Nobody cared what job you did. You were freed of all responsibilities in order to enable you to gather assistance and support for the beleaguered victims of this natural disaster. For my part, I opened the Yellow Pages and found the address for the New Jersey headquarters of the Armenian General Benevolent Union. Without telephoning ahead, I arrived to find that their board meeting was in session. Once I had explained to the secretary who I was and why I was there, I was ushered into the room where, aware of the strength of my feelings, I spelled out the situation as calmly as I could. They immediately agreed to help, and would go on to do an enormous amount.
They collected clothes and blankets, and arranged an expedition by a special medical care group. Together, we located the best medical equipment we could find: everything from boxes of antibiotics from Pfizer to four special waterbeds for those suffering from bad burns, and several cars fully equipped to work in emergency areas. I remember how we went to the airport late at night, and how everyone there on the dark runway helped to create a chain to pass the packages containing the relief goods into the plane’s cavernous hold. Even the airport staff were helping; in fact, the only men who stood aside, not lifting a finger, were the FBI agents who had shadowed my journey. They just watched, impassively, as if none of this was their concern.
Although the work itself was hot and heavy, we were outside in a New York winter and the temperatures outside had plummeted. Luckily I had two large bottles of vodka with me, so I asked the pilot if his crew had anything to eat and he produced a big pile of sandwiches, which we swallowed down with the spirits. Everyone shared except, of course, our friends from the American security services.
It was a huge job and at every turn I was struck by the Americans’ ability to respond with unstinting generosity to a tragedy suffered by others thousands of miles away. It was then that, just before he climbed into the waiting plane, I heard a doctor called Vladimir Kvetan, who had left Czechoslovakia as a boy with his parents in 1968, saying to Richard McOmber, a representative of the Armenian General Benevolent Union who was married to an Armenian woman called Adrienne: ‘Listen, I am going to the USSR to help people, but if I do not return in one week then you will know that I am in the hands of the KGB and you should do something to get me out.’ How could I not respect his dignity and courage? How, indeed, could I not be struck by how ludicrous it was that I should consider him and many others like him, men and women who became lifelong friends, as enemies?
Three years later, I was saying goodbye to the American friends I had met during the crisis. ‘Why go back to Russia during this period of turmoil?’ Richard McOmber asked me. ‘Russia will calm down after a year; everything will be OK and you can go back then.’ I thought for a second before I replied. ‘If this process has started in Russia,’ I told him, ‘then there’s no way it will be over within a year. It will make no difference if I wait or not.’ Unfortunately, I was right.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN YOU COME TO ME TO ASK FOR SOMETHING, BRING ME SOMETHING IN RETURN
In 1992, inspired by my experiences and observations of successful entrepreneurship in New York – and specifically by the World Trade Center – I initiated the creation of an international business centre in St Petersburg. My colleagues and I believed that this was a new page in Russia’s history (something that we would soon learn was an illusion), and that it was time, in the interests of better collaboration between Russia and the West, to help facilitate foreign investment into the country’s economy.
With a kind of inevitability – a blackly humorous turn of events that seems to characterise my country – the building we secured the right to develop had previously been occupied by the local Communist Party, and although we had the lease for the entire property, it was decreed that one of our tenants should be the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, a political organisation founded by hard-line Communists when the official Communist Party had been banned in November 1991. For a while, our work there seemed like a metaphor for some of the wider struggles occurring in the rest of the country. While we were trying to make the best of the opportunities offered in the new polity, trying to create something positive out of the ruins of a disintegrated system, Gennady Zyuganov’s reconstituted Communist Party of the Russian Federation and their allies, who held the largest block of seats in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, still seethed with resentment. They could not accept that times had changed, that the Soviet Union was no more. I, like many others, had mourned its demise, but I knew too that we would achieve nothing by trying to turn back the clock.
I remember that almost the first money that we, along with our partners from Israel, invested was used to renovate the toilets there – they were disgusting, horrible relics. Almost as soon as the work was completed, men from the RCWP broke in overnight; they took hammers to the toilets and mirrors. It was mad, irrational, but the country was disintegrating; it was just how things were. They were there for years, paying no rent, cranking out their increasingly eccentric propaganda. For a long time they insisted on flying their flag (which was indistinguishable from the Communist Party’s old one) from the roof of the building. Each morning they would raise their standard, as if to prove they were still alive, that the battle against capitalism continued. They seemed to believe that, with this small ceremony, they could somehow conjure the regime of the hammer and sickle back from the dead.
In response we hired a cutter and a crane. The cutter was supposed to remove the flagpole, but it was so firmly fixed into the roof and its structure that each time the workmen tried to dig it out it felt as if the entire building was jumping up. So we hired specialist equipment at great cost and finally managed to get rid of it. The next night, members of the RCWP penetrated the roof and erected a rickety homemade post from which they flew their flag. Once again they had proved they were alive, that they were still fighting the bloody capitalists. And perhaps they had a point; after all, they were not the only people who understood how seismic were the changes initiated by the disintegration of the old order.
When Vladimir Putin, speaking many years after the event, described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a geo-political catastrophe, he was murdered in the Western media. They treated him as if he was some kind of revanchist, desperate to restart the cold war and cover the country with gulags. But it was how we all felt; it was not an act of blind nostalgia to say this, just a pragmatic assessment of its profound political impact. The collapse of such a huge, complex system, with its enormous gravitational pull, created consequences of a scale that can only be comfortably compared to an earthquake, with shockwaves sent across the globe in its aftermath.
For decades there was a familiar balance of power in the world, underwritten by a nuclear deterrent, which to a large extent ensured stability in areas defined by histories that might as well have been written in blood. Look at what happened during the break-up of Yugoslavia, look at what is happening in Ukraine, think of the lopsided way in which the United States now exerts its force, almost unimpeded, in any country it wishes. The Soviet Union was an enormous presence, involved in ways large and small on every continent, and then over the course of a handful of months it withdrew completely, taking with it its money, men, weapons, scientists, teachers. How could this change not be experienced as a fundamental shift in the lives of billions of people?