Nakhodka High Life, Part III

Russian roads are notoriously bad, and Russians are notoriously bad drivers. There are only two problems with Russia, goes the proverb. Дороги и дураки. Roads and fools.

In the two years I spent in Nakhodka, I think I saw just about every type of accident it is possible to have. There were countless fender-benders, sideswipes and dings; rear-end collisions at all speeds; bumper car front-end bangs; flat tires at high speeds that left long skids along the roadway; and a jumbo-sized assortment of fatal accidents, with bodies and car parts scrambled out along the asphalt in a bloody oil revolting mélange.

Many of the accidents could be blamed on cars with right-hand steering, the predominate automobile in the Russian Far East. Most are Japanese imports brought into Nakhodka because they are cheap and reliable. Right-hand steering cars are meant to be driven on the left hand side of the road, like in England or Australia; putting them on a right-hand, or American-type road, is a recipe for guaranteed accidents. The driver loses his proper sense of road perspective and has no feel for what is going on relative to oncoming traffic; a loss felt worse when passing another car, when the absence of visibility is alarming. The most common traffic accident in Nakhodka seemed to be a near head-on scraping collision with an approaching vehicle while passing, evidenced by missing left-front quarter panels and left headlights.

By far the worst accident I ever saw was in Nakhodka, on a stretch of long flat road running near the bay near the turn to Vostochny Port. We came upon the accident soon after it had occurred. There were four or five ambulances on the scene and three or four GAI, or traffic police. Two cars with right-hand steering had somehow tried to pass two other cars simultaneously and collided head-on with the oncoming other two vehicles. A fifth car blundered into the mess. It was obvious from the twisted and compacted wreckage that everybody involved had been going very fast. There were five bodies, all ruined splayed arms and legs and flailed torsos, laid out along the roadside.

Needless to say, I drove very cautiously the entire time I lived in Nakhodka. While I never had an accident, I came close plenty of times. Once the GAI nearly provoked me into it. Oxana and I were driving to Vladivostok on business. We had crossed the pass out of Nakhodka and were cruising through a lovely stretch of birch forests when two GAI officers came running out of the woods. One of them waved his white baton, the universal GAI signal to stop drivers. Instinctively, I put on the brakes and stopped the car, not really bothering to wonder what two GAI officers were doing in the woods in the middle of the day. When GAI waves the white baton, you stop.

Oxana opened the window.
Отвези нас в Николаевск, на участок (Give us a ride up to the GAI post in Nikolaevsk) – said one.
Давайте, заходите (Sure, get in) – said Oxana. They opened the door and clambered into the back seat of the Blazer.

Only then did we realize they were dead drunk. A picnic in the woods, a bottle of vodka, and now back to work. Then I realized with a shock that one of them was holding a submachine gun, kind of casually waving it around in the way drunks hold things, the barrel doing lazy circles and bobs around the inside of the Blazer a few inches from my ear.

Oxana looked at me.
Don’t say anything to them – I told her in English. Don’t speak any Russian. Act like we’re both foreigners and we don’t understand.

We drove along in silence. I put on music, the John Coltrane tape we loved to listen to while rolling down this lovely stretch of road, weaving in and out of the birch forest and along the beach, enjoying the interplay of views, light and jazz.

Рок-и-ролл! (Rock and roll) – spat one of the GAI. Рок-и-ролл! Рок-и-ролл!

The gun barrel waved in lazy circles. I took out a rock tape and put it on. We came up along a few trucks chugging along in a slow convoy.

Давай, давай, быстрее! (Come on, come on, hurry up) – muttered the GAI. I pretended not to hear.
Быстрее!! – He yelled, making a chopping motion with his hand. I pulled out, hit the gas, and got past the trucks along an uphill stretch of winding road.

The Nikolaevsk GAI post was right up the road now, at the top of a rise. One of the officers slumped forward, snoring lightly, cap askew. The officer with the machine gun glared at me, bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror.
Давай поехали в магазин! (Let’s go to the store!) – He rumbled. Oxana looked at me, wide-eyed.

The GAI post was on the other side of the road. I pulled up even with it and whipped the Blazer around into the parking area, right up next to the concrete building, and jumped out of the car. Oxana got out and we walked up to the closest officer.
Ваши коллеги приехали работать! (Your colleagues are here to work!) – I announced brightly, while the two GAI staggered out of the Blazer into the heat and light.

