The Deceit of Riches

by Val M Karren

  “I keep the government from stealing from him,” he said as we walked further.

  “And you don’t trust the government either,” I concluded.

  “Never will. Not until it stops stealing from its own people,” he ruled.

  “You are a bundle of contradictions, Misha, just like Russia herself. It’s good to know you,” I laughed aloud in disbelief.

  “Please call me next Saturday morning and we will visit three more apartments,” he said and held out his hand to shake mine.

  “Where should I meet you?” I asked him waiting to hear his wild instructions. “I will tell you on Saturday morning.”

  17. Mr. P.

  I stood opposite No. 11 on the Upper Embankment street taking in the view of the flooded river below when I heard the resurrected church bells below chime eleven o’clock. With the chimes, I woke from my sun worship and cleared the blue and purple blotches from my vision and turned to look at the three-story 19th-century mansion villa behind me. The house was in the design of perfect neo classical symmetry in its architecture and looked to be right out of St. Petersburg. The exterior was stripped of all color, only a mono-brown sandstone, speckled with plaster and dried concrete greeted the passers-by. The gardens were surrounded by an old whitewashed stone wall. There was no view of the gardens at street level but one could see the handsome grove of birch trees standing taller than the walls, that shaded the house from the morning’s searching sunlight. Except for the scaffolds and building materials visible on the porch a half story above the street, pedestrians would be forgiven for assuming that the house stood vacant and abandoned, a relic of the exterminated bourgeoisie, but the same would be mistaken. This was the new residence of Igor Ivanovich P. and it was being restored from the inside out at breakneck speed.

  Dean Karamzin had been successful to entice his old friend into an interview with a foreign academic, but not without a carrot for Mr. P. It was intimated, without so many words by the Dean, that the product of the research and the interview would be read by the governor and accepted as a policy recommendation concerning the future of entrepreneurial activities in the province. It was implied that Mr. P. by means of this independent academic research could help to subtly influence public policy without creating any impression of impropriety between his business activities and the offices of the governor. I suppose the Dean wasn’t lying, but like the forked-tongue beast of old who ruined Eve’s paradise, he spoke a deceiving truth.

  It all seemed too easy for me to walk into the home of a mobster and ask him searching questions about his ‘biznis’ activities in the climate of the day. I began to be suspicious of the Dean’s motives. I hadn’t heard the telephone call between the two, maybe I was being deceived in the same way as I thought Mr. P. was being deceived. Els’ words of warning rang in my ear as I stood on the pavement looking at this riverside mansion and debated walking away. Why would he agree to this so easily? Perhaps he felt his local notoriety made him untouchable. Maybe he was in his breakthrough phase from the shadows into the public eye, into government and immortality, and the more legitimate press he could get would only help him. Maybe I was too late and my interest in writing about him would only help his long-term goals. The doubts in my head swirled around as I stepped forward and rang the bell at the door that was flush with the pavement at street level next to a driveway gated by two tall steel plates blocking any view of the curious pedestrian. I rang the bell half expecting a trapdoor to open up underneath me, dropping me into a basement dungeon where the bones of the local prosecutor were still chained to the wall. Instead, a loud buzzing came from the door frame signaling me to push it open and walk through, as a welcome guest.

  The street level floor of the house was dedicated to screening visitors and giving access to the driveway to the right of the house. Upon entering through the heavy, decorated steel door I came immediately into a brightly lit holding cell. As the heavy door closed with a clang behind me I was startled and tried to open it again. It was held closed by electro-magnets and released from only behind the bars in front of me, where an older fellow in a proper security guard uniform was waiting for me. There were no bodyguards in Armani suits waiting to strip search me and beat me with rubber hoses. There was just a guard behind a barred window and another steel door.

  After a brief explanation for my visit, a quick search of my book bag and a glance at my passport and student card I was let through. On passing the inner barrier the guard asked me to stand still and ran a metal detector wand around me, between my legs, up the crotch of my pants, my ankles, under my arms and around my back and belt. With nothing threatening found he wished me a good day and showed me to the staircase which led to the second floor and sent me on my way without a further escort. He returned to his chair and his camera monitors over the sidewalk and curbs in front of the house and paid me no further attention as I ascended upwards into the house.

  Up the short staircase and through a swinging door I came to stand in front of a full-length glass window to my left which looked out over a commanding view of the river and the countryside. I wondered to myself how the view looked from the third floor. On emerging from the dark ground-floor I was met by a very attractive woman with long legs and long black hair. She was dressed professionally without any gaudiness in a formal business suit with a fitted jacket and skirt. She informed me that she was the personal secretary of Mr. P., that I was expected but would have to wait maybe ten minutes for my host to finish his current telephone call. She offered me a glass of champagne while I waited but I politely refused. She offered me a chair to wait in and asked me not to smoke. I took a seat and glanced out the long window to take in the view of the river again but felt my head turn to glimpse the other captivating view of the secretary walking back to her desk in the corner or the reception area. Russia’s beauty in the spring time is certainly worth the wait!

