Investment Biker

by Jim Rogers

  Even if they were Communists and noble, even though this was the largest empire the world had ever seen, state fiat could not overturn the laws of supply and demand. That is, by keeping these prices low the Communists had robbed everyone, including the state and the party, of any real-world incentive to produce and distribute every product. What possible incentive could there be to make hinges or socks when every pair lost money?

  This was the society that legislated that it was a crime, one called “speculation,” for an individual, organization, or the state to sell anything for more than it had paid for it. I didn’t think even the most ardent Marxist professor at a Western university would believe that any economic unit could survive without tacking on something for its overhead, and possibly its profit.

  No, the real crime here was the perversion of human nature, the original Communist notion that the natural way of trade and commerce that had existed throughout the world for thousands of years was somehow evil. The real crime was the misery—the shortages, the shoddy goods, and the lack of opportunity—perpetrated by the Communists on the Soviet people for decades.

  Here was one of the twentieth century’s largest experiments in statism—an experiment with 290 million lives—and what a failure it had been!

  …

  By now we had a small collection of maps in German, French, and Russian. When I sat down to plan our route to Moscow—six thousand miles away—I found that while the cities listed on our visas were represented with the mapmaker’s usual little white circles, something was missing.

  The roads between them.

  Back west, around Moscow, were the mapmaker’s red, brown, and yellow lines that marked roads. Over the four thousand miles from here to Omsk, however, there were no connecting roadways—not a red, yellow, white, or even broken road line. The crossties of the train line were clearly marked, but not the road.

  “Maybe there aren’t any roads,” said Tabitha, giving me a fish eye, ever the realist.

  “Come on,” I answered. “They just haven’t surveyed out here. You forget how huge Siberia is. It’s cheaper to make the maps without running all over Siberia measuring the place. Besides, the German and French mapmakers probably couldn’t get in.”

  “What about the Russian mapmakers?” she asked. “They couldn’t get in, either?”

  Ignoring her humor, I asked around. People stroked their chins, and a faraway look crept into their eyes. Some were sure there was a road to Khabarovsk, the next big town westward, but even they were uncertain about what lay beyond it toward Chita and Ulan-Ude.

  “There have to be roads connecting these cities,” I said to Tabitha.

  Her fish eye had grown stronger. “How can you be so sure?”

  I didn’t have a particularly good answer, except whoever heard of a country’s major cities, a few hundred miles apart, without connecting roads? It just didn’t make sense. In all my travels I’ve found that locals know less about traveling in their country than do travelers. What New Yorker can tell you how to get to Kansas City, and what the roads are like to get there? Who in Montana can tell you how to get to Birmingham, Alabama? In Russia the locals knew less than usual, as Russians didn’t travel. If your relatives never moved away and shopping was no better one or two hundred miles down the road, why go?

  But if my informants were unclear about the route, they were quite sure about one thing: Whatever route did exist, it was not paved. That was all right. I’d grown up on unpaved roads in the backwoods of Alabama, and since then I’d traveled on my share of unpaved road, lots of it.

  …

  Here in Nakhodka we met some dockworkers who told us, through one of their number who spoke English, that they had learned only the year before that it was legal for foreigners to leave their countries and return without special permission. In the Soviet Union they’d always been told that if they left the country, they couldn’t come back except under exceptional circumstances, and that this was true throughout the world.

  Here was another way the Communists controlled their people, another way they’d brainwashed them.

  These workers were furious at having been lied to, at finding out the world was different from the one they’d been told about.

  Even though the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, it was tormented by memories of prior invasions, from the Mongols seven hundred years before, down to those of Napoleon and Hitler. For many scores of years, their leaders had been consumed by the need to defend their long, vulnerable perimeter, which had pushed them to conquer more and more territories.

