It came out of the blue… No one was expecting this. The enormity of Russia’s financial collapse on Aug. 17, 1998 only really hit home with me the next day. “We are so f-cked,” Sergey, one of our most successful sales manager, explained to me standing in the middle of the office. “The whole system has just crashed. It will take years for us to recover.”
It’s hard to exaggerate the scale and shock of the 1998 crash. The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke. Foreign companies were closing offices. All business activity was halted. ATM machines were disconnected and banks were closed.
I remember sitting at my desk. The phones were dead. I really, literally, had nothing to do… So, I decided to leave Russia and go back to the States.
— TO BE CONTINUED —