We beat it out of there and spent the rest of the afternoon in a very enjoyable drive to Vladivostok. The best part was, we didn’t even get stopped again for the rest of the day.

University of Alaska, Anchorage Language Careers Presentation

The following is a presentation I gave for the University of Anchorage, Alaska, Department of Foreign Languages on April 17, 2009. The title is, Language: Your Passport To The World. Enjoy!

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Thank you to the University of Alaska for asking me here to speak this evening. I would like to thank Olga Livshin especially for organizing the event. I am passionate about foreign languages, and Russian is my chosen passion. I will be speaking a little bit about my career in Russian, with hopes of opening up students’ eyes to the possibilities of a career in foreign languages.

When I heard the title of today’s event, I thought of the passports I have owned since 1986, when I graduated from the University of Vermont with a BA in the Russian language. Since then, I have owned two passports and a diplomatic passport, and if you count the pages, I had to add over the years, the number of passports turns out to be more like five. Russian language has indeed been my passport to the world.

One of my favorite comedy writers, Woody Allen, remarked that he considered becoming bi-sexual because it would double his chances of a date on a Saturday night. Knowing a foreign language works the same way– it doubles your chances of finding a good interesting career.

Russian gave me a kind of lateral freedom to work in a number of different fields. My friends say that I cannot work at a normal job, and I have to agree with them. I have always needed a lot of travel and intellectual challenge to keep from getting bored. A brief resume of my career in Russian would look like this:

Eleven expeditions as a vessel interpreter on a joint Soviet – American fishing venture in the Bering Sea.
Two years as the Ambassador’s gardener at the United States Embassy in Moscow, USSR.
Four expeditions to the Pamir and Caucuses mountains as a trekking guide for REI Adventures.
Two years on Kamchatka, Russia, writing about privatization in the Russian fishing industry for the Institute of Current World Affairs.
Two years in Vostochny Port, Russia, working in container shipping for Sealand Service.
Five years in Moscow, Russia working in project logistics for Maersk Line.
Two years working in St. Petersburg, Russia, in container shipping as General Manager for Maersk Line.

I love my bi-lingual career and cannot imagine life without it. Personal growth has something to do with it – going overseas creates a wonderful alchemy in the mind. It stretches and changes you in ways you never would never imagine. Foreign languages open up new paths in life and beckon you to explore, to see amazing new places, meet wonderful people, try unfamiliar foods and dive deep into exotic cultures. Sometimes I think of my career in Russian as a dog’s life – but not in the sense that it is miserable, rather, that sometimes it feels like seven years are lived in one year, because of the intensity.

The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson disdained to learn a foreign language, saying that he saw no reason to swim a river, when he could cross on a bridge. But a bridge may not be around when you need one, and besides, a little water never hurt anybody. Living in Russia taught me to build my own little bridges wherever I went, to swim when necessary, to look at the world differently and to challenge my assumptions. Russians were so different from what I thought they would be. There is no substitute for finding out for yourself.

Career choice is major plus in knowing a foreign language. International companies willingly hire graduates with foreign language skills and then teach you their business. This happened to me with commercial fishing and the shipping industry. When I left college, I had no idea I would work in these industries. Think of your own possibilities.

Generally, the money is good when you know a second language, especially if you work overseas. Then you enjoy tax breaks, and benefits like paid housing and paid travel. All that disposable income comes in handy. I paid off my student loans for both a BA and a Master’s in record time, thanks to knowing a second language.

If you love to travel, nothing gets you on the road like a career in foreign languages. Moscow, I found out, is two hours by plane from all of Europe. Companies pay you to travel on business. You work with colleagues throughout the world, collaborate with them on projects and get paid to do so. This is not the worst career path in the world.

My career was spontaneous and I cannot really recommend a direct path to anybody – you will have to find your own way and do it yourself. There are no secrets. But hey, you are resourceful and adventurous types, or you would not want a career in foreign languages. That said, here are some places you may want to look:

Certainly check with big global producers of consumer goods. Outfits like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever have a significant overseas presence, and always need fresh talent.
Transportation and logistics companies always need new talent, and the international ones need bi-lingual people by default. Check with Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping, Kuhn & Nagel, Federal Express, et cetera, for opportunities.
The State Department, the United Nations, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and military always need persons with language skills. Other places to look are the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA, and so on.

