Vodka (6 page)

“Speed is the key here, Mrs. Liddell,” Arkin said, and it was the smugness of his tone that prompted Alice to answer back.

“Speed is
always
the key in situations like these, Nikolai Valentinovich, but we can only move fast if you pledge to stick behind me all the way. I planned rapid privatization in Warsaw, and was undone by the bureaucrats. I was more cautious in Budapest, and was criticized for being too slow. Prague was the best I managed, largely because Havel backed me all the way. If this is to work, gentlemen, your support must be unwavering; I can’t do it otherwise.”

“This is Russia,” said Arkin. “You can’t apply the same strictures here as elsewhere.”

“Why not? You’re all postcommunist societies, you’re all facing similar transitions; you’re all the same, more or less.”

The silence was so deep and encompassing that it seemed to swallow Alice’s remark and whirl it down into the black hole reserved for heresies. The muscles in Arkin’s cheeks stood out like walnuts; Borzov struck his clay pipe against the table as though it were a drumstick. It seemed an age before the president spoke, in the quiet and measured voice of someone trying very hard to control their anger.

“Russia is unique,” he said. “It is categorically and absolutely not like anywhere else.”

Alice, her hands held up to pacify, gabbled to rectify her mistake. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend, I was just…”

“We respect your knowledge and experience, Mrs. Liddell.” It was Arkin this time, playing the peacemaker. “And in return we hope that
you
will respect
our
country. By the time your work is done here, you may love it or hate it—maybe both—but you’ll most assuredly see that it is indeed like nowhere else.”

Alice had the sudden and uncomfortable feeling of being a teenager again, chastised by an elder, someone more worldly and sophisticated than she’d ever be. She drank the rest of her vodka and looked around, trying to hide her embarrassment. On the nearest wall was a picture of Borzov, mushroom-colored, emerging from the Moscow River. He was clad only in a tiny pair of swimming trunks, obscured at the front by the pendulous overhang of his belly.

“They break the ice and have a competition to see who stays in there longest,” said Arkin, following her gaze. He’d noticed her discomfort and was now moving to assuage it. Alice was grateful, and confused. “Anatoly Nikolayevich always wins.”

“Only because they let him,” said Borzov. “They think he doesn’t notice, but he does. He’s not stupid just because he’s old, but you try telling his doctors that. Now that he’s nearly seventy, they say he shouldn’t swim in there. Fools!” He grinned at Alice. “Your husband would know better. Anatoly Nikolayevich will remember to ask for him next time he’s carted off to the hospital.” Borzov peered gloomily into his empty glass. “Another?”

“Please.”

He hauled himself out of the chair, refilled their glasses and resumed his place, tamping tobacco in his pipe with excruciating slowness. He was larger than he appeared on television; the screen conveyed the breadth of his shoulders but not his height, nor his depth. Borzov seemed to go
back
a long way, Alice thought.

She looked out the window. There was a demonstration on the far bank of the river; doctors protesting about their pay—less than ten dollars a month, when miners were still earning four hundred—and holding up banners saying
Hippocrates, please forgive me.

Borzov spoke to Arkin. “Now, Kolya, you were saying; speed is of the essence.”

Arkin was turning a book over and over. It was only when he stopped in order to speak that Alice made out the title:
Wealth of Nations
, Adam Smith’s masterpiece of free market doctrine.

“The West thinks every Russian is delirious with gratitude for the end of the Soviet Union. Not so. There are millions, tens of millions, who fear that reform will lead the country to ruin, and they’re well represented in parliament. Forget the resistance you saw during the coup, Mrs. Liddell; parliament is stuffed full of reactionaries who hope and believe we can’t do what we say we will. If
we don’t prove them wrong, and fast, then our window of opportunity will be gone. That’s why something,
anything
, is better than nothing. We don’t need you to run an entire privatization program, Mrs. Liddell, not yet.”

