Sberbank

The Rebirth of Russia’s Financial Giant

Evgeny Karasyuk

Sberbank: The Rebirth of Russia’s Financial Giant

by Evgeny Karasyuk

© 2014, Evgeny Karasyuk

Translated by Lewis White

Book created by Max Mendor

Edited by James Womack

Cover design by Kiryl Lysenka

© 2015, Glagoslav Publications, United Kingdom

Glagoslav Publications Ltd

88-90 Hatton Garden, EC1N 8PN London

United Kingdom

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-78267-093-3 (Ebook)

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

PREFACE

The autumn of 2007 was an unusually warm one. Many said that such high temperatures hadn’t been recorded in central Russia since the end of the 19th century. Fallen leaves mouldered underfoot, but the sun blazed above as if it were the height of summer. Paying no heed to the calendar, most Muscovites went about their business without the heavy clothing characteristic of the season.

Those at the head office of Russia’s largest bank found themselves unable to make the most of the unseasonably good weather. They were not much in the mood. Everyone was too preoccupied with the arrival of the new boss — transfers of power in big organisations do not always work out for the better.

The big organisation in question was Sberbank. The incoming boss was German Gref. Much was known about him, but little of it was encouraging. In his previous post as government minister he had been an irrepressible reformer, earning a reputation as a systematic liberaliser of the economy, the choicest cuts of which were controlled by the state and the handful of business figures close to it. This kind of man was easy to imagine in business — but on the board of some transnational corporation, not Sberbank.

The largest bank in the country was a virtual monopoly, albeit not in the strictest sense of the word. Among commercial banks it was known as the Ministry of Deposits. Sberbank looked down imperiously on the rest of the market, and was no more inclined to change than Gazprom, Russian Railways, Russian Post, or any other hulking state behemoth. So where did this spirit of reform emerge from?

For ordinary companies it requires a tremendous effort for things to go from worse to bad, and then to good only if luck is on their side. Reform is a fundamental condition of their survival. There’s always the potential for the money to run out, and creditors circle like vultures. Competitors champ at the bit to muscle in, and regulators offer no quarter. In truth, major reforms in business are rarely brought about by anything other than desperation. But Sberbank didn’t share anything in common with these unfortunates; its existence was remarkable for its uneventfulness and predictability. The regulator moonlighted as its main shareholder. Strong binoculars were required to spot the competition, they were so far behind. As for money, the bank was flush, and has only got richer in recent times.

Market capitalisation in the middle of 2007 exceeded $86 billion: in Russia Sberbank was trumped only by Gazprom in this regard. Its market valuation outstripped that of major European banking concerns such as Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank. As for the figures it posted, these were beyond reproach; stable results with good revenue and interest earnings garnered the plaudits of analysts year after year. The state bank team was regarded as a model in the idiosyncratic world of the post-Soviet financial nomenklatura. The head of the banking subcommittee of the Russian State Duma, Pavel Medvedev, and ex-member of the Sberbank supervisory board, Anton Danilov-Danilyan, stated that the company was run by a “top-grade manager” and a “brilliant banker”. The management was showered with professional awards from top-ranking financial officials with effusive expressions of their gratitude.

This corporate idyll was only spoiled by one thing: Sberbank was not much loved by its customers. In this sense it brought to mind the country it served. Behind the government’s official crowing lay a rather more grim reality: that many citizens of such an enormous, resource-rich state led an abject existence.

Despite “the brilliance of the bankers”, its customers found dealing with Sberbank a tortuous ordeal. International research agency EPSI, who regularly gauged client satisfaction with Russian banks, reported that Sberbank was in protracted crisis. But until the baking autumn of 2007 this was not seen as much of a problem. Who had time for such trivialities when there were growing profits and stock prices to celebrate?

Enter German Gref, ex-minister, liberal, and tireless reformer. Sberbank staff had been right in their misgivings. The new boss was the kind of oddity that cared about what his customers thought. This most venerable of banking institutions, sure in its inviolability, faced an overhaul the likes of which it had never seen in all of its long history.