A combination of a foreign language degree and a second degree in another discipline is unbeatable in the marketplace.
Russian-speaking petroleum engineers can write their own ticket for the next ten years. A graduate in public health with a foreign language should find a rewarding professional life. A computer programming, accounting, finance or business degree plus a foreign language adds up to a very nice career, indeed. Non-governmental organizations, tourism, and hospitality are good places for graduates with foreign language degrees to find a home.

There is a wider perspective, too. A bit beyond the personal.

On a regional level, the need for foreign language expertise is urgent. The United States shares an Arctic commons with eight other nations, two of which border Alaska. The future of the marine resources and energy reserves in the Arctic will be a major policy issue for Russia and the United States over the next half-century. Alaska deserves a place at the table when Moscow and Washington set Arctic policy. This is a huge opportunity for UAA Russian language students, who live here and know the issues at stake. Every dollar Alaska spends funding Russian language programs at UAA will pay for itself ten times over in the future.

Globally – and I will generalize here – Americans do not know enough about the wider world. Sometimes we assume that all people and nations are the same, with interests, values and motivations similar to our own. We think we can get a sense of a national leader’s soul by looking into his eyes, or understand a country by osmosis, simply because it is right next door.

Foreign languages disabuse us of these assumptions. They demand we learn nuance. They force us to hear people speaking in their own words. They teach us to understand the unfamiliar in unfiltered terms.

I have had my passport stamped in forty countries of the world, just by dint of knowing one foreign language. Do not doubt that learning a foreign language is worth your while. It is good for you, it is good for your state and it is good for your country. So get out there, do your homework, get inspired and think about the good things in the future.

And may your passports have many, many stamps!

Nakhodka High Life, Part II

Oxana’s battles with the Swamp ZheK commenced our very first full day in Nakhodka

Oxana comes from a venerable Soviet navy family; her father, the formidable Stanislav Stepanovich, a ranking colonel, brooks no nonsense. Shortly after I first began dating his daughter, I was visiting at their apartment in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, and I ventured an opinion about the progressive democratic views of a local politician whom I had just met. “WHAT!” he thundered at me, incredulous. “You believed what that IDIOT told you?! He’s a CROOK!” Stepanovich then proceeded to tell me in detail how the politician had conspired to misappropriate some funds earmarked for a construction project into building his personal dacha.

As a child of a military family, Oxana was used to order, stability and precision. Her family’s apartment was in the military neighborhood in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, and the local ZheK dealt quickly with plumbing problems and electricity outages. Nobody from a service bureau had ever hung up on Oxana in her life. After morning coffee, she ventured forth to find the offending ZheK and put them in their proper place.

First, though, we had to find the place. Compounding our unfamiliarity with the Swamp’s layout was the fact that its builders neglected to use any sort of identifiable logic in its construction. It was the ultimate late-Soviet period housing development, a sprawl of identical unpainted five-story concrete apartment blocks dissected by mud fields. Parallel mud fields, it could be surmised, were roads, since they had potholes and wheel marks. The more random mud fields – communal living spaces, or dvori – held random playground equipment and collections of busted up benches among drifts of wastepaper and broken glass.

The streets of the Swamp squiggled around the mud fields in random array. All were named Soviet Street. There was First Soviet Street, Second Soviet Street, Third Soviet Street, Fourth Soviet Street, Fifth Soviet Street, Sixth Soviet Street, Seventh Soviet Street, and Eighth Soviet Street and Ninth Soviet Street. The street names weren’t always painted on the sides of buildings, so at a crossroads it was impossible to tell which Soviet Street went in which direction. The building numbers in some places alternated odd and even on opposite sides of the road, and in others sequentially, with odd and even numbered buildings on the same side of the street and then wrapping around to the other side. On a few Soviet Streets, odd and even building numbers on opposite sides of the streets switched abruptly to sequential numbers, and vice versa. Some of the Soviet Streets were mis-numbered. Squads of cats skulked in feral groups and fled into dark basement windows when we approached. Sidewalks dead-ended in mud holes of green water.

