Postcards from Moscow
In 1993, a young travelled to Moscow for an expo. What he experienced in Russia shaped his belief that other countries have been accomplices in creating the climate that has allowed Vladimir Putin to flourish.
While the votes were being counted in a Russian referendum on April 26, 1993, hundreds of Western executives were feverishly wiring up file servers and buying in salted peanuts for Russia’s largest annual computer show, Comtek.
And I was about to jump into a taxi after flying into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport from my then home base of Budapest, to run a stand at Comtek for a magazine publisher for whom I freelanced at the time, the Belgium-based European Computer Sources.
One of the safety tips given to you when flying into Moscow was never to get into a taxi if there were two people in the front seats. One was there to drive and the other to mug you, or that was the concern. Simple, huh?
Thing is, there was only a driver in the taxi when I stepped inside but just as I was belted in, another bloke hopped into the passenger seat and, zoom, we were off.
The police were all Mafia, the pair helpfully advised me as we scooted along the dual carriageway.
I decided my best bet was to pretend to be a naive Hungarian, rather than a more juicy Western target. So I chatted away with my best pigeon Magyar while offering them both a constant stream of cigarettes in the hope, I guess, that one of them might die of natural causes, or that they might lose motivation.
There we sat, all three, and chainsmoked.
I’m glad to report I assume my approach worked; the demotivation aspect that is, not the death-bynatural-causes plan.
They exchanged some intense words with each other in Russian, then silence, before they dropped me off unceremoniously at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel, now the Crowne Plaza.
A meal and a pint at a fake English pub located inside the hotel calmed my nerves. But the way the publican filled in the credit card chit when it came time to pay made the charge look more like US$90 than $20. He got irate when I corrected it with my biro, but I later found out he got even by simply adding a “1” in front to make the charge a round $120. Touché.
Somehow, I, the trade stand I was supposed to be at, and the boxes of magazines I was dishing out to attendees in return for their personal data, all ended up in the same place at the right time. But not the Russian helper whom Comtek’s organisers were supposed to supply me with for the week (I didn’t speak Russian).
So I co-opted a Russian student who had a gig at Comtek ferrying stall-holders to and from the show, offering to pay him the same amount the show organisers would have billed me for an assistant; US$300 for the week.
This was a massive sum for him given the average wage in Russia was about US$30 a month. Russia was really on its knees at the time; economically, this was pretty much the nadir. But I was 25 years old and a journo, not a businessman, and it seemed fair to me.
The big freebie for stallholders was a banquet-style dinner in the Kremlin on the closing night.
The food was pretty average and the compère’s political jokes worse. Boris Yeltsin was in power and the referendum would give him the impetus to shell and storm Russia’s legislature the following October, consolidating many of the presidential powers that Putin subsequently capitalised on.
About 150 people were killed in the clashes. I was told on my subsequent visit to Comtek ‘94, when I ran the trade stand again and the Pet Shop Boys’ recently-released Go West seemed to be playing everywhere on repeat, that the clashes extended to the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel, where there were apparently snipers on the roof.
I made the mistake en route to the Kremlin in ‘93 of mentioning to the show’s Western organisers that I had hired one of their Russian hands as a moonlighter. They made clear they thought I was a dumb-ass for offering him $300 and suggested I should tell him to bugger off.
When I refused, they strongarmed me into paying them their fee for his time as well.
They were all charges I could expense so I reluctantly succumbed. But I was pleased to report as prominently as I could the following year that Microsoft had decided – I think I’ve got the year right – not to exhibit at Comtek ‘94 because of the organisers’ avarice.
I was even
more pleased that I stayed in touch with my Russian sidekick and hired him for the same gig the following year.
That April the magazines didn’t get delivered to the stall, only making it as far as a nearby courier depot. I tried to carry two boxes from there to the show, but by the time I arrived at the conference centre all the entrances were besieged and my arms were four foot long and aching.
I had to dump the boxes in a flowerbed. My helper showed up at 9am and volunteered to step into the road and wave down a car and a couple of able-bodied men with a $20 note (I’d like to report it was an ambulance as that was the cliché at the time). Delivery soon sorted.
My feeling in the mid-90s was that the West was letting good Russians down, when too many businesspeople showed up for the economic opportunities of a newly opened halfcontinent with nothing more than Comtek-style greed in their eyes.
More importantly, countries, including New Zealand, also let them down when they helped Russian oligarchs syphon wealth, and themselves, out of the country with the aid of murky shell companies and trusts.
