Unusual Imports

Slotted between Belgium and Switzerland, Russia currently ranks as America’s 24th largest trading partner. It is hardly a significant ranking. In 2004, the U.S. imported just under $12 billion in goods and services from Russia, or, put another way, less than 3% of what the U.S. imported from its largest trading partner, Canada. Thus, on the surface, Russia and the U.S. would seem to have a rather puny trading relationship.

But things are always more complex below the surface. Consider that, in 2003, according to the World Trade Organization, 7% of all Russian exports went to the U.S. (in return, Russia gets about 5% of its imports from the U.S.). Consider also that, from 2003 to 2004, American import of Russian goods and services increased by 26%, and that they have essentially doubled over the last five years. Granted, most of this change is due to oil imports, which have in recent years been on a very steep trajectory. According to Department of Energy Data, in February 2004, the U.S. was daily importing 11,000 barrels of crude oil and 184,000 barrels of petroleum from Russia. By February 2005, those daily figures had increased by 2500% and 149%, respectively (to 288,000 and 458,000 barrels per day). As a result, today Russia is America’s eighth largest supplier of foreign oil, falling into the second tier of oil suppliers (along with Iraq, Algeria, Angola, Ecuador and the UK), behind the giants (Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria).

In fact, the overwhelming volume of trade between the U.S. and Russia takes place in the classic Adam Smith realm of comparative advantage: Russia sends the U.S. oil, aluminum, inorganic chemicals and precious stones; the U.S. sends Russia machinery, poultry and electrical equipment. Of course, the U.S. also imports from Russia plenty of vodka, fine arts and crafts – the Stolichnaya and matryoshki trade, along with a range of oddities like fish liver oil, hair for wigs and fermented black tea. These are some of the better-known stories (well, excepting probably the wig hair and fish liver oil) when it comes to U.S. import of Russian goods. Everyone knows about vodka, oil, lacquer boxes and samovars. But there are also some lesser-known imports into the U.S. from Russia. And each has its own story.

Sidecar Renaissance

Bizarre things began unfolding in Russia in the early 1990s, as the economy dried out from a decades-long binge of Soviet excess. Foreigners and Russians alike raided the country’s wealth. A mafia came to light, having crouched for years in the dusty corners of the black market economy. A used car salesman became a billionaire and tsar-maker. Speculators ravaged the sprawling carcasses of huge, city-sized industries, acquiring assets through junk-stock privatization schemes. Thousands of petty entrepreneurs hatched overnight, as if triggered by a long-forgotten capitalist gene, infesting basements, apartments and ramshackle aluminum kiosks with their cheap goods from China and Turkey. Restaurants and bars proliferated.

It was a brave new world. Anything seemed possible. Even the export of Russian motorcycles to America.

But hold on: we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Dial back to 1939.

According to legend, as war loomed in Europe, a secret meeting was held at the Soviet Defense Ministry to decide what sort of motorcycle the armed forces should build. After much deliberation, Germany’s BMW R71 was found to have all the characteristics that were needed to make a durable, flexible and mobile motorcycle corps. A handful of the R71s were acquired in Sweden and the bike was reverse-engineered at a Moscow factory. The new bike was dubbed the M-72. Stalin saw prototypes in 1941, approved them, and production was begun.

Another version of the story is that no reverse-engineering actually took place. Instead, Germany gave Russia casting molds and engineering drawings for the R71 as part of the technology transfer which occurred secretly under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Other weaponry and technology, from cannons to cars, had been exported to Russia in this fashion, so it could well be that this less politically-correct version of history is closer to the truth.

No matter how it begins, the story has a familiar trajectory. In the early days of the war, with the German advance toward the capital, the Moscow factory was moved 900 miles east, to the Urals town of Irbit, where the Irbit Motorcycle Zavod (IMZ) was founded.

According to IMZ, on October 25, 1942, the first M-72s were sent into battle. During WWII, a total of 9,799 M-72s were delivered to the front for reconnaissance detachments and mobile troops. Production ramped up after the war ended. By 1950, the 30,000th motorcycle rolled off the lines of IMZ. At the end of the 1950s, most military production of the M-72 was moved to Ukraine, to the Kiev Motorcycle Zavod, which called their motorcycles the Dnepr. IMZ, meanwhile, built mainly for civilians, dubbing their “variation” the Ural.