  As generations of Russian novelists have described to us, the Russian soul wants to be different, to be Russian and Slavic, to be wild and free and moody. However, it also yearns to be a part of Europe, to embrace logic, order, and civilization. The Russian soul longs for freedom and originality, yet rightly is terrified that new ideas will stir up anarchy and chaos, for both Russia and the Soviet Union had been held together by fragile bonds.

  With all this in mind, we went to visit the head of the docks, the boss of the whole shooting match here, a high Communist official sitting under a picture of Lenin. He spoke excellent English.

  I asked why the dockworkers had been lied to, how their bitter anger affected their work.

  “Why do you ask me these questions?” he shot back. “I’m as angry as everybody else. Don’t think it’s us against them. I’m fed up with Communism, too. From Gorbachev on down, we’re all furious. I’m as angry as those guys on the docks. Life here is a nightmare.”

  This was a year before the coup in 1991. The army was fed up, too, even then uninterested in taking over a bankrupt state, one that, they saw clearly, they had no idea how to run.

  “You Australia?” we were asked in a restaurant by a large, friendly Russian with a strong accent.

  “No, American,” I answered.

  “No good beer, ya?”

  “No, beer is good,” I replied, wondering if something was being lost in the translation. We were drinking vodka.

  “Yes, near no good. Australia better. Don’t stay near.”

  He shuffled off, and I asked Tabitha what that was all about.

  “Beer is good in Australia but not here,” she said. “He’d like to be somewhere else.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “No, just practicing his English.”

  After the fifth person brought up Australia, it finally penetrated. We made inquiries and, to our surprise, learned that an Australian farmer and his family lived only a few miles from Nakhodka.

  We drove out to visit, and indeed there was an Australian farmer. A day laborer on a farm back in Australia, Robert Sokob had left what sounded like tough conditions and had been here several months. He had become discouraged with his prospects back home and, like immigrants everywhere, came here to make more money.

  Both his and his wife Lena’s grandparents had emigrated out of Russia; they’d been White Russians. Both sets of grandparents moved south to China in the twenties or thirties to escape Stalin’s takeover. When the Communists came yet again and took over China, they fled to Australia. Despite their Russian roots, Robert and Lena and their two sons, Peter and Paul, and their two daughters, Anna and Alexandra, sounded as Australian as could be.

  Robert was about forty; Lena, a few years younger. Both declared that even after three generations they thought they might make it in Russia. They paid five-and-a-half rubles, about a dollar, as their monthly rent, and about half that for electricity. The couple said they missed the good roads, friends, and beer from back home.

  The Russians had allocated Robert a hundred hectares, about two hundred and fifty acres, on which he proposed to raise cattle. He had acquired more assets to work with in one stroke than he would have been able to in a lifetime back in Australia. He said that the Russians at the embassy in Australia had tried to dissuade him, saying he didn’t know what he was getting into, but he had insisted on coming. A chance to have his own place had to be b
etter than the meager day wages he had been earning. He would take the chance, the immigrant’s eternal gamble.

  Several Russian magazines had come a long distance to interview him. After all, he was probably the only nonideological person to immigrate to the Soviet Union in fifty years.

  They gave him a house, but it was a house like all of them out here, no indoor plumbing, rudimentary electricity, and a primitive kitchen, not much more than running water and a wood-and-coal stove. Almost every Alabama sharecropper had more. Lena, a bit shy and reserved, seemed perplexed and still stunned by the move and the harshness of their new country.

  Their nineteen-year-old son, Peter, wanted so little to do with this plan that he was enlisting in the Soviet navy. Their fourteen-year-old daughter, Anna, was even less enthusiastic. Of course, fourteen-year-olds aren’t too pleased about anything, but this was life without music, no rock ‘n’ roll, no radio, no telephone, no pictures of pop stars, no soda fountain, no nothing.

  The eight-year-old girl, Alexandra, was noncommittal, and five-year-old Paul was happy to have a bicycle. Other kids came over to play because they didn’t have one. Every day Lena went to school with Anna and Alexandra to help them because the classes were in Russian and they didn’t understand much yet.

