He’ll be the first to admit it was selfish. But when Robert Jan Voerman heard about the invasion of Ukraine, his first thought was: ‘Thank you Putin, 28 years of shit.’ Since the fall of the Wall, the CEO of moving company Voerman has brought multinationals such as Shell and ABN to Russia. Orders are now flowing in from the same companies again. This time to move their household effects and those of their employees back.
The rush to leave the country is enormous, says Voerman, who is in contact with Moscow via a Zoom connection in his office in The Hague. There the storage of 6,900 square meters is filled to the brim with hundreds of McDonald’s office chairs, entire gas pumps and moving boxes of the expats who work for all those international companies. ‘Many foreigners left before we could agree on a price’, says Voerman. “They said: we’re gone, the cleaning lady has the key, will you send the things after?”
The pace at which companies announced their departure from Russia in recent weeks did not only surprise Voerman. “Nobody expected an exodus on such a large scale and so quickly,” said sanctions specialist Maria Shagina of the Finnish Institute of International Relations. What started with the oil giants and tech companies, not the first to associate with social entrepreneurship, has now grown into a list of 450 partly or wholly exiting companies that a Yale research team is keeping a close eye on.
Exodus of young Russians
While companies have gotten away with a social media post on other social issues, such as Black Lives Matter, public pressure (or, in Nestlé’s case, criticism from the Ukrainian president himself) now leads them to vote with their feet. ‘This conflict is also of a completely different order,’ says Shagina. ‘You have a country invading a neighboring country, the images of civilians being bombed. If you are associated with that, it causes enormous reputational damage. You can’t just write it off, it takes a long time.’
While many foreign companies promise to continue paying wages or continuing essential activities, Shagina says their departure will add to the pain of sanctions for the Russian people. Not only are some 150,000 Russians working for one of the departing companies, according to a conservative estimate by Bloomberg, the food and medicine supply is also at risk – things that are deliberately spared by sanctions.
Moreover, the corporate exodus has also triggered another exodus from Russia: that of some 200,000 young, highly educated Russians. “The bottom line is that Russia is going back to the 1990s. With poverty and scarcity of food.’
But unlike now, entrepreneurs like Voerman still smelled opportunities in the former Soviet Union. When he arrived in Moscow as a young descendant of his family business in 1990, he said he found ‘a playground’. ‘Precisely because there was nothing, I knew: anything is possible here.’ Hotel chains that wanted to open a branch in the country had to import everything from counters to beds and crockery. It happened in Voerman’s trucks, as he also brought Unilever and Philips to Russia and, vice versa, Gazprom’s headquarters to the Netherlands.
Appeal to creativity
At the peak, he was even allowed to accompany the Olympic torch relay of 65 thousand kilometers from Athens to Sochi with ten trucks. ‘It was the longest route that flame has ever traveled’, Voerman smiles. “We had to go all over Russia with the idea that in every region an athlete would be ready to take over, but that was not the case everywhere. In the end, our drivers put on such an Olympic outfit and walked part of the route.’ According to Voerman, it is typical of doing business in Russia: that has always involved improvisation.
And now the creativity of the entrepreneur and his colleague Dennis van Diemen in Moscow is once again being called upon. They have to get the boxes with ‘books’ and ‘kitchenware’ from Russia to The Hague. And that is no mean feat. ‘The Ukrainians were the drivers in recent years, but they are now in the army,’ says Voerman. ‘And the Russians find it exciting to drive in the EU with a Russian license plate.’
In the end, Voerman succeeds: an ailing Russian state company appears to dare to lend drivers to Voerman. After a journey of a week, via Minsk, the Baltic States and Poland, the first driver arrives in The Hague. There is not much time to rest: tonight he will drive back to Russia with a new load. This time with the stuff of Russians returning.
What particularly hurts Voerman is that this will probably be his last feat of arms in Russia. Unless regime change comes, he doesn’t expect international companies to resume operations anytime soon. He has already been ordered by a credit card company to throw the entire estate in the garbage container. It means farewell to 20 percent turnover, but more importantly: 23 employees and 28 years of life’s work. “We turned on the light in Russia and now we have to turn it off again.”