Investment Biker Page 18

  The reason, of course, that Communism had survived here as long as it had was that prices went up in the outside world. During the commodities boom of the seventies and eighties, when the Soviets had sold huge amounts of gold, palladium, coal, silver, lumber, natural gas, copper, platinum, and oil to the outside world, they had paid their subservient citizens nothing to drill and mine and plant and harvest. As the price of oil went to forty dollars during the 1970s, Moscow had reaped a bonanza. All the money had gone to the Communist hierarchy and for the space program, to intercontinental ballistic missiles and world-class Olympic teams. The Party managed things so poorly and the system was so rotten, there had been nothing left for the 275 million working toads except subsistence wages and a subsistence existence. If you counted all the Central European workers slaving under the umbrella of the empire, there had been yet more slaves.

  Well, why couldn’t it have gone on forever? If they hadn’t bought anything from the outside, if they’d had a closed system, if they were so smart, why did it collapse?

  Because the system hadn’t been efficient; because nobody had had any incentive to produce more, sell more, or make a profit. A perfect analogy is the U.S. post office or our state-run educational system. Imagine an entire economy run for seventy years by the U.S. postal system!

  That was the old Soviet Union.

  The problem is the real world keeps intruding. In the real world, real prices are the only mechanism that brings in the right amount of supply. All a government has to do to deal with a shortage is let the price go up. We didn’t need gas lines back in the Carter years. All we had to do was let the price of gasoline rise and oil would have been found under every service station. As the price goes up, people drive less. The price always matches supply and demand. That’s what the price is, that matchup.

  If you run out of copper in a closed system in which the price cannot go up, then nobody has an incentive to go out and find more, unless he’s told to. “To hell with that,” he’ll say, “I’d rather go to the movies or drink vodka.” But if the price of copper does go up, then lots of people say, “Hey, wait a minute, I can make a lot of money if I go out and find me some copper.” Owners start to produce their marginal mines; those that weren’t profitable at fifty cents a pound become extremely profitable at a dollar and a half. Scrap pipe comes out of walls and old car radiators and goes to the smelter.

  If you had complete abundance of everything, without shortages and dislocations, in theory I guess a closed system would work. That was always part of the Soviet theory, that “We’ll have an abundance of everything because we are Communists, we plan centrally, our people work hard, and it’s a new mankind.”

  Well, the new mankind was certainly one part of that formula they didn’t quite swing. People don’t change. They haven’t for the past five thousand years I know about, and I have no earthly reason to believe they will anytime soon.

  One effect of low prices in the Soviet world was constant shortages. Every time the price of oil went up in the great outside world, there was an internal shortage. The Communists, however, never told their citizens that they couldn’t have gasoline because they, the Communist leaders, were selling it for hard currency in Europe and Africa.

  As we drove into Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, we were excitedly flagged down by a couple in a fairly new Lada, the basic Soviet car.

  Igor Kulikof, and his wife, Valentina, introduced themselves in broken English as the only private producers of motorcycle helmets from the Urals to the Pacific, or three quarters of the Soviet Union.

  As was true back in the twenties, when the United States had been poorer, the Soviet Union had lots of motorcycles. The Kulikofs’ customers didn’t buy the helmets for safety, but because they looked Western. They made a fashion statement, announcing that this motorcyclist was up-to-the-minute and cool.

  The helmets cost thirty-two dollars at the official rate, sixteen dollars at the black-market rate. There was enough of a demand to furnish the couple with an imported Jawa motorcycle, matching yuppie clothes, and gold chains. They were the Soviet Union’s new entrepreneurs. They were so successful, they had even acquired a second one-bedroom apartment—nearly impossible to obtain in the Soviet Union—which they used as their factory.

  They insisted we visit them. Their home was furnished with tiles bought on the black market, a washing machine, stove, stereo, and other consumer durables. They brought out black-market caviar, wine, and pâté to celebrate our visit.

