Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Perhaps there is an ‘ideal’ mega-project out there, an endeavour characterised by a limitless budget, a generous deadline for completion, compliant local authorities and a landscape free of geographical bear traps, but I have yet to see one. Far more commonly, one sees substantial delays, or budgets that spiral out of control – Eurotunnel and the new Berlin airport are good examples of this. Generally, as a CEO in these situations, you find yourself acting as a kind of risk-assessment manager as much as a strategist. Your role, insofar as it is possible, is to anticipate the problems that the project you are responsible for is likely to run into, and to then take steps that will allow you to cut them at their roots (ideally), or (more realistically) cope with them if they grow. These issues might, very broadly, be divided into three categories: geography, humanity and uncertainty.

The natural environment you will be working in – its topography, weather, the actual composition of the landscape – has a potentially enormous impact on the way in which your project will unfold. I have always believed that building and maintaining infrastructure is an organic process that has to be responsive to nature’s reactions. The world around us does not consist of inert matter; it is a living body with which we interact constantly. Look at the way it has reacted to the decades’ worth of pollutants we have pumped into the atmosphere. It is easy to regard a section of steel railway track, to take an example pertinent to my career, as something immutable that will behave the same way wherever it is placed. But in fact as soon as it is laid, it will begin communicating with the ground below it: together, soil, metal and gravel form a complex mechanism. Any enterprise that does not take this into account is guaranteed to fail.

In this instance the most immediate challenge was presented by the vertiginous mountains that surrounded the resort. It was these as much as anything that had hindered the city’s development over the past couple of decades. We also knew that part of the route for the combined road and railway had to follow the River Mzymta’s valley, which would make for a picturesque journey, but also a winding and circuitous one, adding substantially to the length of road and track we needed to build. And because of the challenging topography, we knew that as much as two thirds of the highway would be made up of bridges, overpasses and tunnels – each presenting their own very particular logistical and technical challenges.

Another issue that we had to plan for in advance was the Tuapse–Adler rail line. Parts of it ran along the coast, which was threatened by two significant environmental factors that promised both to frustrate the construction itself and to present a level of risk that would hang like the Sword of Damocles over the railway’s future operations if we did not take care to resolve them.

There was the danger of rocks cascading down from the cliffs above the shore, and from below there was the substantial risk of water damage by waves. It was plain that reinforcing and making the lines safe by international standards required hefty investment. We all knew that there was no way we could proceed while there was still the possibility of whole slabs of the mountain – stones, earth, trees – destroying everything in its path as they crashed down. I saw this happen three times myself, but just once was enough to convince me that it was imperative we took every step available to secure the slopes so that, even in times of heavy rainfall, the track would be safe from landslides. Huge quantities of concrete and Olympian-sized steel pylons now provide a kind of backbone to the crumbling mountainside.

The problem with the water was perhaps not as dramatic, but no less important. We were given notice of the potential strength of the tide when the feeder port that they had built to supply the construction materials for the Sochi Olympics (worth over 800 million roubles) was washed down in a storm, something that ensured that the responsibility for transporting the construction materials for the project fell almost entirely onto our shoulders. Because the coast was so exposed to the potentially ruinous impact of the local tides, we ended up having to pour 800,000 tonnes of gravel every year onto the beaches to protect the tracks.

One thing that is rarely taken into account when people consider a big infrastructure project like Sochi is that there is only ever a certain amount of resources to go round, whether it be materials, machinery or human beings. This is especially true when you know that everyone involved is working to the same tight deadline as you are. In fact, one of the first signs that this was going to be an unusually difficult enterprise came during the planning stage. Or, to be more precise, the warning came because there was not going to be a planning stage; at least, not as we recognised it. The usual calculation is that the planning stage lasts two years, and that the costs incurred during this period comprise approximately 10 per cent of the price of the entire project. In theory, this enables the company not only to ensure that they’ve had time to produce a blueprint for the project that identifies and minimises all potential risks, but also that it gives them the opportunity to procure essential staff, equipment and raw materials. We did not have this privilege; we had to use materials the second they were ready. Normally, the production of materials, the planning and the construction of the project occur successively. In Sochi, they ran in parallel.

I remember that one day we were preparing for a visit from President Putin to the Olympic Park. All that remained to be finished was a small stretch of no more than 300m. It should have been an easy task, but then, all of a sudden, we learned that the delivery of asphalt we had been expecting had been taken by one of the other companies working on the project. There was huge panic everywhere – how could we convince the President that we were on top of our work if the first thing he saw was an unfinished road? We could not very well tell him that we had been unable to obtain the necessary materials. What kind of message would that have sent to him?

While we hadn’t foreseen this particular problem, we knew that very few things ever go to plan. So Russian Railways contracted entire plants to provide certain materials, including asphalt. This meant that we could operate as efficiently as possible, but also that we had contingency measures in place to deal with these sorts of problems – the kind that are ‘unimaginable’ until they actually take place. In the nick of time, we managed to turn around some of our own cars, which were carrying asphalt to other places, and used this to finish the last few metres. The next morning, when the President and his entourage arrived, their cars could drive across these brand-new asphalt roads, every last man unaware of what had taken place the night before.

As important as it is to engage fully with the ecology and landscape in which you will be operating, or the resources you have to hand, no project will ever be a success without the contributions of other people: there will always be a ‘human factor’. Ultimately, unless you are able to convince others – whether that is politicians, colleagues or members of the public – of the merits of your endeavour, then your chances of seeing it through to completion will be vastly reduced. In the case of Sochi, we knew that an infrastructure development on the scale we had planned would inevitably cause profound levels of disruption, so we had to continue to fulfil our many responsibilities to the people of the city, both those who lived in the region throughout the year, and also the large numbers who came to work for just the summer. We made sure that passenger operations – both long-distance and intercity services – continued to run, no matter how great the upheaval caused by the Olympic work. And while we knew that once everything began in earnest we would not be able to prevent roads from being blocked, or avoid creating unwelcome noise and pollution that would disrupt daily life and discourage tourists from coming to the resorts, we did what we could to mitigate the unhappiness this had the potential to cause. Representatives from Russian Railways met with different local citizens’ groups to explain what we were doing, talking them through every aspect of our endeavours to show them that even the service roads were necessary. In doing so, we were, eventually, able to secure their support.