Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

The floor in this office space was the same intricate, polished inlaid wood as downstairs and undoubtedly was the same in each room. The study was in the same classical style but the walls a dark gray with white highlights. A decorative column flanked both sides of the entrance to his open office. The window behind his desk looked south into the garden and the handsome grove of birch trees that grew there. A garden house could be seen but no garden furniture had yet been set out on account of the weather just having turned warm enough to do so.

Mr. P. was dressed in suit pants and shirt but was not wearing a necktie. With his bright white collar open against his shaven bald head he was the epitome of sterile. His shoes, obviously not Russian gleamed in the lamp light of the office. He sat opposite me on a matching couch with a glass-top coffee table between us whereon my water and his coffee sat slowing steaming.

“So, you are Mr. Peter Turner. We have met before, right?” he started. My heart stopped remembering the night in his restaurant on Valentine’s Day. I knew I couldn’t just not answer him.

“Yes, we have. A few weeks ago, at the Monastery during the student event,” I reminded him.

“Ah yes, Marina’s American friend, but you did not stay too late, no?” he said chiding me.

“I can only apologize for my colleague who misbehaved and was asked to leave,” I said trying to defuse the memory.

“He was drunk?” he asked in an accusatory tone.

“Who wasn’t that night?” I replied with no guilt on my conscience.

“Yes, so was I, so was I!” he admitted.

“It was a great party and we had a fun time. Thanks for that,” I said telling a huge white lie.

“It was nothing. It gives me pleasure to give students some fun,” Mr. P. said with fake humility.

“Well, I believe you succeeded,” I said ironically.

“We have not met before in the Monastery?” he asked again looking sideways at me.

“We had not been introduced before that night. Believe me, I would have remembered!” I said with a friendly smile, but inside I was ready to run for the door.

“So, you came to Russia to study the Russian language?” Mr. P. asked politely as he relaxed.

“Yes, in part, but also history and politics,” I confirmed.

“In Russia, our history is politics. Who knows what the official political history is today? You must be careful about which history you read and write this year. Today maybe its okay, but next year you might be deported to America again if they don’t like your history and politics,” he warned me sitting up on the edge of his sofa.

“Well, that is why I choose to mostly study the most recent history since 1992. When history is too new it is difficult to change it. When nobody remembers it any longer, or all who lived through it are dead, then it becomes easy to make it political,” I parried his short lecture with a counter move.

“You speak very good Russian, Mr. Turner. Where do your people come from?” he asked.

“I have no Russian blood if that is what you are asking,” I replied vaguely.

“I thought maybe your parents were Jews from Russia twenty, thirty years ago when they left in the 1970s, maybe from Ukraine. You have a Ukrainian accent,” he said looking sideways at me.

“I spent some time there before I came to Nizhniy. I am told I have a Nizhniy accent as well when I speak to people from Moscow,” I tried to push the discussion away from me.

“Da nyet, you sound like an American with a Ukrainian accent. Very unusual,” he said and looked away.

“And where do your people come from?” I returned the interest in his genealogy.

“My grandparents are from the Volga village of Plyos. They were farmers on a kolkhoz. So I am more Russian than Mikhail Gorbachev & Boris Yeltsin combined. Real Russians come from the Volga,” he said haughtily.

“As Dean Karamzin maybe explained to you, I am writing an academic paper about the current changes in the economic system and about the policy challenges to help the development of private business,” I changed the subject.

“Yes, he explained this to me,” he said somewhat disinterested in the intellectual.

“Will it be a problem if I ask you many, many questions about how you started your business activities, how you have grown them to what they are today, and what plans you have for the future?” I asked like a doctor examining a wounded pedestrian.

“Yes of course,” he said with an arrogant manner as if relishing being asked questions about himself.

“OK, thank you, but if there is anything I ask about that you cannot answer because it’s confidential, I understand, so just tell me honestly if you cannot or do not want to answer a question. That will be no problem. I am just trying to gather as much data as possible, not trying to be intrusive,” I said hoping to convince him as I knew full well what I was up to.

“It won’t be a problem. C’mon let’s get started,” ,Mr. P settled into his couch as if he was about to watch his favorite movie on the television. It looked like he was going to enjoy this.

“Can you describe your first entrepreneurial activities and do you remember in which year these already started?” I asked him.

“It was 1986 when I started selling replacement and repair parts for the Volga sedans that are built here in Nizhniy Novgorod. Do you know those cars?” He asked me as he answered.

“Yes, my apartment is not far from the factory,” I said dismissing the point.

“I would deliver auto parts to the garages of the taxi companies. I kept the parts in my father’s dacha and garden shed in the Avtozovodski district near the factory. I went to the mechanics and gave them my phone number. When they needed a part, they would call me. If I had it on hand I promised delivery within one hour anywhere in Nizhniy Novgorod,” he said proudly, defying anybody else listening to do it better.

“So, you used Gorbachev’s initiative Perestroika to start a business when you were in your late twenties,” I helped to fill in the historical details.

“Correct. All the sudden it was no longer a criminal act to make a profit for oneself. And because the factory only delivered parts on their own schedule, if at all, the mechanics couldn’t wait any longer as the drivers were losing money by not making profits for themselves. So, anybody who could provide the parts faster than the factory got the order. So, I had to make sure I had the most usual parts in my shed. There were always those that broke fastest or maybe were poorly made from the factory that had to be replaced faster than others,” he explained.

“How did you get the parts?” I queried.

“I could buy them directly from the factory for cash but had to pick them up myself at night after closing, so I used my father’s car once a week to load up the trunk and the seats and drive to our dacha and make the inventory,” he painted a shady picture.

“Sounds very clever!” I swallowed my true reaction to sound harmless.

“It was effective and it was growing quickly as more people were driving their own cars as taxis. I had to find Lada parts and Chaika parts. Soon I bought GAZ truck parts for the delivery companies. Of course, I had to get a larger storage building. So, we rented a used warehouse for cash behind Prospect Lenina that wasn’t being used, from a director of a parts maker for airplanes, and we grew and grew and grew,” he said spreading his arms wider and wider apart.

“What year was that?” I asked.

“Oh, that was right after Chernobyl, so it was… 1988,” he counted years in the air.

“What kind of profits were you making? Was it just small margins and volume?” I asked clinically.

“We were charging big prices for quick delivery and what we called it an inventory charge on top of the official cost of the parts,” he said smiling.