Working for the Soviets.(First Person)(business relations)

IN LONDON MY FIRST JOB after arriving broke in July 1963 was as a plongeur, washing up in a Bayswater pub. At this point in life it seemed to me that I would have far better trained as a plumber or electrician, useful and portable skills, than spent four years and more studying economics at a provincial university. But this was mistaken--it soon emerged that even that was a marketable asset, and could lead to far better things than life as a plumber or sparky. For example, it got me a part-time job as a librarian at the City Literary Institute, which was a WEA-like body where adult students could attend lectures on literary and cultural subjects and also language courses.

Issuing books and checking returns is pretty boring, but there was plenty of time to browse, and the most memorable of discoveries was Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which had a quote on the cover from Brendan Behan, "Just the book to give your sister if she's a large, boozy girl". That's for me, I thought, and plunged in, acquiring a long-lasting enthusiasm for O'Brien's writing.

Then I moved to a higher-paid job with the Institution of Heating and Ventilating Engineers, off Sloane Square, near Chelsea. I also supplemented my income by reviewing books on related subjects for their journal and flogging off the review copies to a specialist bookshop, thus acquiring a theoretical knowledge of things like ducted air-conditioning and small bore water heating systems which stood me in good stead many years later by mystifying my future wife, an East German-qualified draftsman who worked on such recondite matters.

After a few months of this I saw an advertisement in the Economist for an economist to work in the Moscow Narodny Bank, which I soon discovered to be a Soviet-owned bank operating in the City. Why not have a go, said my curiosity. While I detested the Communist Party, I was still very curious about the USSR (though well aware of its bloody history), and sympathetic to Marxism in a general sense, though of course rejecting Marxist economics in favour of Wicksellian economics and social-democracy and a sympathy for permanent-protest-style Sydney libertarian anarchism. I wrote in and was interviewed by an ambitious young man who was in charge of the bank's economic department, and after a while was offered the job. I was never asked about my politics and I have no idea what checks if any they carried out on me.

(In my ASIO file there is a fantastic account dated May 1973 of my having been recruited by a Soviet agent outside the British Museum reading room at a then huge salary. According to this agent I lasted only nine months and was sacked. This is pure nonsense, and I am afraid only demonstrates how sloppy ASIO was about its informants. The salient feature of my ASIO file is the incompetence and stupidity of its agents, who had little respect for accuracy. Indeed not long after my return to Australia they spent a lot of time trying to find out where I was living, and then put me under photographic surveillance--all the time my name was appearing almost daily in the Financial Review. They never thought to ring up someone to ask.)

Thus began four years of secure employment and advancement to, eventually, Manager of the Economic Department. The MNB grew out of a co-operative bank founded in 1911, that is, well before the Revolution, to finance international trade mainly in dairy products on the Pacific side of the old Russia. After the Revolution it was taken over by ARCOS, the federation of co-operatives, and then became jointly owned by the State Bank of the USSR (Gosbank) and the Bank for Foreign Trade (Vneshtorgbank). Thus the MNB was totally Soviet-owned, but established in London under English law as a bank. Its board was totally comprised of Soviet banking apparatchiks on their way up, with a chairman, at that time an ageing party hack (nicknamed Baran, or the Sheep, by his contemptuous Russian juniors), a deputy and directors who also had supervision of the various departments of the bank.

Most of the departmental heads were English, but mine in the Economic Department for a year or so was clearly a good operator (he later became head of the Vozkhod Bank in Switzerland) but totally naive and ignorant of Western banking. Once he came back after celebrating a new loan the MNB had negotiated with a City bank, and when I asked about the terms it became clear that he did not know about compound interest. With an apparently low nominal interest rate, it was clear that the Russians had been taken to the cleaners by the English.