CHAPTER SIX
RUSSIAN REALITY
I had been an intelligence officer during some of the cold war’s fiercest tensions, and in the years that followed I managed to carve out an existence in the midst of the chaotic free-for-all that was Russia during the ’90s. I had been a high-ranking civil servant and had served as a deputy minister in two different government ministries, but I am not sure anything could have prepared me for this test: the biggest project and biggest challenge of my life – a period in which I had to learn so much complex new information that it was as if I had returned to university to take another degree.
Russian Railways had been charged with building the transport infrastructure that would be crucial if the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi were to go ahead. We were working to a fierce timetable in a location that you might think had been designed by God to obstruct the creation of railway lines, roads, bridges and tunnels. The project had been bedevilled by challenges from the very beginning, each of which we had overcome, and yet right then it was as if we’d run into a brick wall – or, more specifically, a mountain that lay on the north side of the Deep Yar Waterfall. Locals knew it as the Dragon’s Mouth, which seemed somehow apt at that moment. The sub-contractors were supposed to be drilling through it what we had come to call Tunnel Complex No. 3 (there were six tunnel complexes in total), a stretch of combined road and railway over 3km long, but they could not lay their hands on the equipment necessary to make any progress through its complex mix of clay and limestone for another eight months. And even if they could get hold of the equipment sooner, they did not have sufficient capital to pay for it. The construction process had not even started, and already we had been confronted by a critical situation: unless we started drilling within the next month, there would be no way we would be able to complete this section of the route before the Olympics began. And the problems didn’t end there. There were no accurate geological studies, and the structure of the mountain itself was so unusual that all the normal methods we had available to determine its architecture and composition were redundant.
If we could not find a way through this mass of rock, all our efforts so far would be wasted. I could not bear even to speculate as to what might have happened if we failed. I had spent a lifetime in the service of my country, had thrown every spare shred of energy I had into my role as CEO of Russian Railways, but if we were not able to deliver that transport infrastructure on time, it would be the end of my career – and perhaps even of the Olympics themselves. I am only half-joking when I say that I would probably have been encouraged to put a bullet in my own head. We could not afford to make the wrong decision. You can try to insulate yourself from failure by introducing into your organisation complex layers of oversight and analysis, but these take time to implement and will inevitably compromise your ability to act quickly and decisively. Nobody was going to turn around and say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we know you were pressed for time, we know that you were faced by a thicket of insoluble challenges. Let’s just forget about it.’
It would be humiliation on the grandest scale for the country, its people, its president and for me. There’s an old Russian saying: ‘Victory has many fathers but defeat has only one mother.’ At Russian Railways, I was surrounded by an incredible team, including the Vice President Oleg Toni, who had particular responsibility for construction, but it would have to be me alone who took that decision, and me alone who answered for the consequences.
And the same question that weighed so heavily on me as I considered the problem in front of me – how do you go about drilling through a mountain when you do not know precisely what you’ll find beneath its surface? – might reasonably have been reformulated to cover the whole Sochi enterprise: how do you successfully shepherd a megaproject to completion when the only thing you know for certain is that no plan survives contact with the real world?
One lesson that history seems determined to remind us of repeatedly is that Russian reality has always had a nasty habit of tripping up even the most elegant and plausible theories. The country is too big, too stubborn, too various, to ever submit itself fully to any kind of utopian scheme. The Bolsheviks, owners of a ferocious totalising impulse, discovered this, as did those who tried during the ’90s to refashion the country as a paragon of free-market capitalism.
The Sochi Olympic Games were not, of course, designed to transform an entire society, but nonetheless grand hopes had been invested in them. By hosting the Games there – in this city which had, like much of the rest of the country, suffered a painful decline since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but which was also afflicted by a host of problems that were very particular to it – there was a chance to develop a neglected region in Russia, to help promote Russia’s image in the West, and to entice Russian tourists back from the ski slopes of Switzerland and France. It would also be a test of some of the seaworthiness of the economic reforms that had been introduced in the country – notably the reorganisations that Russian Railways had entered into.
In 2007, when the selection process began, there was an understanding among those people involved with running the economy that while Russia’s financial position was steadily improving, the sheer number of tasks that still needed to be fulfilled, and the vast quantity of targets that still had to be reached if the country was to reverse decades of decline, imposed a brutal kind of realism on their planning. As a result, their priority was to concentrate their attention and resources on a single link in the chain that they could then drag out of the muck. If at that moment in time it was not possible to develop the economy as a whole, then far better to devote Russia’s efforts in the most effective way and at the most effective point. And if investments were made into the creation of the infrastructure for that particular link, into its economy, into its education, which would encourage a whole range of other economic and social aspects to develop, then the belief was that the nation would see benefits elsewhere along the chain.
Another element in the government’s thinking was that the people of Russia, buoyed by the fact that, for the first time in two decades, they were enjoying a sustained period of economic wellbeing, were beginning to travel all over the world, which meant that a lot of cash was leaving the country, and that, as a result, internal tourism was suffering. So one of the ideas was to use this Olympic Games programme as a way of establishing a place where Russians could feel comfortable going on holiday inside their own country.
But it was also designed to send a message to the rest of the world. Falling thirty-four years after the Moscow Olympics in 1980, it would be the first time the country had hosted a Summer or Winter Games since the end of the Soviet Union. Huge amounts of sentiment and national pride were invested in our ability to deliver something our country could be proud of and which would demonstrate the progress that had been made over the past decade.