The entrepreneur behind Vesuvio pizza came here to check it out and stayed after a stint in Tallinn
Leading up to the Post’s 10th birthday this month, each week we’ve been highlighting members of the local community
who have played leading roles over the years. This week, we talk to Myron Spolsky, co-founder of Vesuvio Pizza and head of the Svit International trading company.
“I came to see what was happening here, because Gorbachev had just announced in December of 1987 perestroika and glasnost,” says Canadian Myron Spolsky, 53, of his reasons for coming to Ukraine.
Of Ukrainian descent, Spolsky was at the time working as a coordinator of cultural programs for the Manitoba government. He was particularly interested in visiting Ukraine because he’d just organized a series of Ukrainian contemporary music concerts in Winnipeg, themed to the observance of a millennium of Christianity in Ukraine.
Another reason to come to Ukraine was that the government was turning over, and as a political appointee he would soon be out of work.
“I stayed in Ukraine for two months and looked around,” he says. “It was 1988, still the Soviet Union, bleak and dreary.”
While in Ukraine, Spolsky got intrigued by the idea of trading in the mineral fertilizers of which the Soviet Union was the world’s leading producer. As the USSR opened up, Spolsky started getting phone calls from people back West intrigued by the possibilities in Eastern Europe. People “from everywhere” were calling the Ukrainian-speaking Canadian who had some familiarity with the region.
Going Baltic
But setting up a business here back then wasn’t easy.
“I couldn’t set up a company here in Ukraine, nobody would let me register here, so I moved to Tallinn, Estonia and registered a company there in September of 1988, and started working from out there.” The Baltic republics were more liberal in their application of Soviet law, which was good for a Canadian citizen who had been involved in Ukrainian dissident circles.
Having established Svit International in Tallinn, Spolsky soon broadened his trading operations, setting up in Moscow. For some time, Tallinn-Kyiv-Moscow was his regular business circuit.
The Tallinn era lasted until the end of 1990. In January, 1991 the political crisis came.
“There were shootings in Vilnius at the TV and radio center,” he remembers. “Twenty people were killed, or something like that. That night we were in Tallinn and were supposed to fly the next morning to Kyiv, and we could hear the Soviet army transport planes landing every ten minutes. We woke up in the morning and there were tanks.”
He sent his Ukrainian wife back to Kyiv and stayed for a short while in Tallinn, getting a sense of things. The situation didn’t seem encouraging.
“We basically started to realize there is nothing much we could do, and the Estonians were becoming more and more isolated. Everybody who wasn’t Estonian wasn’t a part of that society and had to leave,” Spolsky says. Still, Ukrainians encountered a sympathy that Russians didn’t.
“Inevitably they were saying, we’re waiting for you to do something in Ukraine. We’re waiting for Kyiv to become independent.”
“We had some young very interesting employees. A lot of them were involved in the independence movement. Some of them are even parliament deputies in [Estonia now].”
In May of 1991 the Spolsky family decided to leave Estonia, packing up their belongings and driving to Kyiv. Driving along the Latvian-Russian border wasn’t a good idea, he remembers.
“We were driving in the middle of the night and Latvian guards had their guns out, and for a nice Canadian guy it was a bit of a shock.”
Pizza and the world
At that time, a Canadian-owned pizza maker had been operating in Estonia and experiencing some business troubles. Spolsky proposed to them that he move the pizza operations to Kyiv, where the market was wide open, and that they give him co-ownership. An agreement was reached, and Vesuvio Pizza started working in early 1992 on Leontovycha, in the city center.
“Without any permits, sanitary inspection, fire inspection, nothing. We were in business. Boom. That’s it,” he remembers. Vesuvio would bounce around several more locations before ending up on Shevchenko, where it remains now.
Another Vesuvio location, on Reytarska, opened in 1993 and is still there. In 1997, Vesuvio started producing frozen pizzas and supplying them to Kyiv stores. Spolsky says he’s always been proud of the quality of Vesuvio’s pizzas; to facilitate production, the company even opened its own flour mill in southern Ukraine.
“Pizza is fun, it brings stable money every day, but Svit is the main one that handles all the issues,” Spolsky says of his affairs.
After moving to Ukraine, the company broadened its operations to the point where “we trade anything that’s tradable anywhere in the world,” as he puts it. Right now Svit International operates in Romania, South America, and India, and has offices in Kyiv and Odessa. In the next six months Spolsky plans to renew his operations in Ukraine, which stopped after the 1998 crisis. He’ll be focusing mainly on export of semi-processed industrial materials.
Why stay?
Asked why he’s still in Ukraine all these years later, Spolsky has an answer similar to the one many ex-pats offer: “I enjoy the people,” he says. “There’s an ambience here that I enjoy.”
He admits, however, that for a while before the Orange Revolution he thought about going back home to Canada.
“There were signs of things going bad, thugs coming into power, people’s behavior changing. The general culture dropped significantly, people lost the spark of dynamism. We had several unpleasant incidents here with children of the elite. They’re coming up [to Vesuvio] drunk or high on drugs. You ask them to leave, you get closed down.”
Spolsky’s young employees, he says, are very active politically. He supports them in their activism, even though he says they almost destroyed his office copy machine printing out Yushchenko leaflets last year. But things are much better now.
“It’s a very different country than it was a year and a half ago,” he says.
