Vic Socotra

08 December 2008

Stalinist

Red Star

It is bitter cold for a Virginia December. The poor Redskins froze their butts off up in Baltimore, losing to the Ravens in the moist cold air that embraced the harbor. So did the visiting Cowboys to the west, who had to leave the moderate climes of North Dallas to shiver at the juncture of the three rivers and lose to the Steelers.

I watched in a desultory manner, concerned about having to deal with the Stalinist in subcontracting. I don’t mean it is a pejorative fashion. Anastasia is not Stalin, only a graduate of the system wily old Uncle Joe put in place in his Union of Soviets. I mean a real graduate, red scarf of the Komsomol (Communist Youth) and everything.

I hav e to be nice. As a program manager for a major Indefinite Delivery- Indefinite Quantity contract vehicle with the government, I absolutely rely on the swift and accurate performance of the legal arrangements with the subcontractors.

First, an IDIQ contract is exactly as amorphous as it sounds. We had to compete to be awarded something that is worth exactly nothing- just a ticket to get into the Government’s big tent and wander around looking for opportunities. If was a heady experience, brokering exclusive deals with dozens of partners eager to have my company take all the risks and spend all the money staffing proposals.

When the government finally awarded the vehicle, there were eight consortia awarded Prime status, which effectively meant we were all eligible to attend meetings with the Govern ment customers and glower at each other across the long conference table. After the brief flurry of self-congratulations for getting the ticket of admission, the analysis of who the competition might be lead to the disquieting realization everyone who had applied to be a prime had been admitted as such, including those two guys who live in a basement in NW DC.

Damn. This was going to be a lot more competitive than I had thought.

We drove ourselves crazy generating proposals for business, whether it was realistic or not. Most of the work was already being performed by perfectly competent people with whom the government was quite comfortable. The people on the source-selection committees had little incentive to go for the “ best price,” regardless of what the precept might say, since it wasn’t their money they were spending, and the consequences o unseating an incumbent were that they would have to work weekends until the new team was in place and fully trained.

It was more than a little frustrating, and I was beginning to get nervous as the first ten or eleven attempts went by with zero success. I am on “overhead,” as they say, being paid on the expectation that I would bring in business worth more than my salary. Any time your are in that position it is wise to have one eye on the door, just in case there is a major collapse of the housing, financial and automotive sectors of the economy.

Anyway, the key point here is that in the beginning there was no actual business to be done, just the process of making helpful suggestions to the government on how it might be done if they were kind enough to give us some money after a fair-and-open competition with other people who were just as nervous and anxious as I was.

Our subcontracting officer was a pleasant woman named Dee, a northern Virginia native, placid and organized, though I think she might have been one of the smokers who congregate out by the parking garage. I talked to her on the phone once in a while, normally to facilitate the paperwork to get another company on our team and hammer out the non-disclosure and teaming agreements.

What I didn’t realize was that she was nice to deal with because there were never any issues. There were no issues because she wasn’t doing anything. Why=2 0work on something that wasn’t generating any cash? No percentage in that, and besides, she had some issues at home and was besieged with other tasks that had real money associated with them.

The old saying in the business is that dealing with the government is a good-news, bad-news thing. The good news was that we finally figured out how to make the proposals sing like sirens on the rocks to customers in uncharted waters, and the bad news was that we actually had to do what we claimed we could do.

I am pleased to report that more able people than I were able to do exactly that. But there was a little problem. Dee had a death in the family, and her priorities naturally changed. We were sympathetic and tried to be supportive, but in her last few weeks on the job there=2 0was no one home to answer even the most routine of requests. As we became more successful, the questions mounted.

One day I got an e-mail announcing her departure, and the beginning of the scramble to find a replacement for her. It was with a great deal of relief that I got a memo announcing that Anastasia had been hired, followed immediately by consternation. The voice on the telephone was a husky contralto, and the words- English, I thought- were so dense as to require my complete attention. It was disorienting in the extreme.

It was déjà vu all over again. This was the voice of the Great Adversary from the Cold War, the voices of the sad bureaucrats I met with in the mid-1990s in Moscow, in the relic institutions of the empire- Baurman State Aeronautical Bureau where they20taught the students who later designed the fabulous MiGs, or the Kurchatov Nuclear Institute, where I was permitted to touch the graphite blocks of the first Soviet atomic pile.

Sad, they were, but fiercely proud. I liked them. They were fun to drink vodka with and talk about the old times.

Now I had a Russian sub-contracting officer, who was my interface with the legal relationships between me, the government and my industry partners. I knew the war was over, or at least had gone on hiatus, but the rich voice brought it all back. And more. Anastasia was unfailingly cheerful and polite, but it was clear that everything was going to have to be exactly by the book. Every “t” would be crossed and every “I” would be properly dotted.

You cannot object to doing things the right way, even if it hangs up the continuing chaos that results from a dysfunctional customer and hysterical partners. Anastasia was pleasant, though phlegmatic, and much easier to deal with than the North Koreans.

After one session of circling ever closer to an arcane issue until it tired and collapsed, I asked her where she was from.

“Yalta,” she said in her deep rich voice. “In Crimea.” I imagined he r smoking a Sobranie black Russian cigarette, though I knew perfectly well that the last ashtray had been banned from her office decades ago.

“Yes,” I said. “Yalta is very famous here for the big conference between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. It determined the course of the world after the Great Patriotic War.” If she was flattered that I called the conflict by the name in which it was known behind the former Iron Curtain, she didn’t let on.

“I was girl there,” she said, sounding dubious. “Then I got married and moved to Moscow. I had very bad marriage for 22 years.” Her candor was a little un-nerving, flat and matter of fact, like word that the Germans had occupied all the outer metro stations and there might be delays in t he commute.

“Then I divorced. I am newlywed now. Two years in America.”

“And you are doing technical contract work here? In English? That is incredible,” I said, wondering what two decades in a bad Russian marriage might be like. A tiny apartment, a social collapse, dealing with towering vodka-fueled rages and deep deep cold.

“One does what one must do,” said Anastasia, and I realized that she was ex actly right.

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