The Treacherous Path by Vladimir Yakunin

Author:Vladimir Yakunin [Vladimir Yakunin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903779
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

I was constantly on the move during the years I was at the ministry; it sometimes felt as if half my existence was spent 30,000 feet above Russia, on my way to another of the country’s farflung ports. Every visit would be made up of a constant round of meetings: with the port authorities, with the region’s governor, with representatives from the local transport authority, with private entrepreneurs and potential investors. How efficient were the safety and signalling systems in a particular port? Were government funds being spent in the correct fashion? Was each port being developed in accordance with the strategic plans we had laid out? My aim was always to secure as comprehensive a picture as possible as to how these very different elements, all of which had very different priorities, interacted with one another, and to identify where any grit had somehow been introduced into the machinery, so to speak, in order to help extract it.

It was during these years that I came to really know Russia. I saw more of her terrain than I ever had before, more than most will ever see in a lifetime: from Murmansk hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, to Taman on the Black Sea, through to Nakhodka, which perches opposite Japan and the two Koreas. But this period was also an exemplary education in the way Russia worked at every level, its complex administrative ecology. I came to understand something of the intricacies of its government; how, so far from Moscow that they might as well be on another continent, the administrations of Russia’s most remote regions interacted with federal bodies; or the transformative impact transport infrastructure could have on towns that had previously been bereft of even basic medical care.

For decades, even those governors who had not tried to grab sovereignty away from the Kremlin had been accustomed to ruling their territories almost like feudal lords, so, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was sometimes hard to persuade them of the importance of supporting the coal industry when they were thousands of miles away from the nearest mine. They recoiled at any attempts to, as they saw it, undermine their authority over their fiefdoms. The withering away of the state’s authority under Yeltsin left them almost totally unresponsive to orders from Moscow, which for years had lacked the money or even the will to impose its governance. So your chances of achieving anything during this period of time depended substantially on the nature of your relationship with them.

In the KGB (as in many other administrative or managerial organisations) we believed there were two main ways one could be persuasive. The first, perhaps the most straightforward, was to obtain some kind of compromising information about your subject that you could deploy to influence their behaviour. The second was to make them your friend (perhaps it will surprise you to learn that Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People was a key title on our syllabus). I had always favoured

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