The Greening of the East

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Among the countries of the former communist bloc, Russia is perhaps the most active player in sport and the new capitalism. Igor Malyshkov (the Russian equivalent of Bulgaria’s Georgy Tchucklev) was born in Riga, Latvia, but lives in Moscow, where he runs the 89 companies his empire controls. I trailed along as he took a group of investors out of Moscow’s centre heading west along a weaving two-lane motorway into the dense birch and pine forest of the city’s richest suburbs. Eventually, we stopped on a piece of land along the Moskva River near the old summer dacha of Boris Yeltsin, where Malyshkov plans to develop a golf and housing complex.

At the time of my visit, there were just two golf courses in Russia, one in Latvia (the Ozo Golf Club in Riga, a club owned primarily by NHL player Sandis Ozolinsh) and two in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the plans are ambitious. While in Russia, I met with Leonid Tyagachev, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, and Viktor Korobchenko, the first deputy mayor of Moscow. The country’s plan, according to them, was to make the game as big there as tennis.

After touring the property, Malyshkov took us further west into the forested suburbs to what he called Moscow’s “only North American-style gated community,” his vision for future golf communities in Russia. The homes were palaces, each set on quarter-acre plots of land separated by picket fences, small parks and sculpture gardens. The manager of the development, a gregarious chain-smoking man of astonishing girth, toured us through one of the homes. “U.S.,” he said. “Six million.”

Back in his office, which looked like a faux brick-lined dungeon in Hogwarts Castle, the grinning fat man made a show of pressing a button on his desk. I thought we were headed for a subterranean pool of sharks. Instead, the coffee table made a whirring noise and its middle rose up, revealing a huge fish tank. Inside the fish tank were two model houses, which lit up from the inside and began to rotate. We were looking at scale replicas of the multimillion-dollar homes we’d just seen, the type of homes that will no doubt line some of the golf courses these men will build in the untapped markets of Russia, Latvia and Bulgaria.

The manager pressed a button, and the fish tank returned from whence it came. This brought about a few seconds of stunned silence. The mood in the room was twofold; slack-jawed amazement among Westerners and from the Russians a kind of giddy confidence about the scale of their ambition.

On a warmish, sunny Bansko morning, we set off from the Spa Complex Katarino to make the five-kilometre drive to the site of the Pirin Golf and Country Club, which is about halfway through construction. The landscape calls to mind the British Columbia interior: wide gorgeous high-­altitude plains full of white and black pine, all caught between the striking Pirin and Rila ranges. The Bansko ski resort looks down onto the golf course. This is the spot in Bulgaria where you can tell the Bulgarians looked at Whistler and said, “We can do that here,” ­­though you rarely have to swerve around an old goatherd shepherding his flock down the middle of the road on the way to Blackcomb.

But the growth of golf in these countries is not just financial; it’s symbolic. To developers like Tchucklev and Malyshkov, golf represents the West ­– or more specifically, the things newly democratized market economies romanticize about the West. The freedom, the space, the clean air, the sense of privilege. These are illogical signifiers for any pursuit to embody, but golf’s allure is tied as much to the heart as the head.

There’s even a moral component, if the men growing the game in these countries are to be taken at face value. Igor Malyshkov believes golf can be a positive social tool for people trying to find a postcommunist way of living. “Many, many hearts will be opened by golf in Russia and Latvia,” he said. “Golf will change us, I believe that. It has rules, it has codes of etiquette, it has a history of certain types of behaviour. The Russian people need this now, where we are.”

Georgy Tchucklev echoed these sentiments. “Yes, okay,” he said as we sat down to dinner at a traditional Bulgarian restaurant in central Sofia. “Golf is good for business, but it’s for more than that.” He took a slug of Rakia, the 80-proof liquor Bulgarians down like tap water, then touched his sternum. “It makes you a better person too. Bulgarians will like that.”

I asked him if the rise in golf’s popularity in the former Eastern bloc was coming about because golf is, at the end of the day, an individual game with a strong honour code. Did this help explain its growing appeal to a population so highly collectivized under Soviet domination? He thought about that and then shook his head, which was surprising since it seemed a valid point. Then I remembered that in Bulgaria, shaking your head “no” really means “yes.” 

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