The secret…

 Of course, there are no secrets to success in Russia. Everyone has his different experience and his own road to walk. But everyone wants “secrets” and best if they are numbered. So here are mine. Progress has to be built on a basis of personal trust and honest relationships. However, if I have to list my guiding principles, there are five “Ps” that make the point:

Patience: Things take time. Russia is a thousand years old. Things will not work out always to your schedule. It is an Asian, not a Western country. Patience pays off.

Perseverance: According to some dictionaries, “perseverance” is persistence toward a worthy goal. By itself, persistence may be like knocking your head against the wall, when the solution may be to go around it. Keep the goal in your sights, but be prepared for an unplanned course to reach it.

Perspicacity: It’s about understanding and discernment. It may require you to not accept what is said, but understand what is meant. You may be surprised.

Professionalism: So important. Character and standards must be clear and consistent. Know your business and be open to the thoughts and solutions of others. Russians are resourceful. Give them opportunity to make their point.

Perspiration: There are no forty-hour weeks in Russia, not from my experience. Set a standard. Work hard. And enjoy it. But these secrets are nothing new, they are simple, and no different from what works anywhere else. Some foreigners seem to forget that in Russia, when they think they can take short cuts and slip around the rules of the road, they actually have to try harder.

Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

A Glimpse of Olde St. Petersburg

So many have remarked about the cover photo on my book “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia.” I admit it’s great. The photographer is Chris Harrington of Dublin. His work is the best and he spent much time in St. Petersburg, deep into the history of that unique city. Chris recently emailed me a book he acquired via Google from Catherine II’s time, dedicated to her.  It’s in “Olde English.”

Peredelkino

It was like magic, looking out from Boris Pasternak ’s tall windows into the red and golden woods on that autumn day and to know he saw the same thing when he looked up from his small desk as he wrote “Doctor Zhivago.” Boris Pasternak lived in Peredelkino from 1939 until his death in 1960. It is a village of dachas and dogs, and fat cats that sit in the middle of frozen roads in the winter. It is old Russian churches with burning candles and much kissed icons. It is woods with broken benches and small streams and old bridges. It is silence.

Pasternak’s home, a spacious two-storied dacha is surrounded by a garden with pumpkins and beets. Peredelkino is a sleepy settlement of dachas about fifty kilometers west of Moscow served by a train that takes you from Kievsky Station and lets you out on an unprotected concrete slab of a platform. The town is known for its writers; Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Okudzhava. But, poet Boris Pasternak wrote only one novel, Doctor Zhivago, which was translated into 18 languages. I remember the bookcase behind his desk, which I was told by the attendant, still contained some of his books that he loved to read. There was T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W.H Auden, and I was happy to find my favorites, Robert Frost and Rainer Maria Rilke.

My paperback copy of Doctor Zhivago is torn, its dog-eared pages yellowing, and the cover floating free from the pages. Of course to Americans and to me it was Julie Christy and Omar Sharif, Alex Guinness and Rod Steiger and the unforgettable music of Maurice Jarre. But, I read the novel after a lunchtime conversation with girls in my Moscow office. Anya was a beautiful and talented stage actress who was playing Lara, the lead, in a Moscow staging of “Zhivago, the Musical.” In a discussion of the characters, she said Lara was not real, but a ghost, a specter of what every man wanted in a woman and couldn’t have. After that, I had to read it. I re-read Zhivago even today, some parts of it anyway, often to remind me what good writing is all about.

His description of a Siberian winter is matchless: “Torn, seemingly disconnected sounds and shapes rose out of the icy mist, stood still, moved, and vanished. The sun was not the sun to which the earth was used, it was a changeling. Its crimson ball hung in the forest and from it, stiffly and slowly as in a dream or in a fairy tale, amber-yellow rays of light as thick as honey spread and, catching in the trees, froze to them in midair.”

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Room 250

Early in my Russian business experience, in 1992 I think it was, I contacted a man high in Yeltsin’s circles and he invited me to his office at five PM, Room 250. It was on a street just down from the then new McDonald’s where young entrepreneurs were taking orders from passing drivers and giving them to their buddies already well positioned in the block-long line for Big Macs.

The nameplate on the office building said it was a children’s book publisher. We got past the guard easily enough who was impressed we were going to Room 250. We went up the stairs to the second floor. There was no Room 250–lots of other numbers, but no 250. We asked a person walking by and he pointed, “Right there.” There was no number on the door and it was not next to 249 or 251 or any number close to 250.  It was one of my first exposures to Russian disinformation.

Inside were two ladies, one in authority and one talking to her boyfriend on the green plastic desk phone. The one in charge told us to come back another time, that Mr. P  had gone to the bank to ask a question. I said I would wait–and I did for over an hour. She put me into his private office to wait and that alone was a lesson. In the corner was a glass covered case of Lenin’s writings which I guessed had never been handled, much less read for many years. Under the glass on his desk were name cards, about twenty of them, different organizations, entities of one sort or another, all with Mr. P’s name on them. My assistant and I sat at the long table and waited. Soon entered another man with an appointment. Then is when I got a good lesson on Russian organization and power.