Forty-five minutes of exploration finally landed us at the ZheK doorway, where we were only seventeenth in line. It wasn’t ten yet and I was already sweating in gobs. Finally, after an hour and forty-five minutes, our turn came. We approached a tiny closed door, which the Russians call an okoshka, and are an integral part of their bureaucratic life. Civil servants hide behind okoshki like the guard at the gate of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, and open and close them on whim. An okoshka reveals only the face of the civil servant and is always situated at shoulder level, so that a petitioner must bend and kowtow obsequiously before it.

The Swamp ZheK okoshka flung open, revealing a glaring fat female face. “WHAT!” screamed the face. Oxana took a startled step back.

“…we had some problems with our water this morning…”
“WHAT? WHERE DO YOU LIVE?”
Oxana gave the address. The okoshka slammed shut. Oxana rapped twice.
“WHAT?” shouted the woman. “STOP BOTHERING ME!!” The okoshka slammed shut again.
We looked at each other, shrugged and waited. A few minutes later, the okoshka opened.
“EVERYTHING’S PAID TO THE END OF THE MONTH!” the woman bellowed.
“…but we didn’t have water this morning…”
“WHEN?!!”
“…this morning…”
“WHEN?!!”
“…when we got up…”
“WHAT BUSINESS OF MINE IS IT WHEN YOU WAKE UP!! MAKE SENSE!!”
Oxana blew up at this: “WHO do you think YOU ARE! WE DON’T HAVE WATER! WHY!?”
“NOBODY HAS WATER! IT’S A SHORTAGE!” The woman glowered. “I CAN’T WASH, EITHER!” and slammed the okoshka shut.

Later during our stay in the Swamp, we found out the cause of the water shortages. Nakhodka, and the entire Primorye, is one of the lushest and most well-watered regions in all of Russia, its hills and valleys awash in stunning green and gold vegetation, its rivers strong and pure, and its lakes deep and plentiful. Soviet planners, taking advantage of the Swamp’s proximity to a river, put the pumping station for its water supply on a flood plain. If the river rose too high, it shorted out the electricity and the Swamp lost its water; if the river fell too low, the intake marooned above the waterline, and the Swamp went dry. Optimal conditions for water supply existed approximately three days per month. The rest of the time, just enough water could be taken in to supply the Swamp between the hours of one o’clock and five o’clock in the morning.

Equally vexing were the brownouts. Nakhodka, like many cities in the Russian Far East, has a tenuous relationship with electricity. It depends on creaky, Soviet-era coal-fired generator stations for its power, and problems are legion; coal shortages, equipment breakdowns, plant managers with visions of grandeur ransacking the budget, problems that add up to one thing: Cold dinners in dark apartments.

The electricity, we soon found out, went on at eleven p.m. and turned off at seven a.m. The trick was to cook something for dinner while eating breakfast, and then at night, get breakfast ready before going to sleep. Properly coordinated with the water schedule, it was possible to live a reasonable schedule with two sleep periods; one upon arriving home from work, from seven until nine or ten p.m., and then a second one, from about midnight until four a.m. This way all of the washing and cooking and cleaning could be done daily. Oxana and I would shuffle home from work and nap for a while before getting up for a few hours of housework in the middle of the night; a look out of our window confirmed that everybody else in the Swamp operated on the same schedule.

Once we figured this out, life became tolerable. Bizarre REM patterns reduced us to a semi-stunned state for most of our waking life, like being ever so slightly high. We only tipped over the edge when catastrophes hit, such as the time a flood knocked the pumping station out of commission for two weeks. To keep the Swamp supplied with drinking water, ZheK organized tanker trucks, big brown ZILs that chugged into the yard honking to announce their arrival. Immediately a rush of housewives carrying buckets and bottles surrounded them, collecting as much liquid as they could to last until the next day. For American conservationists, I offer this challenge: Try to live for 24 hours on three gallons of water. A gallon for a sponge bath; a gallon for dinner and breakfast; and a gallon for the rest, with all of the waste water going to flush the toilet. It can be done but by day 3, you will definitely need a hot shower, and by the time the water comes coughing out of the faucets at the end of day 8, you will shed tears of joy at the first rusty brown trickles.

