Adventures in Red Tape: Preparing to Open a Moscow Hotel

MOSCOW —  Paul O’Brien, the food and beverage manager for a spanking-new U.S.-Soviet hotel next to Moscow’s Kiev Station, wanted to get some china and glassware out of storage. He needed five--count ‘em, five--signatures.

Not only did O’Brien, an accountant, the hotel’s general manager and two bosses of the joint-venture have to sign papers to get the items released, “but you need stamps on all those documents too,” O’Brien said with dismay.

Or try this: At 2 in the afternoon, four days after the hotel had signed a contract for telephone service to be paid in rubles, the lines were suddenly disconnected; hotel management was told that it must pay for the phones in foreign currency.

“We said, ‘But we’ve got a contract!’ ” O’Brien recalled. “And they said, ‘Too bad.’ We didn’t have phones for another 10 days. It’s just the way they do business.”

O’Brien, part-owner and former manager of the Paradise Grill in San Diego, is no stranger to the hotel and restaurant world. He has helped prepare openings and reopenings of nine hotels--all in different cities--in the past 13 years.

But the Radisson Slavjanskaya has been a revelation. The 640-room hotel and business center, built by Yugoslavs for the Soviet state tourist company, Intourist, since has taken in U.S. partners and become the first Moscow hotel under American management. American management, however, doesn’t change the fact that “what normally takes a day anywhere else takes . . . (roughly) five days here,” O’Brien said.

Although Intourist provided the building and has valuable connections that save time and labor, the hotel’s U.S. crew has found itself forced to expend extra effort to undo what the Soviets did wrong.

In parts of the cavernous hotel lobby, mounds of rolled, tacky maroon carpet--installed by Intourist before the Americans joined the project--wait to be carted off. The Italian furniture is due any day now--to replace pieces that Soviet designers considered solid and serviceable but that many Western designers would consider hideous.

When they deal with Soviet partners and employees, the Americans have learned that they also must cope with one of the world’s most corrupt societies: O’Brien said he has seen ashtrays stolen from a rival hotel being sold on the streets. His counterpart at that hotel lost 40% of the dining room silverware to theft within weeks of opening, prompting O’Brien to observe, “I’ll stick to stainless steel.”

But for all his tribulations, O’Brien said he believes that joint ventures, such as the hotel project, will ultimately do good.

“I see joint ventures as an intermediate step to a free-market system, to where corporations can exist on their own and just pay taxes,” he said, adding: “We’re building an asset in the country, creating a skilled work force and generating revenue. We have 800 employees and we’ll teach them the American way. Then they’ll get excited and open their own businesses.”

His determination is rare, O’Brien admits. “A lot of people have come over here and run into problems and said, ‘Hey, we can go somewhere else.’ ”

They might have a point. The hotel--which will begin receiving guests in July, about a year behind schedule--has been housing only work crews for now. Even they found it unpleasant when Soviet workers turned off the hotel’s hot-water systems recently. Then there was the printer who was supposed to prepare the hotel’s business cards; he suddenly announced that he had reached his production quota and would not do any more work for two months.

O’Brien takes solace in the realization that he is not alone in his frustrations. A manager of a U.S.-Soviet restaurant recently ordered a truckload of breeding chickens, O’Brien recounted with relish, only to find that the roads had been so rough between the farm and town that most of the birds’ necks had been broken; the driver killed the rest, thinking he was doing his boss a favor.

“There’s a story like that every day here,” O’Brien said with a laugh. “But in the end, I’m real positive about what we’re doing here; if I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”