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.