Things continued in this way for many years. The inexpensive Ural became a fixture of the rural Soviet landscape, its large tires and sturdy sidecar making year-round navigation possible across muddy or icy tracts. By the early 1990s, over three million Urals had been built at IMZ, whose 10,000 workers churned out 1,800 bikes a day. The Ural had changed little since 1941. And why should it? It had no competitors and was well-designed for Russia’s rough roads.

Then the tidal wave of economic turmoil that roared over Russia in the 1990s sent IMZ into a tailspin. The company was privatized and downsized. Like all enterprises at that time, IMZ desperately needed hard currency to survive. The Ural had been exported since at least 1953 (often as a form of Third World aid to Africa and Asia), so the factory’s management naturally saw foreign sales as a saving grace. The only problem was that they had no clue how to break into the U.S. or European markets.

Enter American Tom Lynott. Working with a venture capital firm to bring a potato dehydration plant to Russia, Lynott watched that deal sour after a year and a half of investments. “I decided,” Lynott recalled, “that rather than just turn tail and run, I would look around and see if there was something that the Russian economy already produced that could be sold in the West.” The Ural attracted him because he had seen the sidecar bike everywhere in rural Russia during his potato project, but also because he had been involved with motorcycles all his life. “It was also good timing,” Lynott said, “because the factory in Irbit was very excited about the export business.”

In 1993, Lynott’s Preston, Washington-based Classic Motorcycles & Sidecars (CMSI) began importing the Ural. Within a year and a half, CMSI had made the bikes fully EPA and DOT compliant (it took a bit longer in California; that state’s stricter exhaust pollution standards were met in 1998), which required a lot of significant changes to the combustion and carburetion systems.

“We soon had sales up to about 300 units a year,” Lynott said. “There was an avid following because we were very good at supporting the product.” People knew they were buying a tinkering bike, and that was fine with them, Lynott said. “But you have to give them good service. We flew technicians all over the country supporting the Ural.”

One of CMSI’s first dealers was Wagner’s Cycle Shop, in La Porte, IN. And they have since become the largest retailer of Urals in the country. “We sell 97% of our bikes over the Internet [wagnerscycle.us],” said co-owner Felicia D. Landes. “We have delivered bikes to 42 states, selling about 80 bikes a year the last four years.” Key to their sales and service strategy, Landes said, is a rigorous 12-hour tuning and testing and dealer prep process they put each bike through. “The folks in Irbit don’t understand, and they ask what my husband [who is co-owner of Wagner] does for 12 hours. But you can’t just take the bikes out of the crate, slap the front wheel on and sell them to the customer. You are going to have problems.” After Wagner’s spends the 12 hours dealer-prepping the bikes, Landes said, the investment pays off. “We have a very low warranty turn in.” With this kind of prep, Landes said, the bikes easily get “a 9-plus” out of 10 when it comes to reliability.

In 1998, three Russian entrepreneurs purchased the IMZ factory in Irbit and set about improving the motorcycle’s export-worthiness. Difficult economic conditions after the 1998 crash, combined with foreign competition, necessitated radical changes. The factory’s workforce was slashed to just over 1,200 (Lynott estimates that just a few hundred of these are actually involved in the manufacture of motorcycles; other sources say the factory is now down to about half that many employees), and production was reduced to around 200 motorcycles per month.

Then, in May 2003, IMZ and CMSI abruptly ended their relationship. “We decided that we had to be in the market ourselves,” said Ilya Khait, President and CEO of Irbit MotorWorks of America (IMWA; ural.com), IMZ’s new subsidiary in the U.S. “We realized we could not understand the buyers without this. We needed to open the distributorship ourselves. And the decision has proven correct. We now have good, two-way communications between supply and demand.”

But it was not so simple as that. CMSI had made significant investments in the Ural. It had made the bike saleable in the U.S. It had created an avid and loyal customer base. A lawsuit resulted, which Lynott said finally ended in a settlement: IMZ took over all warranty coverage and CMSI would be paid royalties on future sales, in consideration of their investments to introduce the motorcycle to the American market.