CHAPTER 1

INSOMNIA

Bella Zlatkis couldn’t sleep. This wasn’t like her at all. No matter what was happening at work, her nervous system was configured so that she was usually asleep before her head touched the pillow. But not tonight. Zlatkis sat in the kitchen absorbed with thoughts of the coming day. She smoked one cigarette and unconsciously reached for the next. In the last few hours, Zlatkis had taken in more nicotine than over the entire previous month.

The stable position of the bank in the retail market is guaranteed not only by its multiple branches, its working traditions and impeccable business reputation, but by the high standard of service it offers the population.

From the introductory section of the anniversary booklet “Sberbank Rossii: Istoriya, Sovremennost’, Perspektivy” (2001)

A session of the Sberbank supervisory board — or, to put it another way, the board of directors of the most powerful financial institution in the land, responsible for the savings of a good half of the population — had been called for the following morning. Zlatkis had taken part in similar meetings for years as a Finance Ministry official. In professional circles she was regarded as something of a legend, one of the most experienced experts on financial markets. Consequently, when in 2004 she had transferred from the Ministry to Sberbank, her new superior, Andrei Kazmin, had rushed to get her back where she belonged. Kazmin supported her candidacy and she reappeared on the supervisory board, this time as a representative of the bank’s management. At this point, no-one could have predicted that wrangling at the top would later force Zlatkis to make what was possibly the most difficult moral choice of her life.

The current board was preparing to oust Kazmin, head of Sberbank for almost 12 years, and appoint as his successor German Gref, the former minister for economic trade and development.

Zlatkis had long enjoyed good relations with Kazmin, who was also a product of the finance ministry. She had known him for 17 years, and at the outset of his career had even been his boss for a period of time. Good-natured, pleasant-mannered, and intelligent, Kazmin spoke three languages, possessed a Master’s degree and was soundly versed in economic theory. He was, however, let down by a dreadfully indecisive character — colleagues did not regard him as a natural leader, and Zlatkis, if pressed, would be forced to admit this herself.

Gref was made of different stuff. He always strove to master any situation, regardless of the circumstances. Of course, Gref was no banker. Until 2007, his entire banking experience could be considered incidental. In his ministerial capacity he had represented Russia on the board of the EBRD. He had sat on the Sberbank supervisory board for all of two and half years — that is, he’d been to around two dozen meetings. This didn’t constitute much. Among professionals, Gref was an outsider. All his predecessors had built their careers at Sberbank, or had moved in the same circles. Kazmin had worked as an economist in one of the Moscow departments of Gosbank (which, at that time, operated a network of Soviet savings bank branches). Gref, on the other hand, had no education in economics, and as a result, became a regular object of his colleagues’ sarcasm. Professional bankers were often less than respectful in their attitude towards him. They were sure that the minister had no idea what he’d let himself in for. Knowing the weakness Viktor Gerashchenko, former head of the Central Bank, had for plain speaking, journalists badgered him for his thoughts, and he duly obliged: replacing Kazmin with Gref could turn out to be a foolish move.

Zlatkis didn’t think so. She had known Gref even before he’d taken up the job of federal minister. To her, he was a man with progressive ideas and, no less importantly, a man of principles that hadn’t been shaken by years in a government no steadier than the price of a barrel of oil. Gref continued to believe in the market, in competition, and in management as the science of transforming what needed doing into what had been done — just imagine what this could mean for Sberbank.

Dawn approached, but Zlatkis couldn’t rest — it looked likely she’d end up among the opponents of Gref’s appointment as head of the bank, whether she liked it or not. Zlatkis believed that she had no moral authority to vote any other way than as directed by her boss, and it didn’t take much to guess what that meant.

Her last chance to avoid this undesirable course of events was to catch Kazmin before the meeting began. Zlatkis arrived for work early. The towering headquarters on Vavilov Street in south Moscow was just beginning to come to life for the day. Two and a half thousand employees had yet to make it to their desks, hidden in the depths of this wonder of post-Soviet banking architecture.

