Moscow Orientation – Day 11 – Telling it Like it Is

I went to work in the morning today, as our official program didn’t start until the afternoon. It’s nice to get back into the office and a nice contrast to the orientation days of traveling around town and having meetings.

My colleagues at work were interested to hear about our travel plans – the Alfa group is leaving Saturday for Cheboksary, a city of 500k people outside of Kazan. It’s on the Volga, and I’m hard pressed to say much more about it. The guys helped me do a little research, and we turned up a tractor factory called “PromTractor”; prom is an abbreviation for “industry” in Russian. We did some data collection and back-of-the-envelope financial analysis on their most recent annual report. This is what passes for fun in an asset management office, by the way. That was a good time until we discovered that Cheboksary also has a highly regarded museum of the history of beer. Why there, of all places, was hard to figure out but I resolved to try get it onto the official schedule. It seems more interesting than, say PromTractor, which did make it onto the official schedule.

Sasha then asked me when I had scheduled my next trip to Langley (Virginia, where the CIA is headquartered). It was a very clever and ingenious way of making the standard joke that Americans here are up to no good, or at best have a hidden agenda. I doubt very much that I’ll find very much there that will interest my dark masters in Washington, but I’ll file a standard report nonetheless. Ooops, I mean…

The group met for lunch around the corner from my office, and then we traveled off to a meeting with Boris Nemtsov. He was one of the first democratically elected government officials in Russia about 15 years ago, and was tapped by Yeltsin to become a high-ranking official until some economic crisis wiped out that whole layer of government. Now, he’s the head of a bank specializing in oil financing and an advisor to the Ukrainian government.

He came across as a genuine fellow, and pulled absolutely no punches in his analysis of Russian-Ukrainian relations, Putin’s regime, oil, the color revolutions, Russian society, or any of the other topics that we discussed for more than 90 minutes. All of this was peppered with some, well, earthy language and rather risqué anecdotes. All of it was very funny, though, and he gave the impression more of someone you’d meet at a sporting event than of a powerful person in both politics and business.

He asked about who else we’d met with in the past few weeks. Then, he lambasted most of them for their views. Again, very on point and very funny stuff. He went after Medvedeev for being an apologist, Posner for buying into media censorship, Lozansky for being more American than Russian, Arkady for being an idealist, us for not going to his home region of Nizhniy Novgorod, Russians for their lack of work ethic, the government for its paranoia and resulting policies. He assailed all these liberally and equally.

In response to the question “Do you consider yourself a radical?” he answered with a straight face – “No, I’m a completely normal person.”

It was nice to speak to someone who didn’t choose his words so carefully. At times, I’ve felt like we’ve been presented a packaged presentation. But our meeting with Nemtsov was more conversational, realistic, and with no real agenda to propel. He admitted that now he lives “very well”, and has no interest in going back into office.

More power to him. Of course, when the word “oil” is in the name of your bank, it’s hard not to feel like everything is alright these days.