The sales figures, Khait said, speak for themselves. In 2004, IMW America sold 318 bikes – “our best sales in the U.S. in 10 years,” Khait claims. “And we expect to see sales of 500 bikes this year.” It is a number which Lynott said he would love to see, but which is probably not realistic, given the competition. Harley-Davidson, Lynott said, sells about 2,000 motorcycle-sidecar combinations per year and sidecar-only manufacturers put another 3,000 units into the market. Sure, the Ural is cheaper than the Harley by half, but reliability is still a problem.

An improved 750cc engine (up from 650cc) with considerable engineering improvements to the bike in 2005 should help. The factory has sought to address notorious mechanical problems. “Working on reliability is our number one mission,” Khait said. “We need to improve the image of the motorcycle in the eyes of both buyers and dealers.” And that work is beginning. In a recent review, Motorcycle Consumer News gave the Ural 2.5 out of 5.

In the 1990s, according to Carla King, “the Russian factory workers would, for example, finish machining a head and then literally throw it into a pile, breaking off the fins. Ural America went there and asked them to set them down carefully instead...”

King knows whereof she speaks. In 1995, she hatched a wild plan. She would circumnavigate the United States’ borders and send back dispatches electronically, to be posted on an AOL travel forum. The Internet was new and the Ural in America was newer still. Of course, she could take the trip on a smoother, more reliable German or Japanese bike, but where was the fun in that?

“I didn’t care that the Ural was heavy, slow, and would require a thorough, daily once-over with a wrench set and a red tube of Loctite adhesive,” King wrote (her lyrical, keenly observant columns are to be published in a book this fall, with distribution information available on the website, motorcyclemisadventures.com). “I didn’t care that its top speed was 65 mph downhill with the wind at my back. I planned a back roads trip without speed or mileage goals and with a relatively open-ended timeframe.”

The trip covered 10,000 miles and took four months. “The Ural broke down a lot,” King said, “four gas tank weld cracks, four alternators, some electrical problems – mostly due to warm weather and high speeds, and I must say that the factory in Irbit took this information in and made the proper modifications and Urals are pretty (sort of) reliable now, though not for people who don’t like to tinker. But mostly the bike made me a lot of friends because it just looked like (and was) a lot of fun!”

That the Ural makes friends easily is a gargantuan understatement. As Khait pointed out, Ural owners often talk about the bike’s “UDF” – Ural Delay Factor. It is what happens when you stop for gas and people come over to gawk at the bike and ask you questions about it. And who wouldn’t? It is not as if everyday you see  a motorcycle with sidecar rolling into town that, while new, still looks a lot like a WWII-era vehicle, with its retro “tractor-style” seat and unabashedly heavy styling.

Felicia Landes, of Wagner’s Cycle Shop (which is the process of moving its operations to Bonnerdale, Arkansas), related a story about the Ural’s notorious UDF. A few years ago, she said, “the city of Dallas considered purchasing the bikes for use by their meter maids. They thought about it for awhile and finally came back and said, ‘We decided we wanted to use them, but couldn’t, because the meter maids would not get any work done, because they would be getting stopped too much by people on the street to talk about the bikes.’”

There are essentially five Ural models (selling for between $8,000 and $10,000 each), but really just two main mechanical variations: with or without two-wheel drive (where a flip of the switch makes the sidecar wheel a drive wheel as well). “No one else, absolutely no one, has this [two-wheel drive],” Khait said. “As a result, half of our sales are of the Patrol and Gear-Up models [which have this drive].”

This is, in fact, the Ural’s unique selling proposition, and it could help the Ural make further, ahem, inroads in the U.S. market. (Lynott said that, actually, when they were selling the bikes, the models with a differential on the sidecar wheel were the most prized, because they were easier to steer – a motorcycle with sidecar is much more difficult to turn than a straight bike alone.) Ural currently has 56 dealers in the U.S. and, in line with the company’s strategy to make reliability their number one priority, they offer an unusual unlimited mileage, two-year warranty. It is the sort of thing that makes owners of Urals absolutely passionate about their vehicles and turns them into one-on-one marketers for the company.