The decision to build Sberbank’s new headquarters had been taken in the early nineties by Pavel Zhikharev, who had been in charge since the final days of the Soviet Union. He later complained that he had been tricked by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had allotted an unattractive location close to a power station, leading Zhikharev to believe that the plant would soon be shifted further from the centre. This move never took place, and billowing chimneys still spoil the view from east-facing windows. The scale of the project compensated somewhat for the rather unedifying surroundings. The skyscraper, made from smoked glass and white granite imported at eye-watering expense from South America, was constructed by a German firm of architects. Oleg Yashin, who had replaced Zhikharev, allotted himself the top floor of the building, which he had designed as a spacious retreat. However, Yashin didn’t get much opportunity to enjoy his comfortable new office — in January 1996, immediately after the building was handed over following completion, he was dismissed (though Yashin only finally left the bank in October 1996, after just under two years advising the new president). After that, the coveted 25th floor was occupied by Andrei Kazmin and his partner Alla Aleshkina, who was also senior vice-president at the bank.

Zlatkis pressed the top button of the express elevator. She had hoped to speak to the president face to face, and she was in luck: Kazmin was alone. Judging by his expression, he hadn’t slept particularly well the previous night either.

The president’s sacking had long been augured. A motley crew of bankers and politicians had been tipped for Kazmin’s desk, from former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko to Vladimir Kogan, at that time head of Promstroibank, later sold to VTB. None of these wild predictions had been on the mark. Now, however, it seemed for real.

17 people sat on the supervisory board. Sberbank had just short of 237,000 shareholders, but only one of these had any real say — the Central Bank, which owned more than 60% of its voting shares. And it had been decided — Kazmin had to go. The new prime minister Viktor Zubkov had officially proposed (and Vladmir Putin had nothing against) sending Kazmin to take over at Russian Post, another gigantic state organisation. The transfer was worked out. The president of a limited company, even one controlled by the state, is not a state employee and cannot simply be sent anywhere on the say-so of the government. However, such minor details were not considered an issue — a space at the post office had been cleared for him, and its unsuspecting general director Igor Syrtsov unceremoniously shown the door.

In turn, Gref’s appointment as president of the bank would be up for discussion at the supervisory board, and at an extraordinary meeting of shareholders, but only for form’s sake; expressions of dissent at his candidacy were empty gestures.

Zlatkis immediately made it clear that she didn’t regard any parting shots from Kazmin a good idea. Sberbank was the culmination of his career, but not the end of it. Arguing against the state’s choice at a state bank? What was the use? The president was not ready to be lectured that morning, but he might allow himself to be persuaded. Perhaps Kazmin recognised that supporting a successor recommended by the main shareholder would be taken as a display of loyalty — loyalty to an employer upon whom his destiny might later depend.

However, such efforts became academic with the arrival on the scene of his other half, whose word he hung on in all major issues, and who had no intention of going quietly. Alla Aleshkina loved power and hated anything that undermined her. Her presence had loomed over the bank for years. It was thanks to her that the inherent bureaucracy of the system had been perfected. Memoranda had all but replaced face-to-face contact between levels of the hierarchy, and everyone knew his or her place. Kazmin himself probably regarded his role as equivalent to being the referee of some rugby match, a sport he adored so much that he was prepared to travel the globe from Sydney to Paris so as not to miss the “fantastic spectacle”. “In rugby it’s not done for players to argue with the referee,” Kazmin enthusiastically told an in-house magazine. “Only the team captain can speak to the referee and only with the referee’s permission. The captain himself cannot approach the referee. The referee conducts the game with a radio relay. He has a transmitter and his entire team are audible to the crowd.”

At first, Zlatkis had been surprised by the way things were done at the bank. She was used to the egalitarian atmosphere of the finance ministry: there, if something urgent needed to be discussed, it was normal to burst into the boss’s office and have a heated exchange with him without having to bow and scrape. At Sberbank, this was utterly unthinkable. Zlatkis had been astounded to learn the degree of subordination a university friend of hers who worked at the bank was subjected to — there was even a silly bell that rang to indicate when to go to lunch.

The paradox lay in the fact that the atmosphere prevalent amongst the management approached hysteria. Personal dealings supplanted standardised systems of operation. People were constantly arguing, were not on speaking terms, or else avoided each other completely. Work would get bogged down in petty intrigues and pretences. Aleshkina could pull the plug on any senior manager she wasn’t keen on, even if they weren’t her direct subordinates.

