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

However, although the symptoms of this situation may sometimes appear bizarre, or incomprehensible, the causes, if you look carefully enough, are often more straightforward. Sometimes all that is needed to provide you with a different perspective is for someone else to turn the looking glass a couple of degrees in another direction. I cannot pretend that this book will provide you with all the answers about contemporary Russia, but I hope that it will leave you in a position to ask the right questions.

Language is not just about grammar or vocabulary: a single sentence is the reflection of centuries of mentality and traditions; it encodes the differences between cultures. [1] In 2008 I was given a stark reminder of the way in which an entire language can come to bear the weight of history on its shoulders. It was a time when we had been doing a great deal of work with Siemens. But one thing puzzled me: I remember asking their CEO Peter Löscher why it was that during meetings Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had been born in East Germany and was known to speak fluent Russian, confined herself to communicating through a translator. My policy has always been: if I know one word in Chinese, I will use it; if I know three words in German, I will use them. Why would you not? I could not understand why someone who knew Russian as well as her should not employ it when she was in Russia – it was as if she were in the grip of some kind of phobia. Two weeks later a friend of mine sent me a letter saying that the chancellor wanted to meet me in Berlin. She greeted me at the door of her office’s antechamber, and immediately began to talk to me in Russian. ‘She said, Mr Yakunin, you’re right, I do have a phobia about speaking in Russian. When I was a young girl my bicycle was stolen by a Soviet soldier and ever since then I have felt what I suppose is animosity towards Russians.’ ‘Mrs Merkel,’ I replied immediately, ‘There is a large department store around the corner. If I thought for one second that it would heal your wound, I would rush across and buy every single bicycle they have, but I’m not sure it would help.’ Two people from different countries might be able to understand each other’s conversation, but there will still be a gulf of comprehension between the native speaker and his interlocutor. Sometimes this can be a question of jokes or anecdotes that get missed; at other times it is about the manner in which the words are delivered.

Russians have a gift for concision and compression in their speech that I have seen other cultures take for bad manners. We like to cut corners in conversation sometimes, so we can get to our point more quickly, but this brevity – boom, boom, boom, boom – can sometimes leave foreigners with hurt feelings (which is precisely the opposite of what we want to achieve: the Russian mentality aims at making friends). I have been told that even our body language has the potential to send out an unwontedly aggressive message.

There’s a traditional Russian story that sums this up – sometimes an anecdote can explain as much about a culture as whole books full of sociological analysis. One day a landlord visits his premises. As he and his manager walk around the land they come to a small stream that divides two fields. Anxious not to spoil his boots unnecessarily, the landlord very politely says to his manager: ‘Ivan, it would be good if you could build a small bridge here.’ The manager agrees. Two months later the landlord returns and is surprised to find that his manager has not built the bridge. They talk again. ‘Listen,’ the landlord says, ‘Ivan, please could you build a bridge so I don’t get my feet wet.’ ‘Of course,’ comes the reply. The next time the landlord descends on his property he sees to his distress that the bridge still has not been built. Unable to control himself he hits the manager and exclaims, ‘Bloody hound! Just do what I ask!’ The manager stands up, turns to his boss with an innocent look on his face, and says, ‘Sir, why didn’t you tell me what to do from the beginning? Now I understand!’

I remember that when Russian Railways was building the high-speed Sapsan line between Moscow and St Petersburg, we had entered into a partnership with the German company, Siemens. But to begin with we had problems like you would not believe, with neither side able to find a way of communicating happily with each other. The Germans complained that the Russians were rude, inefficient and understood nothing. The Russians, by contrast, perceived their counterparts as indolent and unwilling to adapt themselves to the local ways of working. Unable to see an immediate solution to the impasse I called Peter Löscher, who was then president of Siemens, and with whom at the time I was only scantly familiar. I told him about the problems in hand and we both agreed that a great deal was at stake: it was Russian Railways’ very first international agreement.

We decided that Löscher’s chief engineer would fly out to Russia, where, along with those of his employees who were already on the ground, they would attend a meeting conducted in the time-honoured straightforward Russian Railways style. They watched as we got going, everyone present putting their views across forcefully, and at the end I turned to the room and said,

Listen, I don’t give a damn if you are Russian or German, we have a mutual target and you are responsible for the work. The image of both companies is on the line here, and if you don’t deliver, it doesn’t matter to me where you come from, I’ll eat you alive. And, by the way, Mr Löscher knows about this meeting.

Finished. With that I left the room, leaving the men and women assembled there to absorb the message I had just delivered. My speech had been very short, very precise. I barely did anything to adorn it – I did not raise my voice, and I stripped my face of any signs of emotion – but it must have worked. Two days went by, and after that we never saw another problem. And still, years on, whenever I see Mr Löscher and his chief engineer, they remind me of it, making friendly jokes about what they witnessed. I think it has stayed with them because my approach was so different to what they were used to in boardrooms in the West. American-style companies smile as they’re stabbing you in the back. You never have a hint of impending danger; at least not until the next day when you receive an envelope containing your severance package. (Of course, in Russia we are as capable of being as surprised by the mores of other nations as they are by ours. Drinking at lunch during a working day is, for us, unconscionable, which is some distance from the French perspective on this. I remember being called by a bewildered engineer who, on a trip to France, had been offered wine at 1 p.m. Anxious though he was of causing offence, he was also completely unaccustomed to the idea of having alcohol so early in the day. Being able to work effectively with people from other countries demands a very particular skillset.)

Not all of my experiences of the ways that different civilisations interact with each other ended as neatly as the Siemens episode. My spell in New York City during the ’80s – a location so distant and strange that my mother later told me that when I departed, to her I might as well have been heading for the moon – was a case in point. But it would provide me with my first encounter with a role I have come increasingly to inhabit as my career has progressed – that of a bridge between two groups who cannot and will not understand each other.

My family arrived in the United States in 1985 and returned to St Petersburg in 1991. Our time in North America coincided almost exactly with the Soviet Union’s Gorbachev-inspired era of perestroika and glasnost. The broken country we had moved back to was almost unrecognisable from the superpower we had left six years earlier.