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

by John Mole

  “Oh, Mister John Mole, you are English? You know the Chyarnocks?”

  “Um...”

  “Of Blackburn Lancashire. Very famous in Orekhovo-Zuyevo. They made the Blue and Whites. You must know them. They brought grass from England. It is a pleasure to meet their countryman.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about but rode the goodwill. I discovered later that, like many industrialists at the time, the Morosovs hired British managers. Harry Charnock from Blackburn came over with his nephews. Keen on soccer, they founded the first Russian football club in 1894. They built the ground and imported turf from England. The Orekhovo club still plays on it. They were founder members of the first Russian league, the Moscow League, which they won several times before the Revolution. Bruce Lockhart, diplomat, secret agent and writer, played for them and won a championship medal in 1912. The future Field Marshal Earl Wavell also turned out for the team. They still play in blue and white, the colours of Blackburn Rovers.

  Calling on banks had been my bread and butter for years, so I felt at home. Over fine china cups we inquired about the health of the rouble and the dollar, the prospect for interest rates and the whereabouts of gold and oil prices, like two old aunties discussing their relatives. Sergei Artemovich did everything possible not to lend to farms. The payment system was so bad that it took up three months to get a loan into the borrower’s account. It took two weeks to transfer money among branches of the same bank.

  The financial system was choking business. It tied up working capital, pushed up the demand for credit, dried up cash flow and made self-financing impossible. Because of rampant inflation, money halved its value every three months. Businesses immediately spent their cash on goods, so they were usually illiquid. All this was strangling private enterprise at birth, as I reported in an article called “Enemies of Enterprise” for a British newspaper. I showed it to Oleg and suggested he put it into Izvestia and the Moscow Business Times to puff the credentials of ICBM.

  “Znachet, this is very good for foreigners to read. But it is horseradish. It will make Russians laugh. The goats guard the cabbage. These banks are set up as money pots for their owners. They dip their hands in like kiddies in a sweetie jar. Borrowing money at a good rate is easy. If bank manager gives you money you give him a nice bribe. If he does not give you money you kill him.”

  Banking is a high-risk business. In the past ten years more than 300 bankers have been murdered. I have often wondered if Sergei Artemovich is still with us.

  I called the EU office about the funding application. It had been approved in principle. All it needed was the Representative’s signature, but he had been called back urgently to Brussels before he could get his pen out. He never returned. There was loose talk, gossip, rumour: shady deals, a Russian mistress, dummy companies, slush funds, dodgy deals, sweeteners. Accusations were retracted before they had been made. Things were swept under carpets. Skeletons were bundled into cupboards. Nothing was found, nothing was alleged. It was all based on malice and misunderstanding. But auditors swarmed over the office and local grants were suspended indefinitely.

  I was indignant. I was self-righteous. I was secretly pleased. What seemed a great idea on a flip chart would have been a nightmare in practice. It looked smooth on paper, but we forgot the ravines. The main problem was not the creditworthiness of the farms but the banking system. My proposal was a bad idea. Of course I didn’t say this in my report to the professor. I weaselled on about money supply, reserve ratios and so on, with sideswipes at the EU for not financing further research. My recommendation was that the Farmers’ Union should consider setting up its own network of banks. I suggested that it ask for assistance from another institution with experience of agricultural lending. A Western cooperative perhaps? It was just an idea.

  My employment contact was never formally terminated. Technically I am still a rabotnik. I have four weeks in a sanatorium owing to me.

  Am I coconut?

  Getting information about market trends, commodity prices, supplies and farming capabilities was not easy. In countries with a tradition of secrecy, official statistics are eager to please but not to inform. Hard information is a commodity to be traded. Free information is not to be trusted. You don’t give away the good stuff unless there is something in return. And you certainly don’t gab to strangers.

  Mustard Flor did his best to help me. Over the bitter coffee he brewed behind his shelves of unreliable statistical journals I enjoyed his conversation, a disarming combination of intelligence and naïvety. He asked me about this Western company or that international organization and whether they were hiring economists. I gave him such plausible advice that he treated me like a wise uncle on many other serious matters.