Aleshkina’s capriciousness was known beyond the confines of the bank. She would create a spectacular scene whenever some high-handed finance official needed to be dealt with. A couple of years previously, some unflattering appraisals of Sberbank’s work following checks conducted by inspectors from the Central Bank had sent her into a furious rage, and, in protest, she boycotted meetings of the supervisory board, of which she, alongside Kazmin, had been a member.

The question of whether she’d dance to these upstarts’ tune wasn’t worth posing. Gref? How could a bank be trusted in the hands of an official with no banking experience? Aleshkina and her partner had been treated unfairly — monstrously, in fact. Who else if not them had brought the bank back from the brink?

In 1996 Kazmin and Aleshkina had taken on a failing bank that looked set to come apart at the seams at any moment. Feudal princes ruled in provincial territories, dishing out credit with scant regard to the risks. Sberbank had enormous problems with overdue loans and, consequently, liquidity. In some regions, such as Krasnoyarsk Krai, arrears had reached 97% of all loans in the local bank’s portfolio. Among the bank’s regional subdivisions it was normal not to share information on clients and any risks associated with them. It was an opportunist’s dream. Small-scale commercial banks essentially functioned as corporate borrowers (at that time loans were not issued directly to businesses) and would amass tremendous amounts of credit in different regions with no intention of paying it back. Regulations that made it a requirement to coordinate with Moscow over the issuing of loans were flagrantly undermined. Regional managers knew full well that headquarters were wholly unable to monitor all their actions.

At that time, Zlatkis was heading up the securities and financial markets department at the finance ministry, and she was well aware of Sberbank’s condition. “So much was pilfered that no-one knew how the bank was going to survive,” she would say later.

However, the bank did survive. With state support, Kazmin and Aleshkina managed to steady the balance and even come out of the 1998 crisis relatively unscathed. Under them, the bank began to beef up its lending procedure, and over the course of a few years, the organisational structure of Sberbank was overhauled — the number of regional bank divisions was reduced from 71 at the outset to 17 in 2001, wiping out the feudal factionalism of before.

This staved off the threat of collapse. The International Monetary Fund, at that time an influential lender to Russia, proposed the breaking up of Sberbank into a number of individual parts shortly after August 1998. The IMF, concerned that a state monopoly was suffocating competition, advocated the revitalisation of the financial sector, and aimed to improve the governability of an organisation whose decision-making process had become overly complicated and lacked transparency.

Three quarters of the nation’s savings were held by Sberbank — at that time the only Russian bank whose deposits were guaranteed by the state. As a result, the government was reluctant to follow the radical advice of the IMF experts. The government, the Central Bank and, naturally, the management itself, felt it best simply to integrate the internal sub-departments of the company. Subsequently, against a rise in the bank’s profits and share price, Kazmin met all suggestions of restructuring with flat rejections. “In no country in the world would a rational government consider such a move”, he bristled. “Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?”

By the 2000s the bank’s management had begun peddling its successes like an election manifesto. In 2001 the main objective was not to capture hearts and minds, but “to preserve the position of a modern, first-rate, competitive bank, the largest in Eastern Europe.” The results of the five-year development plan up to 2005 also painted a picture of untouchable dominance, boasting an assortment of unique competitive advantages, from the strong brand and reputation to its highly trained staff. Sberbank was one of the largest employers in the country, and recruited almost continually. More than 204,000 people worked for the bank in the period leading up to 2002, and six years later this number had exceeded 262,000. The size of its workforce was equivalent to the population of a small country such as Iceland or Barbados. With around 19,000 branches, the bank was second in the world for the scale of its branch network (the largest was that of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, with 37,000 branches, though this was later halved).

In striving for perfection in banking, Sberbank devotes particular attention to optimising development paths based primarily on our clients’ interests.

Andrei Kazmin in the anniversary booklet “Sberbank Rossii: Istoriya, Sovremennost’, Perspektivy” (2001).

