Published: 6 February, 2009, 00:00
Edited: 6 February, 2009, 00:00
The best part of my job here at RT is dealing with Russian literature.
No second meanings in this one: we are going to have a massive literature section on our new website because, well… because we can, and Russia above all is a literaturic country, one you can’t fully understand without being familiar with the works of its writers.
Sounds a like banality, which can be claimed by any country, doesn’t it? But wait till I give a bright example of the above notion collected just last weekend.
As I was preparing Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s ‘The Storm’ for our website, the Russian blogosphere was all about Evgeny Chichvarkin – the latest embodiment of Russian officials ‘nightmarising the business’.
Nobody speaks of the nightmarising done by the rotten three ring circus sideshow of freaks a.k.a. Russian business where Chichvarkin claimed his place.
Oh, those Russian businessmen, the spineless bunch!
With no social consciousness whatsoever, and no sense of belonging to Russia, they themselves regard their fortunes as something not earned by hard work, but rather as something won in a game of roulette. In Russia there is no such roulette, other than the deadly Russian roulette.
It was not the Tsar or even the corrupt officials – the chinovniki – who let Russia down on the brink of 1917. It was the bourgeoisie, who mocked the working class, bullied the literate, and distanced itself from the army to go and live off their earnings in Paris, which is excellently shown in Ostrovsky’s late works like ‘The Fortuneless’. His dramas dealt with the first-generation nouveau riche merchants, whose trade was spawned by the 1861 abolishing of serfdom. Had he ever got to know the first-generation nouveau riche ‘entrepreneurs’ spawned by the 1991 abolishing of communism he would’ve been astonished by the striking similarities between the two groups.
The dramatic changes mentioned above left most of the country dumbfounded – like most ex-serfs in 1861, who basically didn’t know what to do with themselves now that they had their own lives. The Russians of 1990s had no idea how the market economy operated, what’s lawful and what’s not – especially regarding labour. So there was plenty of room for illicit activities, when, due to weak law regulations, the only boundary left between business and fraud was the morality of the entrepreneur (granted there was one).
Oh, there I go again, mentioning morality when talking about business. My late grandmother was probably right when labeling 13-year-old me ‘naïve’ in 1997.
Nobody would call Chichvarkin so back then. His newly-founded Euroset was breaking sales records with so-called ‘grey phones’ (not custom-cleared).
But then everyone sold them, so it didn’t prevent Chichvarkin from enjoying popularity comparable to that of Sergey Brin among Russia’s meager population of Gordon-Gecko-wannabe-finance-specialists and/or sales managers, i.e. those sweaty three-penny-suit wearers in hope of a better, brighter tomorrow, with no crisis and them in the place of George Soros. Ready to spend billions on useless books on effectiveness and about other peoples’ successes, they all admire his brief biography called rather modestly ‘Chichvarkin: the F***in’ Genius’.
God, some say he’s even more respected than Brin! Because, and I quote “Brin created Google in the almost greenhouse conditions of the U.S., while Chichvarkin had to work in this country (it’s always ‘this country’ for them, not ‘our country’ and certainly not ‘Motherland’), with all the chinovniki, the militia etc.”
I’ve always felt that all those MBA-wielding business executives are a bunch of incompetent lamers – after that statement I know it.
There are no significant growing markets without corruption issues, you idiots, live with it! It’s just something that comes with the ability to make a multi-billion company from a $US 2,000 business in less then ten years (what Chichvarkin has achieved), so stop complaining.
Brin all but invented a market on his own in a country where 99.99% of markets have been occupied since 1880s.
Chichvarkin, on the other hand, sold mobile phones. Surely this takes nothing less than a genius to do. And he did with such aplomb, as if he had invented not just the cellular connection, but the concept of talking itself. Even Artyom Lebedev, that pompous bigot of a web layout manager did some R&D of his own, while Chichvarkin didn’t even have a computer in his office – “I don’t master a computer. Why should I?” he said in an interview, with ignorance comparable to Ostrovsky’s iconic Madame Kabanova and Dikoy from ‘The Storm’.
With his Palace of Connection flagshop right across Moscow’s central Tverskaya street from Lebedev’s studio, Chichvarkin was little more than a low-end gadget pusher for low-end people.
I am aware that to millions of Euroset’s clients this probably sounds like a blunt insult (if you are reading this blog, please be prepared for lots of those as I’m aiming to overcome the ‘eternal’ record of insulting, set by George Byron, who managed to dishonour some 70 people on six pages of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers). But Euroset’s morbid ad/pr campaigns leave little doubt of being aimed at someone, whose last SMS was his/her biggest reading since the middle school and his/her new ring tone is his/her biggest musical experience since the last Pop Idol.
To name a few: issuing promo mugs with an obscene word used for describing the cheapness of Euroset’s prices, that is highlighted when hot liquid is in the mug; buying off a show at the Russian Fashion Week – which doesn’t come cheap – to display a bunch of yellow t-shirts and intentionally pour cheap beer on all the VIP-guests from the podium; sending dildos as holiday gifts for corporate partners with a note “Want a present, here’s a *** for you”; and on top of it all – giving away free phones for the clients, who would come into Euroset’s shop and get completely naked in front of cameras and other clients.
Social consciousness, anyone? Every single one of these ‘happenings’ is enough to make decent people unwilling to have anything to do with Euroset.
Yet another one of Chichvarkin’s similarities with Ostrovsky’s merchant folk was of course the XIX-century-style attitude to his employees.
When some tension between Euroset and Samsung erupted, Chichvarkin confiscated all of the Samsung products from about 35,000 employees, including their personal ones. To buy a custom-made Porsche Cayenne as a birthday present for Chichvarkin a sum of $US 2 was collected from every employee. Naturally, their consent was taken for granted, $US 2 is not a sum Russian employees would fuss about, they know their rights – they are after all the great grandchildren of those pre-1861 serfs! And in this case their main right was to get fired over some minor $US 2.
Russia is like a big (and presumably kind) whale, that eats hordes of small fish multiple times a day, Euroset’s employees wouldn’t want to be the small fish. Those slightly bigger animals, like Chichvarkin, may be lucky enough to take a ride on the whale’s back, but if they don’t cling to it with every muscle, it will eventually shake them off no matter how good they are. And Zhenya Chichvarkin wasn’t any good.
So farewell, Zhenya, and thank you, Britain, for accepting another disgusting idiot from Russia. Hopefully, there are not many left.