“I like the ease of working on these bikes,” said Landes. “On most motorcycles these days, there is so much plastic, you can’t see anything. The only plastic on this bike is in the turn signal lights.” Asked about other top selling points, Landes let loose a chain of bullet points guaranteed to sway any fence-sitter: “There is independent suspension on the sidecar – it has a very cushy ride. I have a lot of women out there who do needlework while riding in the sidecar... It still has a kick start. What other bike today has that? It is also safer than any other bike on the road. You can’t tip over, and it has a six-by-eight-by-four foot profile – people are going to see you. In fact, because it is such a unique vehicle, people will wave you through intersections, just to watch you pass. It is a rugged bike, big enough for a family. For some people, it’s like a family station wagon. I take it to the grocery store and people are amazed to see me put a cart and a half of groceries in the sidecar. And then they are just floored when they watch me back out of the parking slot. And I am telling you, these bikes are chicker-picker-uppers. Guys try to get a girl to ride on the back of their bike, and it’s like ‘no way.’ But they’ll hop right in the sidecar. It is just a fantastic bike,” Landes gushed. “It just needs good marketing and knowledgeable dealers.”

And, in the end, this is the biggest hurdle which IMWA and the Ural face in the future. Dealers are everything in the motorcycle business, because it is on them that service and support depend. But most dealers selling the Ural do it as a sideline, part-time. Landes is unique in selling only Urals. “They need more full-time dealers,” Landes said. “It’s not the bike’s fault that more aren’t being sold every year.” The bike has gotten some bad press, she said, and if IMWA can clean that up and establish a reliable supply of bikes and spare parts, they could sell plenty more. “I am selling bikes even before they are put on the boat in Russia,” she said.

Future success also depends on the Ural moving beyond its status as a bike for tinkerers or enthusiasts of vintage motorcycles. Khait said he feels things are already moving in that direction: “The Russianness of the product is important as part of the history of this product. But it is not the reason people buy it now,” Khait said. “They buy it because it is a functional motorcycle, because it has endurance. We are not interested in selling this as a vintage vehicle.” Indeed, Khait said they are already seeing that, whereas the buyers of Urals used to be enthusiasts, now over 70% are middle-aged “family buyers.”

Join the story. Ride Ural is the tag line for the company’s new advertising campaign, rolling out this summer. It emphasizes “the ride” over “the bike” and smartly sells the experience of sidecar biking (no mention made, of course, that this is not a bike for persons “afraid to tinker”). It is a signal that perhaps a new chapter in the Ural story is beginning. “We are currently anticipating a renaissance of interest in sidecar motorcycles,” Khait said. “And we are well placed to take advantage of that.”

Russian Culture

Success in business often builds on serendipitous connections, on unexpected changes in fortune.

It’s a bit like life that way.

In 1976, Michael Smolyansky emigrated from Russia with his wife, one-year-old daughter Julie, and less than $100 in his pocket. Twelve years later, he started a company. Two years after that, the company went public. Ten years after going public, in 1998, the company had annual sales of $6.8 million. Over the ensuing six years, the company became one of the most rapidly expanding companies in America, with net income surging by double digits each year. In 2004, the company had sales of $16.3 million and was listed 38th on Fortune Small Business’ list of the 100 fastest small growing companies in America.

Such “rags to riches” stories like this are central to the American mantra that says hard work and risk-taking pay off. And it might be a rather predictable story line, except for the fact that the product around which Smolyansky built his company, Lifeway, was not some high-tech, flash-in-the-pan gadget, but kefir, an ancient and humble fermented beverage.

Kefir (pronounced “kee-fur”), is, “a creamy probiotic dairy beverage similar to but distinct from yogurt,” Lifeway literature expounds. “Lifeway believes it offers the largest selection of kefir in the world. Low-fat or non-fat pasteurized milk is the basic ingredient in kefir. Its effervescent quality stems from the kefir culture, which contains seven active, ‘friendly’ microorganisms, compared to two or three in yogurt.” The beverage has reputed benefits, Lifeway claims, “for digestive problems, and is particularly good in reestablishing necessary intestinal microflora, which may have been destroyed by antibiotic or other medical treatment.” The company also suggests that kefir is “an ideal milk substitute for infants, pregnant women, nursing mothers, convalescents and elderly.”

In short, kefir is Russian health food. And, according to Julie Smolyansky, the company’s President and CEO, Lifeway is “the only authentic manufacturer of kefir in the U.S.” Other manufacturers make kefir products based on yogurt cultures. But real kefir contains probiotic cultures like saccharomyces kefir and torula kefir bacteria. The mix of cultures – Lifeway’s “secret recipe,” and the original cultures Smolyansky retrieved from Russia, reputedly set the company’s product apart.