  A couple of years before, when it had become legal to produce goods privately and sell them, they had given up their factory jobs to concentrate on helmet production. They’d crafted their helmets from fiberglass, aping the models they’d seen in foreign pictures, and sold them on the black market. Working together at a kitchen table, they’d made ten times what they could have made in a factory, even though they’d had to give half their profit to the state.

  “This country can’t go back,” Igor told us. “We have to move forward, become like the West. We won’t let the old bosses go back to the old ways. The past is dead.”

  We also met their shell-shocked Afghan-war neighbor, fat and unemployed. I couldn’t help but think that Valentina and Igor represented the future of this country; their sad, pathetic neighbor, its past.

  For a few days Igor and Valentina traveled with us on their bike, wanting to spend time with us and loving the idea of crossing part of their country with Americans.

  In the poor hotels in which we stayed, rooms rarely had double beds, yet they told us they always woke up in the same bed together because sometime during the early morning one of them crept into the bed of the other.

  They had been married as teenagers, had a child, and after ten years they still did everything together, supported each other completely. Romance was clearly still in the relationship.

  I saw in their marriage something I’d never seen before. I realized such long-term relationships were actually possible. I was very sorry when they turned back.

  The Hotel Novosibirsk refused us service because the rooms weren’t “good enough” for foreigners. Ha! They should have seen where we’d been. So we stayed at the Hotel Central, which took foreigners but almost refused us too, since the only rooms available weren’t “good enough for Americans.” Ha, again! They finally gave us a suite, which was what we usually got in our quest for a minimum standard of comfort. At least the refrigerator worked.

  A bright banner arching across the street drew our attention. Special events were so rare here it made us stop and ask what was going on. A festival was being held. Everybody would bring his accordion for a combination folk festival and dance. Yes, indeed, we wanted to go.

  That afternoon, accordion players and dancers gathered on an outdoor stage. We were introduced to Genadi Zavolokin, the folk accordion star, and his wife, Svetlana. He had a broad Slavic face, warm and generous. In the Slavic part of the Soviet Union, in Mother Russia, he was very famous, with his own television show and albums. We learned that he, his folk music, and his dances were part of the revival of the Slavic spirit. The accordion spun such soul-captivating Slavic notes that the adoring public gave these festivals a special name, Play Garmonica.

  He introduced us to the crowd. Tabitha and I danced on the stage with the rest of the celebrants. This seemed to be a combination church festival, country-music hoedown, and square dance. Certainly it was a throwback to the days before the Communist Party. Genadi wanted to keep his music separate from politics, but I gathered that the Slav nationalists wanted to conscript his music into their cause.

  I asked him to define for me the Russian soul. “Ahhh! Fire! Stars! Talent! Joy!” he declared, his eyes shining.

  To him this festival wasn’t political—and yet it was. He was one more manifestation of what we’d seen in so many places in this part of the world, people grasping for an identity that was theirs alone. The Slavs were reaching for their heritage through Genadi’s music and dances, reac
hing for their traditions the way the Mongols and the Muslims were.

  We went to our new friends’ dacha with their kids, sixteen-year-old Anastachia and eleven-year-old Zahar.

  What was strange to us was how the dacha was situated. Out here, still three thousand miles from Moscow and in the very heart of Siberia, there was nothing but vast tracts of unused land in every direction, yet the government would set aside only five acres for the entire town and say, “Okay, you can build all the dachas you want on these five acres.” So, there would be forty or fifty summer cabins—with no running water and no electricity, with tiny yards and tiny gardens—all crowded together on a few acres in the middle of this immense wilderness.

  We swam in the River Ob and then sweated in their banya, the Russian steam bath. Genadi stoked up the woodstove, then after he had heated up some rocks, he threw water on them, creating clouds of steam. We were given a particular type of birch branch, one as fragrant as eucalyptus, with which to lash ourselves. The women and girls undressed in the house, wrapped up in towels, and rushed into the banya. When they couldn’t stand it anymore they came back and the men went in till we couldn’t stand it anymore either.

