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[Read Calling Moscow (Part 6).]
The party ends early. The exodus of the disillusioned. Figureheads fall whilst 1930s Chicago plays out as a backdrop… Just another travel crisis, put it with the rest: pragmatism through 15 years of curve-balls.
Neil has been informing me of Russia’s difficult transition from Soviet to capitalist state, the losers and winners along the way and trying to run a business in quite literally a State of flux.
“The initial hope and celebration… very quickly turned to ashes when people realised that this wasn’t going to be a new era of freedom. It was going to be Chicago in the 1930s, more like gangster-wars… and it was only going to be the most ruthless who made it to the top. The party was over before the last record had been played I think. In the mid 1990s a lot of Russians were leaving because they saw no future in the country and they decided to take their skills abroad where they might be better paid for them… around 94-96, public morale was extremely low and it was quite common for people to refer to the Russian Mafia. Of course there never was actually a Russian Mafia in the same sense that there’s an Italian Mafia: an actual structure which has a boss. What they meant was: a system in which criminals seemed not only to get away with it but be rewarded for their criminal behaviour. I think that many people, especially those in public service, like health or education felt very despairing because they realised that they were being run by people who were creaming massive amounts off into their own private pockets…
“There was one famous year, during the Yeltsin years, where there were five prime ministers! So… trying to second guess what might happen next was our main strategy. You just assumed that “today” was going to get better… Yes, in reflection, it was very uncertain… and being a fairly small company gives you the ability to flex around things and change in a way that perhaps larger companies couldn’t, so we were always looking for what was happening next. To a certain extent we still are… even though Russia has become more stable than it used to be back in the mid-’90s. The situation is normalising a little slower than people want… but, eventually, people are realising that it is worth it. Now, that flood of people leaving has largely stopped… Younger people who’ve acquired skills and qualifications which are of genuine worth, (rather than Soviet Certificates of Nothingness) in things like computers, banking, insurance, business administration… are choosing to stay in Russia rather than going abroad. They can get better paid at home and avoid all the uncertainty of trying to earn a living outside Russia…”
So, the system is settling and finding its feet. With this comes confidence and a degree of stability, but also hindsight and revelation too: “What angered a lot of people, say 8-10 years ago, was when they realised that actually Russia always had been quite a wealthy country. It had all that oil and gas and… all these industries that could have been… But the Soviet government didn’t do anything about it… and left the people poor.”
So for you, it was a case of catching all the curve balls, over the last 10-15 years? “That’s very much the way of looking at it, absolutely. We are continuously trying to keep track of what’s happening in the Russian market, reacting to that and trying to come up with solutions to it so that we can provide the best way of visiting.”
It’s happening virtually as we speak. Apparently, a major Trans-Siberian link from Lake Baikal to Moscow has been re-routed to St. Petersburg instead, directly affecting Neil’s scheduling and transportation plans. “So we just go back to the drawing board and reinvent all of our itineraries… and we come up with something new.”
A pragmatic approach tried and tested by necessity and through years of experience. To my surprise, I’m hearing that in spite of all the upheaval, for Neil it was, and still is, business as usual, Soviet collapse or not. The curve balls so prevalent during the communist era, and throughout the ongoing “reformation” are still incoming, at least to some degree. They may have different names and origins… but essentially they are still there. It’s not that nothing has changed, plenty has. But paradoxically uncertainty seems to be the one certainty in Russia. Something you can count on. So in that respect it’s more of the same. The critical variables seem to be the degree of change and how it will affect you personally.
Neil still seems to have a certain nostalgia for the formative, chaotic days of the new Russia: “It was more interesting… fun in a mad, manic kind of way, before things changed to a more European way of working. But it’s a more peaceful life now in the sense that we don’t get quite so many unexpected situations blowing up. Probably as I’ve got older I appreciate the calm and reliability of what we’ve got now, more than before when we were running around with a fire extinguisher, trying to put out the problems before they affected the clients.”
In part eight: Madmen cling to lofty peaks as the Soviet tide ebbs away. The workplace reshuffles into flawed order and old habits linger.
[Photo by yeowatzup]
