Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
This old man is Dim.
He’s Russian
and I’m American.
We’ve been friends for more
than half of my life.
We met on the eve
of the Soviet Union’s collapse,
when Dim was 58,
the age I am now.
I’m Dmitry Zimin...I just took appeared on a program
whose name I’ve already forgotten,
but it doesn't matter.
I happened to be born in 1933, by the way.
Here's also an amazing thing:
He was an American, by the way, young enough to be my son,
and we became friends for life.
His Russian is about as good as my English,
very bad that is.
In December 2021, a week before Christmas,
I got a call from Dim’s son, Boris,
he urgently summoned me from Chicago
to Dim’s bedroom in a rented apartment
in far-away Cyprus.
There, Dim told us of his plan:
at the end of the year,
he would undergo euthanasia in Switzerland.
I asked to be buried in ski boots.
Here's the headstone, here's the picture
and then the inscription:
this subscriber has been disconnected.
In 1992, during a brief period of friendship
between our two superpowers,
we built a very successful
telecom company -
VimpelCom,
It became the first ever Russian company
listed outside of Russia,
and the first telecommunication start-up
listed on the New York Stock Exchange,
making us both independently wealthy.
30 years ago,
connecting people, we were looking forward
to a very bright future.
Two months after my friend’s passing,
Russia invaded Ukraine.
I found myself silently grateful
that Dim didn’t have to see it.
He wouldn’t have to witness the horror
and atrocity I saw the Russian army
commit in the Kyiv region.
The prosperous future for Russia,
Dim’s country,
and America, my homeland,
that we dreamed of in the ‘90s
was gone.
Our story became a poignant chronicle
of the clash between
the American dream and Russian destiny.
When I watch this footage,
I don’t know what to make of it.
Had Dim given us hints about his plans?
Could we have figured it out?
This is probably going to be my last journey.
In September, Dim invited us to
what he dubbed his “last journey.
I assumed it was just an older man's way
of describing an adventure.
Maybe a cruise?
Dim left Russia in January 2021,
just as Russian opposition leader
Alexei Navalny was getting arrested.
For more than 12 years,
Dim’s family financially backed Navalny
along with other causes fiercely
opposed by their country.
In Russia, Dim was the only one
openly doing this work.
My dear Augie, you haven't changed a bit
since the last time I saw you.
Three months before his assisted suicide,
no one realized that Dim had meticulously
orchestrated every detail of his final days.
Bringing his wife, Maya, onto the boat
wasn't easy, but it meant a lot to him.
He also invited a friend, a film director,
to capture footage and leave behind
memories for his grandchildren.
You remember everything!
Plexsys systems are in the back.
Is it okay if I tell your story, Dim?
I know he would have said, “Yes.
I've thought a lot about why he chose to end
his life on his own terms,
and why he did it before 2022.
Dim had cancer, but it wasn’t terminal.
He was beginning to lose his memory,
which terrified him.
“What’s the point of living without
my memories? Dim’d ask.
But more than anything, he feared
witnessing the outbreak of a new
large-scale war—one that the US
would warn about daily that fall.
I got excited.
Can I have a cognac? A little one.
Gentlemen, cheers! My hand is shaking horribly.
It'll stop shaking when I have a drink.
Our story began in the '80s,
when Russia was still part of the USSR.
Dim was a top-secret Soviet radio engineer,
working on developing an
anti-American missile radar system.
For decades, the Americans and Soviets
had been bitter enemies.
In the minds of most Americans,
myself included,
the Soviet Union was the evil empire.
But then, out of the blue for us
regular folks, the new Soviet leader
Gorbachev shook things up
with the perestroika,
tore down the Berlin Wall,
and dismantled the communist system.
Suddenly, the endless race between
our military tech came to a halt.
Let us look forward to a future of
Clear skies.
for all mankind. Thank you.
Thank you.
We must realize that we lived under a totalitarian regime.
A totalitarian regime cannot exist
if it has no enemies.
I think I welcomed Gorbachev from
the very beginning.
He was very appealing to me.
Gorbachev and his whole new way of thinking.
He revolutionized politics.
I was 22, a sophomore at Stanford,
walking around the university campus one day,
when I passed the Slavic department door
and saw a sign advertising
an upcoming trip to the Soviet Union.
For some reason, I was intrigued.
Just like that,
I found myself in Moscow at the same time
that the Soviets were finding out
what perestroika meant.
There, my first deal was trading
a Walkman player with headphones
for tickets to the Bolshoi theater.
Back then, I had no idea
what the second one would end up being.
I would say there have been three
major periods in my life.
The first period lasted 30 years.
I worked in the military-industrial complex,
at the Mints Science Institute.
