XANDER BLAKELY
|
|
 |
Post Gazette, Pittsburgh, PA In 1992, an adventurous and somewhat rash young man, armed with a newly acquired economics degree from Swarthmore, landed in Novosibirsk, Siberia, with a mission: to teach market capitalism to natives newly released from communism. Instead, he discovered that he had a lot to learn from them -- about business, about economics, about life. Over the next four years -- years that witnessed a riotous transformation of the Russian economy -- he discovered how to wheel and deal, and live and love, in this wild land characterized by vast frozen tundra and intense human relationships. Not to mention a lot of "Terminator" vodka. The story opens as the author's Russian partner Sasha blithely arranges for the two novices to arrange shipment of 25 tons of cocoa beans, to sell 6 tons of chocolate and to repay a loan of $20,000, all on the strength of handshakes and bottles of (what else?) vodka. And it works. Within months they are running their quickly expanding trading empire that ultimately includes trucks, condoms, hotel construction, latex autopsy gloves (used for harvesting), potatoes and perfume, and that is so successful that they generate a million dollars in revenue within six months. Blakely encounters the ideal setting -- "blissfully chaotic" -- for risk-taking and imaginative business endeavor: not for nothing does Sasha insist that communism was the ultimate school for entrepreneurs. This is a tale full of the freshness of discovery and of youthful impetuosity, and told with a good eye for the crazy and ironic. We take a riotous ride through Kazakhstan, past a radioactive city, to the backdrop of an attempted coup; we watch the bizarre progress of a hotel being renovated by immigrant Chinese cooks; we suffer through devastating pyramid schemes and scams perpetrated on citizens innocent of marketplace ruthlessness; we take hilarious shopping trips to America arranged as payoffs to Russian officials; we feel the bite of colossal Siberian mosquitoes. We hear a little too much about the author's love life. Principally we experience the gradual transformation of a Siberian town, the author's "frozen Utopia," from a vibrant and peaceful remote village into a modern capitalist economy, complete with traffic jams, street crime, weight gain, parking lots and "Siburbia." Read this book to learn about the daily experience of entrepreneurship and economic development in the developing world, about the "pursuit of happiness" and simply about a legendarily frigid place full of human warmth.
|