  Lena treated us to birch juice and vegetables, all she had. Robert said he wanted to build a proper house, but it was dawning on him that without a corner lumberyard, it was almost impossible.

  “I go around all day trying to get things—lumber, cement, nails,” he said. If the Russians had something, often they just gave it to him, wanting to be helpful to an immigrant.

  “For weeks I’ve been trying to get gravel to put on the driveway to cover this damn mud,” he said. “I put the word out, and every now and then a truck shows up and dumps a load of gravel. I can’t pay for it. They don’t want to be paid for it.”

  The Soviets had promised him a second hundred hectares, but they made it clear that no matter how hard he worked the land, they wouldn’t allow him to sell either parcel. He could pass the farm on to his children. Of course, in thirty years who knew under what form of government he’d be living. I remembered that there had been a huge argument in the Soviet Union. “Yes, we want to privatize,” they’d say, “but do we just give people land? Won’t they then become speculators?”

  Most farmers answered back, “I’m not interested in your thirty-year lease. I’ll improve the land and you’ll take it back? No thanks.”

  I thought raising cattle out here was a totally absurd concept, but maybe he would make it. If he had the staying power to last twenty or thirty years, maybe he would become a cattle baron in eastern Siberia. I hoped so, for his family’s sake.

  When we went to leave Nakhodka we opened the footlocker in the hotel lobby and found our rim and extra tires had been stolen. I insisted that Boris, the desk clerk, find them, but he only shrugged.

  “Why would anybody want a BMW wheel and tires?” I asked Tabitha.

  “You’ve been in the stores,” she said. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  She was right. If I looked hard enough, I’d probably find a BMW tire and wheel on someone’s homemade wheelbarrow or sitting in a living room as an exotic status symbol. Thank God we had put our bikes in the police compound. I resolved to continue doing this throughout the Soviet Union.

  Luckily, I had set up an account with the BMW dealer back in Japan who overhauled my bike. It took a number of frantic phone calls that made buying postcards look like a snap, but I managed to order an extra rim and tires to be shipped to Khabarovsk, where we expected to be in a few days.

  So we set out to drive the six thousand miles to Moscow across the tayga, which I had now learned was Russian for the Siberian wilds. Losing such important spare parts so early—before we’d even left the port city—brought home that if something went wrong in the middle of the tayga, we’d be in big trouble.

  You can set down the whole of the continental United States inside Siberia without touching its borders, and you can also put Alaska and all the countries of Europe, excluding Russia itself, into the remaining margin. After doing this, you’ll still have enough room for a second state of Texas.

  Foreigners were not allowed in certain strategic cities in the Soviet Union, except under extraordinary circumstances. The best road to Khabarovsk was via Vladivostok, which was one of these closed cities because it was the home of the Soviet navy. To our surprise, we weren’t stopped by the military police but sped right through it. I figured we were too far from Moscow for the local gendarmes to be efficient.

  True to what we’d been told, the paved road out to Khabarovsk quickly turned into gravel, big, baseball-sized stones on which it was almost impossible to ride. Afraid we’d go down, we couldn’t drive fast. At such a slow speed, when our wheels hit a grapefruit-sized boulder, the bikes would try to spin out of our hands and push us over. Driving was a constant battle with the road. Every fifty or seventy-five miles Tabitha fell over and I’d get off to help her. I got through this unscathed, but she again became ready to give up.

  She might now have ten thousand miles of motorcycling experience, but very few motorcyclists had experienced conditions like these. Seduced by the new bike, she had come from Japan against her better judgment and her heart wasn’t in it. The road was just too terrible, the thousands of miles ahead too great. “Damn it,” said Tabitha, cranking up her bike after her dozenth spill, “I’m going home.”

  “Home!”

  “When we get to Khabarovsk I’m getting on a plane and going back to New York.”

  “It’ll get better,” I said.

  “Now, how do you know that, Jim Rogers?” she asked, furious.

