EA-17 • RUSSIA • NOVEMBER 2009 ICWA Letters INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS From Lenin and Marx to Toilet Paper and Egg Cartons, or the Elena Agarkova is studying management Siberian King of Makulatura of natural resources and the relationship between By Elena Agarkova Siberia’s natural riches and its people. Previously, Elena was a Legal Fellow at the he white van came to a stop at the corner to talk to him, he is an incredibly charismatic University of Washington’s of Karl Marx Street right after passing me. character who has lots of great ideas,” said one School of Law, at the IT closed my cell phone and walked up to slide “semi-legal” plastics processor. Berman Environmental the door open. It was 14 minutes after 7:00, on Law Clinic. She has clerked a frigid morning in Irkutsk. Light snow was for Honorable Cynthia M. I thought it fitting that our first encounter Rufe of the federal district falling, and I hoped I would not have to wait happened in the van that does daily pickups of court in Philadelphia, and too long. Mikhail Prokopievich told me the day Vtorma workers around Irkutsk. The same van has practiced commercial before that they pass down this street between returns workers from the first shift back to the litigation at the New York 7:12 and 7:24. That had to be him. city in the afternoon. The factory has a problem office of Milbank, Tweed, finding reliable employees and holds on to those Hadley & McCloy LLP. Elena There were three or four people inside al- it already has. “Almost everyone around this was born in Moscow, Rus- ready. I said hello and one of the two men in the neighborhood drinks too much,” said Mikhail sia, and has volunteered for front, the one wearing a big fur hat, introduced Prokopievich as he opened the heavy front door environmental non-profits himself. “I am Mikhail Prokopievich.” The van in the Lake Baikal region of Vtorma’s three-story office building for me. of Siberia. She graduated sped off into the still-dark city, picking up more “We have to get workers from as far as the vil- from Georgetown Universi- people along the way. Forty-five minutes later we lages around Irkutsk now.” Other problems be- ty Law Center in 2001, and arrived at Vtorma Baikal’s factory on the outskirts came apparent as we walked to Chernorubash- has received a bachelor’s of Irkutsk, in the semi-industrial Novo-Lenino kin’s office. He has been forced to rent two of the degree in political science neighborhood. I came here to find out how one three floors to another company, to pay ever-in- from Barnard College. runs a business making recycled toilet paper. creasing heating, electricity, and transportation bills. All of these services used to be subsidized Vtorma Baikal shares the street with other by the government in Soviet times. Not any Institute of Current waste processors, handling everything from more — in the new economy former state agen- World Affairs metals to ash, but it is the largest and the oldest cies became ruthless moneymaking machines The Crane-Rogers Foundation paper recycling business in the region. “Vtor- that use monopoly power to extract profits from 4545 42nd St. NW, Ste 311 ma” stands for an abbreviation of two words, their customers. “It used to be that the railroad Washington, D.C. 20016 vtorichnaya, or “secondary” (a word that came tariff constituted 0.001 percent of our production Tel: 202-364-4068 to mean recyclable resources in Russian), and cost. Now transport and electricity cost up to 10 Fax: 202-364-0498 makulatura, or discarded paper and carton. percent. We pay 350 thousand rubles a month E-mail: [email protected] Mikhail Prokopievich Chernorubashkin, now for electricity. The railroad tariff used to be 1,000 Web: www.icwa.org in his 70s, has been its director for more than 40 rubles per ton; now it’s 150 thousand rubles.” years. He led Vtorma through several incarna- Mikhail Prokopievich gestured to the industrial The Information tions, from a Soviet state-controlled paper-col- landscape outside his window. “Before Yesi- contained in this lecting agency, to its current status as a private povsky [the previous governor of Irkutsk, who publication may not recycling processor and manufacturer. Mikhail governed for less than a year until dying in a be reprinted or re- Prokopievich is a legend around here. When I helicopter crash last May, during what many published without the started talking to people in recycling business in suspected to be an illegal hunting trip] a square express written con- Irkutsk, almost everyone, from other business- meter cost 68 rubles here. Now it costs 628 ru- sent of the Institute of men to government officials, asked me wheth- bles.” He explained that regional bureaucrats Current World