All of this, of course, is to say that Nakhodka is representative of a typical working-class, middle-sized Russian city. The people are, for the most part, poor – talk of oligarchs and Russian billionaires dominates the American press, because people in general worship wealth and think that rich people are more interesting than poor people are, but Nakhodka (or something similar) is the reality for most Russians. They put up with a dilapidated infrastructure, bad drinking water, cramped and poorly built apartments and bad food because their poverty leaves them no choice. This is the Russia where the average wage is a few hundred dollars a month and life expectancy for men is under sixty years.

Nakhodka High Life, Part I

I have lived for major periods of my life in different Russian cities – in Moscow, twice, once from 1987 through 1989, and again from 1997 through 2001; most recently in St. Petersburg, from 2006 through 2008; and in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, on the Kamchatka peninsula, from 1992 through 1994. For some reason, though, the Russian city that stuck with me most in terms of experience was Nakhodka, where I lived in 1995 and 1996, while on contract with Sealand Service to work as the Operations Manager in Vostochny Port. Vostochny Port, located about 170 kilometers east of Vladivostok, and maybe 20 kilometers outside of Nakhodka, is the largest container terminal in the Russian Far East.

Life for any westerner in Russia is an adventure, in the best and worst senses of the word. On the positive side, you grow and stretch and expand, and learn things about yourself and the world you never dreamed possible. Living in Russia at that point in my life meant, for me, complete and total immersion in Russian language, culture and society – a continuation of the baptism by fire I had undergone on Kamchatka and earlier, on the fishing fleet with Marine Resources. I wanted the whole kolbasa; I wanted to work with Russians, speak Russian at work and at home, watch only Russian television, eat only Russian food, play basketball with Russian buddies, go the banya at night, explore all of the familiar and unfamiliar mazes of foreign life, lose myself in the experience. Strengthening the positive were two mighty circumstances working in my favor – first, I had a serious girlfriend from Kamchatka, the wonderful, mystical, baby-blue-eyed Oxana (whom I later married and who remains with me, the angel). Second, I somehow had a serious job, a job with career prospects, with Sealand, and the thousands of dollars per month flowing into my bank account would go a long way towards easing my debt burden of student loans.

There were, of course, multiple downsides to complete and total immersion in Russia. Once you get past the romance of living in a foreign land, I realized, you quickly realize that the country you moved to has exactly the same proportion of idiots, greasy lowlifes, greed heads, blowhards, moral degenerates and pinheaded mean-spirited dingdongs as the country you left behind. The good citizens of your adopted country will be more than willing to laugh at you, kick your ass, take your money, degrade and try to destroy you, mentally defenestrate you in their native language (which, no matter how hard you try, will never really and truly master), make you a figure of fun, rip your heart out, hand you your head and have a grand old time talking about you long after you’ve fled the scene with your tail between your legs. Russians in particular; remember, these are the people whose ancestors shot foolish Polish pretenders to the throne of the Russian Empire out of cannons towards Warsaw, back during the Time of Troubles. And, as Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grand Army learned, they would rather burn down Moscow than let any foreigner get the best of them.

I knew I was in for it the first time I saw Nakhodka, at the tail end of a sweltering hot August day. I had just spent three days in Tokyo on the way over, visiting Sealand’s corporate headquarters there and going from conference room to conference room to meet with my new Japanese colleagues, who would shake their heads and admonish me, “Things are very very bad in Votostochiniy! Very bad!” At one point one of them grinned and asked me, “Peter-san, you like in Vostotochsiniy?” “Yes, I do, Hiroto-san,” I answered politely. My colleagues whispered quickly among themselves in rapid Japanese and then entire room erupted into gales of laughter. “Hahahahahaha! Peter-san like in Votstotochniniy! Hahahahahaha!” I felt like some sort of sacrificial chicken; the omens were all bad. On the train ride from Tokyo to Niigata airport, Dan, my partner, hung-over and panting in the heat, sweated and fussed incessantly with his bags and briefcase until he wound up losing his passport and plane ticket, a fact he only discovered while registering for our flight. Hordes of sullen beer-bellied Russian men in cheap suits and their garishly made up, leggy molls, waiting for the flight to Vladivostok, pillaged the duty-free shops and lurched around the cocktail lounge, guzzling liquor and chain smoking.