Kefir dates back thousands of years. Nomadic shepherds discovered that fresh milk occasionally fermented into a delicious and healthful, effervescent beverage when stored in leather pouches. The beverage’s name is thought to come from the Turkish word “keif,” meaning “good feeling.” Widely touted in Russia for its ability to cure everything from lactose intolerance to hangovers, the product was little known in the West until early in the 19th century. Among others, Russian Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov (see Russian Life, May/June 2005) was a great advocate of kefir and the microbial flora it introduced into the digestive system. The drink also has friends in high places. In early June, Russia’s first lady, Lyudmila Putin, revealed in a rare interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta that President Putin drinks a glass of kefir after returning from work each night.

After emigrating to the U.S., Michael Smolyansky got a job as a mechanical engineer. His wife, Ludmila, opened up a Russian deli, which eventually developed into a chain. In 1986, on a business trip for the delis, the couple traveled to a food show in Germany. There, Smolyansky rediscovered kefir, which at that time was not commercially available in the U.S. When he returned home, he started brewing batches of kefir in the basement and selling it through his wife’s and other stores.

It was an opportune time to be starting up a health food business, and Smolyansky rode the rising tide, introducing sweeter flavors, adapting his kefir to the American palate. He also created European-style cheeses.

Expansion required capital. Smolyansky’s friends told him about public companies, so he went to the library, read up on the process and took the company public, raising $800,000. Growth was swift and relatively debt-free. Sales went national. In 1999, French dairy and yogurt giant Danone bought a 20% share in the company. By 2002, the company was riding high and experiencing huge sales growth. Then, disaster struck. Michael Smolyansky was felled by a fatal heart attack. His daughter Julie, then just 27 and only a few years out of college, stepped in as CEO. She had been working in the company for five years, shepherding its sales growth as director of sales and marketing. As she later wrote of this difficult time, “it was a classic trial by fire.... I just did what I had to do.”

What Julie Smolyansky did was continue the steep sales trajectory she and her father had began plotting in recent years, expanding sales and the product line (Lifeway recently acquired a gourmet cream cheese maker). In 2004, the company’s stock split.

Through it all, Lifeway has remained a distinctly family company. The Smolyanskys (Julie, her younger brother Edward and mother Ludmila) still own more than 50% of the stock. And it is a very Russian company. “Most of our staff is Russian,” Julie Smolyansky said. “We hire within our community. I feel we do a service for the community by offering jobs to people who might otherwise have a problem getting into other corporations because of language problems... It’s like a family. I don’t think it is any different from a non-Russian company, except maybe that company parties usually involve some vodka.”

One of the company’s most successful product lines (bringing in 20% of revenues) is its La Flora drinkable yogurt, aimed at the Hispanic market. “It is a huge part of our business,” Smolyansky said, “and it is only going to go up... drinkable yogurt is a staple of the Hispanic diet.”

It is taking advantage of opportunities like that which has enabled the company to grow and, Smolyansky asserts, will help move kefir from a niche product into the mainstream. “Kefir has gone past being a niche item,” she said. “I definitely have the feeling it is going into the mainstream now... we are positioning it as a health food, a natural food. And we see the market as only growing, in line with the general buying habits of upscale, middle-American consumers... Natural and organic is not a fad; it’s just good living. People want things that are good for them and healthy, not processed.”

Smolyansky said she did not necessarily have a “grand vision” for the company when its leadership was unexpectedly thrust on her three years ago. She just sought to do better what the company was already doing. But she said today her vision is “to increase market share and sales any way I can. I’m not focused just on kefir, although that is our bread and butter product. I want to expand our offerings and our customer base.” In a recent interview with Hoovers, Smolyansky was more eloquent: “My dad’s dream was for kefir to be a well-known product. He wanted a bottle of kefir in every refrigerator. I’d like for it to be as well-known as bagels and for there to be two bottles in every refrigerator. I think I’d like it if Lifeway could stand for achieving the impossible and building something good.”