Affairs. er I haD met Chernorubashkin yet. “You have are personally interested in raising the land tax. ©2010 Institute of Current World Affairs, The Crane-Rogers Foundation waste: remnants of sail cloth, sacks, used boat sails, sailors’ bedding, and parchment leftovers. But Peter the Great merely fol- lowed a 2,000-plus-year-old tradition. Paper as most of us know it — paper made out of virgin trees, or wood cel- lulose — has existed for a very brief time in human history, only since the second half of the 19th century. What came as a surprise to me was the fact that until then most paper came from materials that today we would call re- cycled. A historical detour: some scholars believe that the word paper derives from the Greek term for papyrus, writ- ing material that ancient Egyptians began making from a grass-like aquat- ic plant called Cyperus papyrus more than 4,000 years ago.1 However, nei- One of the old news articles about Mikhail Prokopievich, titled ther papyrus nor rice paper classify as “The Toilet King of Near-Angariye,” from his personal collection. true paper, or thin sheets made from macerated, intertwined fiber.2 “It stays in the local budget.” Mikhail Prokopievich kept running through the numbers, which meant one thing to Papyrus, on the other hand, comes from woody stems him: “The state is incapable of governing.” of Cyperus papyrus, cut or sliced end to end, and pasted to- gether in a manner similar to laminated wood. Rice paper is He remained an enthusiast of the extensive system for not true paper either because it’s made out of strips cut from collecting and utilizing “secondary resources” (the Rus- the inner pith of the rice paper tree, a small shrub widely sian term for recyclable waste) that existed in the Soviet cultivated in China and Japan. And until the 15th century Union and even prior to that. “Peter the Great issued a Europeans preferred an entirely different writing material decree ordering traveling salesmen to collect old rags, to to paper: animal skins. When Gutenberg printed his first be recycled into paper products. After WWII men drove Bible in 1456, most manuscripts were still made from parch- around the country on horses, collecting rags and paper.” ment (specially prepared, or scraped, skin of a sheep or Mikhail Prokopievich knows his history. As early as 1715 goat) or vellum (scraped calfskin). Apparently, you needed Peter the Great issued a decree mandating use of waste skins of 300 calves to print one copy of Gutenberg’s Bible. from fabric and rope manufacturing for paper production. No wonder reading remained an activity for the elite few.3 Five years later he issued two more decrees, ordering col- lection of old paper, to be transferred for recycling to paper The immediate predecessor to modern paper dates mills in Russia and Holland, and collection of rags from back almost 2,000 years (even though there is some evi- inhabitants of St. Petersburg and Moscow, “for the paper dence for paper being used even before this date). We do business.” The tsar, who set out to “westernize” backward know for sure that in AD 105 a Han court official, eunich Russia, worked tirelessly to create industrial manufactur- Ts’ai Lun, officially presented paper, made from macer- ing almost from scratch in a heavily agrarian country, im- ated vegetable fiber, to the Chinese Royal Court. Ts’ai Lun porting foreign specialists, subsidizing talented Russian used discarded cloth, tree bark, “well prepared” hemp and businessmen, and lending a hand himself occasionally. perhaps even old fishing nets, becoming the first official He studied ship carpentry and had a passion for building producer of recycled paper. The invention made its way ships. His paper mills in St. Petersburg even utilized fleet to Japan via Korea, then part of China, 500 years later. His- 1 The Egyptian word papyrus, meaning “that of the king,” may indicate that the Pharaoh had a monopoly on writing materials. 2 “Once fiber has been macerated until each individual filament is a separate unit, the fiberse ar intermixed with water. Using a sieve-like screen, the fibers are lifted from the water, leaving a sheet of matted fiber on the screen. This thin layer of intertwined fiber is paper.” Hunter, Dard. 1978. Papermaking: the history and technique of an ancient craft (New York: Dover. Original edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1947). 3 No one knows exactly how many copies of the Bible were printed, but scholars believe the total to be around 180, with about 135- 145 on paper and the rest on the more luxurious and expensive vellum. A single complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible has 1,272 pages; with 4 pages per folio-sheet, 318 sheets of paper are required per copy.