  The floors of the first level were a beautifully polished, newly inlaid birch wood in a very intricate traditional Russian pattern like one would see in a royal palace’s ballroom. I felt as if I should have taken off my shoes and skated on the floor in my socks so as not to scuff it. I wondered how the secretary walked on it in high heels without gouging the floor with little pock marks. The interior was tastefully decorated with classical upholstered furniture in a tasteful Imperial style of the 18th century. The walls were painted a light yellow with moldings and door frames were painted in a stark plaster white. The columns on the porch outside cast long diagonal shadows across the floor and the furniture.

  After perhaps fifteen minutes of waiting nervously, trying to look calm and collected, the secretary approached my chair in long graceful strides and asked if I would follow her to Mr. P’s office. We ascended another staircase, but this time we swept upwards, instead of climbing, to the third floor over plush, red embroidered carpets pinned to white marble steps with brass bars at the base of each step up. The house was appointed inside like a miniature palace with no details spared to replicate the grandeur of what it once was. To my right over the railing now at eye level hung a crystal chandelier which cast faint, dispersed prisms on the yellow wall on my left as I followed the Cossack beauty up the staircase to the third floor. How did she walk on this thick rug in those heels without even wobbling? She must have gone to finishing school to learn that trick! My mind seemed to be on anything but the interview that was about to start. I had to push out all the distractions of the environment and focus. I stopped watching the skirt and legs in front of me to get my thoughts together and watched my own dusty shoes shuffle over the shallow upward steps. I felt at once very underdressed seeing the frayed hem of my blue jeans although they were clean, sort of. At least I was wearing a jacket with a clean shirt under it. What else was a poor student supposed to wear? We had arrived.

  As I entered the palatial office on the third floor Mr. P. rose from behind his large dark wooden desk and walked toward me with his stocky gate with his right hand extended to greet me in a
very professional and warm way. As we shook hands he clasped his left hand on to my left shoulder, welcomed me to his home and invited me to sit down on a firm leather couch, one that might be found in the den of a British country gentleman. It was very comfortable. I set my book bag down, leaned up against the end of the couch. Notes would be taken later. His secretary who had been waiting at the door offered to serve drinks.

  The floor in this office space was the same intricate, polished inlaid wood as downstairs and undoubtedly was the same in each room. The study was in the same classical style but the walls a dark gray with white highlights. A decorative column flanked both sides of the entrance to his open office. The window behind his desk looked south into the garden and the handsome grove of birch trees that grew there. A garden house could be seen but no garden furniture had yet been set out on account of the weather just having turned warm enough to do so.

  Mr. P. was dressed in suit pants and shirt but was not wearing a necktie. With his bright white collar open against his shaven bald head he was the epitome of sterile. His shoes, obviously not Russian gleamed in the lamp light of the office. He sat opposite me on a matching couch with a glass-top coffee table between us whereon my water and his coffee sat slowing steaming.

  “So, you are Mr. Peter Turner. We have met before, right?” he started. My heart stopped remembering the night in his restaurant on Valentine’s Day. I knew I couldn't just not answer him.

  “Yes, we have. A few weeks ago, at the Monastery during the student event,” I reminded him.

  “Ah yes, Marina’s American friend, but you did not stay too late, no?” he said chiding me.

  “I can only apologize for my colleague who misbehaved and was asked to leave,” I said trying to defuse the memory.

  “He was drunk?” he asked in an accusatory tone.

  “Who wasn’t that night?” I replied with no guilt on my conscience.

  “Yes, so was I, so was I!” he admitted.

  “It was a great party and we had a fun time. Thanks for that,” I said telling a huge white lie.

  “It was nothing. It gives me pleasure to give students some fun,” Mr. P. said with fake humility.

  “Well, I believe you succeeded,” I said ironically.

  “We have not met before in the Monastery?” he asked again looking sideways at me.

  “We had not been introduced before that night. Believe me, I would have remembered!” I said with a friendly smile, but inside I was ready to run for the door.

  “So,’ you came to Russia to study the Russian language?” Mr. P. asked politely as he relaxed.

  “Yes, in part, but also history and politics,” I confirmed.

  “In Russia, our history is politics. Who knows what the official political history is today? You must be careful about which history you read and write this year. Today maybe its okay, but next year you might be deported to America again if they don’t like your history and politics,” he warned me sitting up on the edge of his sofa.

  “Well, that is why I choose to mostly study the most recent history since 1992. When history is too new it is difficult to change it. When nobody remembers it any longer, or all who lived through it are dead, then it becomes easy to make it political,” I parried his short lecture with a counter move.

  “You speak very good Russian, Mr. Turner. Where do your people come from?” he asked.

  “I have no Russian blood if that is what you are asking,” I replied vaguely.

  “I thought maybe your parents were Jews from Russia twenty, thirty years ago when they left in the 1970s, maybe from Ukraine. You have a Ukrainian accent,” he said looking sideways at me.

  “I spent some time there before I came to Nizhniy. I am told I have a Nizhniy accent as well when I speak to people from Moscow,” I tried to push the discussion away from me.

