"STAY AWAY FROM SCAM ARTISTS!"

(There is also a more detailed entry Transcisco Of San Francisco in the Mirror section, to be posted later. For the record, this Transcisco Company would prove itself incapable of sustaining the capitalist competition in its own country, and would be taken over, in 1995, by the Texas-based company Trinity Industries, lock, stock, and barrel.)

In 1992, a meeting was arranged for me in San Francisco with a certain Marvin B. Hughes, Chief Operating Officer of the San Francisco-based Transcisco Company, which, for some time already, had been engaged in business in the USSR and had now been trying to adjust its previously steady, reliable and fairly predictable “Gescheft” with Soviet government organizations, to the new, wildly unpredictable capitalist scene in post-Soviet Russia.

While the biographical details of that meeting are relegated to the Mirror section, my advice to Hughes is of some interest. “Stay away from all these new Russian entrepreneurs,” I warned Hughes. “This is a volatile transitional period in the history of Russia, and these new capitalists, who are rising up like weeds in an unkempt garden, are nothing more than scam artists, who are seizing on this opportunity to make a fast buck. When the totalitarian law and order come back to Russia, and that is going to happen very soon, all Western deals with these prospective criminals will be carefully evaluated, and most of them disavowed by Moscow, and it will be hard, if not impossible, for the now-happy Western investors to recover their losses.”

“This is not to say that I am discouraging you from doing business in Russia these days,” I continued. “But it is essential that you do it explicitly through the channels authorized by Russian government, so that when they start tightening the screws, your deals will be hard to renege on. To the advantage of your company, I must say, is the fact that you are not involved in one of those frivolous businesses which are thriving today, but will be going under tomorrow. On the other hand, railroads, and everything on them and around them, are strategic assets, in Russia’s eyes, and because your business is about railroad tank cars, and such, you are of substantial lasting value to the Russian Government, and you may do well there, if you are careful.”

I also recommended to be very careful in doing business through Finland, which was Transcisco’s practice at the time. As my reason, I considered a strong possibility of an impending acute financial crisis in Finland, citing its particular closeness to the former Soviet Union, and foreseeing, as a result, some serious economic difficulties in adjusting to the new, no matter how temporary, realities of Russia, and to the objective realities of the new world order, in general. With this suggestion, I sort of went out on a limb, but, to my vanity’s satisfaction (no offense to Finland though), in less than a year after our meeting what I said about Finland also came true, even before my other, certain predictions had a chance to establish their veracity.

Recapping the substance of my Transcisco story, it can serve as a microcosm for American (and, generally, all Western adventurism in post-Soviet Russia. Apparently, in retrospect, all those Westerners who involved themselves with Russia’s new capitalists got burned as a result of their greedy adventures, as though none of them happened to be familiar with the useful English-language idiom: too good to be true. In fact, it would be up to the Russian government under Putin (as soon as the dust started settling down) to pick and choose, which Western companies should be absolved from their unsavory practices in Yeltsin’s Russia, and which were to be properly punished.

But, also in retrospect, the Transcisco story can be a metaphor for the Western overall involvement in post-Soviet Russia. Arrogance and greed are not only factors in capitalist business, but they are also qualities of American, in particular, political behavior. Capitalist practices often boil down to taking advantage of the other party, which implies disrespect. It’s only when the other party is deemed savvier, or at least on a par with you, that a capitalist starts displaying something like respect toward the other party. Ironically, there was no problem with American respect toward the USSR during the cold war, even if this respect was based on fear. It was only when the mighty Soviet Empire collapsed, that the recklessly uninformed presumption was made that the Russians had fallen and could not get up, and the immediate desire to take maximum advantage of the situation became the cornerstone of American foreign policy…

Looking back at my involvement with Transcisco and Mr. Hughes, I realize now that our relationship could not go anywhere in a positive direction, as the company and its directors were tuned to Washington’s wave length, whereas my advice was in direct contradiction with Washington’s own practices and attitudes. No wonder then that my Transcisco venture was fated from the start to fizzle out.