By the time we landed in Vladivostok and cleared customs, I was delirious. Oxana met us at the airport, radiant, fresh and sunnily blonde, all smiles for me. Dan had arranged for our driver, Andrei, to meet us and take us to Nakhodka straightaway. Andrei, whose slouch and haircut suggested a previous incarnation as a brown throw rug, stood in the parking lot, stuttering out some explanation about the disappeared tire from the company Blazer, which he had changed the day before, only it turned out to be defective and he left it at the shop and so now we had to drive on the spare...

The drive from Vladivostok to Nakhodka is, actually, quite lovely – a sporty windy two-lane asphalt track winding through sun-dappled groves of live oak and picturesque high fields with views of the Sea of Japan sparkling in the distance. Every few dozen kilometers it passes through rough villages of one and two story ramshackle houses surrounded by fruit trees and lush green gardens. A long stretch of the road runs right along the ocean with lovely views of islands like gumdrops scattered here and there on the bounding blue – and many times I would enjoy nothing more than to pop some jazz into the tape deck, Coltrane maybe, and tool along with Oxana, bopping to the beat and the sunshine and the cool sea breezes.

Not today, though. Today heat, jet-lagged misery, humidity and lack of sleep adrenalized me into a buzzing insectile wakefulness. Everything whitewashed, colors fading in the hot air before my bulging bloodshot eyes. I blabbered nonsense in Russia to Oxana who, irritated at my incoherence, scrunched up against the opposite door and pretended to look out of the window. Up front, Dan and Andrei argued incessantly about the lost Blazer tire. The road had a long unpaved stretch and billows of choking white dust flew up around us as we bounced blindly through the gritty clouds. Periodically the grime parted to reveal other cars slaloming madly through an obstacle course of potholes and gravel piles – little rocks peppered our windshield as we swerved around avoiding head-on collisions.

At last, we got out of the dirt and back onto asphalt. The road climbed steeply up a pass into green rolling mountains, the Blazer laboring on the relentless grade until at last we topped out. There was a huge gray wooden boat stuck on top of a boarded-up dilapidated old concrete building up in the middle of a parking lot on top of the pass, a symbol, Dan explained, of Nakhodka’s proud maritime trade history. Although as nearly as I could remember, Nakhodka’s proud maritime history consisted mainly of its role as a transit point for political prisoners, whose only view of the city came when they were kicked out of livestock wagons after traversing the Siberian hinterlands and herded onto boats sailing north for Magadan, the frozen gold mines of Kolyma and certain death.

A few minutes later, we turned off into our new neighborhood, a sloppy aggregation of five-story unpainted concrete block buildings known locally as Bolota – the Swamp. We passed a small market of open stalls; women in housedresses walked slowly through the heat and dust, laden with groceries and packages. Cows wandered around the roads and yards between the buildings. One sauntered up to a dumpster, reared up on its back legs and, forelegs resting on the edge, poked in its head for a little snack.

Our apartment was three flights up a dank unlit garbage-strewn staircase that reeked of urine and frying onions. We let ourselves through three locks on the red iron door, then another two on the wooden inside door. It was your basic Russian flat. Russian flat design dates from the Soviet design period, when everybody had the choice of one type of apartment and one type of furniture. Therefore, all Russian flats use the same basic layout – kitchen to the left, living room straight ahead, bedroom and bathroom to the right; and the same basic interior design – Oriental rug hanging from one living room wall, check. Brown nubby fabric couch under the hanging rug, facing the wall armoire and television, check. Brown nubby fabric easy chair facing the television, check. Brown throw rugs on the floor, check. Immersion beckoned; for a brief moment, I was like a terrified six-year old whose laughing sadistic older brothers grabbed his arms and legs and heaved him flailing into the deep end, knowing he can’t swim.