Primary Colors

Ever since she was a young girl in Russia, and her parents bought her a first box of paints, Marina Kontorina has been using Yarka watercolors. “I used them throughout architectural college and in the University in Kazan,” she said. “One of the important things I packed when I moved to the United States was a set of Yarka watercolors.” Today, Kontorina, who lives and works in Michigan as an artist and architect (her painting, “Country Garden” is this issue’s cover), is happy to be able to buy Yarka watercolors here. Despite the huge variety available in the U.S. (she also reports using Winsor & Newton watercolors), Kontorina still finds Yarka to be “an irreplaceable item in my studio, because it has beautiful colors and textures and excellent quality.”

“Yarka watercolors have very strong pigmentation. They are very finely ground,” said Colleen Richeson, Vice President for Sales at Jack Richeson & Co., importer of Yarka watercolors. “This makes them a professional grade product, a specialty item.”

About five years ago, Jack Richeson & Co. bought out the Yarka product line from Fosport, a company founded in the wake of perestroika to sell Russian art supplies to the West. “Russia is known for being a very strong center for art,” Richeson said. “So there is a fairly strong market and interest in Russian art materials.”

The Russian manufacturers were interested in developing a brand name, and they were eager to have Russian brands recognized outside Russia, particularly in the U.S. market. But there was and is one major obstacle. “In the U.S. market,” Richeson said, “artists are more focused on tube watercolors versus pan watercolors. Pan watercolors [what Yarka offers] are used everywhere but in the U.S. or Australia. Pans take a little more effort to build up intense color, but pans are better for outdoor painting.”

Yarka watercolors are much more than ordinary dry bricks of color incited by the addition of water, however. They are a semi-moist paint that is actually liquid-poured (many other manufacturers used a compressed intrusion process) into trays at a factory in St. Petersburg that has been producing color for over 100 years. “Because the colors are poured,” Kontorina said, “this creates a smoother, more vivid color.” Beginning with a plastic-boxed set of 24 colors that retails for around $50, Yarka offers 55 total colors in various configurations, including handsome wooden boxed sets. And Yarka is at the less-expensive end of the professional watercolor scale, often retailing for about half of similar color selections by Winsor & Newton.

Jack Richeson & Co. (which acts as a wholesaler and does not sell direct to consumers; the paints can be purchased at art supply stores) also imports Yarka’s “Russian Sauce” pastels, with rich colors made from Chasov Yar clay, Russian linens and canvases, and world-renowned Kolinsky Sable brushes. These brushes, artist Kontorina says, “are of the highest quality and hold a large volume of water, making it excellent for wash techniques – I can just paint and paint and paint... Magic can happen when I use them!”

Seeing Clearly

In the early 1990s, Boris Dubrovsky would load up a van on Fridays and spend the weekend driving to and exhibiting at gun shows around the U.S. – in Las Vegas, Florida, Washington, DC. “I was new in this country, and didn’t understand anything about marketing,” Dubrovsky, now 61, said. But he was selling a quality product: Russian optics.

“Look,” Dubrovsky explained, “Russian optics were designed for military use. They had to pass rigorous tests. They had to have exceptional design. Russia was rich with metal and machinery and expertise.” The resulting products, he said, are still superior to most commercial products on the market today. “These Russian optics were military products,” Dubrovsky reiterated, “they had to be able to be repaired easily, with simple tools, like a screwdriver. Western consumer optics are designed to be thrown away if they have a problem.”

Dubrovsky has been selling Russian optics (binoculars and monoculars, night-vision devices, telescopes, microscopes) since 1990, through his company Lan Optics (russianoptics.com). At first, most sales were through shows, and, for a time in the mid-1990s, he published a mail order catalog. But since 2000, most of Lan Optics’ sales have come through the Internet. “Business is not like it was 10 years ago,” Dubrovsky said. “The situation with the war in Iraq has changed everything. It is harder now. But that is the way it should be.”

A decade ago, Dubrovsky said, he would receive 50 or more inquiries a day from around the world about the optics he imported. But now, with increased security concerns (e.g. U.S. Government restrictions on re-export of any products made for military purposes), he cannot just send orders off anywhere he likes. “I have to watch what I do,” he said. “Where it goes. You may get an order from Germany, but the trail does not end there. And you would have to have five people just working as import/export managers to research restrictions and figure out if you can send these things where there are orders.”

As a result, and partly because of his age, Dubrovsky has scaled back the business, doing about one-fifth the business he once did and dealing largely with individual buyers through internet sales.