“But that’s what I—”

“There’s no history of private property in Russia. Communism succeeded czarism; czarism had succeeded feudalism. Privatization will be as seismic as introducing money into a barter economy—I don’t exaggerate. This is why we tell you that Russia’s different. We need to hurry, but we also need to be realistic about what we can do. To privatize everything overnight, that’s impossible. But a single factory, successfully sold off, to show that it
can
be done … Make that work, and the rest will follow. The dinosaurs will see that privatization is going to happen whether they like it or not. How long would that take you, to sell off an enterprise?”

“In Poland, I did one that…”

“No, by Western standards. To sell an enterprise, with due diligence and so on; how long?”

“A year, perhaps. Nine months at the outside.”

“Parliament meets in the second week of March. You’ve got nine weeks.”

They told her what was needed. The enterprise chosen would be in Moscow, just about the only place in the nation where more firms were still functioning than going to the wall. The guinea pig had to be well known, stable and commercially viable; bidding would be stronger for firms with good export potential and a strong retail base. Finally, it must already be corporatized as a joint-stock company; corporatization was a cumbersome process, and performing it anew would take too long.

With all these factors taken into account, there were seven possibles—
seven!
Alice thought. In a country that spans twelve time zones, only seven! There was the Vorobyovy chocolate factory; the Moskovksie Brewery; Koloss, which made spaghetti, snacks and tea; Moscow Food Processing; the food wholesaler Torgovy Dom Preobrazenski; and the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory. All these were suitable in financial terms, but not politically; the government couldn’t hold up a spaghetti manufacturer as the harbinger of the Great Leap Forward, for instance. For the test case, the flagship, they needed something more … more
Russian
, something quintessentially national.

The seventh possible enterprise was the Red October distillery, and the decision had already been made. What could have been more appropriate? Vodka is just about the only recession-proof industry; the worse the economy gets, the more vodka people drink. In many of Russia’s cash-strapped regions, vodka was a stable currency, making it as profitable as diamonds or oil. Alice had read that teachers in Murmansk were receiving their salaries in vodka (having rejected funeral accessories and lavatory paper) because the local authorities couldn’t pay them. The nation’s consumption of vodka borders on the heroic, and the figures remain staggering no matter how many times you hear them: Russia accounts for four fifths of the world’s vodka; a million liters are downed in Moscow each day; the average Russian drinks a liter every two days (the
average
Russian, including women and children—consider that for a moment).

“Choosing Red October—it’s not just an economic decision, you know.” Borzov held his glass up to the
light and squinted at it, as though the nation’s secrets were held within. “The people will understand why, because vodka’s our lifeblood, the defining symbol of Russian identity. It’s our main entertainment, our main currency, our main scourge. Vodka affects every aspect of Russian life, good and bad: friendships, business, politics, crime, and the millions of Russians whose lives are lonely, embittered and tough. If there’s one thing that unites the president with the frozen drunk found dead on a Moscow street, it’s vodka. Vodka’s always been the great equalizer, from here in the Kremlin down to the hovels. The good, the bad and the ugly, they all drink it. No matter what’s going on up above—monarchy, communism, capitalism—there’s always vodka, and all life goes through it. Our history and our future depend above all on one thing: vodka, and our relationship with it.”

This was a sacred homily for Borzov, and Alice respected that. Borzov lowered his glass and stared at her. “What’s vodka, Mrs. Liddell, if not all things to all men? It can be a folk medicine, a hallucinogen revealing the mysteries of the soul, a lubricant more commonly applied to sophisticated machinery than any conventional liquid—and of course it can simply be vodka too. Every aspect of the human condition finds its reflection in vodka, and its exaggeration too. Russians drink from grief and from joy, because we’re tired and to get tired, out of habit and by chance. It warms us in the cold, cools us in the heat, protects us from the damp, consoles us in grief and cheers us when times are good. Without vodka, there’d be no hospitality, no weddings, no baptisms, no burials, no farewells. Without vodka, friendship would no longer be friendship, happiness would no
longer be happiness. It’s the elixir sipped sociably, spreading gregariousness and love; it’s also the anesthetic without which life would be unendurable. Vodka’s the only drug that enables the dispossessed to endure the monstrously cruel tricks life’s played on them. It’s the only solace for desperate men and women for whom there’s no other release. So where better to begin the second revolution than at the spiritual home of Russia’s vodka production, the drinker’s Mecca?”

