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There were collective sighs of relief in Moscow’s banks and securities houses when Boris Yeltsin won a convincing 14% victory over communist rival Gennady Zyuganov in the presidential elections in July. But none were louder, or longer, than those of a small group of US passport holders all of whom were mindful of an incident 79 years earlier when their aristocratic and capitalist grandparents were forced to flee the country after the communists bypassed elections and won the subsequent civil war. They are the White Russians, a group of young professionals who returned to their homeland and whose public face outside Russia has been Boris Jordan, the 30-year-old banker entrepreneur who reputedly made $100 million for CS First Boston in one year, before setting up his own firm, Renaissance Capital. They all come from in or around the same town, Sea Cliff, Long Island a suburb of New York. Some were former school friends, some were tent mates at summer camps, but they all have flawless Russian language skills. The drift back to Russia began in 1992 when the then minister for foreign affairs, Andre Kozyrev, called a meeting in the New York Plaza hotel, where the turnout of 100 young professionals came mostly from the financial sector. He apologized for what had happened to their grandparents and emphasized they would no longer face political danger should they go back. His hope was that they would return with their skills. His charm offensive was successful. The first to go back, and probably still the most influential, was Peter Derby, president of DialogBank, one of the few commercial banks in Moscow where the experience of cashing traveller’s cheques is a relatively pleasant one. “We are foreigners who are treated with the opportunity to be part of the domestic scene,” comments Derby. Derby’s Russian credentials are hardly in question. So much so that prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin once introduced Derby to a friend as “a Russian kid that grew up in America”. His first visit to Moscow was in 1987 with US rock star Billy Joel, whose Russian concerts he organized. But when he returned for good in 1990 it was still a sensitive issue to admit to banker as an occupation. To this day his passport states that he is a financial engineer. He says not all the Sea Cliff crowd responded well when he announced his intention to return. Many were sceptical of Gorbachev’s reforms. “I told my grandfather,” says Derby, “and the next day he died of a heart attack.” But being there at the beginning gives him a claim to credibility that is unique among Russian Americans most of whom arrived only after the hammer and sickle was abandoned. He still vividly recalls an early visit to the finance ministry when he asked about the finance law. “You see that pad and paper over there?” he was told, only half in jest; “Why don’t you go over there and write it?” In the event he contributed to both Russia’s finance law and company law. “I’m in Russia to contribute my knowledge,” says the former Chase and NatWest banker. “Our main principle here [at DialogBank] is not to maximize profits but to do what’s right. I have supported anyone who has come here with the right long-term honest ideals.” Derby takes ethics very seriously. “He really believes in all that stuff,” says a rival. A fresh-faced 35-year-old in a dapper flannel suit, Derby nevertheless represents the older generation of Russian Americans working in Moscow. In 1992, a Washington lawyer phoned him to ask if he knew a young man called Boris Jordan and if he could give him a reference. Derby readily did so; he had spent many summers at camp with Boris’s older brother Nick, whom he’d met at age 10. Jordan got the job at CS First Boston. Commenting on Boris’s subsequent success, Derby hedges his reply: “Boris is young and a very strong marketer. But he is more financially driven than I am. I am more paced.” He points around the sturdy office, recently constructed by an American friend, as he explains that all Russian Americans have a duty to be role models. “When people try to poach my staff,” he adds, “I feel personally violated. You spend so much time training them. You should add value as a foreigner, not reallocate it.” One recent loss was George Schivlovsky, another of the Sea Cliff Russian Americans, who left Dialog to join Renaissance. Schivlovsky is married to Jordan’s sister. The other Jordan in Moscow, Nick, 37, heads capital markets at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. “I don’t have the same entrepreneurial desires as Boris,” he says. “I’m a banker. I like working for a large corporation.” He trained at Bank of New York but quickly moved to Manufacturers Hanover where he remained through its merger with Chemical Bank. He eventually switched to trading and rose to head the emerging market bond desk in London. His direct boss at that time was Alexis Radzianko, now head of United City Bank, the Russian arm of MC Securities (recently taken over by Banque Bruxelles Lambert). In contrast to many of the younger generation of Russian Americans, both did their time “making the coffee on Wall Street”. Nick Jordan’s contract is for three years, and in July he relocated his family from London. But of his move to Russia he is careful to say: “I’m not coming home. I consider the United States my country and I’m very proud of it. It’s the passport my family and I carry.” Ironically enough, Nick Jordan was hired, like his younger brother Boris, to build a trading business from scratch. He readily admits, “we are in acquisition mode” but then so is most of the Deutsche group. His