食品领域的俄式反击战 Banning Brie and bulldozing geese
Two years ago, a group of Moscow restaurateurs made what on paper looked like a sound business decision. They chose a trendy location — Moscow’s Gorky Park, an oasis for hipsters — and opened a gleaming new restaurant called Oyster Bar, which planned to purvey molluscs and other imported delicacies to the city’s cosmopolitan elite.
两年前，一群莫斯科餐馆老板做出了一个理论上貌似不错的商业决定。他们选择了一处时尚之地——潮人聚集的莫斯科高尔基公园(Gorky Park)，开办了一家名为“牡蛎酒吧”(Oyster Bar)的全新餐厅，准备为莫斯科的国际化精英群体提供牡蛎和其他进口美食。
One year later, in the wake of western sanctions, Vladimir Putin announced Russia would ban an array of American and European food products, including cheese, beef and seafood. Oyster Bar tried to rebrand — boldly renaming itself No Oyster Bar and relying on a menu of local ingredients — but the gamble didn’t pay off. The restaurant closed a few months later.
一年后，随着西方国家的制裁，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔渠京(Vladimir Putin)宣布禁止进口来自美国和欧洲的大多数食品，包括奶酪、牛肉和海鲜。牡蛎酒吧试图改头换面——大胆地更名为“无牡蛎酒吧”(No Oyster Bar)，并依靠本地食材提供餐品——但这次押注并未奏效。餐厅在几个月后关张。
The fate of Oyster Bar seems to fit a familiar narrative. Threatened by increasing western influence in Ukraine and the rise of Nato, Putin is hitting back against the west both in Ukraine and through a culture war at home, where a propaganda campaign has made Moscow’s pro-western, oyster-eating minority the enemy.
对于牡蛎酒吧的命运，我们似曾相识。由于受到西方在乌克兰影响力日增以及北约(NATO)扩大的威胁，普京既在乌克兰也通过国内文化战对西方进行回击。在俄罗斯，一场宣传战已将莫斯科亲西方的、喜欢吃牡蛎的少数派变成了敌人。
It is an allegory straight out of Tolstoy’s playbook. InAnna Karenina, the corpulent, adulterous, French-speaking Oblonsky orders a meal of Flensburg oysters, Parmesan and Chablis. His friend, the proletarian hero Levin, prefers cabbage soup and porridge.
这是托尔斯泰(Tolstoy)剧本中常有的一幕。在《安娜愠列尼娜》(Anna Karenina)中，臃肿、荒淫、操着法语的奥勃朗斯基(Oblonsky)要了一桌包括弗伦斯堡牡蛎、帕尔马干酪和夏布利酒的大餐。而他的朋友、无产阶级英雄列文(Levin)更喜欢卷心菜汤和粥。
On the Oblonsky-Levin scale, I probably lean more to the former. Returning to Russia from abroad, I’ve been known to stick copious amounts of jamón, Brie and Parmesan in my handbag. Yet during the ban I’ve found myself eating things such as scallops from Murmansk and crab from Magadan — and licking my fingers after every bite.
如果将奥勃朗斯基与列文放在天平的两端，我可能更倾向于前者。很多人知道，我从国外回到俄罗斯时，手提包里总是塞满了伊比利亚火腿、布里干酪和帕尔马干酪。然而，在禁令期间，我发现自己吃东西——如来自摩尔曼斯克(Murmansk)的扇贝和来自马加丹(Magadan)的螃蟹——时，每咬一口都要吮吸自己的手指。
Alexander Yezhel, an expert in the Russian mollusc industry, is inclined to agree with me. A former colonel for Russia’s security services with piercing blue eyes and a permatan, Yezhel reinvented himself upon retirement as a small-business owner. His trade: oysters.
俄罗斯牡蛎行业专家亚历山大叶热列(Alexander Yezhel)倾向于同意我的观点。这位有着一双锐利的蓝色眼睛的俄罗斯情报部门前上校，在退休后当起了做牡蛎贸易的小企业主。
Yezhel says Oyster Bar didn’t survive because its owners were “dilettantes”. For stalwarts, such as his own company Zhemchuzhina (Pearl), switching to local molluscs from Russia’s Far East and Black Sea regions has been good for the bottom line. Because the domestic oysters are cheaper, he can sell them at a higher mark-up than the French ones he used to import, a business strategy that has led to a 50 per cent increase in Zhemchuzhina’s profits, he says.
叶热列说，牡蛎酒吧之所以倒闭，因为其所有者“不专业”。对于内行的公司，比如他自己的Zhemchuzhina（意思为珍珠），转而销售来自俄罗斯远东和黑海地区的本土牡蛎带来了不俗的业绩。他说，因为本土牡蛎更便宜，较之过去进口的法国牡蛎可以赚取更高的差价，这一商业策略已经使公司利润增加了50%。
This is the Kremlin’s dream scenario and illustrates the two-pronged goal of the food ban: to boost patriotism and give Russians a chance to thumb their noses at the west, while also giving a fillip to Russia’s agricultural industry, which has lagged behind since the fall of the Soviet Union.