  We ate and danced and drank and banya-ed till one in the morning, having a fine old time.

  In Novosibirsk we saw our first really big demonstration, scores of people gathered around the ubiquitous Lenin statue, demonstrating against the Communists.

  One man protested that he was a war hero, had been decorated several times, and wasn’t getting his military pension. There were others with similar gripes. Most of these people were protesting that they wanted more democracy, a better economy, and an end to the life-draining shortages.

  We went out to a think tank at Academgorodok, the local university, a gigantic one built by Khrushchev, second-largest in the Soviet Union. I was hoping to get a better fix on these enormous changes. I met an English-speaking economist, Svetlana Muradova, who taught courses in capitalism here. We talked about what was happening.

  The command economy, she said, planned from the top down, had been reasonably effective in the early stages, when the Soviet Union had been trying to leap into the industrial age, but was hopeless now. The country had to move to a market economy.

  While it was hard to swallow, I remembered that Kiev mathematicians were said to have calculated that to plan in adequate detail just one year’s industrial production in the Ukrainian republic alone, the entire world’s population would need to be employed for 10 million years. Besides being inefficient, such a command system devolved into bureaucratic delays, shoddy goods, no consumer power, no competition, no innovations, and perpetual shortages.

  “After seventy years of Communist teaching and sixty years of planning,” Svetlana said, “our people expect the state to take care of them. They are used to taking orders, not taking initiative. We can’t get it out of our heads that people who get rich, speculators, or people starting a co-op, are inherently evil.” She sighed. “The truth is, the capitalist system works. The Communist system doesn’t.

  “We have two big shocks going on,” she further explained. “Loss of hard-currency income, which led to Gorbachev’s twin reforms of glasnost and perestroika. We sell commodities abroad like a Third World country, not quality goods like a superpower. With the collapse of oil prices, we have to sell three barrels of oil to buy the same German machine tool we used to buy with one barrel.”

  I knew their trade amounted to only 2 percent of the world’s total, pitiful for a superpower.

  They had never had inflation in the Soviet Union, she explained. It was an evil of capitalism that they bypassed because they never raised prices.

  At a time when a ruble was officially worth sixteen cents, a hundred kopecks to a ruble, the bus cost two or three kopecks—less than a tenth of a penny—and newspapers two kopecks. In our money, it cost anywhere from ten to eighty cents to stay in a hotel room, for the best room in the house. Newspapers were so cheap, people bought them for wrapping paper. In the state store a bottle of vodka was ten rubles, a dollar and a half. A tomato was five kopecks, a tenth of a cent or so, if you could find it, whereas on the private market a pound of tomatoes cost fifty cents. The only thing the state store had lots of was birch juice.

  The economist said they were only now starting to figure out how to measure inflation. She was baffled by what she saw around her, obviously sensing that events were occurring that were momentous but not knowing what to do or say about them.

  “Isn’t standing in line a form of inflation?” I asked. “Isn’t all that time and energy a tax, one that increases the price of goods?”

  She shrugged and gave me a weak smile.

  As if to give myself a living example of the absurdity of their pricing, at a poster store in Novosibirsk I bought about a hundred posters—which weighed more than fifteen pounds—for twenty-four rubles, about $2.50. No wonder there was a paper shortage if posters were this cheap.

  Then I found a 1991 calendar for forty cents with pictures of all the czars on it. The czars! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Had glasnost come so far that the former “oppressors” could be celebrated? Figuring it would be valuable after the Soviet Union fell apart, I bought it, too.

  This was like being down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Nothing had a real price. At the post office it cost me twenty-eight rubles, less than three dollars, to mail these fifteen pounds of posters to New York.

  The babushka there wrapped up my purchases lovingly, but I wondered how they could make it halfway around the world at such an absurd rate.