The market share of hundreds of other players was statistically negligible. Remove Sberbank from the equation, and the country’s banking system would lose a quarter of its assets. In 2007, Sberbank’s piece of the pie reached 5 trillion roubles. The quantity did not negate the quality. In the 1990s, three quarters of assets had been in securities, mostly in the infamous GKOs (Government Short-Term Commitments, bonds synonymous with the 1998 Russian financial crisis). Now their place had been taken by loans. The management was proud of the fact that it had transformed “a thrift institution system” into a commercial bank that “guaranteed a growth in profit returns of 25-30% yearly”. The stock market looked on this with evident approval, and share prices rocketed — from 1998 the bank’s market capitalisation grew 116 times, reaching $95.7 billion. This had all been down to Kazmin and Aleshkina.

The only thing missing to complete the picture was the love of its clients. The story of Sberbank’s coming of age reads as a kind of parable about where the hubris of apparent success can lead. The bank was treading the same path as that of the country that sent the first man into space while simultaneously building a deeply insensate economic system. It was as if the surly, contemptuous cashiers of the Soviet grocery stores had simply been transplanted into branches of the bank. Newer parts of the banking chain underwent something of a Euro-style renovation, but the level of service remained abominable.

It is also worth noting the high level of confidence and security from fraudsters offered by the Sberbank savings book in comparison to plastic cards.

Excerpt from the article “Sberknizhka Sberbanka: v chem sekret populyarnosti?”, www.sberbank.ru.

The grinding gears of this gigantic machine were operated by low-paid personnel who had no desire to consider either client convenience or the value of their free time. Zlatkis saw that the procedures the business operation functioned on were wretched and not fit for purpose. Kazmin estimated that investment in technical improvements at the bank had cost more than $1 billion, but this outlay had barely changed anything. Opening an account, clients automatically received a savings book, just as they had in 1841. Later, consultants would state that in its approach to IT the bank was still in the Jurassic period.

The bank itself, however, didn’t think so. Kazmin’s team was no more sensitive to outside criticism than the bronze statue of Nikolai Kristofari, the bank’s first depositor, which stands at the entrance to the building on Vavilov Street. Viktor Orlovsky, who, before moving to Sberbank, had worked for the organisation as a consultant for IBM, was struck by the narrow-mindedness and haughtiness of his future employer: “People from the Department of Banking Technology who invited me to a consultation were barely interested in what I had to say. The majority of the meeting was spent demonstrating what we were doing wrong at IBM.”

Sberbank felt invulnerable, nestled as it was in the bosom of the state. This incarnate security atoned for everything else — antediluvian technology, long queues, and rudeness. The company was too big and wealthy to make a drama from such minor shortcomings. Kazmin would admit that not everything ran smoothly at the bank, but as he presented it, these service issues were more the side effects of popularity. In an interview for Kommersant in 2007, Kazmin put forward the following argument: “There is a very high strain on our operational apparatus — seven times more than Eastern Europe, and around ten times that of Western Europe. They have 1000-3000 clients per service point, while we have 30,000-40,000”.

Lord Victor Rothschild of the celebrated banking family saw the purpose of banks as “facilitating the movement of money from point A, where it is, to point B, where it is needed.” Sberbank solved this problem in its own way. It was able to vacuum up citizens’ savings thanks to the state guarantee and the ubiquitousness of its branches around the country. This money was then made available as loans, not for private individuals — these made up no more than a quarter of the bank’s loan portfolio — but for businesses. In a system like this, retail banking was an optional extra. Essentially, the same applied to businesses, which would line up dutifully for loans on favourable terms, obtained by having connections at the bank. Applicants even came to Vavilov Street itself to ingratiate themselves with the right people.

The bank favoured major borrowers. These included Nafta Moskva owner Suleyman Kerimov, cement king Filaret Galchev, and Yelena Baturina, head of Inteco (and wife of the then mayor of Moscow). Such captains of industry were simultaneously major shareholders. Kerimov’s stock alone, according to the Russian edition of Forbes, may have reached a hefty 6% by the end of 2005 (five years later the biggest private shareholder controlled all of 0.017% of the bank’s shares, while among corporate entities this amount did not exceed 0.3%).