There’s no place like Russian flat, though, and Oxana and I soon settled into life in the Swamp. We rustled up some dinner and collapsed into bed for our first night in Nakhodka. Soviet planners built the Swamp for railroad workers from the Nakhodka Switching Yard, and conveniently located it less than a kilometer away from the main operation. All night long, the loud harmonic rumble of freight trains and bang crash boom of wagons coupling and uncoupling filled the humid air, broken only by the hysterical instructions of an obviously overstressed woman dispatcher yelling over a loud hailer: “TRAIN FOUR TO TRACK THREE! WHAT?! KLAVA SERGEEVNA, FOUR TO THREE! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?! WHAT?? NO, TRAIN FIVE TO TRACK FOUR IS LATER!! WHAT? WHAT?! LOOK AT THE SCHEDULE, KLAVA! MORON! SAME TO YOU!!!”

Fortunately, Soviet planners designed the type of building we lived in to retain heat during the summer and shed it in the winter, so that it was uncomfortable year-round, no matter the weather. The cleverly laid-out apartment design guarded against any whiff of fresh air from moving into the building from outdoors, meaning we didn’t feel so bad about keeping the windows closed against the swarms of gigantic mosquitoes rising from the swampy marshland surrounding the Swamp to feed. The closed windows kept the noise from the Switching Yard down to a dull roar for most of the night and ensured a sleepless night for us as we marinated in a twisted tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and slow-roasted in the airless bedroom.

Morning found us heat-blasted and even more exhausted than when we arrived. To our dismay, when we turned on the taps to take a shower, only a weak trickle of water came out for a few seconds, before dying away into nothing. Oxana called ZheK – the Communal Housing Services association, the Russian agency tasked with providing water, heat and electricity for the neighborhood. “Don’t you know anything!” the woman on the line shouted at her so loudly I could hear her across the room. “We’re having water shortages! Water is only available from one a.m. to five a.m.!” Oxana looked up at me. “That woman just hung up me, the witch,” she said.

Thus began the first of many skirmishes with ZheK that would eventually escalate into a full-blown war….

Re-Exporting Wrecked Cars from Vostochny Port

Customs Re-export

Early in the 1990s, I was working as the operations manager for Sealand Service in Vostochny Port, Russia. Vostochny Port, a port complex handling shipping containers, general cargo, lumber and coal, stretches for a few kilometers of lovely curving bay along the Sea of Japan about eighty kilometers east of the city of Vladivostok.

Its main attraction for Sealand was that Soviet planners thought it would be a logical place to build an excellent container port. Even though it is literally at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere (it’s a forty-five minute drive to the small city of Nakhodka, and trackless maritime taiga surrounds it on three sides), Vostochny has strategic value as the easternmost terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Nowadays, the port operates at about thirty percent of its potential, but before the fall of the Soviet Union, it served as a critical link for rail traffic between northern Asia and Europe.

I got the posting in Vostochny for two critical reasons; one, although I convinced Sealand’s hiring managers that I was in full possession of my faculties, I was, in fact, crazy enough to want to go there, making me that rarest of corporate hires, a person simultaneously sane and stark raving mad. Two, nobody else in Sealand wanted to go there, no matter the salary offer. I understood that Sealand sent me there as a kind of life probe, and if I survived, then Sealand would send a real shipping professional.

One nice thing about working in a western company was that we got company cars to drive. This was my first experience with company cars, and Sealand had sent us out two used Chevy Blazers for the rough road and climate conditions. The brown one was the good car; it burned a quart of oil per tank of gas but otherwise was dependable for my daily, ten-kilometer commute. The white Blazer we used for official business. Its muffler fell off one day and it spewed clouds of exhaust upon starting, and except for its backfires and earsplitting fart noises. We let the driver, Gennady take the car on weekends.

Sealand imported both Blazers under a Russian Customs regulation called “temporary import.” The company did this because it wanted to avoid paying duties on an imported auto, and in the faint hope that the Blazers could be sold back in America after service in Russia. Temporary Import rules allow a company to bring equipment into Russia for specified time, after which, the equipment must be exported out of the country. Temporary Import is one of those things about Russia that looks good on paper but is, in reality, a trap – like Napoleon, thinking that if he captured Moscow, that would be the end of it, Alexander would just give up, little realizing that his troubles were just beginning.

My troubles began one rainy Monday morning. I was at my desk, catching up on some paperwork, when an officer of the militia came into the office. We stopped your driver at the militia post last night, he said. The driver was very drunk, and began to raise a fuss with us. Then he took off in your company car. You’re sure it was our car? I asked. Gennady, our driver, still hadn’t show up for work yet but was due in any minute. Yes, I’m sure, said the officer. Your company has the only white Blazer in town. Anyway, he drove the car off a bridge and it’s lying on its side in a ditch. You have to get it out of there, people are slowing down to look at it, and it’s a hazard.

