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

Another part of the ‘human factor’ is your ability to negotiate with administrative entities. Every country and region has an administrative ecology that is just as particular to it as its natural geography. I have lost count of the number of construction projects I have seen crushed at birth by oppressive Russian legislation and the proliferation of organs responsible for implementing it. More often than not, you are required, at least in theory, to secure preliminary permission to start work, but because this process takes a huge amount of time to complete, and involves exchanges with a plethora of different agencies, you can end up waiting for so long that it risks seriously damaging your enterprise’s prospects. As a result, most constructors start work without the appropriate permits, and hope that they’ll be able to pick them up along the way.

For instance, the area around Sochi in which we were supposed to be creating the infrastructure was a designated conservation region. You could not even cut a tree over there without getting permission first, and industrial activity was prohibited. So even before the first hole could be dug, we had to introduce special amendments to the Law On Specially Protected Natural Territories, and have them passed by the Duma. Then, once the state was content for us to begin, we knew we would have to deal with the local authorities. One example of how complex, even maddening, these interactions could be arrived when we needed to create a service road on the left bank of the river where there were a handful of houses, but not even a track to connect them to the outside world. According to the federal environmental protection laws, after finishing the work, we were supposed to rip the tarmac up and restore everything back to how it was, which is what, with a somewhat heavy heart, we agreed to do. However, during the final stages of the project, the residents, who almost overnight had been given the means to travel easily to Sochi and beyond, demanded that the road should be kept once we’d moved on. Which is, of course, a useful illustration of how capable human beings are of springing a surprise or two.

This brings us neatly to the third and most challenging category: the things that cannot be predicted. There are some events that you can neither anticipate nor prevent, and being able to step up when your company activity veers outside its normal modus operandi is one of the defining features of a good CEO. Life does not provide you with a complete script for every breath you take, and when you find yourself exposed to abnormal, unprecedented situations that are not covered by existing legislation and procedures, you cannot afford to lose your head or be afraid of taking risks.

However, you can at least introduce prophylactic measures. Sochi is within spitting distance of places like Abkhazia, Ossetia, Georgia and Chechnya, territories that, while peaceful at the time, all had a recent history of violence and discontent, and we had to safeguard our supposedly idyllic resort against the possibility of a terrorist attack. To this end, we installed a special system of around-the-clock observation and security, which included video surveillance, fences, dedicated security centres. Under Russian law, the owner of the infrastructure is responsible for its protection. The security services made recommendations and we were compelled to follow them, no matter how expensive they were.

Another potentially lethal threat came from the fact that Sochi is situated in an area that has historically been particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, something which had to be considered during our planning and construction. But if we could at least conceive that a terrorist attack or volcanic eruption might occur, there are always predicaments that, like Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ‘unknown unknowns’, leap out at you, seemingly out of nowhere, halfway through the project or just as you are about to cut the ribbon to celebrate its completion.

Over the next few years we would be hit by one unexpected event after another. Some, like the financial crisis in 2008, impacted upon the rest of the country, while others affected only us (who could have predicted we would have to purchase five million fish to preserve a river’s fragile ecology, or search for different ways to keep the Olympic Flame alight in windy conditions?).

It was not long before it became clear that our problems with drilling tunnels were not limited to trying to find the right equipment. My Vice President, Oleg Toni, the same person who had alerted me to the first issues with the Dragon’s Mouth, came to me again and he told me:

You need to know this. We have discovered that the geological picture which we were given was incomplete, and in the course of our work on Tunnel Complex No. 3 we’ve learned that once you get a certain distance inside the mountain’s skin you begin to hit a substance like powder.

We were, he said, operating in Karst topography, a landscape shaped by the effects of underground water on soluble stone, which meant that it was honeycombed by caves and sinkholes. This meant that each section of the tunnel we were drilling was effectively unique and had to be tackled individually: the engineers would not know exactly what they were dealing with until they had made their first incursions into it.

It was almost a paradox; you would have thought that the softer the rock, the easier it would be to tunnel through. But what was actually happening was that the drills were set up to rotate at a velocity sufficient to excavate incredibly hard materials, but when working with this powdery rock, the drills did not encounter the same resistance, so they simply spun faster, faster, faster, faster, until they reached temperatures of up to 1,400 degrees, which also happens to be the point that metal begins to melt. Although there were sophisticated electronic monitoring systems that were supposed to regulate the operating temperature of each drill, the changes came so quickly that the machines could not respond in time. It ended up with the metal solidifying with this powder-like substance and thus preventing the blades from rotating. It was very hard to free the equipment afterwards. No matter how methodical we tried to be, no matter how many sophisticated new technologies we tried to use, we were caught on the horns of an age-old dilemma: if you do not know what to look for, how are you supposed to find it?

In the end we had to use an awkward, time-consuming combination of drilling and blowing if we wanted to make any kind of progress without permanently damaging the equipment. We would drill horizontal holes to try and anticipate what lay ahead.

Progress was slow, and then one day my deputy came to me again, very tense, and said:

Listen, we only have 150m of the tunnel left to excavate, and at this moment, I cannot be 100 per cent sure that, although we are exerting as much control over every moment as we can, we will not encounter unstable cavities again. And if that happens, then I can guarantee you that a major part of the equipment will fail.

He carried on and explained that there was only one company in the world – a Canadian company – that would be able to repair the machinery in the event of this taking place.

We can hire them so that if our machinery falls victim to this threat then they will be on the spot immediately, in time to fix it before the delay will wreak havoc on our capacity to meet our deadlines. If we hire them and the machinery doesn’t fail, then we’re just wasting a huge pile of cash.

As before, I knew that it was not fair that a decision like that should rest on his shoulders. If your decision left Russian Railways unable to complete, then you would be responsible for blowing up the entire Olympic Games infrastructure and arrangements. If it comes to nothing, then you are the boy who cried wolf. You have landed a company that is already investing huge amounts of money into the project with a redundant bill. That was a dreadful time. I was trailed constantly by heavy feelings of anxiety and some days I did not feel anything beyond a persistent obligation to the task I had been given, but it would only be later, when I looked in the mirror, or into the faces of those friends who had studied my face with concern, that I realised how tense and exhausted I truly was.