Russia – The Farewell Post

There has been a significant amount of silence emanating from these pages over the past few months.  I have been waiting for an apposite moment to announce that the Ruminator has left Russia.  Never say never; but for now there will be no business return to Russia, or the FSU (sic), ever.  The Ruminator has returned to the UK, where ‘returned’ is an odd concept given that I have lived and worked in Russia longer than anywhere else in the world.  Indeed, my life in west London as is strange as the early days in Moscow.  I considered finishing this blog with a series of posts on being an expat in your own country; but the fire and the ire are unoriginal and interesting only to a few people. Turn left at the Porshe garage on your way in from Heathrow and drink a reasonably priced bottle of wine for further discussion.

Since I was outed by the FT at the time of the Rosneft IPO, I have maintained a figleaf of anonymity.  For the sake of friends and business colleagues who continue the unequal struggle with hubris and corruption, this farewell post will not out me or them.  I shall reserve the truly gruesome stories of corruption for my memoirs; the hubris you can find here.

It was October 1994 that the Ruminator first set foot in Russia.  Five days holed up in the Metropole Hotel trying to run a schedule that started a meeting every hour, in a country which had no idea which hour the meeting was supposed to start.  The trip ended with dinner in Santa Fe, a restaurant with many memories and no cuisine.  The talk was of hope and of business trips to privatisation auctions, with bags of cash, to places that were to become household names (well in our house anyway).  After a night sampling  (vodka and beer – oh the things that you learn) the hope that was then pervasive I was hooked.  It took fifteen years to wean me from that drug.

By the time that living in a hotel in Moscow turned in to living in an apartment in Moscow we had made some fairly iconic investments.  One of my last acts on leaving Moscow with my family was to change my contract with Beeline, for no discernible reason; a Company whose early financing was built on our cash.  There are plenty of others interesting and profitable investments but this is not a post where boasting is much appreciated.  There have also been lean years – few of us have managed to make it through a decase and a half unscathed.

Along the way I met some more or less reputable characters; with the exception of Leonid Dordonovich, they are no longer in favour – oh and the incompetent idiot who runs Rosneft.  I would like to say that the least pleasant was a meeting with Khordokovsky about some boats (may he rest in Chita) but I think that it was with Yakovlev about some porcelain.

Along the way Moscow ceased to be a pleasuredome and became the city in which I lived with my family.  It also became a city fueled by the price of natural resources with no concept of value, values or ingredients.  In my forecast for 2007 I began to rant about the impact of inflation on the narod. What was obvious back then was denied by the great and the good right up to the month in which we took our leave.  Moscow was never beautiful, but in thinking itself so, flew too close to mamon and melted.  I no longer possess the drive to fight my way through another crisis – yes there is money to be made but alongside what kind of thief.

My first krysha was a Colonel in the KGB who was made persona non grata from a NATO country for activities not compatible with his status.  Ten years later he accepted an interview with MI6 (the price for a UK visa for this gentleman was a glass of whiskey at Heathrow) and until earlier last year sat on the board of a UK company.  How much better that brand of barely-sophisticate spy than their thug-like fifth directorate successors; too slow to understand the mess for which they were responsible but clever (khitry) enough to scam their way back to the top again.  And once again they are facing a Brezhnevian mess; this time though globalisation will ensure that there will be no lost decade and the result will be worse for Russia, if not for them.  They had a window of opportunity and have missed it – I believe that is how history will judge them.

Comparative crapness is as much subjective as objective.  To say that Russia is in a worse state today than at any time over the past 15 years is abject nonsense.  But on the day that Obama was elected President of Hope, I have less hope for Russia than at anytime in the past. 

And so, with a glass too many of whiskey inside me, this is the end of Ruminations on Russia.  The archive has a lot to be proud of, maybe not if you believe that grammar is important.  I have reread  most of it; mostly pithy, often wry and mostly right.  That will do for an epitaph.