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Russia's Defiant Business Tabloid
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20196 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
2,630 Words |
| Author
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Brad Durham
Brad Durham was editor of the English edition of Commersant
and is now a free-lance writer and business consultant based
in Washington, D.D. |
The offices of Commersant, the Soviet business weekly, are almost impossible to find without help. There are no signs to indicate that what awaits visitors to the ugly yellow and white tile housing block in northwest Moscow is any different than the modest family dwellings in any of the identical buildings in the jungle of housing blocks along Khoroshevskoye Chaussee (Good Street).
Weeds grow high at the curb in summer, and a huddle of hunchbacked babushkas squat permanently on a bench near the entrance, whispering and pointing as I enter. As the first editor of Commersant's English edition and the only foreigner on a staff of over 100 Soviets, to them, I seemed a foreigner spreading plague from the decadent West. But as I crossed the threshold, lo, I became a learned mentor of capitalism.
Inside Commersant sit the future scribes of Soviet capitalism, clacking away on a half million dollars worth of IBM equipment. Their mission? To cover the privatization of state enterprises, the stocks and commodities exchanges, the almighty dollar, and to write fawning profiles of foreign businessmen who have come to share their ingenuity with the Soviets while attempting to craft lucrative deals for themselves.
Unlike most Soviet publications, Commersant does not flinch at capital gains, neither its own monthly after-tax profits of 500,000 rubles--an astounding 33 percent profit margin--nor the profits of others. Since its founding two years ago, its editorial content has been stubbornly free-market in a country that still hasn't legalized buying low and selling high.
Commersant's nine-room office, rented with the usual Soviet ritual of palm greasing, is plush and spacious by local standards. The place is always thronged with visitors, dressed in the uniform of Soviet professionalism (i.e., dusty gray suit, deep red tie, dark blue polyester shirt, and galoshes in winter, sandals with matching socks in the summer). Visitors mix in with the usual crush of pacing editors, scruffy reporters, maintenance people, and snooping security guards. In short, the place looks like a Teamsters meeting. The cacophony of chatter is replaced by a reverential silence when Commersant's leader emerges from his sprawling, smoke-filled office.
Commercant's editor in chief, Vladimir (Volodya) Yakovlev, 31, is a meeting machine. Since he doesn't delegate, Yakovlev runs chronically late. Those familiar with his overscheduling plan on a two-hour
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