I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia by Mole John

Author:Mole, John [Mole, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: NB Ltd
Published: 2010-12-01T21:00:00+00:00

Poppem inna orven en sierem paipin hort

Since the dawn of civilization culture has spread along trade routes. Who knows how far Gyedder in de Greebi has spread along the motorways through Russian-speaking lands, how many generations will hand it down? From tiny spores great mushrooms grow. It’s nice to give something back.

If you don’t grease you don’t travel

The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, announced that only the Cyrillic alphabet was to be used on public signs and logos. McDonald’s had to become and Pizza Hut . And Jackets? . We were relying on foreigners to fuel our launch. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut had recognizable logos, but Jackets? How would a foreigner ever recognize How would they know it was Western? And what would entice affluent Russians to taste a bit of England in a place that looked like it was named after a factory town in the Urals?

Misha, who was on a visit from Rome, Oleg and I sat round our world headquarters in the bedroom plunged into gloom. Like 1920s Bolsheviks we bemoaned Russian chauvinism, bourgeois nationalism, the death of internationalism. What is to be done? Who is to blame?

Every problem is an opportunity. Because Jackets did not have a brand presence outside South London, we were not shackled by it. There was nothing to stop us changing to a euphonious and compelling name that would appeal to both Russians and foreigners. But what? Look carefully at the Russian names above. Some letters you would have no idea how to pronounce unless you deduced them from the context. X for example, or or Others look familiar but are deceptive: Russian H is our n, C is s and X is h. As any stamp collector will tell you, the Russian for USSR is CCCP - three s words followed by an r. If you can bear to look at those junk-food names again without feeling nauseous, you will see five letters that look the same and sound the same in Cyrillic and Roman.

“AKMOT,” I shouted. “That’s our answer!”

“AKMOT? Is this a name for a restaurant? It does not sound too tasty to me.” In Russian it is pronounced AKMORT, which is even more sinister.

“It is so meaningful. So symbolic. It’s what we have in common, the bridge between two languages, two cultures. In these five letters is the meeting of East and West...”

“We are selling potatoes, not world peace.”

“All we have to do is make up a name with these letters and put it in lights.”

After some discussion, and bowing to the wisdom of a Western marketing expert and entrepreneurial consultant, they came round to the idea, which, like many such ideas, was more exciting in concept than in practice. We soon exhausted the anagrammatical possibilities of using each letter only once. In theory there are 120 combinations of five letters but only 28 were pronounceable. None of them was very catchy. “Let’s go out for a MOKTA” didn’t sound appetizing in Russian or in English. We tried using

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