I was the deputy chief designer of this giant
radio locator station.
Have you seen any pictures of it?
This is a radar station belonging to Moscow's
missile defense system.
The missile defense systems were developed under
an agreement with the Americans.
The famous Brezhnev-Nixon agreement.
The most important event in
the development of Soviet-American relations
was the visit of Leonid Brezhnev,
The General Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
to the United States.
Despite the Cold War’s fear and tension,
back then you could still see the Soviet Leader
and the American President together
in the same helicopter.
I was about seven or eight
years old back then.
Ten years earlier, my parents had emigrated
from Mexico and Colombia to the States
with 24 dollars to their name.
This was shortly after
the Cuban Missile Crisis,
when Russia had engaged in nuclear
blackmail for the first time.
My father, a highly trained engineer,
worked tirelessly in various jobs.
For a while, he even pumped gas day
and night, hustling to build a new,
peaceful life for his children.
According to that agreement,
the famous Nixon-Brezhnev agreement,
We could have one missile defense system each.
The visit resulted in a new set of Soviet-American
agreements, including an agreement
to prevent nuclear war.
We chose to deploy our missile defense system around Moscow.
The Americans chose to deploy their missile defense system,
At a place that I've forgotten the name of, where their
missile launch facilities aimed at the Soviet Union
were located.
It's this big field.
They were guarding this place,
and we were guarding Moscow,
which, generally speaking, was an impossible task.
Because in order to destroy
the ¤AmericanØ missile launch facilities,
which could withstand a load of about
six kilograms per centimeter squared,
only a direct hit could work.
They had a very sturdy armor.
On the other hand, all it would take to destroy Moscow
was a single rocket being able to penetrate.
Moscow could be destroyed with one hydrogen bomb,
So Moscow's missile defense system
was money being thrown away, no defense at all.
Brezhnev, senile and ill, lived in Moscow.
So we were making a city defense system,
while the Americans,
their system was called Safeguard,
were protecting their strategic missiles.
The anti-missile system was
only made around Moscow.
Btw, despite the fact that decades have passed,
I’m not sure that all this can be told.
Although there is nothing like that here.
Please be careful with this information.
There was a completely stifling climate of secrecy.
Secrecy, and sometimes ridiculous,
utterly ridiculous secrecy,
was prioritized over efficiency.
Why has the Institute of Physics and
Technology produced so many geniuses,
far more than the Faculty of Physics?
I asked myself that question too,
I knew many people there.
Hell, it was the culture.
It was almost free entry.
There was a library next door.
They had a different life.
In some ways, I was jealous of them.
Of course.
You were completely classified personnel,
as far as I know.
Totally closed off.
So you couldn't go abroad?
Of course! No way!
All secret papers in the Soviet Union were
divided into secret, top secret and
top secret of special importance.
In order to have access to documents of "special
importance," you had to have this form.
Wiretapping was completely official.
The whole system was shoddy:
It all came down to the fact that
before I could even call another city from my office,
I would have to call the authorities to
say I was ordering a long-distance call.
And I was expressly forbidden to have
a non-monitored conversation from my apartment.
Was anyone watching? Who knows? But, in theory, yes.
I was the head of the largest department,
Chief Designer, Doctor of Science,
I wasn’t a member of Communist party.
I've never been a member.
I found it. I have a lot...
It is necessary to say, to be honest,
that to make more tanks than the rest of mankind,
we have largely destroyed the country.
A country, a society, first of all deserves respect
when it creates a decent life for its people.
When did you feel that you were
no longer a Soviet person?
August '68,
seeing our tanks in Prague.
That's when the last Komsomol illusions ran out for me.
I realized quite clearly that my country was led by thugs.
If we mark the brightest and darkest dates
in our history on the calendar,
then I would mark as bright dates
the times that brought us
something like freedom - ‘90s.
This was the emergence of a free Russia.
Or at least a step towards freedom in Russia.
Gorbachev’s rise to power in the USSR
and the end of the Cold War coincided with
the beginning of the telecommunication
revolution in the United States.
People on the go, busy people moving,
working, but some of them still able
to keep in touch by telephone with
business partners, customers, family,
friends, even while they're on the road.
My father's engineering instincts
had the wind at his back.
In 1983, the first commercial cellular
system was introduced in the States.
In 1990, my father and I—a young
inexperienced entrepreneur— bought Plexsys,
a small technology company
in Corinth, Mississippi.
We used the company assets to take out
roughly one-and-a-half million dollars in loans.
At the same time, the new era of peace
in the USSR meant that military radio
engineers were looking for a way to support
themselves without state funding.