Borzov’s cheeks lapped over the edges of his bulbous nose. He clenched a fist and grinned at Alice; she raised her glass to him and then followed his lead—down in one.

“You drink like a Russian,” he said, and meant it as a compliment.

“Nine weeks,” she told Lewis over dinner. “That’s ridiculously short. A quarter of the time we need, at best. They must be mad.”

“I bet they got your measure the moment you walked in.” There was more than a trace of irritation in Lewis’s laugh. “You
love
it. It’s just another challenge to you; something else huge and complex and impossible for you to pull off. No, don’t insult me by arguing, Alice. I’m right, and you know it.”

He
was
right, and Alice did know it. The thrill rose in her gut like a salmon leaping from clear Siberian waters. This impossible schedule was the latest in the endless series of obstacles against which she could measure herself and discover in that measuring whether she was all she hoped she was—whether more, perhaps, or whether less?

“It’s
not just
another challenge to me,” she said.

He shrugged. “Right, whatever.” His tone warned her off this line of conversation. There was only one thing in Alice’s life that she was happy with as it was, and that was Lewis himself. She’d told him more times than either of them could remember that he grounded her, he saved her from herself; when she shook things up in giant snowstorms of endeavor, he was the constant.

Saturday, December 28, 1991

C
ome summer, the old royal estate of Kolomenskoe creaks at the edges, but at this time of year Ozers and Butuzov had only the crows for company. Both men were dressed in light colors, the better to blend in with the white snow, the gray sky, and the dirty cream tent-roofed Church of the Ascension against which they were standing. The only splash of black was the binoculars against Butuzov’s face, swinging in a long, slow sweep from left to right.

Kolomenskoe stands at the top of a hill, and Karkadann’s property was at the bottom by the river, almost large and impressive enough to count as a rival estate. Away from the riverbank, a line of poplars traced the manor’s perimeter. Butuzov guessed they’d been planted more for aesthetics than security, to hide the endless march of smokestacks and grimy high-rises. The real security began behind the trees; a razor-wire fence
topped with netting to catch hand grenades, a concrete wall behind that. An outsider would see nothing at road level, but from this high up Butuzov could make out stables, a landscaped garden, more outbuildings—garages and guest cottages, he imagined—and finally the main house itself, dark red like a bloodstain on the snow. It had come from Norway; Karkadann had seen it, liked it, bought it and then had it shipped over and reassembled brick by brick.

Butuzov lowered the binoculars, handed them to Ozers, leaned his head back against the church’s wall and peered up at the gables that climbed like artichoke leaves toward the spire. He could almost have forgotten that they were in Moscow at all; Kolomenskoe was sufficiently far from the main road for traffic noise to be a distant grumble and for the air to be halfway clear. Butuzov closed his eyes and inhaled as though sniffing a fine vodka; even Mafiosi on stakeout are children of nature at heart.

“Looks almost impenetrable,” Ozers said disgruntledly; irritability was his default setting. “There’s no weak link in the fence that I can see, and the gatehouse is manned. We’ll have to get closer and see if we’ve missed anything.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

Butuzov lifted the binoculars to his eyes again and studied Karkadann’s house. A streak of color flitted across the viewfinders, brief enough for him to start. He scanned the area quickly and found it again; a van heading down the drive, away from the house. Butuzov held the binoculars firm and tried to read the name on the vehicle’s side. It was hard to make out—the stenciling was old and the van was moving—but he got it after a few seconds: Comstar.