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

In retrospect it was perhaps obvious that this would have occurred. However, you can sometimes become so focused attending to a particular problem (in this case the overwhelming urgency of having everything ready for the Olympics) that you forget that the solution might have its own unwanted consequences.

It is in situations like that that you find yourself wishing you could have your time again. Suddenly, it becomes obvious what you should have done. The fog clears and solutions present themselves with perfect clarity, but of course it is too late. You have to accept that you have made a mistake. Your chance to prevent it from occurring again has long since slipped through your fingers, and yet you have at least been left with something: experience. This humbling reminder of one’s own limitations is the hardest-won kind of knowledge.

Most lives are full of hugely varied experiences, each of which plays its own role in forming one’s character. I have worked as both an entrepreneur and servant of the state, steadily learning a huge amount about everything from transport and education to governance. In St Petersburg during the ’90s, I was part of an innovative, forward-thinking business community; at the North-West Inspectorate, I received a practical education in how state and municipal institutions functioned; my experiences at Ust-Luga taught me how to plan and manage a complex infrastructure project; and my time at the Ministry of Transport sometimes felt like I had returned to university. I gleaned a great deal too from those years involved with Sochi. But if there is any consistent principle that is true for every stage of my career, then it is this: there is an almost unbridgeable gulf between theory and practice. You can think that you are just getting to grips with the task in front of you, that you understand it from every angle and are in control, and then circumstances intervene, and in the blink of an eye you find yourself having to come to terms with a role that has mutated out of all recognition.

In Russia, a country whose economy and society is in a constant state of transition, the picture is always partial; one is never presented with a complete plan of the terrain before you, the kind that might show you which route to take, and allow you to avoid missteps. It is only with hindsight that what was right and what was wrong become clear. I have come to understand that there are limits to what we can ever truly know, and limits too on what we can control.

When I was in St Petersburg working as a civil servant during the late ’90s, I learned that 5 per cent of your activity will always go awry. You cannot account for every piece of gravel, or every kilo of cement. The same is true for a big system like the railways; indeed, the more complex the system, the greater the chance of deviation. One must accommodate oneself to the knowledge that at any moment, somewhere within the system, there will be accidents; that somebody will be making the wrong decision, that there will be shortages of manpower or equipment. Before I began at Russian Railways, there was not even a procedure for recording derailings: they were so frequent, and happened in places so remote from our centre of operations, that there was no point.

Ultimately, these small incidents of chaos were not sufficient to affect the workings of the system as a whole, so they could be absorbed. To try to change this and achieve a pristine model of management is, I have come to understand, a futile quest – one that would consume untold amounts of your energy and resources for little or no reward.

Of course this does not mean that responsibility can be abdicated entirely. It would be criminal to neglect security, the comfort and wellbeing of your customers and staff and the safety of the cargo and the operations. But elsewhere, you have to make this accommodation with reality, with the many loose ends within the railway system that simply cannot or will not be tied. You have to accept that somewhere in one of the more remote corners of the country, one of your functionaries is likely to be abusing his power, and that unless he makes a mistake or gets too greedy, there will be little you can do to stop him. It was no different in the days of the Soviet Union, where people would come to special arrangements with their boss, or the men and women who ran local food stores, in an attempt to gain small advantages that would make their life that little bit easier. It was not consistent with the regime’s ideology, nor was it legal, but nevertheless it was a persistent feature of life under communism. Russia resists any attempt to micromanage it; you cannot regulate every breath.

In Sochi, almost the sole circumstance that did not change was the one we might most fervently have wished could be amended: the date by which our work absolutely had to be finished. Years later, when all the dust had settled, I talked with my friends, the CEOs of the foreign railways in France or Germany, about what we were faced with, the sheer range of challenges. They told me, shaking their heads, that it would be completely impossible to create that infrastructure on that timetable in the West. In Russia, the only thing that was impossible was that we should fail to meet our deadline.

But there was another thing that we had not anticipated. Sochi would be, though we did not know it at a time, the last example of this kind of grand-scale infrastructure we undertook. Storm clouds were gathering, and events outside my control were already beginning to conspire against us.

Much ink has been spilled about my departure from Russian Railways in 2015: fanciful, lurid allegations have been made against me and members of my family; speculations that belong to the world of political dramas. The circumstances surrounding my exit are not replete with the kinds of details that might interest tabloid papers, but there is much in the narrative that I believe will be of interest to anyone curious about the ways in which Russia and its politics work. And I do not know if this counts as a plot twist, but little of what happened was a surprise to me – I saw it coming.

It was in September 2013, after eight years as president of Russian Railways, that I realised my time there was nearing its end. The Russian economy was under pressure; growth had slowed to just over 1 per cent and the value of the rouble was falling. Perhaps even more so than after the global financial crisis of 2008, it felt as if we had begun to exist within a completely unprecedented set of circumstances. Twelve months earlier, in his famous May Decrees, President Putin had promised the Russian people that spending on social welfare would remain high. The pressures on the government were mounting by the day, and everyone looking on knew that, before long, something would have to give.

The new conditions had already announced themselves within the offices of Russian Railways. It was not just that the atmosphere was changing – though you could sense it shifting, almost by the second – but that our ambitions were being circumscribed, our ability to act decisively pinched. Nobody could agree on the measures that needed to be taken to get the Russian economy back on track. The Ministry of Finance was vociferously arguing for a cut in tariffs – the prices the railways charge to private businesses to transport their goods across the country – in the belief that it would cut inflation. I was doing everything I could to make the case for increased investment in the economy, a programme that would give private business the opportunity to make money by building infrastructure. We waited anxiously for the budget due that September, when a decision about what path to take was to be made, hoping that it would bring relief.