“How do I look?” he asked. The truth was, he looked amazingly like Vladimir Lenin. “I dress up as him sometimes, for events,” he said, then clicked through more photos: Lenin at a bar, Lenin hoisting a massive beer stein, Lenin crooning into a microphone. Pasha’s Lenin truly was—wait for it—the life of the party. “I do it sometimes for Misha’s events too.”
Ah, yes, Misha, the young entrepreneur. “Can I see him?” I asked Pasha.
“Sure!” he replied. “I’ll call him.”
“Thank you, Comrade,” I said.
Misha and I met for lunch the next afternoon. Whippet thin and sporting a blond crew cut, he was dressed in the business-casual garb of the entrepreneur: dark suit jacket, patterned button-down shirt, and faded blue jeans. He was a young man now, and he carried himself, and his black leather briefcase, with confidence—but when he smiled I still saw that charmingly gawky 15-year-old I’d met a decade earlier.
We sat down in a booth at the Traveler’s Coffee restaurant, and instead of giving us paper menus, the server handed us each an iPad. “Wow,” I said. “High tech.” Then I noticed a large circular device affixed to the banquette, just over Misha’s left shoulder. “What’s that?” I asked.
“You push the button to call the server,” he said. I looked closely, and there were actually three buttons: one with a picture of a bell, for calling the server; one with a line through the bell, in case you need to cancel your call to the server; and one with a dollar sign, for when you’re ready for your bill. I hadn’t expected to see the next wave of restaurant technology in far eastern Siberia, but this place—which was actually part of a national chain—had a good system going.
Misha and I ordered club sandwiches and cappuccinos, and I asked him about Avantazh. He explained that the company created parties and events for clients. “I started it two years ago,” he said, “and all this time, I’ve been investing money into the business, to keep it going. Now, it’s finally starting to turn a profit.” Where did he get the money to invest? “By working at other jobs,” he told me. “I’ve worked as a sound person and DJ at a restaurant, and I also buy old cars, refurbish and resell them.”
This was gutsy, I told him, especially since he was doing it in the midst of a severe economic downturn. “Yes, the krizis has affected everything,” he said. “People won’t allow themselves to spend money right now, which makes it hard for a business like this to survive.” But while he planned to keep working at his other jobs, Avantazh was his main focus. He was utterly determined to make it succeed.
When I asked how it felt to have his father work for him, he laughed. “That didn’t go so well,” he said. “We couldn’t sort out the relationship.”
He explained, diplomatically, that Pasha’s work ethic wasn’t the same as his own. Pasha was a free spirit, he said, and some tension arose from their different approaches to the job. Further complicating matters was the fact that father reported to son. “I told him, ‘At work, you have to call me Mikhail Pavlovich’”—the use of the patronymic “Pavlovich” (which, of course, came from Pasha’s own given name, Pavel) denoting respect—“but at home we could just be father and son.” But Pasha couldn’t get used to that idea, and the work relationship soon fizzled out.
I observed that young people seemed more serious about their jobs, their health, and their lives in general. Did he think that was true?
“Yes,” he said. “Young people are eating healthier—more fish, less meat. It’s fashionable to exercise now, and it wasn’t before.” He told me that he exercised almost daily, didn’t drink, and didn’t smoke. “It’s not cool to smoke anymore,” he said. “In my circle, if there’s a group of ten people, maybe one will go out to have a smoke.”
We finished up our sandwiches, and just as I was about to reach over to press the dollar-sign button, Pasha suddenly appeared, plopping down beside me in the booth. I asked if he was checking up on me, and he laughed. “I’m checking up on you both!” he said. When I told him how impressed I was with his son, he beamed.
“OK, I should get back to work,” said Misha. His father then turned to me. “You need a ride somewhere? I don’t have anything going on this afternoon.” And that about sums it up, I thought. I hugged Misha goodbye, then climbed into the van for a ride back to Sasha’s place. She and I had a date to go to the Panama City Motel.
The same yellow and white sign towered over the motel, and as Sasha pulled into the parking lot I saw the gray bungalows, looking much as they had before. But the complex had even more new additions, most notably a karaoke bar and a strip club. And while there were splashes of color from a few flowerbeds, the grounds were a bit unkempt, with overgrown grass, chipped paint, and hastily patched roofs.
We walked through the bungalows and into a newer section of the complex, where a more traditional hotel building stood. At the front desk, a blonde woman in a blue and white uniform sat in front of three wall clocks, which showed the time in Chita, Moscow, and Beijing. I explained that I was an American writer who’d first come here twenty years ago, and that, if she didn’t mind, I’d really love to look into one of the rooms to see if they still had American furnishings and equipment.
“Of course,” she said, and walked us down the hallway. She showed us a room, and while it was perfectly nice, I didn’t care at all about the rooms in this newer building. “Would it be possible to see a bungalow?” I asked, enjoying the sound of the word in Russian: boongalo. To my surprise, she simply handed us the key to number 18, sending us off to explore on our own.
The welcome mat in front of bungalow 18 was exactly that: a mat with WELCOME in English. This was a good sign. I turned the key, and we walked inside to find an ordinary-looking hotel room with two double beds, a small table with chairs, and a long, low dresser with a TV and phone. Then I started looking more closely.
The light switch was an American stem-style switch, with ON and OFF written in English. “Look at this!” I called to Sasha, then went to peer at the air-conditioning and heating unit under the window. Sure enough, it was a Carrier brand unit, with all the controls in English. I started bouncing around the room like I was on a treasure hunt: there was an old GE “13-memory” phone, a Briggs toilet, a gray fuse box with instructions in English, an English-language TV remote. Sasha and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
At that moment, the door opened. A hotel employee walked in, and Sasha and I clammed up as if we’d been caught defacing a monument.
“I need to replace the water bottles,” the woman said, and busied herself doing that—though Sasha and I both knew the real reason she was there was to check up on us. Either the woman at the front desk had gotten skittish about having given us the room key, or possibly someone had heard and reported the two weirdos who were cackling in boongalo 18.
We walked out with the employee and returned the key to the front desk. Sasha had to get back to work, but I stayed to explore the rest of the complex. There was a Chinese restaurant, as well as a sauna, a steakhouse, and even a Panama City brewpub that made its own beer. I asked a woman working in the pub whether business was good, and she told me, “We mostly get Chinese tourists now, though occasionally American motorcyclists come through.” This explained the clock showing Beijing time, and the fact that the motel’s business card had information printed in Chinese, Russian, and English. (It didn’t, however, explain the fact that American motorcyclists were now riding across Siberia—the first I’d heard of such a feat.)