wife, a Russian Frenchwoman who does not speak Russian, will also set up a business: the new Moscow office for headhunters Heidrick & Struggles. However, both husband and wife’s task will be a walk in the park compared with their four-month effort to find real estate in Moscow. After abortive efforts to find a house landlords have taken to asking tenants to refurbish their property for them they have settled on an apartment inside Moscow’s Garden Ring road which passes close to Red Square. They chose to live on the west side where the air quality is considered better most of Moscow’s factories are in the city’s east. Is it coincidence that three out of four of the Jordan family have finished up in Moscow? The fourth, Michael (or Misha), occasionally visits from London in his capacity as head of Bank of America’s emerging market flow-trading desk. The temptation is to draw some sort of genetic conclusion, although it is probably best not to. But the Jordan family history is interesting. On the maternal side, the family name is Shishkoff, a prestigious name which features in the Velvet Book that determines the most ancient Russian nobility. The name Jordan came through a pre-revolution marriage into the German nobility. In common with many other families that ended up in the US, the Jordans settled first in Yugoslavia, only to flee Marshall Tito’s regime after World War II. They ended up in Sea Cliff, Long Island, where, in common with their compatriots, they established roots. The initial lure of this town is not known. For those who arrived later, it was the existence of two Russian orthodox churches. In Sea Cliff, a close-knit community developed in which the children had to speak Russian at home. “I used to hate it at the time,” points out one young trader now making prices in Lukoil each day, “but I’m glad now my parents made me do it.” The children all went to normal American high schools, but their parents made every effort to make their extracurricular activities as Russian as possible, and to keep alive the Russia they had known and still held out hope of returning to. In the winter they would arrange balls and put on plays, and certain traditions would be upheld, such as adhering to the Julian calendar. This meant that unlike their American school mates they celebrated Christmas on January 7. Two summer camps were established, both about an hour and a half’s drive out of New York: Arur and Nor. They were not exclusively for Russian Americans, although in practice this proved the case, since one of the requirements was that children spoke Russian at all times. Of those in Moscow today, many were neighbours or school friends. For example, DialogBank’s treasurer and head of foreign exchange, Sanya (Alexandra) Zezulin, has known Nick Jordan since she was old enough to talk. She remembers starting kindergarten with him in the Russophobic days when the slogan “better dead than red” was on the lips of every American. “At first I didn’t have an accent,” she says, commenting on her language ability. “I just didn’t speak any English at all.” Zezulin recalls Jordan’s spectacles being smashed by the other boys on a regular basis and being teased because of their tsarist names: Nikolai and Alexandra. She speculates that since Russian American children had to struggle, a high percentage became over-achievers and a disproportionate number moved into banking. Strangers in a homeland All of the Russian Americans admit that the Russian they speak differs significantly from the street Russian spoken in Moscow, which they all find abrasive and often rude. Theirs is a more mannered and traditional language passed down by their aristocratic grandparents. Their accents are mostly neutral, although a couple of traders were told they spoke Russian with an accent like that of the Baltic states. On the trading side, there are a whole slew of Russian Americans in their mid-20s who drink together, reminisce about camp, address each other by their schoolyard nicknames and are constantly in touch during trading hours in a market where price moves can be as opaque as they are sudden. For example, the two Pataleff brothers, Alex (who works at Creditanstalt-Grant) and Victor (at Renaissance), share an apartment with Nick Mokhoff of Alliance Menatep. Peter Kizenko, who was headhunted by ING Barings (and was at Alliance Menatep), used to live there too, and still drives down in his Volvo to the dacha they collectively rent at weekends. Their apartment has a basketball net. The younger generation of Russian Americans are following in the footsteps of Boris Jordan, who arrived in Moscow when he was 25. Whenever Boris walks into a bar, a cluster of the younger traders are sure to gather round to hang on his every word. But there hasn’t been much of that lately. It was with shock that the Russian Americans learned that Boris Jordan’s entry visa was revoked in June, albeit temporarily, it appears. Some took this as a sign to be wary of some of the more reactionary elements in Russia. Another sign reinforced this: a couple of days before the second round of the presidential election, Yeltsin’s “running mate”, Alexander Lebed who is admittedly a little prone to the unpredictable commented it would be a good thing to rid Russia of “foreign thieves”. However, the Russian Americans, in spite of their language and ancestry, will always be regarded as foreigners by Muscovites. “These guys will never be Russians,” is the comment of one American trader. And some Russian Americans are equally aware of this. “Not everybody is here for genetic reasons,” says Nick Jordan. “Some are here just because they have a language skill.” |
