Soviet submariner who saved sinking Hearts

ROMANOV UNRAVELLED

FROM IAN JOHNSTON
IN LITHUANIA

THE nuclear submarine’s great black hulk nosed stealthily through the coastal waters until it came to a halt a few feet beneath the surface, suspended within easy torpedo distance of enemy ships as they lay tied up in harbour.

Young conscript Vladimir Romanov’s mind raced as he contemplated the consequences of being captured while on a secret mission 2,000 miles from home.

After all, the discovery of a Soviet submarine clandestinely patrolling British waters at the height of the Cold War could have triggered a major diplomatic incident.

But the vessel evaded the clutches of the Royal Navy, slipped back into international waters and eventually returned with impunity to its home port of Murmansk in northern Russia.

A look through the periscope while sitting offshore would have provided the teenage son of a Second World War hero with a hazy view of Britain’s coastline, but he could hardly have imagined that 40 years later he would return to Britain, flying into Edinburgh to proclaim his intention to rescue one of its most beloved (at least by one half of the city) institutions.

Yet, the successful submarine scouting operation in the mid-1960s was to play a fundamental role in the remarkable story of Vladimir Romanov’s transformation from poor communist to wealthy arch-capitalist - from a young man selling bootleg Elvis records from the back of a taxi to a 57-year-old international businessman with a paper fortune of £260 million.

From submariner to saviour of the Heart of Midlothian Football Club.

His tale, which mirrors in miniature that of the billionaire owner of Chelsea, Roman Abramovich, begins in June 1947, in the province of Tver, north-west of Moscow, where Vladimir was born to parents Zinaida and Nikolai.

The couple had lived through terrible privation, even by the appalling standards of Stalin’s Soviet regime. But they survived. And while young Vladimir was born into a poor family, he inherited his parents’ resourcefulness and determination.

In the Second World War, Zinaida was caught in the siege of Leningrad.

Some 200,000 Red Army troops defended the city and its population of three million for nearly 900 days until it was finally relieved by the Soviet army in January 1944. Hundreds of thousands were killed by the German bombardment, starvation and disease. In the winter of January and February of 1942 alone, some 200,000 people died and bodies littered the streets.

Zinaida survived by fleeing her hiding place in the city in the dead of night. She managed to evade enemy patrols - and being shot by her own side in the dark - to reach safety.

Nikolai was a career soldier and an officer; he fought with distinction during the storming of Berlin.

After the war Nikolai remained in the army while Zinaida worked in a factory assembling radios.

The Romanovs were regarded as model Soviet citizens, a respectable couple who had no problem fitting in and finding friends.

But in 1956, when Vladimir was nine, his father was posted to a new army base in Lithuania, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union as its armies advanced.

From 1944 to 1953, a guerrilla force of about 50,000 men and women - known as the "Forest Brothers" - had fought a battle against the occupying Soviet forces in which more than 20,000 people lost their lives.

Today in Lithuania, six national holidays mark the country’s struggle with the Soviet Union - three independence days, one to mark the 1939 Nazi-Soviet deal which gave Lithuania to the USSR, one for an uprising against occupation in 1941 and another to commemorate mass deportations to Siberia.

It is hard enough for any nine-year-old to move to a new area, but when the Romanov family arrived in Lithuania’s second city of Kaunas, finding new friends for young Vladimir was a particularly difficult task.

However, in the playground of his school in the tough district of Vilijampole where he grew up, the Russian managed to deal with the bullies and make long-lasting friendships that would serve him well in later life. These friends were among the first to rally round when his father died of a massive heart attack when Vladimir was just 16.

Vladimir was thrust unexpectedly into adulthood and had to get special permission from the Communist authorities to start working - before the usual minimum age of 18 - to help support his mother and sister Olga, while he carried on his schooling at evening classes. But even as he began his "official" job as a taxi driver, Vladimir was putting his emerging talent for business to good use to give his family a better life.

It was 1963 and while the young people of Kaunas had long given up the idea of armed insurrection to drive out the Soviets, they were becoming eager converts to a different kind of revolution - rock ’n’ roll. The music of Elvis Presley stirred something within the soul of the young Romanov, who by this time was already writing his own poetry, a lifelong hobby. Getting hold of his records meant visiting the burgeoning black market in American and British music.

In a spirit of youthful rebellion, coupled with a keen eye for a quick buck to help his mother and sister, he began to sell records out of the back of his taxi.

A friend said: "That was one of his first entrepreneurial moves. He had to earn the income for the family and that’s when the selling of Rolling Stones, Beatles and Presley records came into being."