It was not clear that it was market conditions that were determining the granting of loans to big companies, who were inclined to buy up shares in the same bank and effectively dilute its capitalisation. However, as far back as 2002, Vadim Kleiner, Head of Research at British investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, who had joined Sberbank’s supervisory board, publicly accused the bank of lending to major Russian corporations at undervalued rates. How did the bank react? Not by entering into a public spat; instead, it mounted an action in defence of its business reputation, winning the case with little difficulty.

This artificial inflation of capitalisation likely spelled the end for the management. Gref, as minister and member of the supervisory board at Sberbank, was not the only official to recognise the disastrous consequences of the endeavour (he said himself, with his usual frankness, that it had led to inevitable conflict with the bank’s leadership). The game was so risky that even the Kremlin was beginning to feel uneasy.

In shareholders’ meetings I would tally up amounts for producing reports, and I know the composition of our shareholders. We have don’t have the major shareholders to propel shares.

Interview with Bella Zlatkis, Ekho Moskvy (12.07.2006).

Those in banking could only sigh — such squandering of colossal resources! If it had played its cards right, Sberbank could have been competing with the world’s biggest banks. This competition could have been driven by a prudent lending policy, professional staff, modern technology and practical working environs — instead, it was based on its relationship with the state.

Zlatkis regarded Gref as one of the few people up to the task of civilising the bank. Gref didn’t just understand that change was long overdue — he actively pursued it, heedless of doubters who considered reforms in such a bank doomed from the off. The will of a single, albeit influential man met a seemingly insurmountable wall of inertia at this enormous corporation. Gref’s Western ideas held no sway with this intrinsically Eastern mindset.

What became of the dreams of those liberals seeking a European path to Russia’s development? The further it progressed, the more the nation rejected the values of the emancipated West. Soviet nostalgia enjoyed a resurgence — the loyal state employee became the hero of the new era, and it was to them that most politicians began to pander. Young people ever more rarely saw themselves in business, preferring instead a steady income as an official or, even better, a manager at some large state company. Of all hypothetical freedoms, Russia evinced only one to any real degree — freedom of consumption. Private enterprise was on the decline. Willingness to work hard and inclination towards self-improvement and betterment of social status were characteristics comparatively few were disposed to exhibit. It was difficult to imagine a society less inclined to reform. Why should Sberbank be made of more pliant material than the country as a whole?

In regarding as foolish the government’s decision over Kazmin’s dismissal, Alla Aleshkina could consider herself the voice of a general consensus. Before the session of the supervisory board she did not lose her fighting spirit. Kazmin’s wife wasted no time in restoring her husband’s composure. There was no trace of the doubts planted in his conversation with Zlatkis; the president was sure of what position to take.

On 16th October 2007, Gref’s candidature was approved by a majority. Three of eleven members of the supervisory board, Kazmin, Aleshkina and Zlatkis, voted against. “To this day it’s dreadful to think back to how I felt at that point”, admits Zlatkis four years on. The protest vote, however, was just the first act.

In the evening of the same day, it became known that seven of the board of directors, including Kazmin and Aleshkina, had sold up their shares. Kazmin explained this as his reluctance to take part in the extraordinary general meeting: “I’m leaving the bank, so it should be those who are staying that vote.” A short time later, senior managers composed an announcement about the dismissal, recorded in the official account of events as being “at (Kazmin’s) own request” and “due to taking up new employment”.

Kazmin was still expected to appear at the shareholder’s meeting at the end of November. Those present recall being moved by the rather dry valedictory address from the outgoing president. The hall remained on their feet, some close to tears. With Kazmin went an era of fairy-tale prosperity, during which the bank had made a fortune, shares had increased in value and dividends had grown. In the four months leading up to the meeting, the price of stock reached its historic peak, trading at 113.05 rubles per share. What now? Wasn’t it ridiculous to think that this liberal dreamer from the government was capable of running the bank any better?

Gref, addressing the meeting after Kazmin, must have sensed the mood in the auditorium. He made no attempt to whitewash the situation he’d inherited: the bank had turned its back on its customers and hadn’t adapted to their changing needs. This was a big problem, and one that required solving.