I spent the remainder of the day running around with one of our workers, Andrey Polovstev, a local Vostochny genius who knows everybody and can get anything done. We drove down to the Blazer, a pathetic heap of broken glass and bent metal tipped on its side in a drain ditch. I looked in the car and saw empty bottles of vodka, pieces of half-eaten kolbasa and brown bread; Gennady’s last supper.

Andrey went off to arrange for a mobile crane and truck while I fooled around at the car taking out the tool kit and documents. The Blazer finally found its way back into the port at about seven that evening; a stevedore hauled it off the flatbed truck on a forklift and deposited it in its usual parking spot, where it served as a source of amusement for the next few days.

I fired Gennady the next day. He wrote up some ridiculous complaint to the militia to the effect that they stopped him illegally and beat him, causing him to flee – but his vodka breath told the real story. Getting rid of the Blazer turned out to be not so easy. We wrote a request to the local Customs officers asking to scrap it at a local yard. They refused, citing the temporary import rules. The car would have to go back to its place of origin, the port of Tacoma, Washington.

We duly stuffed the wrecked Blazer into a container and got it ready for shipment. Customs refused to allow the car to leave, though. It came with tools and spare tires, and they had to go out with the wreck, too. Andrey and I gathered up the tools and tires, and again submitted the export documentation. Not so fast, said Customs. We need to make sure that the Blazer was wrecked officially, that is, that there was a record of the accident with the militia. They wanted a copy of the accident report. So I drove to the local militia post, which referred me to the district militia post, a two-hour drive from the port. There, the militia informed me they would be glad to issue a report, provided I submitted my request for the report in writing and included a statement from Vostochny Customs confirming that they needed the report. Vostochny Customs took only a week to provide the statement but they were careful to collect the request for it from me in writing.

By then, over two months passed since the accident. Then Customs demanded a statement, in Russian, from the Tacoma Port Authority, confirming that they “did not object” to receiving a container with a wrecked Blazer inside of it. I spent a day or two trying to get Sealand in Tacoma to arrange a statement but my emails were met with utter incomprehension. Then I followed up with a few phone calls to Tacoma but only succeeded in annoying the operations people, who had more pressing things to handle than to run around getting papers for Vostochny Customs. It was a moment of despair; the wrecked Blazer would sit forever in SEAU389653-7, ruining my yard report and making our operation the laughingstock of the company.

Then I dug out some flyers and brochures I’d collected in Tacoma while training for the Vostochny job. One of them was from the Tacoma Port Authority. I carefully cut the letterhead off a brochure and found a round stamp on the one of the flyers that would do nicely. Andrey wrote up the Russian text for the letter and I signed a made-up name. Then we copied the whole cut-and-paste job and ran it through the fax machine a few times, and lo and behold, we had the permission we needed. Customs took a few days to come back with an answer and this time it was positive – finally we could evacuate the wrecked Blazer.

Or could we? Now Vostochny Customs obligated us to provide the original letter from the Tacoma Port Authority within 30 days of leaving Vostochny. Then the Customs operations group demanded to look at the Blazer one more time before it shipped out. Another two weeks passed, and then finally the ill-fated Blazer loaded onto the container ship Kapitan Mann and left Russia for Busan and points east.

I heard from the operations people in Tacoma about a month later. Upon opening SEAU389653-7, they found a wrecked white Blazer with empty vodka bottles, glasses, dried up pieces of kolbasa and moldy bread. Was this a bad joke? Higher managers got involved, questioning the wisdom of shipping wrecked cars at the company expense. I fired off barely comprehensible accounts of Russian temporary import rules to finance managers who understood Russia about as much as I understood GAAT, and got an eyeful of good corporate advice: Get ‘creative’ locally; tell Vostochny Customs their rules make no sense; hire better drivers next time.

Vostochny Customs followed up with me a few weeks later, too. One of their officers stopped me during a visit to their office and said, do you know you still owe us a letter from the Tacoma Port Authority? I said no, but if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.