Red Ticket: Crime and Punishment
In which I lead a strike in Moscow
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin tells about the time the business manager of the expatriate magazine where I worked started routing our payroll through Cyprus, he said, to avoid taxes. This meant we went a month and a half without getting paid. At that point, I thought it was a good idea, as editor in chief, to lead the newsroom in a strike against our Russian employer. God, I was so dumb.
If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30.
Chapter 31: Crime and Punishment
by Robin Whetstone
Kommersant, the media behemoth that owned the Guardian, said they planned to pay us in rubles, but what they actually did – not pay us at all — was much worse. For a while, we tried to ignore it. We decided to believe the business manager’s explanation that he was sending our salaries through Cyprus to avoid paying Russian taxes. It was just taking longer, he said. But after the sixth week with no paycheck, Jason called a meeting and suggested we go on strike until we were paid. This idea sounded good to us. Wasn’t this Russia? The workers’ paradise? They’d have to be sympathetic to our methods, given their long history of strikes and revolutions. We still didn’t understand that in Russia, “Human Resources” is a man in a sharkskin jacket with a gun.
Jason asked Brad to change the password and lock down the files for the next issue. Stu suggested that David drive off with one of the rainbow cars. We left a Post-It note on the keyboard telling our bosses that if they wanted us to unlock the next issue and give them their car back, they’d have to pay us. Then we all went out to Jacko’s Bar to toast our moxie and chortle over the looks on their faces when they saw what we had done.
A few hours later, at 1 a.m., there was a knock on Jason’s steel door. He opened it to find the head of the Guardian’s security and two other men. The security head had been Special Forces in Afghanistan before this gig, and his short leather coat was tight across his shoulders but loose enough on the hips to show off the gun he was wearing.
“Get dressed,” said the man. Jason got dressed.
The three men escorted Jason to a car and put him in it. They drove through the dark city toward the Guardian’s office, not speaking. When they got there, they took Jason up to the top floor, to the office of Vladimir Yakovlev, the Guardian’s owner.
Yakovlev not only owned the Guardian, he also owned Kommersant, the first business newspaper in post-Soviet Russia. He was the most successful of Russia’s new crop of media barons, and, according to Bear Hunting with the Politburo, one of the country’s most prolific swindlers. We’d all heard rumors about him: the murders and the money laundering, the dojo in the basement where he forced his Russian employees to practice martial arts, but few of us had ever seen him. But now it was two o’clock in the morning, and Jason was sitting across from him, alone, in his office. Yakovlev’s face was sharp in the light of his small desk lamp, the only light in the room.
“Why did you not come to me first?” said Yakovlev.
Jason’s meeting with Yakovlev was the world’s most definitive performance review.
“I thought the business manager was acting on your behalf. I talked to him and he said he was laundering our salaries in Cyprus, or something. We’ll all be glad to get right back to work as soon as we’re paid.”
Yakovlev regarded Jason across his desk for a long time, his dark eyes flat. Probably, he was considering how much trouble there would be if something bad happened to this young American, an American who many people in Moscow would miss if he disappeared, and whether the fuss would be worth it. Finally, Yakovlev spoke. “How much do you want?”
Jason did some quick figuring and cited a number. Yakovlev reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a large stack of $100 bills, peeling them off and laying them in the middle of the desk. When he was done, he sat back. “Good?”
“Uh, good,” said Jason, pocketing the cash. Jason left with the three men who had brought him there, and that was the end of the strike.
The next day, Jason called us all in to the office and handed out our six weeks of back pay, in dollars. There was much rejoicing as we heard the story of how Jason had gotten us what we were owed. We crowed and laughed as we made Jason tell it again, and as Brad related how he had also been visited by men with guns the night before, and forced to unlock the files. This was fantastic. Jason’s meeting with Yakovlev was the world’s most definitive performance review. If they hadn’t believed our work at the Guardian was worth something, they would have just shot Jason and thrown him in the Moskva River. This meant that things were going back to normal.
“Okay,” said Jason, “One more thing. We’re all fired, effective immediately.”
***
For two weeks, it looked like Margo Kidder would be our superwoman. She was in Moscow filming an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and David had interviewed her. When he contacted her to ask if she’d help us start something new, she said she was interested. We chattered to each other about our new patron and all the things we’d do once we relaunched the magazine, but soon Kidder stopped returning our calls and it was clear the idea was going nowhere. I assumed that as a famous person Margot had a lot on her plate and was too busy to help, but Jason set me straight. “She went crazy and had to go home,” he said to me one night as we wandered around the city. “She came to Russia and it drove her crazy.”
This kind of thing was typical, and did not surprise me. It was never a question of whether you would go crazy in Moscow – it was the only sane response – merely of how long it would take. I was sorry for Ms. Kidder and sad that our magazine was a pipe dream, but I understood. In some ways, it was a relief. Ever since the dead man at the coal-walking workshop, I hadn’t written a word.
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