay where they fell on every flat surface. A table was heaped with little clothes and fabrics.

  “My wife, Ludmilla.”

  “Is she a puppeteer?”

  “She makes dolls.”

  “Quite a hobby.”

  “By no means. She makes a fortune.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. He clattered around and microwaved a meaty soup to keep us going while he gutted the morning’s catch.

  “Where does Ludmilla sell her dolls?”

  “Houston. Phoenix. San Diego. They love ‘em over there. Antique dolls is big business. Big collectors. They pay a lot of money. By no means. They love old Russian dolls.”

  Over soup and beer and fried fish with gherkins, he told me about Ludmilla’s business. In the early days of street trading, antiques of all kinds could be picked up for nothing. Ludmilla had a doll that had belonged to her great-grandmother. In the Izmailovsky Park flea market a Texan woman called Marcia gave her ten dollars for it. Ludmilla couldn’t believe her luck. The American walked away and came back. She said she couldn’t give her ten dollars, it wouldn’t be right. Ludmilla was ready to fight to keep the bill, make a scene, call the police. The American said she would give her another ten if she came to her hotel. In her room Marcia showed her the other old dolls she had bought. Back in Houston they were worth up to a thousand dollars.

  Ludmilla went into business with her. She scoured the markets for antique dolls. She made trips to other cities, built up a network of suppliers, became an expert in restoring them. She found craftsmen who could work in china and wax and wood. As the supply of genuine articles dried up, the craftsmen made replicas out of old materials. She found old fabrics and threads and learned how to make the clothes in authentic ways. She taught other miniature dress makers. A year ago she went to a convention in Houston and made direct contact with collectors, by-passing Marcia.

  “Amazing. What an entrepreneur. What a case study. I’d love to meet her. When will she be back?”

  “Coupla months,
probly. They got conventions this time a year. She’s getting our daughter into college.”

  “How long has she been away?”

  “I toldya. About a year ago. By no means.”

  Afanasy huddled over his fishing rod summer and winter, feeding a family who would never come back. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Would you ever go out and join them?

  “They’ll come back. Dry bread at home is better than roast meat abroad”

  “So are these fish. They’re very tasty, Afanasy.”

  The goats are guarding the cabbage

  We identified several private farms that could grow potatoes for us from the seeds we gave them. Financing was a serious problem. They could get grants for plant and equipment from the Union, but they still had to find financing for running costs, fertilizer and so on. In the West they would get seasonal credit from banks. Our suppliers had no experience and no established market for their produce. While they had a right to their land in a sort of lease, they could not mortgage it, as all land remained the property of the state. No bank manager worth his two-hour lunch would lend to such a prospect. So when the chance came to find financing for the farms, I took it.

  I was looking forward to a quiet afternoon, catching up on paperwork, drinking tea, eating cabbage pirozhki, practising my Russian, watching television with the secretaries, staring out of the window at the falling snow, reading Chekhov, doing the puzzles in the Moscow Times. I was on my second glass of tea when Natasha summoned me to the professor’s office. His secretary, a well-endowed girl with big hair, was doing something intricate with her fingernails, so didn’t give me a glance when I knocked on the professor’s door and walked in. He was shaking hands with three enormous men.

  “Why, come and see us. Before the football season’s over.”

  “Hmmm. Do you have ice hockey?”

  “We got the St Louis Blues.”

  They turned and looked at me like defensive tackles eyeing a rookie quarterback. A combined 750-pound dressed weight of superior cornfed well-hung well-marbled certified prime Midwestern cowman, bursting with vitamins, probiotics and growth hormones. Mail-order grey suits with tube jackets and turnups above the ankles. Matching tie and top-pocket handkerchief. Short-sleeved white button-down shirt with a red pack of Marlboro in the pocket. They were an awesome sight. The professor didn’t introduce us and they plodded out in single file.

  “Hmmm, Mister John, you were a banker. Please, we would like your proposals for a Farmers’ Bank. There are 60,000 private farms in Russia and the banks will not lend to them. We have to make our own bank.”

  “Why don’t you find a European bank to advise you? The French are good at that sort of thing.”

  “We have a proposal from Land O’Lakes. Those were the men. They will set a bank up for us with branches in each oblast”

  “Then why ask me?”

  “Hmm, we want a second opinion.”

  Land O’Lakes, based in St Louis, Missouri, is the biggest cooperative in the world. Its logo is an Indian maiden recursively offering a pack of butter with the logo of an Indian maiden offering a pack of butter with the logo of an Indian maiden... It dominates the dairy business. I sniffed per diems over the horizon. Perhaps I could get involved with the project. It was ten years since I had escaped banking and in any case I knew nothing about agricultural lending. I reckoned two weeks would be long enough to bone up.

  “Of course. When shall I come back?”

  “Twelve o’clock.”

  “What?”

  “We have a meeting of a deputation of the Council of Economic Regeneration. We have the deputy mayors of ten Russian cities. It will be a good opportunity to discuss the proposals.”

  I had exactly an hour to develop a presentation or a sudden illness. Less the twenty minutes when my mind went a complete blank. He who takes no risks never gets to drink champagne. I decided to go back to the fundamentals of banking, ask the audience how they applied to farmers, and hope that I could swing it out until they went for lunch.

