From Russia with Misgivings

Piney Wood Journal writers have occasionally look nostalgically at their earlier work or leisure times. I’ve seldom, if ever, done so, but I’ll share one experience this month.

A bit over 30 years ago, I spent several weeks in Moscow where I had been invited to lecture at the Plekhanov University of Economics and their Moscow Managers Night School. My receiving that invitation had more to do with chance and networking with a few academics in Russia and the USA who were ambitious to develop collaborative ventures shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. I was then a professor in business ethics at Eastern Illinois University. Several Russian university officials must have been curious enough about this topic to include me along with another professor who was invited to visit. This Russian university was undergoing turmoil and change. Almost all their existing faculty had been educated in Marxist-Leninist economic theory and were deemed close to useless for preparing business students and managers for a new rush of enthusiasm concerning Western business prospects.

The unsuccessful August 1991 coup against Gorbachev sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. The total collapse of the Soviet Union came in December 1991, partially due to economic stagnation and military overextension. When I arrived in June 1992, I noticed that my English-speaking host professor was uncomfortable even entering a hotel in which we met. He said that it had been previously reserved only for Russian military officers and top politicians, and the security station at the front of the hotel had not allowed him to enter previously.

Moscow in 1992 was a culture shock for my wife and me. We were provided with the use of an apartment in a large building that was being rented by a professor who was then visiting and lecturing in the USA. From the balcony of this ten-story apartment building, we could see the many domes in Red Square a few blocks away.

Economic hardships existed then for many Russian citizens. Two of the large department stores in central Moscow were completely surrounded by many hundreds of city residents standing shoulder-to-shoulder selling some of their own personal items. Our Russian professor host explained how disillusioned and cynical most older Russians were. Those under 30 years old or so, he said, were generally more optimistic that their lives would improve as Russians embraced more democratic and capitalistic practices. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my interactions with students in day classes and with managers in night sessions. Some remained after scheduled time periods and asked questions about Western and American business practices. Some of the students and managers spoke English, but the need for interpreters meant that conversations and questions took more time.     

By far the most common question that I was asked by the Moscow managers involved employee theft and corruption. They said that these problems were enormous in both public and private organizations. Since my Arizona State dissertation was on managerial perceptions and reactions toward suspected employee theft in business, I described how diversely the American managers whom I had interviewed tried to handle this issue.

There were many female students attending this Russian university and among the young managers present in its nightly sessions. Their most frequent comments concerned the wide-spread sexual harassment that they had encountered. Plekhanov University proudly displayed photos of classes there from before 1920 showing many women student present. Government and university officials claimed to be ahead of USA and Western European nations in encouraging women toward business careers. The women that my wife and I met said that it had been difficult or impossible to advance in business careers without acceding to the sexual demands of their male superiors. 

Beyond lectures and conversations with Russian professors, a colleague and I met with a wealthy ex-patriate American entrepreneur, Paul Tatum, who co-owned a recently constructed, luxurious hotel in Moscow. He showed us his modern business center on the second floor of this hotel. Tatum asked us to put together a proposal for how we might organize and run a private education/training center based at his hotel. We suggested that it should have Russian educators to help Western managers assigned to Moscow-based firms learn more about the culture and existing practices there. The center should also have American and Western educators working with Russian managers who would be later traveling to Western countries. In our proposal, my colleague and I offered to return to Moscow later that year to help with some of the classes and programs described in our proposal.

A week or two after our return home, we received a formal letter of thanks and appreciation for our proposal from Paul Tatum. He declined our proposal to return and be a small part of his venture. We learned later that the training center venture he started was modeled closely on the one that we had proposed. We reasoned that he didn’t really need the expense of the two of us traveling there again and involved with classes and training programs. There were many other academics and training specialists readily available to staff his programs.

Many of the hopes and enthusiasm for a new Russia dissolved within the pro-Western academic community there after our visit in 1992. Putin and his oligopolistic associates led the country in a very different direction. Paul Tatum whom we encountered in 1992 had an untimely and tragic end in 1996. He was killed in a shooting spray of bullets at a metro station very close to his hotel. His death was never officially solved but was attributed to Russian organized crime.

A Russian political and economic system that might over time resemble or draw closer to Western European norms never materialized.