  “Ah, Mister John, why does dollar bill have pyramid and eye? Are all Americans Freemasons?”

  “Ah, Mister John, is it true that Jimi Hendrix was Cherokee Indian?”

  “Ah, Mister John, you know America, what is difference between horseshit, bullshit, ratshit and chickenshit?”

  One day he came into my office on the fifth floor. Struggling with conflicting data on potato prices in the Black Lands, the fertile crescent of Southern Russia, I was glad of the interruption. He asked what I was doing on the following Saturday. A wise person answers such a question by stalling and fudging until they find out what is being proposed. But I wasn’t thinking and he was delighted that I had no plans.

  “Please be my guest at Tchaikovsky Symphonic Theatre.”

  I passed the theatre on my way to work. It was a greystone barracks of a building on the corner of Tverskaya and the Inner Ring. Except for his ballet music I like Tchaikovsky, although I hoped they were not doing the 1812.

  “I’d love to. What are they playing?”

  “It is State Troupe of the Autonomous Republic of Udmurtia.”

  “Oh. Ah. How nice.”

  I kicked myself for not stalling and fudging. It was too late now. One of my earliest black-and-white television memories is the Red Army Choir at the London Palladium, Cossacks squatting and kicking their legs out and beefy chaps in AA patrolman uniform belting out the “Volga Boat Song”. I was not impressed then and nothing I have seen since has converted me to manufactured folklore, from Riverdance to Chinese opera.

  The name Udmurtia sounded so improbable outside a Tintin story that for a moment I hoped it was a satire based on dire Soviet national culture shows. But Udmurtia is all too real, an autonomous republic in the middle of the Urals, famous for steel and locomotives and Kalashnikov rifles. It has its own language, Udmurt, in the same family as Finnish and Hungarian. Flor was born in the capital, Izhevsk. His father was a Muscovite and his mother Udmurt. They moved to Moscow when Flor was ten and shortly afterwards his father left them. His mother did not want to give up their precious Moscow propiska and the chance for Flor to go to Moscow State University, so they remained exiles. His mother had died a few months before, so saloon-bar psychology suggested that the show was part of the mourning process.

  “Ah, Mister John, you will like it very much,” he threatened. “Udmurt culture is wonderful. We have music and singing and dancing.”

  And colourful frocks and funny hats and hand clapping and plinky-plonk music on peculiar instruments and inventive ways of doing the splits. Ah well. There would be shampanskoe and red caviar canapés at the interval. Look on the bright side.

  “And you will meet my girlfriend, Maria. She speaks very good English. She wants to go to America.”

  It would be just the three of us, an odd combination. I could see why he would show off his cultural heritage to his girlfriend and to a curious foreigner, but not to both at the same time.

  We arranged to meet at Belaruskaya metro station, green line, direction Krasnogvardeyskaya, last carriage. I was there first and when they appeared I thought her appearance was a trick of the artificial light. She was the first Goth I had seen in Moscow. Pancake-white face, purple lipstick, red-rimmed eyes, rats’ tails of long bl
ack hair shot with silver braid, long black dress, black shawl. A green woolly hat and a standard-issue maroon Russian overcoat marred the vampirish effect, but it was 20 below outside. Under it all she was very attractive with high cheekbones and very blue eyes.

  “Hi, I’m happy to meet you, I’m Maria, how are you today?”

  “Orchen priadna. How do you do?”

  “I’m good? I hope we didn’t keep you waiting too long?” She spoke like Voice of America, enunciating statements as questions, but with the stern expression that Russians put on when they first meet.

  “Mister John was many years in America,” said Flor, and I understood why I had been invited. She was crazy about the US. If I had known I would have come in a parka and baseball cap. I didn’t even have any gum to chew. I hoped she would not be disappointed.

  “Oh wow? Where?”

  “Nooyawk. Ellay,” I drawled.

