New AmCham chief still feels Russia’s pull

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Nathan Gray – December 18, 2013) It was more than business that pulled banker Alexis Rodzianko to Russia in 1995.

Eight decades earlier, his great-grandfather had chaired two sessions of the pre-Revolutionary Duma and conducted abdication negotiations with Tsar Nicholas II. Now Rodzianko had competing job offers between New York, London and Moscow.

“The call of history made me take the job in Russia,” Rodzianko, who became president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia last month, told The Moscow News. “I didn’t expect it to really work out, but I thought I’d better get it out of my system, or it’d bother me for the rest of my life.”

His posting with a start-up investment bank was not his first time in Russia. Fresh out of Dartmouth College in 1973, he became an interpreter for American and Soviet delegations touring each other’s countries, his knowledge of Russian since childhood proving an asset in his test at the U.S. State Department.

“It was about growing pineapples in Hawaii,” he said. “The word ‘pineapple’ was supposed to trip you up, but I knew it, so I passed.”

A family community

Rodzianko’s family fled Russia during the Civil War, his father’s side landing in Serbia and his mother’s side in Estonia. The upheavals of World War II and fears of the Red Army took both of his parents to Munich and eventually to New York, where Rodzianko was born in 1951.

“It was a big family, and most of them made it and lived nearby,” he said. “Leo Tolstoy’s daughter had a fund called the Tolstoy Foundation, which helped resettle refugees from communism, and she helped my family and a lot of other families.”

Rodzianko’s time as an interpreter took him to the SALT II arms limitation talks, including the 1979 summit where the treaty was signed, but a less prominent element of the job helped him focus on his ultimate career.

“One of the trips was to all the best business schools in the U.S., and each of the deans would give his pitch, and I translated it, interpreted it into Russian,” he said. “I came out of that and said, ‘This isn’t a bad thing for me to do.'”

He received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980 and embarked on the first stage of his banking career in New York, which culminated in his appointment as head of Chemical Bank’s emerging markets desk in 1991.

Starting small

Arriving in Moscow in 1995, Rodzianko worked at MC Securities’ boutique bank until early 1997, when he moved to J.P. Morgan to set up its new Moscow office.

After preparatory stints in New York and London, his team arrived in Moscow just a few weeks before Russia’s August 1998 default crisis, and scrambled to reduce its approximately $250 million exposure to the market.

“The morning we came to Moscow [we] decided, ‘Things don’t seem right, let’s get out of this position,'” Rodzianko said. “We were left with about $50 million at the time when the music stopped, so we had some losses, but on a relative basis, quite modest.”

Aftermath of a second crisis

After time at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, Rodzianko went to to the smaller operator Metropol in 2010. There he encountered a series of problems, a legacy of the 2008 global financial crisis.

“The portfolio investor has shied away from emerging markets as a group,” he said. “The kind of deals you would see that a smaller investment bank would be able to get just aren’t happening with the kind of frequency that happened before the crisis.”

Instead of the recovery in speculative investment he and Metropol expected, the bank’s strongest business was in the fixed-income market, but its success was attenuated by its lower resources compared to larger players.

“You have to have liquidity available at any time, at advantageous prices, and that’s not the case for a small institution,” he said. “And I think, if you look around the Russian landscape, it’s not an unusual situation. You’ve got pretty much no independent investment banks left.”

Moving in cycles

The cyclical nature of markets, though, means that the sober outlook will not last forever. Many of AmCham’s member companies performed better in 2013 than their sisters elsewhere, an indicator of Russia’s relative strength, Rodzianko said.

He was about to return to the United States upon completion of his contract with Metropol earlier this year, when he was contacted about the presidency of AmCham.

“The historical motherland didn’t want to let me go just yet…. When the headhunters called, I said, ‘Well, it’s probably the only job in Russia that I’m really interested in taking,'” he said. “It’s not even a job, it’s a position, a chance to serve, I guess, a chance to give back – and a lucky chance, because not everybody gets it.”