A good deal of bravado was necessary to take this step, comments Chris Butler, the present-day chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Lithuania.

"If you imagine in the 1960s, that was a terribly dangerous thing to do ... and he comes from a military family. If his dad had been in the Russian military and he was doing stuff like that, it sounds quite daring," he explained.

This may have put Romanov at odds with the Soviet authorities, but it widened his circle of friends and enhanced his credentials as a Lithuanian rather than a Russian at heart.

In Lithuania at the time, a book smuggler was considered one of the most respectable occupations as the Lithuanian language was banned. Those who managed to obtain Western music were seen in much the same light.

With two years’ experience under his belt of dodging the authorities in order to engage in illegal free enterprise, the 18-year-old Romanov found himself drafted into the Russian navy for national service and he travelled to Murmansk - the largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and the main home-port of the Russian nuclear submarine fleet.

The next six years in Murmansk, as a submariner and then in the merchant navy, proved to be life-changing.

It was there that he met and married Svetlana, from Leningrad, which is now St Petersburg.

But Romanov was never likely to remain static, even amid newlywedded bliss. As he travelled round the globe in the navy, he began to realise what the world outside the Communist Bloc had to offer. There was a lot more than rock music that would appeal to Lithuanian youth and there was money to be made by selling goods made in the USSR, he learned.

Doubtless his covert trip into British waters - "actually I’ve been here before ... sort of," he told an astonished Hearts official when asked whether he had enjoyed his first trip to Edinburgh - provided little opportunity to exercise his business acumen. But the ports of Soviet-friendly countries that he visited gave him an almost revelatory vision of just how successful private endeavour could be.

Liutauras Varanavicius, now one of Mr Romanov’s closest business advisors, said: "His ideas came from travelling when he was in the navy. He saw a lot of the world and he had a lot of ideas how to reinvent it here at home."

Mr Varanavicius said his first encounter with Mr Romanov ten years ago had quickly made him realise just how much business flair the former navy rating had developed during those formative times.

"He was quite extraordinary. His ideas were four or five years ahead of other Lithuanian business people," he said.

"The first time you listen to his ideas, they seem very strange, but after some years everybody comes to understand these are bright ideas."

In 1971, 24-year-old Romanov and his wife decided to return to his adopted home city of Kaunas, an industrial centre of some 380,000 people.

Svetlana may have been worried about the move from Russian to Lithuanian soil, but for him it was a return to his own territory, among loyal friends who would be there if he needed them.

Afew months later, he had started his first private company, as the Soviet Union began to relax restrictions on private enterprise.

Over the next few years, he began to build up a successful business, buying raw materials in Russia and turning them into finished goods in factories in Lithuania. Turning basic textiles into clothing was one project.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he managed to build up a small but profitable trading company without falling foul of the Communist authorities.

A policy of keeping his head down - "staying in the shadows", in the words of one friend - was to serve him well and is a strategy he has carefully pursued ever since.

Just how much money Mr Romanov made during the Communist era is unclear, but it was enough for him to take advantage of the break-up of the Soviet Union.

In 1991, a "velvet revolution" saw Lithuania once again become an independent country and it was quick to throw off the legacy of Communism.

State-run companies were sold off at public auctions to the highest bidder. Mr Romanov was among those who successfully acquired several firms and it is through this process that it is believed he first began to make serious amounts of money.

He also joined forces with several other companies to found Lithuania’s first private bank, called Ukio.

A separate investment company, called the Ukio Bank Investment Group, followed later.

Mass privatisation happened in Lithuania more quickly than in any other former Communist Bloc state, and being there from the outset helped Romanov become something of an expert in the process.

This turned him and his team of advisers - which includes his sister Olga Goncaruk, whose blessing is crucial to Romanov for any investment project - into a valuable international commodity.

As ever, he was quick to see the opportunities.

During the 1990s, he and his companies began to get involved in other eastern European countries and have since helped privatise factories in Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Ukraine, shares were handed over to factory workers and then bought up by Romanov firms.

Friends insist there was no single deal that saw him achieve such wealth and that it has all been simply a matter of hard work.

Asked about Mr Romanov’s "criminal" past as a record seller in 1960s Kaunas, Mr Varanavicius shrugs his shoulders: "In the Soviet Union days, we always tried to do something to earn extra money. Every kid did the same."

But this particular kid was not the same as his contemporaries. And while his crewmates on board the Soviet submarine could probably think of little else but their situation as they sailed in enemy waters, the young Mr Romanov was dreaming of ways to get rich.


Taken from the Scotsman