September 1994
Small-time businessmen started streaming into Vatrushka. They took out loans against collateral and got their operations running.
The moment things started picking up and figures with zeros started appearing in their accounts, the athletes would drop by with questions: any difficulties? How are you handling them? How can we help? To Vatrobank, its borrowers were like small children, meant to be doted on and pampered — not for free, of course, but for a cut of the turnover.
The athletes talked in concrete numbers — a righteous ten percent of income. If a borrower tried to wriggle out of the guardianship, the tone of the conversation shifted: dear comrade businessman, we’re just small people, protecting our investment, nothing personal, strictly business. We’re authorized to keep an eye on the process. If you refuse to accept our authority, we’ll crack you on the forehead and take everything — we have every right!
Most borrowers accepted Chicha’s guardianship and paid the tribute calculated by Vatrushka’s accountants. A minority — the reckless ones — refused to put freeloaders on their payroll. It happened.
Chicha’s athletes would clean out their warehouses, and the daredevils would suddenly start falling behind on their loan payments. A month or two later, Vatrobank would legally seize the collateral property — apartments, cars, whatever else. Only serious people, the kind who never used Vatrushka in the first place, could avoid Chicha’s guardianship. The ones who came looking for free credit were the businessmen with a casual attitude toward paperwork and a desperate hunger to earn their first million.
The load on the Khryakino warehouse kept multiplying, and then a small miracle happened, born of my own idleness that summer. With nothing better to do, I’d cleaned up the liquor lineup: slashed prices on the dead stock, set volume discounts on the fast-moving items. Then I automatically raised prices by the size of the largest discount — forty percent. I remembered the pre-New Year’s rush and pre-contracted the popular items in quantities three times what we actually needed.
It’s no good leaving money sitting with Pinochet. Gotta plow it into inventory!
Turned out I was right, a hundred thousand times over.
In October of ninety-four, a flood of buyers from the wealthier regions crashed down on Proma, buying not by the crate but by the truckload — alcohol, champagne, the works. And if there was room left in the truck — why drive back half-empty? — they’d buy up whatever else caught their eye at the Khryakino warehouse. The warehouse emptied out. We switched to buying the shortfall from Moscow wholesalers instead.
Yurik and I made a discovery that floored us both. Turned out you could skip all the hassle of buying in Poland, dealing with shipping and customs clearance, and just buy any consumer goods in Moscow itself and resell them in the regions within three or four days, at a ten-percent markup.