  We gathered in the main conference room. I was to speak in English with Natasha for consecutive translation. Twenty men sat in rows with politely glum expressions, hands folded across their stomachs, a posse of deputies - Deputy Mayors, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Deputy Chairman of Moscow District Agricultural Council, Deputy Governors, four plain and simple Deputies from the Parliament. I have ransacked my files and my diary for the name of the Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg. Two men had just been appointed to that office. One was Vladimir Putin, but I don’t think he was there as I would have remembered him, since he resembles my fellow Brummie and Blues supporter, the comedian Jasper Carrott.

  I stood at a flip chart, jacket off, mind blank, sniffing the felttip for courage. First, the professor explained the problem. In theory, Russian banks were supposed to lend to private farms at 20 per cent. But they could earn 300 per cent on lending overnight to other banks. Their excuse was that farmers were not creditworthy. What could be done? The professor sat down. Over to me. I took a deep breath, mastered the liquefaction of my innards, ignored the pounding heart and perspiring brow and started.

  “Well, er, um, what is a bank?”

  Thank God for consecutive translation - precious moments to think of what to say next. I started off with the fundamental job of banks: to look after other people’s money. This was startling news to my audience. Brought up under the old system of centralized planning, they thought that banks were mechanisms for dishing out the state’s largesse.

  I have to say this was one of the few occasions when I have impressed myself. I have often winged it but rarely taken flight. I started out at the flip chart in a state of near total ignorance and when I finished I had learned as much as anyone.

  The gist of my story was that the Union did not need a bank. Who would run it? They would need premises and safes and guards and clerks and credit analysts and systems. They would have to survive in the chaotic Russian money markets. What the Union needed was a Guarantee Corporation, which would guarantee loans to farmers. The Union would pool the collective risk of their members. If they could wheedle a government guarantee so much the better - banks would have no excuse not to lend, in fact they could classify the loans as government securities that they had to hold by law. The Union would do what it was good at, evaluating the viability of its members.

  I finished, my shirt damp, heady with adrenaline and high on felttip fumes. I slumped in a chair. The others were huddled in a circle talking too fast and too low for me to understand. Finally, the professor stood up.

  “We like your ideas. Please, we would like you to put it into practice.”

  “What about Land O’Lakes?”

  “Your idea is better. I will tell them tomorrow.”

  The satisfaction of putting one over on the Yanks was overshadowed by the enormity of what I had taken on. The Russian financial market was a mystery. I reassured myself that I was little different from other advisers parachuted in from the West to put the Russians right. But unlike them, I wasn’t being paid. Either I had to palm the project off onto someone else or find a gravy train to hop onto.

  The first step was to establish credibility. I persuaded the professor to hire me as a employee of the Union, a rabotnik. The contract was approved by the central committee of the Trade Union of Agricultural Workers and regulated by Russian labour laws. I was entitled to Russian holidays, free Russian medical care, and a week in a sanatorium if I stayed more than three years. If this wasn’t incentive enough, I had a salary of 10,000 roubles a month. This was more than twice the national average, three times the pay of a university lecturer and twice that of a middleranking civil servant. When I signed the contract 10,000 roubles was worth $50. After three months it was worth $25.

  With a Union business card and an outline for a feasibility study, I called at the office of the Representative of the European Union. A helpful young man explained that the Representative had his own budget for
smaller projects that he could approve locally. He told me what to say in the application and was optimistic that we would be successful. I delivered the form that afternoon. Buoyed with hope, I got down to some basic research.

  I wanted to talk to a bank outside Moscow that had farmers as customers, so Afanasy fixed me up with the newly established Komprombank in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, fifty miles east of Moscow. “Newly established bank” was as much of a cliché as “onion-domed church” or “frozen steppe”. In 1988 there were five banks in Russia. Five years later there were over two thousand.

  Orekhovo-Zuyevo had been a textile town since the eighteenth century. Under the Morozovs, Old Believers and new industrialists, it boomed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Now on harder times, there were still old mills and mansions and handsome workers’ housing among crumbling Soviet monoliths. The headquarters and only branch of Komprombank was the pre-revolutionary Merchants’ Club. The Communist Party used it as a guest house. Two years ago they sold it to a consortium of privatized state businesses for their new bank.

  It was a lumpish red-brick building making three sides of a courtyard. A neoclassical portico was stuck on the front, topped by a weatherworn goddess with a torch illuminating the triumph of Commerce, Communism or Capitalism, depending on the era. Milling in the courtyard was the usual mob that hung around public buildings: drivers, messengers, beggars, drunks, old women selling pies and cigarettes in singles, and a score of people with legitimate business, pleading to be let in by bouncers in long leather coats. Natasha and I were on the guest list. In a marbled hall, toughs in sharp grey suits took our coats and ushered us into the antechamber of the general manager, where two decorative secretaries attended to his needs, their manicures and the daytime soaps. All trace of the building’s Communist past had been washed out in pale pink and cream.

  Sergei Artemovich came out to greet us. Little and round and jowly and bald, he affected half-moon spectacles, a heavy three-piece suit and a watch chain. He looked like a relic of the Merchants’ Club, straight out of a Capitalist Enemy of the People poster of the 1920s. He ushered us into his sanctum and we sat down in front of his desk on upholstered mahogany. The walls were covered with the dark panelling with which bankers the world over hope to convince us they are trustworthy. The desk had two telephones, black and green. He ignored the black when it rang, bongoeing his fat fingers on the arm of his chair until one of the secretaries risked their nails to pick it up. When the green rang he plucked it up and stood to attention and spoke in hushed, urgent tones. This was the power of the telephone seen at the receiving end.