No-one wanted to live in the chaos of
1993 Russia, not even those who enriched themselves in the process.
Those emigres, had they stayed, were the people who would otherwise have had the vested interest in becoming a stabilising and gradually modernising force within Russia, and who might perhaps have prevented the slide into despotism. But, instead, that check on power simply left the country.
We were at best bystanders and at worst accomplices in the looting of the Russian people and thereby in creating the climate that allowed Vladimir Putin – a textbook fascist – to tap into a well of social conservatism and economic discontent that slops around in most communities.
It’s regrettable that New Zealand still has no law requiring the public disclosure of the beneficial ownership of businesses and trusts, despite years of mucking around on the idea of meaningful reform.
The former government said it would introduce a bill to do the job but its proposal was too weak and in any case the legislation never actually materialised.
The textbook I’d use to label Putin a fascist is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was written contemporaneously with the rise of the Nazis and published in 1933, but which seems an ever better explanation for Putin’s mindset.
Reich’s theories would suggest Putin’s attack on the rainbow community and his extreme outrage at a photoshopped image of himself with his face in drag is no sideshow, but rather the most direct view we may get into his troubled soul.
I know enough Russians to be under no illusions about how desperately afraid many are of Putin.
I’m aware of the Voldemort-like panicked response that the mere mention of his name can engender among better-connected Russians far away in a quiet English pub.
But I also met hundreds if not a thousand educated Russians fleetingly, at Comtek, who reinforced to me the obvious truth that there are pretty much the same mix of people wherever you go.
Of course there are. What else would you expect?
Just like anywhere, there are mostly decent and also some incredibly brave people in that mix.
The protest by Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up a sign live on Russian state TV in 2022 proclaiming “Stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to’’, was the bravest thing I
can ever recall witnessing.
By and large, Russians are an educated bunch who know what propaganda and disinformation is. They’ve been subject to different brands of it for more than a century after all. I doubt many are irretrievably brainwashed.
And that’s why, in my view, countries including New Zealand should have the confidence to double down on pressure against Putin and pray something buckles within the country, and just double down again if it doesn’t.
New Zealand trade sanctions seem to be working broadly as expected, but there appear to be some firms still willing to do business with the country.
We imported less than $200,000 of goods from Russia in the three months to the end of September, with perhaps the surprise items being $1119 of “arms and ammunition”.
Exports to Russia during the quarter valued $3.8 million. A decent chunk of that appears to be accounted for by medical equipment, which notunreasonably tends to be ring-fenced from sanctions regimes and which is probably mostly accounted for by breathing-machine masks produced by Fisher & Paykel Healthcare.
But exports included $2.2m of food items, predominantly “preparations of cereals, flour, starch or milk; pastrycooks’ products’’ and fruit and nuts.
Is there a really important reason why Kiwi businesses need to be sending pies or frozen croissants or whatever exactly those products might be to Russia right now?
More significantly, 4083 Russian nationals entered New Zealand last year, according to Immigration NZ.
That’s a smaller number than the 7856 who arrived in 2019, the year before the Covid pandemic temporarily closed the border, but still a pretty large contingent.
The number of visitors’ visas issued to Russian nationals fell to 1400, from 5067 in 2019, but the number of Russians arriving on student and work visas was little changed at 388 and 1390 respectively.
Last year, 286 Russians arrived on business or skilled visas, steeply up from 134 in 2019.
It’s perhaps a tricky question whether that should be of any concern.
People do not necessarily need to normally reside in Russia to be travelling on a Russian passport or counted as a Russian national.
Presumably few of the Russians who entered New Zealand last year will be Putin-loving Muscovites. But it might be nice to be sure.
The goal of New Zealand and the West in general should be to make clear there is no path back to acceptance and normality for the Russian state and, unfortunately that means for the mostly-good Russian people, until the cloud inside Russia has lifted.
It would be particularly useful for Foreign Minister Winston Peters to send that signal strongly now, when there appears to be a risk of the conflict in Ukraine becoming a frozen one.
To be clear, what I’m arguing for here is more sanctions, unrelenting pressure and for us to impose more sacrifices on ordinary Russians out of respect and faith forged from personal experiences that can only help them achieve a better future.
I haven’t returned to Moscow since 1994, but one day I’d love to go back and hop in an Uber under different circumstances. Maybe the front seat next time.
Tom Pullar-Strecker
Tom Pullar-Strecker is a business journalist for
The Post.