...for centuries our bank has lagged behind the world leaders of banking in a host of areas, primarily in technology.

Letter from German Gref to colleagues (29.04.2010).

“We need to demonstrate that elephants can dance”, announced Gref to a murmuring audience. “We need to create a versatile, market-reactive, saver-friendly and secure structure. Give me time, and you’ll see what I’m capable of.” The new president chose not to go into the specifics. He didn’t tell shareholders that these dance lessons would herald the most unprecedented programme of change ever seen in Russian business, or that he and his team were about to install a radical new management system at the antiquated bank. There were too many disgruntled people in the hall, and any account of what awaited would have been tantamount to ridicule.

CHAPTER 2

THE MAIN STRATEGIST

Gref was regarded as a master of public performance, but he was not a born orator. Colleagues claim that he had once been pretty much tongue-tied. Old television footage records an incoherent address by the young minister in the corridors of the Bely Dom, the seat of the Russian government: a couple of statements about Land Code reforms garbled to journalists, encased in an armour of bureaucratese. However, Gref didn’t need too much time to get over his handicap: with experience his speech became clear and authoritative. As a youth, he had learned to cope with adversity, developing an uncanny ability to pursue his aims with startling determination.

Gref was born in February 1964 in a small village in northern Kazakhstan: Panfilovo, founded by exiles from St Petersburg. His family had been forcibly evacuated to this distant backwater, miles from the regional centre, at the outset of the Second World War. At that time, virtually all ethnic Germans were subject to deportation. Viewed with suspicion due to their kinship with the aggressor, Soviet authorities kept them further from the front lines. “I’ve experienced more than a few awful things in my life,” he said later, “starting from the day I was born. I could have grown up in a nice flat with lovely parquet flooring somewhere on Nevsky Prospekt. But fate decided otherwise.”

German, the youngest in the family, grew up without a father. His mother ran the accounts department of the local rural council, while simultaneously taking on the running of the women’s council and working at a local radio station. His grandmother was largely responsible for raising him. Neighbours recall the young Gref as a skinny, fastidious boy who was well turned-out even when sent to tend the cattle.

After finishing school, Gref wasted no time in taking his leave of his native backwater. After two years’ national service in a special ops unit of the Interior Ministry, he continued his education at university, enrolling first at a rabfak, an institution designed to prepare workers for higher education. Of the reasonably respectable ones, the closest was Omsk State University (the Irtysh district of the Pavlodar oblast, where Panfilovo is situated, borders Omsk oblast to the north). Gref chose a subject that suited his meticulous nature — jurisprudence.

The future minister graduated with an honours degree. Later, Gref would confess that he had no time for straight-A students. He evidently did not want to be thought of as a calculating careerist, methodically setting out for himself a route to the top. Gref, by his own admission, wasn’t particularly concerned with formal elements of study such as grades. “Somehow I got to my third year before realising I hadn’t even managed a B”, he recalled.

Gref didn’t normally display much of a weakness for reminiscing about childhood and his younger days in public; accordingly, his biography during his ministerial years became riddled with myths. As with many Russian politicians, Gref had two biographies — the official one, and the off-the record version. According to the first, Gref rose up through the ranks quickly and without setbacks. The second affirms that there had been a few blips along the way. Immediately after finishing school, Gref purportedly went to Moscow and entered the Faculty of International Economic Relations at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, but was in fact kicked out after two years of study.

However, in both versions of the biography, the picture emerges of a man not afraid to swim against the tide. Working as a legal consultant to the agricultural administration for the Irtysh district, as Gref did at the beginning of the 1980s, may have been a perfectly agreeable way for some people to while away the years in the limitless expanses of the Kazakh steppe, but the ambitious young man wanted more. He understood what he was capable of in life, provided he put in the effort — nothing was likely to fall into his lap.