  Tabitha was tightening the heads on my bike when she realized the wrench wasn’t clicking; it just kept turning. She found that the threads of two of the long studs holding my cylinder to the crankcase had become stripped, ending the mystery of the source of the knocks in my engine.

  She surmised that this had been caused by overheating compounded by the pummeling the bikes had taken on those bad roads. In addition to my driving this air-cooled engine at such low speeds that it hadn’t properly cooled, my large fairing had further boxed in the heat. We couldn’t go any farther till these studs were repaired.

  We asked around, the way you shopped for everything in the Soviet Union. Certainly there were no motorcycle dealers. Somebody’s kid’s history teacher knew somebody at the auto plant. Armed with a sort of introduction, we drove out to the factory, hoping the automotive engineers there would help, as well as have tools.

  Yes, they would help. Tabitha got into a collaborative process with the workers, and they all tackled the problem. I tried to imagine what would happen in the States if you pulled up to an automobile factory and asked for help with your motorcycle.

  They said, “Okay, the first thing we’ll do is make a part.” Someone remembered a Czech truck engine that had metal studs of about the right length, also threaded on both ends. Czech meant quality, they bragged.

  The stud was larger than we needed, so they had to lathe it down to the proper size. This international crew took a tap-and-die set, tapped out the holes, and rethreaded them. I hoped they knew what they were doing, since I certainly didn’t. To make sure the stud didn’t wiggle loose, Tabitha insisted on using a little of the Loctite we’d brought. When completed, the repair was supposed to make the bike as solid as new. However, the autoworkers presented us with a couple of extra truck studs in case we had further problems.

  At long last we were on the M-5, the main road into Moscow. Not only was there more traffic, but here it was faster and more reckless. Our excitement, too, was rising at nearing the capital.

  Now the traffic-guard stations were all manned. Also, there were many more cars than trucks, whereas out in Siberia it was by far the other way around. Despite this traffic, the vast, empty spaces we’d been across made it hard to believe that the Soviet Union was the world’s fifth-largest producer of cars, turning out 1.3 million a year. Under the thirteenth five-year plan, the one for the nineties, car production was suppo
sed to double, but I had every doubt that this would happen.

  Back in the States there was a diversity of vehicles on the road: campers, big trucks, little trucks, motorcycles, station wagons; European, Japanese, and American cars. But here there was only one kind of car and one kind of truck. Oddly enough, the cars looked like small Italian boxcars, with no refinements, no padding, and no real dashboards—just tiny stripped-down boxes. For twenty years the Russians had made the same car in the same factories, changing them very little. Our motorcycles had more horsepower, more cubic centimeters to their engines, than did these cars.

  The reason, of course, was that when the Russians said, “We gotta have a car factory,” they went around to see who was going to build them a factory and show them how to build cars. The Italians won the bid partly because at that time the Italian Communist party was the largest in Europe. Fiat came over and built the car factory for them. In fact, the Russians renamed the town Tol’yatti, after the leader of the Italian Communist Party. So to this day the Russians turn out only sixties-style Fiats, but with the brand name Lada.

  The closer we came to Moscow, the more ordered and clean became our surroundings.

  We stopped at a collective farm. Factory workers from Moscow were there harvesting what was supposed to be a bumper crop, their wages paid by their factory. There was an excellent chance, however, that despite the good harvest, half the grain and vegetables wouldn’t reach the consumer because of tractors, combines, and trucks that sat idle for lack of spare parts and gas. The factory and office workers who were working the fields told us they thought their coming here was a stupid policy. One engineer said it was a waste of his talents for him to be pulling up carrots.

  The farm’s manager said this year they would again have to import wheat from the United States. He felt private farms and adequate machinery would solve Russia’s food problems even though, yes, this would make some people rich. Poor Lenin! He had led the revolution and made himself into the father of the new world order for the peasants, and now they thought it was all a mistake. Every farm worker had productive private plots, while the state farms never met their potential.