  “Oh wow?”

  Actually I’d spent most of my time in Pittsburgh, the Izhevsk of the Midwest, but I was trying to help Flor out. Nervous at first, he relaxed on the way to the theatre as Maria and I discussed our preferences for bagels over muffins, the ocean over the coast, Morrison over Jagger.

  “Me, I’m heavy metal?” she said.

  “I saw Aerosmith once.”

  “Wow, I don’t believe it? In Central Park?”

  “Pittsburgh Civic Arena.”

  We had good seats in the front of the first balcony. The inside of the theatre was as grey and functional as the outside. The audience were ordinary Moscow folk out for an evening’s entertainment. The same audiences with the same taste in music, hairstyles and clothes were at The Sound of Music in Watford Civic Centre, Jesus Christ Superstar at the Dortmund Staatsoper, Oklahoma! at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. Maria the Goth could not have stood out more in ballgown and tiara.

  The State Troupe of Udmurtia lived up to every misgiving. The national costume was a confection of Turkic flounce and Celtic Tartan. Their music sounded like national music everywhere, cover versions of the same dozen old European tunes and jigging rhythms. We had the Udmurt versions of the maypole and the floral dance and the eightsome reel with hand slapping and foot stamping. In between the dance numbers a young woman with a flowing headdress and a zither on her knee sang about wild swans. A white-haired bard declaimed some complicated business involving a green man of the forest taking a human bride away on the back of a bear with a bull riding on a fish. A lad with a balalaika charmed a crescent moon out of the sky for his lover, or perhaps it was his dead lover, I didn’t quite catch the drift. It was the usual stuff you find from the Atlantic to the Urals, the Baltic to the Med.

  I tapped my feet and played arpeggios on my knees to show willing. Maria made no pretence. She looked like a vampire selecting her next victim among innocent villagers at play. Flor loved every cadence, every swirl, every hop and leap. The climax of the first half was a full-company rendition of Udmurtia Miyam, the national anthem, which had him applauding with tears in his eyes and shouting bravo.

  The interval was difficult. I could sense a headache coming on, not in me but Maria. I felt it my duty to distract her until it was too late to say she was going home. While Flor queued for the demi-sec and canapés, I tried to find out what she saw in him.

  “Where did you meet Flor?”

  “We were classmates in high school? We live in the same apartment building? We did figure-skating lessons together?”

  “Do you live with your family?”

  “My mom?”

  “What does she think ofAmerica?”

  “All Russians wanna go to America? The difference is between those who make it happen and those who make wishes on the birthday cake?”

  Flor came back with the refreshments looking excited. “Hey, there’s big party afterwards. I meet my friend Alexei from Izhevsk. We go in his car. Some actors from the show will go. It will be big Udmurt party. We will have a good fun.”

  This was the moment for Maria’s migraine/flu/fainting fit/fever to strike. I would insist on taking her home and leave Flor to enjoy the show and the Udmurt reunion. But she didn’t fall ill and condemned us both to the second half. She lapsed into more murderous brooding, I turned on false gaiety, Flor was transported. After a touching scene from an Udmurt epic in which the heroes get killed and come back to their girlfriends as big eagles and do the hokey-cokey, he turned to me with misty eyes and said that his mother would have loved it. I was happy for him, but very sad that he missed his mother and a little sad that he liked this stuff.

  I queued up for the coats while Flor and Maria looked for Alexei. He was a fresh-faced lad with the broad shoulders and barrel chest of a wrestler. He led us to his car, a Peugeot 504 estate with three rows of seats. Nine of us got in. Maria had to press up close to me, which was pleasant. Our Udmurt friends, led by Flor, broke into song. It was a lot more raucous than what we had just been listening to and all the better for it.

  We ground through a blizzard, Alexei crouched over the wheel, our breath misting up the windows, not that it made much difference with the state of his wipers and the horizontal snow. The journey was interminable and would have been insufferable if Maria had not found her most comfortable position with her thigh on mine and her head on my chest. In the stench of hot bodies and damp clothes, she smelled of warm raspberries. By the time we arrived my right side was asleep, my back was in spasm and I was in love.

