By William Green
December 11, 1994

They are the most sought-after fashion accessory in Russia today. Boris Yeltsin has dozens of them. Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought a pair with him to celebrate his homecoming to the mother country. And I got one too, as soon as I walked off the plane at Sheremetyevo airport. He grasped me by the arm and introduced himself in a thick American accent. "I am Igor. You are Bill. You are coming with me, please." You don't argue with people like Igor. He is a professional bodyguard, a gorilla, a Moscow minder.

"I am used to be security man for gold bullion. Now today I am friend for Western businessman," he confided, as he marched me to the front of the immigration queue. Nobody tried to stop us. Igor is tattooed on the hands, very burly, and he carries a lot of scar tissue on his left cheek. For this meet-and-greet he was wearing a flashy suit that did not suit him at all. Later, he appeared in the casual uniform favoured by every gangster, strong-arm man, bouncer and bruiser in Moscow a black leather jacket.

There were the inevitable problems at customs. The passport officer tried to shake me down for $300, on the unconvincing pretext that my visa was forged. We waited for an hour until Igor found a superior official who was prepared to settle for a smaller sum. At the taxi rank Igor fought off the sharks demanding $60 (a month's wages) for the 10-mile ride, and settled me into the back seat of a battered Volga.

I was on a flying visit to Russia, to attend the grand opening of a new "Western-style" hotel the Radisson Lazurnaya in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The Russian women's national synchronised swimming team was to give a display in the hotel's Olympic-sized pool. For some reason this prospect was enough for me to make the arduous journey, with its doubtful Aeroflot schedules, grubby airports, recalcitrant clerks and greasy-palmed officials. In the event, I arrived just in time for the vodka-splashed ceremonies, although it poured with rain all evening and the girls never got launched into the water. But without Igor at my elbow, I would probably never have made it to Sochi at all.

Igor works for an agency called PBN, which has offices in the business centre of the Moscow Slavyanskaya hotel. The Slavyanskaya, managed by, and normally known as, Radisson, is one of the new Russia's most successful enterprises. It has been reported to be making profits of $1m a month. More importantly, the Radisson has become the hub of Western business, media and even diplomacy in Moscow. The Press Centre and Reuters are in residence, and it is through here that all news is processed west.

The foreign press corps was present in force at the party for the Radisson-on-Sea in Sochi, and so was PBN and its invaluable employees. I met one of company's American directors, and when I thanked him for having lent me Igor, he gave me his card: "PBN Public Relations, Public Affairs, Crisis Management." His firm, he said, offered foreign visitors the facilities to help them "confront the political and economic uncertainties of Moscow today".

Everybody had stories that fleshed out this euphemism. It had been an average week in the capital a Western correspondent mugged, a parliamentarian murdered. The Moscow Times admitted that most companies were losing half their profits in protection money, but publication of the first Russian edition of Cosmopolitan had finally been achieved. Gangs of child gypsies were appearing on Moscow streets, prompting the Radisson management to distribute warning leaflets to all its clients. I was advised to react thus: "Shout and swing briefcases or umbrellas, as they have been known to bite and stick victims with their pins."

Money the lack of it is at the root of the violent mood in Russia. The black economy runs on cash and vast sums are carried out, sewn into clothes, stuffed into briefcases and (no doubt) rolled up in umbrellas. At the crash site of the Aeroflot plane that went down in remote Siberia some months ago, recovery teams picked up notes worth $175,000 and nearly 1m roubles. There had been only 75 passengers on the flight. One pernicious rumour tells of an opinion poll taken among Moscow teenagers, about their hopes for the future. Half the girls said they wanted to be hard-currency prostitutes when they grew up. All the boys wanted to be gangsters.

In such an atmosphere, it is no wonder that foreigners seek the ordered calm of the Radisson's lounges, and the security of a minder when they walk outside.

Igor stood with me at the Vnukovo domestic airport, as we waited in the VIP lounge for another flight. We watched while two Kazakh men tried to persuade an airline official to allocate them seats on the plane. They were lugging a bulky blue-and-white parcel, marked in English: "This package contains food donated by the people of the United States of America. "I was reminded of the acerbic comment made by a congressman in the Billy Wilder film, A Foreign Affair, as he gazes through an aeroplane window at the ruins of post-war Berlin: "If you give these people a loaf of bread, that's charity; when you put a wrapper on it, that's imperialism." Igor appeared and clapped me cheerfully on the back. He had got my boarding pass. I wondered how much he must despise me.