Mr. K was from Kursk, my assistant said. She could tell by his accent. Mr. K explained that in Russia, the man you see is not the man who “does.”  He said there were twenty military districts and in each–he held up his hand like a puppet master–there are the controllers for that district. And at the end of the strings–he bounced his hand up and down–are the “officials.” He told us not to assume that who we see in the Kremlin was who ran the country and he cocked his head toward the empty desk.

I have never forgotten that lesson. It rang true to Kafka’s “The one who you call is not the one who answers,” and “It is not the official letter, but the unofficial letter that counts.” Indeed, if our elected officials, dealing with this vast and geographically vital country ever read Kafka, they would understand the minds we deal with there. I have been in business there for now over 17 years and while there are two sides to the coin everywhere, in Russia, there are often three.

Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

The Captain from Yakutia

Russia, for all its drama and unpredictability, is full of humor—yes, humor. It was 1998, the time of, what’s her name? Monica Lewinsky. It was winter and I was drinking a Dr. Pepper and eating almonds in the departure lounge of Sheremetyevo I, waiting for Transaero Flight 141 to St. Petersburg when our group was approached by a short man in the uniform of a captain of the MVD, the police arm of the Ministry of Interior (like the KGB). He had short cut gray hair and an Asian face.

“I heard you speaking English, who is the American here?” he said. My friends were quiet. I pointed to me.

He grabbed my arm and faced me straight on, enveloping me in an alcoholic mist, and said, “I have something important to tell you. You take this message to Bill Clinton. You tell him the people of Yakutia are behind him 100%.” He held my arm tighter, “If we had such a man in the Kremlin, we would know that he was healthy and able to govern.” (This was the time of Yeltsin.)

His two friends tried to pull him away as his plane was leaving for his far-away home, but he shoved them away. “You are welcome in Yakutia.” He scribbled his name, Vladimir, and phone number on a scrap of paper. His friends dragged him away.

He struggled back and said, “You bring no money, just come to Yakutia where the cleanest river in Russia runs. Seven hundred kilometers and you can see to the bottom all the way. Come in July when the ice has melted.” Three big friends hauled him away.

He escaped again and bounded back up the stairs and grabbed me, “No, bring a dollar fifty.”

“What for?”  I asked,

“For the rowboat,” he said. He again scribbled his name and address on the backside of the same scrap of paper.

I said, “I know that river flows north, and I am afraid I will not be able to row south fast enough before it freezes again. But, thanks.”

 Four guys pushed him down the stairs for the plane to Yakutsk, where it must have been minus sixty degrees that time of the year and where they only have diamonds and bears. I neglected to pass this on to Bill Clinton, but no doubt he would have been comforted to hear this message.

Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

“Instead of a Preface” Anna Akhmatova

The Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee raised money to help an archivist in that great Russian city begin a conservation and digitization of the works of the famous poet during Stalin times, Anna Akhmatova. The story of that brave woman is heartrending and her writing under such deathly circumstances is incredible. That such feelings could be put into words is so powerful. The following is a universal favorite and says so much with so little.

“In the awful years of Yezhovian horror, I spent seventeen months standing in line in front of various prisons in Leningrad. One day someone “recognized “me. Then a woman with blue lips, who was standing behind me, and who, of course, had never heard my name, came out of the stupor which typified all of us, and whispered into my ear (everyone there spoke only in whispers):

 “Can you describe this?

And I said, “I can.”

Then something like a fleeting smile passed over what once had been her face.”

April 1, 1957

Leningrad

Akhmatova suffered much, yet in the indirect Soviet style of effecting the desired intimidation of popular people, by imprisoning or killing their loved ones and relatives. N. I. Yezhov: head of the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police from 1936 to 1938, was noted for his ferocity. He presided over the great purges, and this period is therefore known as “Yezhovshchina.” The poet lost two husbands and a son was imprisoned for eighteen years. Her greatest poem, “Requiem,” recounts the suffering of the Russian people under Stalinism─specifically, the tribulations of those women with whom Akhmatova stood in line outside the prison walls, women who like her waited patiently, but with a sense of grief and powerlessness, for the chance to send a loaf of bread or a small message to their husbands, sons, lovers. The poem was not published in Russia in its entirety until 1987, though the poem itself was begun about 1938, the time of her son’s arrest.  It was his arrest and imprisonment, and the later arrest of her husband Punin, that provided the occasion for the specific content of the poem, which is a sequence of lyric poems about imprisonment and  its affect on those whose loved ones are arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated behind prison walls.. Akhmatova was awarded and honorary doctorate by Oxford University in 1965.  She died in 1966 in Leningrad.

We, at the Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee have contributed funds for the conservation and preservation of Akhmatova’s work, an ongoing task.