Signs of a Russian Thaw (Toward Business)

And business was good. A year earlier, Mr. Telkov, who has tightly cropped brown hair and the shoulders of a hockey player, traveled to Guangzhou, on China’s southern coast — he speaks Mandarin, along with Arabic and English — to attend a trade show and meet with local fabric manufacturers. He negotiated a production contract on the spot. By cutting out the middlemen, Mr. Telkov was able to sell fabric for less than half the price charged by his more-established Russian competitors: around $5 per linear meter, as opposed to $12. In less than a year, Mr. Telkov had recouped his start-up capital of around $1 million and had a fleet of trucks, three warehouses and 18 employees. “I saw no limits to how big it could get,” said Mr. Telkov, now 33.

That May morning, not long after Mr. Telkov got to his warehouse, a convoy of speeding cars pulled up. Out came 10 police officers, some carrying automatic weapons. The officers told Mr. Telkov that he was under suspicion of copyright violations and that they would have to confiscate some of his goods as evidence.

Other men in plain clothes walked around and pointed to rolls of fabric: Take this, take that. The search lasted the whole day and continued into the next. In the end, the police carried away 527 rolls of fabric. Mr. Telkov was confused, not to mention panicked: a big furniture exhibition in Moscow was two days away, and he had just lost 80 percent of his inventory. He went from one government office to another, as he put it, “knocking on doors and saying, ‘Guys, you stole my goods, where are they?’ ” He got no answers.

Two months later, in July, investigators officially charged Mr. Telkov with copyright infringement. The indictment cites designs for five styles of fabric that Mr. Telkov had supposedly stolen; among them was a leopard-print pattern, as well as one that resembled a slab of marble. It was funny, absurd even, but it was also uncomfortably serious. If found guilty, Mr. Telkov could spend up to six years in prison.

Some 100,000 Russian businesspeople are either in prison or have been subject to criminal prosecution. Among the most famous is Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, who had been in prison for more than a decade until he was unexpectedly released this month by President Vladimir V. Putin. The pardon, coming as it did on the cusp of the Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, Russia, was viewed more as a political expedient than as a harbinger of reform.

Mr. Telkov says that in his situation, investigators seemed more interested in pressuring him to plead guilty than in building a case; he says he was promised a suspended sentence, in which he would avoid prison but lose his confiscated goods. That’s how Russian businesspeople who find themselves in the middle of such cases often choose to plead. But Mr. Telkov was, simply put, a nuisance, filing requests and demanding to see the fabric that had been taken from him. If someone wanted to intimidate him or wear him down, it wasn’t working.

Finally, in January, at the request of investigators, a judge ordered Mr. Telkov arrested and held in pretrial detention. He was put into a cell with 10 other men, most of whom were facing drug charges. As Mr. Telkov remembers, investigators suggested that it was his own fault — if he would only make a deal, he could go home.

Weeks passed, then months. Mr. Telkov’s wife, Adilya, said she was sure that the court would see the absurdity of the case and release her husband. “At first I was absolutely certain that if not at this hearing, then the next one. If not there, then one more,” she said. After a few months, though, she said she “stopped being naïve.”

A Well-Placed Advocate

When Boris Titov heard about Mr. Telkov’s case, it struck him as a clear reminder of why his job is necessary. Mr. Titov, who holds the official title of presidential commissioner for entrepreneurs’ rights, was appointed to his position — which reports directly to Mr. Putin — in June 2012. Fighting corruption and easing the way for business are among the main priorities, at least in rhetoric, of Mr. Putin’s current economic agenda. After years of oil-fueled growth and rising consumption, the economy is slowing, with growth in gross domestic product falling to just over 1 percent. Kremlin officials hope that an improved climate for small business will help save the country from a prolonged period of stagnation, thus preserving social and political stability.

Russian Service, and With Please and Thank You

Finding attractive cabin crews has never posed much of a problem for Aeroflot. Training Russians to be nice to customers, well, there’s the rub for the Russian airline and many other Russian businesses. But Aeroflot seems to have done it.

Aeroflot, which says its classic Soviet emblem of a winged hammer and sickle now represents a smile, has been at the forefront of a broad and transformative trend in the Russian service industry brought about by the rising demands of middle-class consumers.

Skytrax, a company in Britain that surveys passengers after flights, found that Aeroflot had the best service of any airline in Eastern Europe this year, a mini Velvet Revolution for a region accustomed to old ideas of Russian service.

Aeroflot beat American carriers like Delta and airlines offering old-school European service like Austrian Airlines.

“Anna, you just showed the champagne bottle but didn’t say anything,” one instructor gently admonished a trainee, 23-year-old Anna Grishina.

“This is the silent service of Soviet times,” the instructor went on. “You need to talk to her,” she said, indicating a fellow student posing as a passenger. “And you need to smile and smile and smile.”

Gone are the scowls, the cold shoulders and the wordless encounters. Aeroflot introduced training that included compelling candidates to memorize dialogues of pleasantries and reinforcing rules on smiling. Its success in improving service is being taken to heart by other companies in Russia’s consumer industries.

Airlines, restaurant chains and coffee shops are putting in place ever more elaborate service training that is yielding results; a new generation of Russian flight attendants, shop assistants and waitresses has become — amazingly, given this country’s sour attitude to friendly service for so many years — customer-oriented.

“It’s a really hot topic in Russian companies,” said Alex Sukharevsky, a partner and leader of the consumer goods practice in the former Soviet Union for McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, which has a booming business here advising retail companies.

The trend is one sign, along with the demands for better governance seen in recent street protests, of how a decade of oil money trickling down is transforming Russian society. In politics as in business, rising wealth has given birth to rising demands from an expanding middle class.

“All of us know that Russian culture by definition is not the most client-oriented culture,” said Mr. Sukharevsky, a specialist on Russian customer service. He has taken a number of companies here through what he calls the “consumer experience transformation.”

Russian service employees, it appears, can be trained to be nice. Rosinter, which operates T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants and Costa Coffee shops in Russia, has a training academy that focuses on customer service, as does Dixy, a grocery store chain. The national retail bank, Sberbank, has set about retraining 210,000 tellers to become “customer service specialists.”

Baristas at Starbucks in Russia smile as brightly as anywhere else. McDonald’s internal training for managers in Russia follows a global curriculum, but it puts special emphasis here on “communication skills” and a course called “emotional leadership,” said Oksana Belaychuk, the company’s spokeswoman.

With these lessons drilled in, at a McDonald’s in Russia it is more common than not to find a line of smiling employees, decked out in pressed shirts, all calling out cheerily to serve the next customer.

“Hello, I’m listening to you,” a young counterman with the name tag Sergei said on a recent evening, using this polite Russian expression that is akin to “How may I serve you?”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 2, 2013

A picture caption in an earlier version of this article misidentified the role of the woman serving flight attendants in training at the Aeroflot school. She, too, was training, not instructing other flight attendants.

Foreign Automakers See Potential in Russian Market

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