I Was the CEO of an American Ice Cream Company in Russia in the 1990s
The way our partner then deceived us reminds me of Russia's lies about wanting peace
This article is not for the politically correct or the faint of heart. Stereotypes and sweeping generalizations will be tossed out like rainbow sprinkles on a delightful dish of freshly made French vanilla ice cream (this is the ice cream we made in 1994).
(Originally published on March 31, 2022)
Russia has been trying to shift attention away from the lull its battlefield failures have forced it to take. The bogus claims about things like “we want peace” and “we won’t attack northern areas as much anymore” are the kind of bullshit lies that Russians tell themselves daily.
As the military gasps for air, the ball-less men sent to negotiate with the strong ones across the table expect the world to believe that their word suddenly means something. The problem is, as I have learned from working in Russia for twenty-seven years, they really don’t expect anyone to believe what they are saying. They are merely putting out the obvious lies to play a role they think we need.
They want us to say those nice things about peace, so we will. Like children playing office in the basement or doctor in the backyard, they go through the motions and pretend to be grown-ups. However, they are still children and incapable of understanding the difference between the words they are saying and the actions that ultimately don’t align with those words.
They act this way because they don’t respect anyone. After all, no one has ever shown them respect. Their sole goal is, and always will be, what is absolutely best for me? Lying means nothing if the lie can improve their plight, and enhance their gain, at the expense of others.
Onward to my ice cream story
Fresh out of graduate school at Columbia, I suddenly found myself in my beloved St. Petersburg, Russia, employed as the CEO of a Soviet-American Joint-Venture making premium ice cream. Knowing very little about such a role, I was struck by the obvious cultural mistakes made by the American partner that convinced me that the business would severely struggle.
To begin with, the ice cream was packaged in colorful hand-held plastic cups and three very popular flavors: strawberry, Belgian chocolate, and French vanilla. The cultural hubris that led to these four foolish marketing decisions is a lesson to anyone trying to negotiate with representatives from a foreign culture.
However, you ask what cultural hubris is about that innocent-sounding ice cream.
Problems abound
First of all, Russians in 1994 didn’t have much money, and buying premium, single-serve ice cream was not something many could do.
Secondly, Russians back then usually only ate ice cream that could be held with one hand because the second one usually carried a bag filled with groceries. Setting the bag on the dirty ground to eat ice cream with a wooden spoon was not a cultural possibility — Russians are deathly afraid of putting anything on the ground, even if it is in a bag.
Finally, and this will surely come as a surprise to most Western ice cream eaters and to all Americans, the three flavors “forced” upon the joint venture by the American partner, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, ones that formerly dominated America’s ice cream landscape, were not so much as unpopular in Russia as they were simply unknown!
Russians didn’t have vanilla ice cream in the Soviet Union but rather “white” ice cream, which tasted like of frozen cream. Chocolate ice cream was so rare due to the lack of cocoa that no one really knew it, and Russians then had never eaten “strawberry” ice cream — ever. To begin with, Russia’s forests are filled with tons of berries but not strawberries. The little wild strawberries gathered each summer are called “zemlyaniki” and they don’t taste or look a lot like the plumb, juicy — and often cottony — variety we know so well.
So, right out of the gate, the American partner cast his ice cream value system onto the Russian, who was against those flavors. The American partner, however, a very successful yogurt maker in the US, would certainly not have listened to his Russian colleague because “this is my area of expertise, trust me.” Hubris and mistake number one which
Smile and wave
Because the American partner was giving all of the money, he felt he and his team had a dollar-given right to “school” the “backward Russians” in how to do business. However, Russians, quite oddly, are not a people of conflict. They love to bitch and moan, but when it comes right down to it, they will run from a fight nine times out of ten. They will shut their mouths and smile and wave rather than confront.
But inside, each one of them is stewing. The anger, the sense of hurt, the feeling of being disrespected festers, and they will get their revenge when given the chance. They will steal, lie, cheat, and do anything they can to screw you while offering up big smiles and waves, and not for a second will the pangs of a guilty conscience slow them down or change their chosen course of action. If you are on the receiving end of that genuinely Russian trait, then nothing about you means anything to them (Ukraine).
The Soviet-era dairy was barely functioning in 1994, and the only bright spot was the production room loaded with beautiful new ice cream manufacturing equipment from the US. The workforce on the floor was from Russia, and the management side, sales & marketing, and general administration were American. I was the CEO and pretty much the head of marketing.
The production director, the eyes and ears of the owner, was a Russian and a good friend of the Russian partner. He sat in the same office as me and wrote down every conversation I had about sales and marketing with my colleagues. All of it was then reported to the Russian partner and, where possible, sabotaged.
This story can go on for many pages — it is in this book I wrote about my life in Russia, which I am shamelessly peddling here. Let me sum up how many Russians regard Western influence in their lives and businesses, and now in peace negotiations with this small vignette about my freezer.
Melting ice cream
The production director, the spy, would inform the Russian partner that we had just loaded our freezer with six tons of freshly made ice cream. Ice cream is soft when produced and needs to be deep-frozen for at least eight hours. If not, it melts very quickly in transit, especially since
many Russian trucks had no refrigeration back then.
Aleksey, the Russian part-owner of the joint venture, would sabotage his own joint venture by shutting off my freezers and putting a whole six-ton load of ice cream at risk. It did not matter to him that the loss of six tons could bankrupt the company. He was determined to ruin American management, and if he failed in his plan, then let the company die on the vine.
Panicking as we sought out clients who would buy the ice cream as quickly as possible and at a significant discount, Aleksey would call me to his office and begin screaming at me for trying to destroy his business because I didn’t plan my production to coincide with his “freezer cleaning.”
Aleksey would then call my boss in Connecticut and tell him that I had almost ruined six tons of ice cream. On the call, Aleksey would inform my American boss located in Connecticut that because I hadn’t adequately planned the day’s production, the company was in grave danger and that it seemed I might be trying to destroy the company — a sinking ship I fought to right for two years nearly 24/7.
He would then suddenly put his arm around me, praise me to my boss and say that since he liked me so much, then he would bail me out. He would take all of the ice cream for X-price. That ice cream would then be sold to my distributors at 30% below what I could legally sell it for. The cash he made would go straight into his pocket. The joint venture would never see that money.
This scenario played out once a month like clockwork, and each time it was blamed on me despite the dozens of warnings about when we planned to produce. My distributors would never pay a premium to me because they knew that this saga would play out once a month, resulting in ice cream being dumped onto the market.
Always struggling and spending at least half of my work time dealing with the sabotage of the Russian partner and his spies in my production team, who were being rewarded for messing things up like adding too much sugar or too little milk, the company was never able to live up to the promise of that fantastic equipment.
It was eventually closed and because there were no spare parts, that beautiful equipment was eventually picked apart by employees who sold the pieces for scrap. Some employees cried and apologized for sabotaging the ice cream but said they had to listen to the boss. They admitted that it was wrong for him to do that — even though they were doing it — but “that is Russia,” they would all say with a shrug of their shoulders.
With that experience and thousands more such tales about the self-destruction that Russians always seem to bring upon themselves, I can say that nothing they are saying today is true about wanting peace. They want nothing but to destroy Ukraine and make sure no one ever lives a life of more promise than the misery they bring upon themselves generation after generation.
As much as I do somehow bizarrely have a love for Russia, it is a cursed place and really, there are no enemies of Russia — except now Ukraine — because no enemy would ever have the long-term commitment to destroying Russia that Russians themselves do.
Shrugging their shoulders as they lie again about moving troops away from Kyiv, they will say, “This is Russia; this is who we are.”