"You just specify where you want delivery." Eight million dollars, I replied, was rather more than I had budgeted for this trip. "OK, I cannot change the price, but I give you whichever kind of rocket attachments you like, for free, a special gift Air-to-air, or air-to-ground You decide."Welcome to the new Eastern Europe. I considered this and asked how I could get the plane out of the country. "Don't worry my friend, all the paperwork and forms, customs, everything will be taken care of," he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.
Apparently that would be quite straightforward, now that I had met Sergei. Everything was for sale, especially weapons."How much for this MiG then?" I asked, in an insouciant drawl, as though this was the sort of purchase I considered daily."Eight million dollars," replied Sergei, taking a long swig from his beer. But before hostilities could commence, like every new potentate, I would have to equip my generals with the necessary top-of- the-range military gear. Why not? This was a time when independent states were sprouting across the former Soviet bloc like mushrooms after the rain, each with its own armed forces Maybe I could have my own country as well LeBoristan.
It had a certain ring to it.My first task as head of state would be to start a border dispute with the neighbours. But how about a fighter plane? A fully operational MiG 29?Now he was talking My own air force. Bank managers, difficult editors would quiver with terror as I buzzed their offices. Just $30,000, he said, who could quibble at such a cheap price? I hummed and hawed a bit No boat, he said, OK. A boat, he ventured, perhaps I would like to buy a nice yacht, with plush furnishings and a fancy motor? It was out in the harbour, bobbing gently in the waves Perhaps, I replied, a boat might be fun to own. Communist officials had become capitalists overnight, still helping themselves to the country's resources.
Only now they operated in the name of the free market instead of a centrally planned one.So I tried the hotel bar where I was presented with a sandwich by the waitress, and several other offerings from my new friend Sergei. Into this power vacuum stepped rapacious businessmen like Sergei, to pick over the remains of the state. No waiter appeared when I tried to dine there, but it did not seem a place to complain about the lack of service. That was back in the early Nineties, when Ukraine was newly independent, but anarchy and the tinkle of broken glass were in the air as the old one-party system collapsed, yet to be replaced by democracy or indeed any kind of government Nobody knew who was really in charge, because nobody was. Its main restaurant was packed with sailors blitzed out of their minds on vodka, slumped face down on grimy tablecloths. Vigilant private security guards patrolled back and forth, walkie-talkies crackling, their long truncheons at the ready, ready to club any miscreant insensible And that was just inside the restaurant. Perched on the edge of the Black Sea, with a famous long staircase down which a pram tumbles in the Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin, former manor of Leon Trotsky, Odessa then was an untamed place.