April 8, 1996
Monday
11:00 a.m.
In the morning I looked over the map of Paris and the fax with the list of documents to bring to the travel agency on the third floor of the «Pekin» hotel. Departure to Charles de Gaulle on the tenth of April, the tower view guaranteed (the address, «Hôtel du Paradis,» enclosed), return flight either on the twelfth or the twenty-sixth, my choice.
Couldn’t spend two weeks, but what’s a day in Paris anyway? The arrival day and the departure day don’t count.
Found the Eiffel Tower on the map, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre. Fiddled around with a ruler, couldn’t figure out where the center even was. Found the hotel six centimeters above the tourist attractions, across from Montmartre. About like Sretenka across from the circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard in Moscow. Gotta take it! Paris has been my second hometown since childhood. After school I used to go see Three Men and a Cradle, Les Ripoux, and other films like that.
Sent the courier over to Mayakovka, got down to the reports and paperwork on Neftevolzhsk. Well, well!
Before the French took Alsace back in the nineteenth century, the Germans had relocated the kerosene plant there, with all its equipment, to Pomerania, closer to Poland. Seemed safer that way, or so the Germans thought. Turned out it only seemed that way: thirty years later the plant moved further east, to the village of Maslovka, by the Volga region’s oil derricks. Reparations.
A sensible decision. Why haul crude oil down the Volga by barge when you can produce gasoline and diesel right at the extraction site and fuel the tractors and trucks that give the country its Volga-region harvest!
They brought convicts and German POWs into Maslovka. The convicts built the plant, the Germans built the residential blocks around it. The village was renamed the settlement of Neftevolzhsky. Engineering and technical vacancies were filled by graduates of the capital’s universities, and the workforce was drawn from the surrounding villages. A modern industrial facility – and here it was!
In the sixties the Neftevolzhsk oil refinery was reprofiled into the Neftevolzhsk Chemical Combine, its product line expanding to a hundred items. NVKhK hummed like a beehive right up until 1991, when the freedom to sell finally arrived for oil producers. They were allowed to sell whatever they extracted to anyone at all, and above NVKhK’s purchase prices. The combine went into a tailspin. Rising raw-material costs drove up wholesale prices. Buyers – the seller’s inevitable headache and hemorrhoid – vanished. And that’s when we showed up, the new owners.
First thing, as is customary at Proma, we ran a delayering-and-downsizing pass: cut every deputy director, meaning we fired seven men who were somebody in the district, seven sultry secretaries, and seven personal drivers. Sold off the personal Volgas, reprofiled the transport shop into a self-supporting auto-repair operation. The accounting department, a dozen aunties strong, got replaced by a finance department of three boys with college degrees. Shut down the factory canteen, cutting loose fifty-odd staff: the canteen director and her two deputies, a butcher with a rate-setter and a storekeeper, cooks with cooks’ assistants and countless dishwashers. We handed the freed-up kitchen space to Neftevolzhsk’s Azerbaijani diaspora on the «Metallsnab» scheme: feed NVKhK’s workers to their heart’s content, in exchange for the lease payments. Every combine worker got a plastic card letting them stuff themselves for free five times a week.
Proma got lucky here. Fifty years ago the German equipment had been unloaded at a rail siding by some godforsaken village. Now the combine occupied three hectares in the center of the region’s second-largest city, right behind the train station. The vast banquet hall – the factory canteen by day, a banquet venue by night – brought its tenants astronomical profits.
Second point of cost-cutting: the finished-goods warehouse itself.
Proma switched to contract deliveries: an advance now, then a month later we’d draw off the final product from the tanks and ship it straight out. The warehouse, a sprawl of sheds in the city center, turned out unnecessary. On vacation in Turkey, the Neftevolzhsk mayor’s nephew struck up a friendship with the associates of investors who’d put money into the banquet hall. Millions started looming for replacing equipment that was a century old and had already been relocated once. Just the details left to work out.
Ready for the trip to Paris and signing the contract!