  “Well, we’ll get used to it. Surely it can’t be like this all the way to Moscow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it just can’t. This is like our Far West back in the nineteenth century. They haven’t got around to putting in roads this far from Moscow.”

  “Bullshit,” she said, flinging out her hands to take in the miles of gravel in front and behind us. “No road on the map, and lo and behold, no road here. No road on the map to Omsk, and I’ll bet there’s no road there, either.”

  I knew the driving was beating the hell out of her, but I wasn’t happy about going on without her.

  “Look, you said you’d come,” I said. “I need you. We’ve learned so much together. Our partnership is stronger than this.”

  “You said there would be roads. This isn’t a road, it’s white-water rafting on a motorcycle. I want to go home.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, beaten. “I’ll put you on a plane at the next airport.” I hoped by the time we got to one, this would have passed.

  We pressed on, slipping and sliding on that damn baseball-sized gravel.

  It took us five long days to go from Nakhodka to Khabarovsk, five days of slipping and falling, five days of wrestling with our bikes. But it wasn’t all bad, not by a long shot, and we didn’t travel the entire day. This was open country with pure, clear air. The flowers were in bloom, and puff seedlings more than once swirled around us like warm snow on their journey to seed the earth. In one village Tabitha was taken for a traveling movie star, and the people stared at her blondness and touched her in wonderment. They had never seen foreigners. In Siberia we were as exotic as the first Europeans were to the Native Americans.

  In Khabarovsk Tabitha hadn’t changed her mind. The plane wouldn’t leave for several days, so the question of what she was going to do hung fire. I argued with her, angry because I wanted her with me and she wanted to go back. Part of the excitement of a trip like this was having someone to share it with.

  “No, these are hard roads and it’s just a bitch,” she said. “This isn’t my dream, it’s yours. Go around the world six times if you want. I’m going home.”

  She bedded down in a separate hotel room to show me she meant business.

  Perturbed, I took a walk to reflect.

  Kha
barovsk was a city on a hill, sort of a cliff overlooking an enormously wide river, at least a mile or so across. I began to tramp about.

  It was beginning to dawn on me what I had taken on in committing myself to this trip, and that it was more than I’d expected. Yes, I had known many of the roads would be rough, but even though I was an experienced rider and had been in many primitive countries, I hadn’t realized how rough and for quite how long they would go on that way. Still, I was plenty game, but I could well understand that a novice might not be.

  My feelings related back to my Wall Street days, as well as those I’d spent with students at Columbia University. I didn’t teach the kind of finance usually taught at business schools, the kind dreamed up by professors whose only relation to real money was their monthly paycheck. I taught what I knew, how to invest the way I invested, how to think about markets and opportunities the way I thought. It wasn’t orthodox in a time of computers and complicated mathematical models of the economy, the stock market, and index derivatives. However, I’d used my way of thinking not only to make some money, but to keep it.

  If you ask a thousand people if they want to be rich, every one except the poet and the mystic will say yes. When you explain what is needed to become rich, maybe six hundred of that initial 998 will say, “No problem, I can do that.” But when push comes to shove, when they have to sacrifice everything else in their lives—having a spouse and children, a social life, possibly a spiritual life, maybe every pleasure—to meet their goal, almost all of them, too, will fall away. Only about six of the original thousand will continue on the hard path.

  Most of us don’t have the discipline to stay focused on a single goal for five, ten, or twenty years, giving up everything to bring it off, but that’s what’s necessary to become an Olympic champion, a world-class surgeon, or a Kirov ballerina. Even then, of course, it may be all in vain. You may make a single mistake that wipes out all the work. It may ruin the sweet, lovable self you were at seventeen. That old adage is true: You can do anything in life, you just can’t do everything. That’s what Bacon meant when he said a wife and children were hostages to fortune. If you put them first, you probably won’t run the three-and-a-half-minute mile, make your first $10 million, write the great American novel, or go around the world on a motorcycle. Such goals take complete dedication.