Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

XXII

TWO YEARS HAD PASSED since the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacque Rogge, closing the organization’s regular session—which was held in Guatemala—exhaled, “Sochi!” which unleashed a storm of excitement and happiness across the vast Russian expanses from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad. Two years passed and the happiness hadn’t faded away, it only changed in its form—it no longer rumbled from sea to sea, but peacefully shone in the form of a small bronze plaque outside an expensive office a fifteen-minute walk from the Kremlin. Olympstroi was the most mysterious state-owned corporation in the country. Of course, its name was familiar to everyone—the newspapers regularly wrote about some construction blunders or about how the corporation had again changed its CEO—but in the grand scheme of things all of this news didn’t have anything to do with its most important secret, and the corporation itself had even less to do with the upcoming Olympics than might appear to be the case. The person closest to the root of this mystery than anyone, but without actually realizing it, was the editor of the “Economics and Politics” section of Kommersant. For no particular reason, he put together a chart of who had come to work at Olympstroi and from where within the last year and a half and published it on his LiveJournal page. From that, it turned out that this wasn’t any kind of corporation, but a sort of vacuum for professionals—even a quick glance at the chart revealed that for some mysterious reasons even the lowest positions at Olympstroi (up to the position of deputy departmental director) were filled by people who had eagerly relinquished their positions as ministers and governors and top-level managers of both state-owned and formally-privately-owned companies. Perhaps the creator of the chart could have guessed what the response would be, but by some maddening coincidence on exactly the same day that the chart with these names and positions appeared on his LiveJournal, some Internet asshole hacked the journalist’s email account—thank God, he didn’t touch his personal or work correspondence, limiting himself (possibly his signature trait to show off to other hackers) to stealing his LiveJournal password and erasing all of his posts over the past year. To mark his work the hacker left a picture of a popular Internet meme: Mikhail Boyarsky in a feathered hat with the slogan, “You are all faggots!” After two days, LiveJournal administrators deleted the hacked blog. The journalist was not upset, he had always treated LiveJournal as something fun but noth too important. Incidentally, just after the chart was posted, the security service of Olympstroi was ordered to block every possible leak of new personnel decisions within the corporation. Because the most interesting thing to know about Olympstroi is that the construction of the Olympic facilities themselves was, let’s put this carefully, a secondary component of the corporation’s activities. Generally speaking, no one seriously expected that the Olympics in Sochi would take place—and Jacque Rogge was informed of this within a month following the ceremony in Guatemala—well, as it happens, Russia did not calculate its capabilities and resources properly, and the IOC had made a mistake, but on the bright side, there was enough time before the Olympics to find a reason to move them to Korea, which in contrast to our country, could be “understood with the mind,” and which had been prepared for the Olympics long before their formal request to the IOC.

But Olympstroi had another, perhaps much more important, function than building stadiums and hotels. Using their unlimited capabilities, the corporation had been scrupulously monitoring and tracking any and all inventions and discoveries that had been achieved on Russian territory with interesting potential applications over the last three years. And if one were given a task, such as to gather one hundred of the most mysterious deaths and suicides that had taken place in the country over this time period, it would become immediately apparent that a large part of them were connected in one way or another with what went on behind the closed doors of the corporation. A manufacturing engineer in the Kaluga brewing factory, Nikita M., drowned in a vat of beer, an unfortunate accident that is intriguing enough as it is. But who knew that the deceased had his own original formulas for increasing the efficiency of beer production ten times over, which could allow his company break into the ranks of the leaders of the Russian brewing industry in a fantastically short period of time. So said the Olympstroi specialist, at any rate, waving some papers around when the leaders of all of the biggest brewing companies of the country had gathered in the company’s head office to formally to discuss the new “Olympic” brand of beer and the opening up of bids for its production. They understood everything about the sensational technology immediately and accurately, and those voluntary donations “for the Olympics” that the beer industry was still sending into the budget of Olympstroi, possibly, could be considered the price of keeping the murdered Kaluga manufacturing engineer’s idea from ever being realized.

But Slava had heard about the story about the beer from others—this happened before his time. His time began with the meat. The same kind of meeting, but now under his, Slava’s, chairmanship—and the presenter was a fidgety red-faced fatass from somewhere in the south.

“Valentin Vyacheslavovich Rusak,” Slava introduced the fatass, checking the name on his papers. Those gathered—the people who controlled the country’s entire meat industry (all of it, up to and including kangaroo) were listening. They listened with horror, though what scared them was not so much the lone rider with his magic serum that the presenter was talking about as the fees that Olympstroi, in the form of Slava, could request to prevent the magic serum from destroying the existing market balance for which many of those who sat before Slava at that moment had paid for with the blood of their partners, rivals, or whomever else. And not only with blood.

Therefore they were all quite surprised when Slava referred to money in a seemingly conciliatory tone—and he immediately realized that the usual charge for not using the invention in this situation was not the most important thing. He was most interested in the part of Rusak’s report about how one of the overactive local meat distributors (“Fi-li-mo-nenko” Slava pronounced in his head, trying to remember the name) had either simply burned down the lone rider’s laboratory or—and he didn’t even want to think about it—had also destroyed the invention that could be useful both for the Olympic organization and also his own slush fund.