June 1996
After returning to Moscow, a schedule awaited me: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I dined at restaurants along the Garden Ring and Boulevard Ring, meeting little men in drab suits — cheap ones, expensive ones, some like mine, some haute couture I hadn’t grown into yet.
Proma Holding had accumulated fifty-odd enterprises. The scraps of Soviet industry came to us on the principle of «take it, God, whatever we don’t need» — quarterly losses exceeded their sale price. Suppliers and buyers alike were swindlers, there was no money, nothing at all except barter, promissory-note tricks, and Zhorik’s sheer nerve.
Vladlen Georgievich quit, explaining that he was moving into a government post, since he’d always been «a servant of the state.» The finance department turned into a problem zone. Financial discipline evaporated. Who owed whom how much and for what — nobody could say. I pored over reports, hammered at the calculator buttons, and understood nothing. The plants were sliding back to their old state — into a Soviet relic, churning out junk and losses.
Yurik confirmed it: 90 percent of Proma’s product line could be bought abroad for half the price. You’d need to cover shipping and customs clearance, but that was pocket change if you knew the workarounds.
— You sure?
— Absolutely. We poked around, parted ways with half our suppliers. We buy from Turkey and China now. Same quality, lower price. The catch is, they’re parting ways with us too.
From Thursday through Saturday, I flew around the regions with Team A. It worked out well that, along with a chemical plant in the Tula region, we squeezed out the local air detachment — a Yak-42, a hangar, and a runway, two hundred kilometers from Moscow. The Yak got converted into a business jet, multiplying Proma’s mobility.
Team A, having graduated from Proma’s own school of BFV (Bootleg Vodka Sales), knew exactly what the people wanted. They gave instructions to the Technical Directorate on which product lines were in demand and which direction to retool toward. Grzegorz roamed Europe, buying up equipment from the Poles, Czechs, and other «Democrats» that had been condemned to scrap and given a second life in Russia. The most valuable equipment turned out to be packaging machinery: our products got dressed up in bright wrappers and shipped off to the markets — the real markets, where women at the entrance sold sunflower seeds by the glassful.
The sales department came back to life. Sales started moving, and problems piled on with them. Enterprises fattening up with new prosperity drew the interest of both regulators and local criminal outfits. Their interest was the same: how to squeeze us.
I bounced between restaurants and cafes, sitting through gatherings with people I didn’t need and who didn’t need me, but circumstances demanded my presence, demanded conversation drifting around this and that, out of which some grain of information would surface — something Proma’s security people and financiers found useful. Without these meetings, the holding and I would drop off the radar of the unremarkable little men who always opened with the same line: «There’s a matter...»
There weren’t many of these little men — two, three hundred. Each one held some piece of information, a small fragment, and each wanted to sell his own particular fragment. I hadn’t broken into the top tier, the ones settling things at the presidential level. Nor the second tier, settling things at the government level. Third-rate wasn’t quite reject-grade, but I was nobody even at the regional level.
I hung around at the level of mid-sized businessmen, respected at the municipal level. To handle problems with the district tax office or the gangsters running the protection racket on a kiosk by some plant, I hauled myself there in person. And I assembled puzzles out of fragments.
There were no laws. Matters were settled by understandings, at a face-to-face meeting. All kinds of matters — from the number of buses on a plant’s shuttle route to hot water at the daycare attached to the factory. Bus routes, water, and every other marker of civilization belonged to the local khans, waiting for tribute. Tribute got paid according to Zhora’s formula: «give it to the head»!
Hah... good luck getting anywhere near the head! I noted down the issues and stashed them in the red briefcase. Sunday mornings I’d pull them out, spread them across the table, think, calculate, recalculate, stuff them back in. Zhora recommended drinking through the thinking process, but I didn’t have time for that. Monday morning I’d hand my draft decisions and documents to Ida; by lunch I’d get instructions on who I was having dinner with, where, and when, today, tomorrow, and the day after. Thursday I’d fly out with an empty briefcase for a fresh batch of headaches.
Ugh! If only I could split myself into two mid-sized businessmen: one, modest, bustling around Moscow settling matters, the other, puffed-up, doling out favors in the regions...