  “Da nyet, you sound like an American with a Ukrainian accent. Very unusual,” he said and looked away.

  “And where do your people come from?” I returned the interest in his genealogy.

  “My grandparents are from the Volga village of Plyos. They were farmers on a kolkhoz. So I am more Russian than Mikhail Gorbachev & Boris Yeltsin combined. Real Russians come from the Volga,” he said haughtily.

  “As Dean Karamzin maybe explained to you, I am writing an academic paper about the current changes in the economic system and about the policy challenges to help the development of private business,” I changed the subject.

  “Yes, he explained this to me,” he said somewhat disinterested in the intellectual.

  “Will it be a problem if I ask you many, many questions about how you started your business activities, how you have grown them to what they are today, and what plans you have for the future?” I asked like a doctor examining a wounded pedestrian.

  “Yes of course,” he said with an arrogant manner as if relishing being asked questions about himself.

  “OK, thank you, but if there is anything I ask about that you cannot answer because it's confidential, I understand, so just tell me honestly if you cannot or do not want to answer a question. That will be no problem. I am just trying to gather as much data as possible, not trying to be intrusive,” I said hoping to convince him as I knew full well what I was up to.

  “It won’t be a problem. C’mon let’s get started,” ,Mr. P settled into his couch as if he was about to watch his favorite movie on the television. It looked like he was going to enjoy this.

  “Can you describe your first entrepreneurial activities and do you remember in which year these already started?” I asked him.

  “It was 1986 when I started selling replacement and repair parts for the Volga sedans that are built here in Nizhniy Novgorod. Do you know those cars?” He asked me as he answered.

  “Yes, my apartment is not far from the factory,” I said dismissing the point.

  “I would deliver auto parts to the garages of the taxi companies. I kept the parts in my father’s dacha and garden shed in the Avtozovodski district near the factory. I went to the mechanics and gave them my phone number. When they needed a part, they would call me. If I had it on hand I promised delivery within one hour anywhere in Nizhniy Novgorod,” he said proudly, defying anybody else listening to do it better.

  “So, you used Gorbachev's initiative Perestroika to start a business when you were in your late twenties,” I helped to fill in the historical details.

  “Correct. All the sudden it was no longer a criminal act to make a profit for oneself. And because the factory only delivered parts on their own schedule, if at all, the mechanics couldn’t wait any longer as the drivers were losing money by not making profits for themselves. So, anybody who could provide the parts faster than the factory got the order. So, I had to make sure I had the most usual parts in my shed. There were always those that broke fastest or maybe were poorly made from the factory that had to be replaced faster than others,” he explained.

  “How did you get the parts?” I queried.

  “I could buy them directly from the factory for cash but had to pick them up myself at night after closing, so I used my father’s car once a week to load up the trunk and the seats and drive to our dacha and make the inventory,” he painted a shady picture.

  “Sounds very clever!” I swallowed my true reaction to sound harmless.

  “It was effective and it was growing quickly as more people were driving their own cars as taxis. I had to find Lada parts and Chaika parts. Soon I bought GAZ truck parts for the delivery companies. Of course, I had to get a larger storage building. So, we rented a used warehouse for cash behind Prospect Lenina that wasn’t being used, from a director of a parts maker for airplanes, and we grew and grew and grew,” he said spreading his arms wider and wider apart.

  “What year was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that was right after Chernobyl, so it was… 1988,” he counted years in the air.

  “What kind of profits were you making? Was it just small margins and volume?” I asked clinically.


  “We were charging big prices for quick delivery and what we called it an inventory charge on top of the official cost of the parts,” he said smiling.

  “Were you wholesaling the parts for a discount?” I pushed for more details.

  “We can say that I wasn’t paying the full price for my parts. You must understand, it was a confusing time. Nobody understood how to price their materials and costs into a sale price. Factories were all producing at losses, but remember it was the volume of production that mattered in the old system, not the profits. Profit was a dirty word for the industrial managers. The quota was the goal. It was for quotas that they were rewarded. If they produced and could prove it - holiday on the Black Sea for the managers. What happened to the cars and parts after that wasn’t important to anybody at the factory,” he explained justifying himself.

  “Has that changed now, nine years later?” I asked not actually knowing the answer.

  “Yes, as soon as the word ‘privatniy’ got known even those factory managers understood how to make profits. They made profits for themselves and not for their factories, but yes everybody understands it now. The difference between those who can and cannot make profits has to do with their position. Many people went out to find a position or a different job to make profits,” he explained with a unique inside understanding.

  “How did the business model change with the political environment?” I asked again like a scientist.

  “When the director at GAZ figured out what we were doing with his car parts he closed the gates and thought he could do it better than us. He tried, but it didn’t work because he didn’t have the market. We did,” he was bragging now.

  “So, what did you do then?” I egged him on.

  “We started importing cars in 1990 from Germany. After the Berlin Wall, we could import Mercedes, BMWs, Opels, and Volkswagens. So instead of the car parts, we would sell the whole car to the young people driving taxis and to new businessmen in Russia,” he said reminiscing a bit.