Heads You Win

“Then perhaps it might be wiser to go up to your room where we won’t be disturbed,” she said, moving her hand a little farther up his thigh.

This certainly wasn’t something Bob had anticipated, but if that’s what it took …

* * *

The last time Alex had been this nervous was on the battlefield in Vietnam. And just as then, the waiting was the worst part.

His first anxiety was that no one would turn up to hear him speak. When Nelson Mandela, George Soros, and Henry Kissinger are also on the menu, you have to accept that at best you’re the dessert. However, the organizers assured him that “Russia’s Role in the New World Order” was the dish of the day, and that most of the delegates had been ordering it.

When an attendant knocked on the door of the speakers’ room and told him it was time to make his way backstage, Alex didn’t even have the nerve to ask how the house was looking. When he could finally bear it no longer, he peeked through a gap in the curtain, to find that the organizers hadn’t exaggerated. The hall was so packed that some of the delegates were sitting in the aisles.

Klaus Schwab rose to introduce him, and opened his remarks by telling the delegates that Alex Karpenko had been among the leading investment bankers in the burgeoning Russian republic for the past decade, closing deals that had stunned his more cautious rivals who’d been left in his wake. Lowell’s had brought a new meaning to the words “risk reward ratio,” having secured at least one deal that had made a thousand percent profit in its first year, while at the same time raising the wages of every one of the company’s workers.

“In the days of the gold rush,” said Schwab, “you needed to climb on the bandwagon and head west. In today’s Russia, it’s a private jet, and you have to head east.”

Alex was relieved that Schwab didn’t also mention that he had once escaped from Saint Petersburg in an ambulance, but not before his wallet had been emptied by a rent boy and an off-duty paramedic.

The applause was friendly when he emerged from behind the curtain to take Schwab’s place at the podium. The kind of reception that hints, we’ll wait and see how the speech goes before we pass judgment.

Alex looked down at row upon row of expectant faces and made them wait for a moment before delivering his opening line.

“Whenever I address my local Lions club, a student forum, or even a business conference, I’m usually fairly confident that I’ll be better informed than anyone else in the room. I accepted this invitation without realizing that everyone else in the room would be far better informed than me.”

The laughter that followed allowed him to relax a little.

“Lowell’s Bank has been working in Russia with the local people for the past ten years, and Mr. Schwab kindly described us as one of the leaders in the field. The same bank has been doing business in Boston for over a century, and we are still thought of as upstarts. However, in the context of Russian investment banking, we are regarded as part of the establishment after only a decade. How can that be possible?

“Less than fifty years ago, Stalin ruled over one of the largest empires on earth. When he died in 1953, he was mourned as a national hero and statues of him were erected in even the smallest of towns. The people referred to him affectionately as Uncle Joe, and around the world his name was mentioned in the same breath as those of Roosevelt and Churchill. But today you will be hard-pressed to find a statue of Stalin anywhere in the former Soviet Union, other than in his hometown.

“After Stalin, there followed a series of unelected despots who had sheltered in his shadow for years: Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, all of whom clung on to power until they died or were forcibly removed from office. And then suddenly, almost without warning, that all changed overnight when Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the scene and announced the birth of glasnost. A simple translation being, the policy or practice of more open consultative government and a wider dissemination of information.

“From March 1990, when Gorbachev became the first elected president of the Soviet Union, the country began to change rapidly, and for the first time entrepreneurs were able to operate without the restrictions of a centralized command economy.

“However, the people

who oversaw this transformation were the same gang of thugs who’d run the old regime. How would you feel if the leader of the Communist Party in America was handed the keys to Fort Knox? And this despite the fact that the Soviet Union had one of the finest educational systems in the world, that is, if you wanted to be a philosopher, or a poet, but not if you wanted to be a businessman. In those days you had a better chance of studying Sanskrit at Moscow University than of finding your way around a balance sheet.

“Russia has twenty-four percent of the world’s gas reserves, twelve percent of its oil, and more timber than any other nation on earth. But while the average worker may no longer consider himself a comrade, he is still earning less than the equivalent of fifteen dollars a week, and few people are paid more than fifty thousand a year. Less than my secretary. So the transition from Communism to capitalism was never going to be easy.

“We are all aware that first impressions tend to linger, so I should not have been surprised when, after I had been back in my homeland for only a few hours, some of Russia’s problems were brought home to me. I was standing on a street corner trying to get a taxi, and I couldn’t help noticing that while there was no shortage of BMWs, Mercedes, and Jaguars, there was almost no sign of a Ford Fiesta or a VW Polo. The disparity between rich and poor is starker in Russia than in any other nation on earth. Two percent of Russians own ninety-eight percent of the national wealth, so who can blame ordinary citizens for rejecting capitalism and wanting to return to what they now regard as the good old days of Communism? If Western values are to prevail, what Russia most needs is a middle class who, through hard work and diligence, can benefit from their country’s staggering wealth and natural resources.

“This doesn’t mean that there aren’t great opportunities to do business in Russia. Of course there are. However, if you’re thinking of going east, young man, be warned—it’s not for the faint-hearted.

“Mr. Schwab told you that Lowell’s had closed a deal that made my bank a thousand percent profit in a year. But what he didn’t tell you was that we also signed three other contracts where we lost every penny of our investment, and in one case even before the ink was dry on the paper. So the golden rule for any company considering opening a branch in Russia is to choose your partner wisely. When there’s the potential for a thousand percent profit in a year, the stupid, the greedy, and the downright dishonest will appear like cockroaches from under the floorboards. And should your partner breach a contract, don’t bother to sue, because the judge will almost certainly be on their payroll.

“Could this all change for the better? Yes. In the year 2000, the Russian people will go to the polls to choose a new president. We can safely assume they won’t reelect Boris Yeltsin, who by now would have been impeached in Washington and banished to the Tower in London.”

Laughter followed, humor often emphasizing the truth. Alex turned a page.

“The Communist Party, which appeared to be dead and buried a decade ago, has once again raised its head, and is now comfortably ahead in the polls. But if a candidate were to stand for president whose first interest was in democracy, and not in lining their own pockets, who knows what could be achieved?

“You see before you a Russian who escaped to America some thirty years ago, but who in recent years has regularly returned to his homeland, because Lowell’s Bank takes the long view. I hope that in a hundred years’ time, America will still be Russia’s greatest rival. Not on the battlefield, but in the boardroom. Not in the nuclear arms race, but in the race to cure disease. Not on the streets, but in the classrooms. But that can only be achieved if every Russian vote is of equal weight.”

A long round of applause followed, as Alex turned another page.

“Two hundred years ago, America was at war with Britain. In the past century, the two nations have twice united to fight a common enemy. Why shouldn’t America and Russia have a similar aim?” Alex lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “I hope there are those among you who will join me, and try to make that ideal possible by building bridges and not destroying them, and by believing, as any civilized society should, that all men and women are born equal, whatever country they are born in. I can only hope that the next generation of Russians will, like the next generation of Americans, take that for granted.”

An audience that had decided to wait and hear Alex’s words before they passed judgment rose as one, and caused him to wonder, not for the first time, if he should have taken Lawrence’s place not in the boardroom, but in the political arena.