Some Lessons from the Mys Kuznetsova

I showed up for my first expedition with Marine Resources on the Mys Kuznetsova woefully unprepared. Looking back on it, there was really no way to prepare any of the company reps for the work. We got the basics in a training video and went through some practice drills on dry land, but nothing can prepare a landlubber for industrial, round-the –clockwork the ocean. Like so many things in life, you just have to go out and start doing it to find out if you are any good at it.

I had a couple of strikes against me already when I climbed up the ladder onto the deck of the Mys Kuznetsova for the first time. I had put myself through college and was the only guy in my degree program who had not been to Russia. I studied hard but never had little experience actually hearing Russians speak their native language. Since this was back in 1986, and the Cold War was still very much alive, I thought part of my job as a rep would be ‘citizen diplomat’ – somehow I was going to make relations between the American catcher boat captains and the Soviet factory ship captains improve, thereby contributing to the lessening of tensions between our countries (or some such baloney). In a word, I had what Russians so eloquently describe as ‘kasha v golove’ – a head stuffed with kasha, or a mush-head. It took me a week or two to realize that I was on a boat in the middle of the Bering Sea, far away from Misters Reagan and Gorbachev, and that the only thing expected of me was to do my job.

With these two factors working against me, it was no wonder I fell onto my face with such a resounding splat. My grand debut on the Golden Venture turned into a grand debacle on the Mys Kuznetsova. The turning point for me came when I faced the prospect of being sent home for my lack of competence. I realized I had to screw my courage to the sticking place or it was go back to Vermont and spend the rest of my life working in some restaurant. The key was mastering the language and the processes at the job; Anatoly Ivanovich did me a huge favor, in retrospect, by demanding that I master the technical terms and procedures. We were dealing with hundreds of tons of metal in constant motion on rough seas, and the price of a mistake could easily be somebody’s life. One time we were taking a delivery of fish and an inattentive mate on the catcher boat forgot to release the bag. When the catcher boat turned away to let us winch the bag onto the factory boat, the two vessels were still connected by the steel cable. The twanged out of the water, buoys popping off everywhere, and cable torqued wildly across the trawl deck, sending the crew diving for cover. Fortunately, our crane operator hit the quick release immediately and got enough slack into the line to keep it from snapping. People got hurt out in the Bering Sea all the time, and the best way to prevent an accident was precision, attention to detail and constant vigilance.

Later in my career, I learned that the lesson applied everywhere I worked in Russia. Russians are frighteningly intelligent and give professional respect only when they see mastery at work. As a foreigner, I was under the microscope and if I couldn’t perform, they wanted somebody who could. It was a simple lesson but easy to forget. You earn the esteem of your colleagues by your performance.

The ‘citizen diplomat’ thing is a little harder to explain twenty years after the fact, but for those who remember, the nineteen-eighties was an extremely tense time between the United States and the Soviet Union. Many of us feared that a nuclear confrontation was likely and this gave birth to a number of ‘No Nukes’ movements. If only we could get to know one another, the logic went, we would realize that Americans and Russians are only people, and we could work together to prevent the ultimate catastrophe. It was naïve but I like to think that the marches and demonstrations helped to change the political atmosphere (actually I know they did in the Soviet Union but that is a different topic).

The upshot of this is that I arrived on the Mys Kuznetsova looking for a dialog that simply didn’t exist. Nobody out there cared much about politics – they were a bunch of fishermen trying to make a buck. In fact, the joint venture operated somewhat under the radar; it was a rarity and did not need to be politicized. The American reps were cautioned against engaging in any political discussion of any kind, ever, with the Soviet sailors. It was an offence egregious enough to get sent home for. Without the warm and fuzzy cushion of good international intentions to soften our interactions, the American reps and Soviet sailors were left, inevitably, with fishing. That is what we did, and since industrial fishing can be tense and situations difficult, conflicts are sometimes unavoidable. I was shocked the first few times I got screamed at, and retreated into a deferential political posture, trying to understand the deeper meaning behind it. Then it hit me: All they want is for me to convey the right information at the right time. The Bering Sea is a notoriously foggy place and a big part of the rep job was standing on the bridge, translating positions and headings, and playing find the catcher boat. The captains and mates needed to have complete confidence in my abilities – again, the price of a mistake could be people hurt or even killed.

One last thing. It took me a while to appreciate the intense hierarchy existing on a Soviet factory ship; the captain had the first, middle and last words in all affairs great and small. Everything that happened on board his ship was his business, and in the case of Anatoly Ivanovich, he spent his entire life and career getting command of the Mys Kuznetsova. During my first few weeks, I did not appreciate this simple reality, and allowed myself to criticize him; which only undercut my own credibility. It was a stupid greenhorn posture to adopt. Our moment of truth came when the Raven was getting fuel from the Mys Kuznetsova and he came out to ask the Raven’s captain to untie without getting the promised bunker. By this point, I was far enough along to understand that he was worried about keeping more than one hundred sailors busy, but at the same time, he probably didn’t like to break his word to the Raven. He was between a rock and a hard place. When we had our confrontation later by the map room, though, he saw that I would stand up for what I thought was right, and by not leaving the Mys Kuznetsova, I proved that I was ready to handle any pressure he put on me. Fortunately, I had the intuitive sense by then not to inflate the confrontation or even mention it further, which meant that in a general sense I did not challenge his authority. Our argument turned into a useful departure point for developing a better working relationship. This lesson served me in good stead throughout my career in Russia; it is important to establish yourself but not at the other person’s expense.

None of this means that the remainder of my career went entirely smoothly, or that I discovered some sort of magic key to working in the intense cross-cultural environment that always ensues when Americans work together perfectly with Russians. But it did instill in me an awareness that my chosen path would lead me through some very difficult waters, and that when I hit those waters, my assumptions should be the first thing to jettison overboard.