Gref’s strong-willed nature made him a very resilient character. In January 1999, the Volga saloon in which he was travelling to Kemerovo Airport hit a truck at high speed. Newspapers reported that he suffered a serious head injury and broke several vertebrae. He was admitted to intensive care and was not expected to return to full health. However, Gref was stubborn. Physical exercises, which many of us would regard as a form of self-inflicted torture, became a daily ritual for him. Every morning he would set off on a jog, no matter the weather or the location. Gref would not even allow himself a break while on business trips. As colleagues noted, it did not take long for him to make a full recovery.

Who knows how the hard-working young lawyer’s life would have turned out had he not been in the right place at precisely the right time, as the political establishment that would go on to take absolute power in Russia began to emerge in Soviet Leningrad.

In 1990, Gref earned a place on a Masters course at Leningrad State University. His academic supervisor at that time was the head of the economic law department, Anatoly Sobchak (he eventually defended his dissertation, “Development of and perspectives for structural institutional reforms in the Russian economy”, at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in February 2011). Future Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, a fellow student at the time, helped poster for Sobchak in the lead-up to the elections. And while Sobchak was head of Leningrad’s city council, he took on a KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin as an advisor. With Sobchak’s election as the first democratically-chosen mayor of the northern capital, Putin became a key member of the administration, alongside Gref’s future colleagues in the federal government, Alexei Kudrin and Dmitri Kozak.

Gref joined the St Petersburg district property management committee while still a Masters student. He rose rapidly through the service and quickly established himself at ‘head office’ — the City Property Management Committee. The head of the committee was Mikhail Manevich, who would become a major influence on Gref’s reforming views over the three years they worked together. A friend and confederate of economic reformer Anatoly Chubais, Manevich was a strong advocate of wide-scale privatisation, recognising the state as legislator, judge and regulator, but not much of a property owner. Later, Manevich’s colleagues would say that even though the marketplace was in its infancy in Russia at that time, in him St Petersburg already had an expert on market economics.

Gref’s boss endeavoured to breathe life into the city property sector for which he was responsible. Manevich believed in the power of private property at a time when so much around was government-owned. He implemented a register of city buildings, establishing a basis for their market valuation, and, generally, strove to determine a civilised path of development for the market, control over which officials were forced to share with the criminal elements of the city. In the end, Malevich paid for this with his life. In 1997 he was shot by a Kalashnikov-wielding contract killer on his way to work (to date, neither those who ordered the killing nor those who carried it out have been brought to justice). Ten days after the tragedy, German Gref was presented as the new head of the committee.

Gref set about reforming the housing and utilities infrastructure of the city. In essence, he wanted to turn the remaining elements of the Soviet economy over to the market. St Petersburg was no easy ride — the city’s splendid façades hid courtyards more in keeping with Hades than the Venice of the North. Almost every fifth resident of the northern capital lived in a communal flat. The dilapidation of the utility systems beggared belief, but no one was willing to do anything about it.

Gref didn’t expect many plaudits for changes implemented in the housing office — popular reform is virtually an oxymoron, whether the heating works or not, but trying to instil a culture of competition among plumbers and electricians would prove to be an especially thankless task. The single-minded head of the property management committee became a scapegoat for everything. Communal flat dwellers took him for a meddler, while pensioners blamed him for the rise in utility costs.

Those who have worked as civil servants for real and didn’t just fill their boots know: it’s ungodly work when you consider the effort, responsibility and thanklessness of it. You do menial work for peanuts, with no holidays, for months on end without ever hearing a thank-you, and all you get in return is more rubbish about you in the press.

Interview with German Gref, Forbes Kazakhstan (11.2011).

Scandal even overshadowed the opening of a settlement for the descendants of Germans deported to Kazakhstan. Gref had decided, in an attempt to right a historical wrong, to offer them resettlement in Strelna, near St Petersburg. The construction of a few dozen cottages required no budgetary outlay, as the project had been funded by the German government. However, families of servicemen also had designs on the land, and the furore that erupted around an old public building that had been placed at the partial disposal of the re-settlers even attracted the attention of the public prosecutor’s office.

Just before the August 1998 financial crisis, Gref moved to the capital. He was now working as a federal official in his capacity as Deputy Minister of State Property. A year later the 35-year-old Gref would get the chance to become no less than the country’s top strategist.