  We piled out of the car into a factory courtyard. It was littered with rusting machinery and looked disused, but in Russia it is hard to tell. The concept of depreciation is unknown, so assets are used until they fall apart. These business-like thoughts were far from my mind as I slithered, bent and stiff, through the snow in pursuit of Maria, like Quasimodo after Esmeralda.

  We took a freight elevator up to the top floor and stepped out into a Greenwich Village loft circa 1965: cranes and tackles and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, a double bed on a platform made of packing cases, clothes hanging on lines strung wall to wall, a drum kit, an industrial heater like a jet engine, tables made of trestles and boards. In the middle of the floor was a wrestling mat. The walls were sprayed in rainbow colours. It smelled of liniment and marijuana, beer and ripe trainers. Alexei’s father was the factory manager. When the money went out of Russian sport and public facilities were privatized, he gave the top floor to Alexei and his friends to practise in.

  More people arrived, including some of the cast of the show. We applauded them out of the elevator. They had changed out of national into international costume, jeans and leather jackets and trainers. Someone put on Led Zeppelin. Alexei produced cases of beer, paper cups, loaves of bread, onions and a massive salami. Vodka and cognac were spirited out of coat pockets. The sweet smell of hash mingled with Russian Marlboro. A quartet of Goths arrived, but not even they could cheer up Maria who sat disconsolate on the bed chain smoking. I sat down next to her.

  “Cheer up.”

  “Is this like America?” she asked.

  “Not any more. Rich people live in lofts now. Bankers. Media people. The sort who can’t tell the difference between a life and a lifestyle.”

  “Russians have no lifestyle and no life? What can we do?”

  “What Americans do. Get an analyst and a decorator.”

  Flor dragged me up to introduce me to his friends. I drifted round in his wake, remembering to look pofaced and not grinning like a half-wit. I washed up next to a pale, cadaverous man in black suit and shirt, immense purple bags under his eyes, lurking in the corner shadows. He offered me a joint. It was like an anti-drugs commercial. Say No to Death. As Rizlas were in short supply, stoners used Russian cigarettes, called papirosa, that have a hollow card-board tube instead of a filter. A couple of flicks got rid of the tobacco and you refilled it with stuff. I declined. I have never mastered the technique of speaking while I held my breath. It was too much like the conversations on a chest ward.

  “Good shit. Kazakh,” he croaked in American E
nglish. “Grows wild on the steppe. Organic. Good for you.”

  “They use this in Udmurtia?”

  “Use it all over. Kazakhs and Kirgiz and Uzbeks have smoked it for ever. Not even those Communist sonsabitches could stamp it out. You know how the Russians conquered them? They were smashed on vodka. Alcohol makes you aggressive. Grass makes you pacifist. Booze against grass.”

  “Are you from Izhevsk?”

  “Chicago. My grandparents were from there. Sent out to learn the steel business in 1922 and stayed. I came back to help out the old country.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Pizza Hut. You?”

  “Jackets. Baked potatoes.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a struggle to find raw materials here.”

  “Do what we do. We import everything from sauce to napkins.”

  “Let’s have lunch.”

  “Sure.”

  The noise got too loud to talk. One of Alexei’s wrestler friends started hammering the drums, as if the music wasn’t loud enough already. I was out of my depth. I hadn’t been to a party like this for twenty years and I didn’t like them then. Maria had disappeared. I lurked in a corner on a packing case and wished I knew how to get home.

  I escaped from the noise and fug down a corridor to a similarsized loft, still used for storage by the factory. It served as the chill-out room in more senses than one, as it was unheated and must have been 20 below. It was like coming out of the sauna and diving into the cold pool. Flor was there, standing by himself at the window. I stood beside him and we watched the snow falling on factory roofs. Through the static was the Moscow River, frozen and snow covered, a swathe of nothingness through the city.