Boris Fyodorov

摘要

Most of Russia's super-rich spend their summer holidays on yachts in the sunny Mediterranean. Boris Fyodorov preferred visiting English country churches, the older, the better. The buildings, and especially the gravestones, fascinated him. He saw in them symbols of an historical continuity that Russia had lost under communism. Born in poverty as a factory caretaker's son, he delighted in making discoveries among his aristocratic roots: trinkets unearthed at his family's ruined estate, a (Polish) coat of arms. His dacha outside Moscow was notable not for pet wolves or other fashionable extravagances, but for his valiant attempts to create a weedless, stripy English lawn in a hostile climate. He flew a Russian flag there too, scandalising the neighbours, who insisted he needed a permit.rnVisitors to his office sometimes wished the chairs had seat belts. Conversation would ricochet from Russia's recent economic history to the tragedy of the aborted reforms brought in by his hero, Pyotr Stoly-pin, one of Tsar Nicholas II's prime ministers. It would touch on the lamentable failure of the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin to promote proper corporate behaviour in the boardrooms of Russia's big companies, bounce to the hypocrisy of Western bankers who failed to pay their taxes, and comernto rest with a robust inquiry into the virtues of cylinder mowers compared with the rotary kind.rnThe chat would be in muscular, fluent English. Mr Fyodorov's job in the declining years of the Soviet Union had included monitoring the world economy by reading the Financial Times. This had left him at ease with the jargon of the new age, and also well placed to be finance minister of Russia (still just a part of the Soviet Union) as the planned economy entered its death throes. He briefly represented Russia (after it had become an independent country) at the World Bank in Washington, and then spent a year as deputy prime minister and, for a short while, as finance minister too.