这是克里姆林宫梦想的一幕，而且展示了食品禁令的双重目标：提振国民的爱国主义，给俄罗斯人一个蔑视西方的机会，同时也可以刺激一下自苏联解体以来一直处于落后状态的俄罗斯农业。
The stimulus the ban provides is great in theory. But it does little to solve the industry’s longstanding problems: primarily, poor logistics and a lack of incentive to modernise and make the industry more competitive. While Yezhel’s oyster business may be booming, it is still dependent on the entrepreneur’s warehouse of aquariums in the Moscow suburbs. So fragmented is Russia’s national logistics system that it is quicker and easier for a shipment of oysters to travel from the country’s Far East to central Russia via Moscow than it would be to make the journey between the two destinations directly.
进口禁令带来的激励在理论上是巨大的。但对于解决该行业长期存在的问题基本上没有帮助：主要是糟糕的物流，以及缺乏现代化、提高俄罗斯农产品行业竞争力的激励机制。虽然叶热列的牡蛎生意或许很红火，但它仍依赖于这名企业家设在莫斯科郊区的水族仓库。俄罗斯的全国物流体系如此割裂，以至于一批牡蛎从远东地区经由莫斯科到达俄罗斯中部，要比直接在这两个地区之间运输更快速、更便捷。
The ban isn’t making Russian food products more competitive but creating an artificial lack of supply and driving up food prices in the process.
进口禁令并未让俄罗斯的食品更具竞争力，却人为制造了供应不足，在此过程中推高了食品价格。
Annual food inflation has risen to 20 per cent in Russia since the ban. Yet few in Russia seem to either make the connection between the two or to mind. In a poll conducted this month by Levada Centre, Russia’s most respected polling agency, two in three respondents said they viewed the ban positively.
自实施禁令以来，俄罗斯年度食品通胀率已上升至20%。然而，在俄罗斯，似乎很少有人将两者联系起来，或者在意这一点。俄罗斯最受尊敬的民调机构列瓦达中心(Levada Centre)本月做的一项民调中，三分之二的受访者表示，他们支持这一禁令。
Authorities risk alienating a larger swathe of the population with its newest decree, which declares that any sanctioned European or American food products that have found their way into Russia must be destroyed on the spot.
俄罗斯当局最近冒着惹恼更多俄罗斯民众的风险颁布了最新法令：任何禁运的欧洲或美国食品，一经发现进入俄罗斯，必须当场销毁。
Since the ban took effect on August 6, Russian state television has shown blanket coverage of the staged destructions, which at times appear like a parody of Russian bureaucracy. In one video, a dour Russian official gravely reads out the death decree for three frozen Hungarian geese found in a Tatarstan food shop. With half-a-dozen witnesses watching, the geese are then carefully arranged on the ground and run over multiple times by a bulldozer.
自该法令8月6日生效以来，俄罗斯国家电视台对销毁禁运食品进行了铺天盖地的报道，有时看起来像是在“高级黑”俄罗斯的官僚主义。在一段视频中，一名脸色阴沉的俄罗斯官员严肃地宣读着对在一家鞑靼斯坦人开的食杂店发现的3只匈牙利冷冻鹅的销毁令。在6名见证者的注视下，这些鹅随后被煞有介事地排列在地上，然后用推土机反复碾压。
In a country that lived through the Leningrad blockade and bread lines, the destruction decree has not been as widely popular as the ban. Nearly half of Russians polled by Levada said they viewed the new measure somewhat or very negatively, arguing that the food should be donated to the needy instead.
在一个经历过列宁格勒(Leningrad)大围困和购买面包都要排队的国家，销毁令并没有像进口禁令那样得到广泛支持。勒瓦达中心调查的俄罗斯人中，将近一半受访者称，他们对新措施持有一定程度或者非常负面的看法，认为应该把这些食品分发给穷人，而非销毁。
One friend said her 95-year-old grandmother had watched the broadcast of the destruction, convinced that the authorities were only destroying food that was rotten or dangerous, so difficult was it to believe that they would raze it for another reason.
一位朋友说，自己95岁的祖母看了销毁食品的电视转播，但她相信当局只是在销毁腐烂或危险的食品，很难相信会因为其他理由将食品全部销毁。
The new decree may not be working entirely. On a recent evening at a Mediterranean restaurant in Moscow, my waiter cheekily confided that the halloumi on my plate had come from Greece, one of the sanctioned countries. Banning Brie and bulldozing geese is an easy matter on paper. Getting rid of the systemic problems — well, that’s another matter.
新法令可能也无法彻底实施。最近一天晚上，我到莫斯科一家地中海风味餐厅用餐，服务生嬉皮笑脸地对我吐露，我盘中的哈罗米芝士来自希腊——禁运国家之一。禁运布里干酪、碾压冷冻鹅在理论上都很简单。而摆脱系统性问题——嗯，那是另一回事了。