The superiority of Russian optics is derived from the fact that, as Dubrovsky said, they were a military product and benefited from the spoils of WWII. After the USSR occupied Eastern Europe, technology and tooling were raided from the best optical plants in the region, most notably the Carl Zeiss-Jena factory in Germany. Russian engineers and scientists made additional refinements and the privileged position of the military and its need to “stay competitive” insured that production would be world class.

But that may be changing, Dubrovsky suggested. “I don’t know what will happen with Russian industry,” he said. “Russia is very interested in selling oil. But industry does not look good. When the Soviet economy collapsed, optics production was cut back and no money has been invested in new designs for almost 20 years. Now these factories need to create new designs, and that will mean higher prices.” And, for Russian optics, which, as the Kalinka Optics website [kalinkaoptics.com] put it, “provide amazing quality at a fraction of the cost,” that could be a particularly difficult challenge.

Spreading Seeds

For years now, a battle has been raging over ownership of the Commons. Multinationals seek to patent our food supply, while agro-activists are trying to convince the public of the dangers of genetic modification of seeds and organisms. Agro-industrial complexes plant county-sized monocultural farms with seeds genetically designed to be sterile, meaning that farmers cannot – as they have for thousands of years – reserve a portion of the crop as seed for the next year. The seed is the property of the seed company that developed it, so we are told.

But others have a different view. Seeds, they say, are our common heritage, and cannot be owned by any one person or corporation. Heirloom seeds – open-pollinating varieties that have been passed down through generations because they are better tasting or perform well in particular climates, are their answer to preserving diversity in the world’s plant supply. And to supplying tastier, healthier food than that supplied by the agro-conglomerates.

Jeremiah Gettle is an heirloom seed advocate and owner of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (rareseeds.com), a company that gathers, grows and resells hundreds of unusual and tasty vegetable varieties from all over the world, including Russia.

Russian vegetable varieties are particularly prized among gardeners for the fact that they are both hardy and tasty, able to thrive in short North American growing seasons, as well as survive through longer hot seasons. “There are a lot of seed varieties in Russia that people just aren’t used to here,” Gettle said. “In particular, there are the tomatoes, the dark or black varieties. These all have a very intense tomato taste – most of the dark varieties come from Russia, from southern regions, and they have a lot more overall taste than American varieties... a lot more flavor and taste than supermarket varieties.”

And taste sells. Gettle estimated that fully 15-20% of the tomato seeds his firm sells are dark tomatoes, mostly of the Russian variety. But it is not all about dark tomatoes. They also sell a Russian-sourced red tomato, the Cosmonaut Volkov, which Gettle said does very well in hot climates.

“We also have a lot of melons,” Gettle said. “[Russian] melons tend to be very good, early and sweet.” Gettle said he is particularly fond of the variety known as the Collective Farm Cantaloupe, which hails from the Black Sea region. It has a sweet, green meat and a very high sugar content.

What else? How about the Black Russian Sunflower, prized for its oil-producing capabilities. Or Russian tarragon (an interesting herb, but less prized than the more fragrant French variety).

In all, Baker Creek offers some 13 Russian vegetable varieties, about half of which are tomatoes. There are also some interesting selections from Ukraine. Gettle was particularly effusive about the Odessa Squash (more like a zucchini, actually), for its rich flavor and the fact that it grows on a vine, rather than a bush, meaning it spreads its fruit out over the entire season, rather than dumping it on the gardener all at once.

Gettle, whose grandfather, it turns out, came from the Odessa region, got his start in the heirloom seed business in his late teens, having been an avid gardener from a very early age. His seed catalog contains some 900 varieties and mails to over 70,000 customers worldwide, spreading biological diversity wherever it goes.

By no means is Gettle alone in his efforts. Other sources for heirloom seeds include Seed Savers Exchange (seedsavers.org) and Seeds of Change (seedsofchange.com). Both offer some or all of the Russian varieties mentioned above.

If there is a common thread in these stories, it is that quality Russian consumer products tend to enter the U.S. market as a niche product. Certainly vodka began that way after World War II and has only in the last 20 years exploded to become the most popular hard liquor in the U.S. Most of the products profiled are still banging around in their exploited niche. Some are destined to reside there forever, but others have mainstream potential and may well seize it, if they can bring together the right combination of marketing savvy and scalable production. Which surely is easier said than done.   RL