The Soviet Union still existed,
military orders had practically ended,
we weren’t being paid salaries.
There were also factories
other than us in this condition.
The factories were trying to find what would
make it to market.
Flirting with any foreign companies was encouraged.
They spat on all the secrecy,
but besides, there was no secrecy there.
We were looking for any way
to just survive.
We were engineers, after all
Were we supposed to starve?
Listen, I forgot everything, I have to get
my notes and use them as a base
Did you feel like you had to go to work as
a street cleaner? You had a family
to support, tight?
You know I didn't. We had some skills.
After all, radio electronics is a pretty broad field.
I thought I'd be able to find something to do.
At this very moment, on the other side
of the world, in a remote suburb of Chicago,
a flamboyant Lebanese American
salesman knocked on our door.
He sold L’Oréal cosmetics and
his name was Ed Saad.
He is driving a red ?adillac
with white leather interior, convertible,
with jewelry all over him.
I mean, completely crazy.
By the name of Ed Saad.
Do you remember Ed?
Yes!
A Lebanese American that lived
in a suburb of Chicago,
by the name of Ed Saad, came to us and said,
“I’ve been reading about your company.
I’ve been reading about your infrastructure equipment.
The Soviet Union needs your equipment.
Your system is designed for small cities.
It’s the perfect system for Russia.
If you come, you can sell millions
of your systems in Russia.
He actually convinced my dad,
after about 2 or 3 months of dialogue,
that we should go.
It took me about six months to get convinced
that we should try and see what would happen.
So the deal he made with us was:
“I will charge you a consulting fee of $50,000.
It was his fee.
$25,000 we’d pay before we went,
and $25,000 we pay if we signed an agreement.
We had to use several of our 12 credit cards
to pay the expenses. It was crazy.
We were driven by the L’Oreal cosmetic
success in Moscow, my experience with
tickets to the Bolshoi, and the data:
even the landline density in the Soviet Union
was only 17 phones for every 100 people.
Simply put, the people could not connect
with each other!
Before boarding the PA74 Pan-American flight
from JFK to Moscow, we wrote wills
and bought life insurance.
We decided to either become American pioneers
in Russia or to leave our family some money.
Alive, I had a negative net worth;
dead, I would have been worth $1 million.
In our top-secret office Vympel - RTI
we started to get visits from foreigners.
It was completely unbelievable.
It was known that in our secret
radio technical institute,
my lab was starting to do something different.
Where did Fabela come from?
We really latched onto the business of cell phones .
Fabela supplied us with a base station
and a switch at his own expense.
He brought and gave us
about 15 of these phones.
When we first walked around with the phones,
we loved it.
And he invited us to get into this business together.
When we were going into these institutes,
they were top-secret institutes,
and we were going in as Americans.
From our perspective, that was extraordinary.
How in the world were we,
you know, if this had happened three years ago,
he’d be in jail, I'd be in jail
for going into these institutes, right?
Within the first two days of meeting Vympel,
before I even met Doctor Zimin,
it was clear that they had no intention of buying anything.
They wanted technology.
They wanted to know what they could manufacture.
Totally different from what Ed Saad had told us.
Completely different.
So, we were in Moscow for seven days.
On the second day, we figured it out
that they were never going to buy.
They wanted to manufacture something.
I quickly realized that the only reason these
50-60-year-old Soviet radio engineers
came to meet with me, a young non-engineer
American, was because we had a breakfast buffet.
They’d head straight for the table,
pack sandwiches into their briefcases,
and then talk to us.
I understood they were just taking
food home, and I was proud that we could
at least feeding someone.
Yeah, it even got to the point where
I invited you to my house.
In Khimki Khovrino,
I was so proud: I had a three-room apartment.
I asked them: how many rooms do you have?
They tactfully just said they lived in houses.
And the final day, the seventh day
where we got together with the CEO,
the general director of Vympel.
He brought all the different institutes that we visited
to start a negotiation as to how we could work together.
At that point, we had kind of decided
if we have any potential of returning our investment,
we need to figure out something to do.
And we said, let's see how we can maybe
manufacture locally with Vympel.
And there was some point, I have no idea
what it was, but there was some point
of negotiation that Doctor ZImin was absolutely
against giving to us, absolutely against it.
And he literally, literally in this room of 20 people
started banging on the table saying, “no way,
absolutely not. Never going to happen.
It was very animated as he can be,
but literally he is banging on the table.
It was essentially decided that
we should prepare for the fact that we, Vimpel,
a manufacturing firm,
would be operating, and to prepare production
we should familiarize ourselves with
the manufacturer in America.
A delegation was assembled,
which Augie then invited.
In those days going to the States was unfathomable.
The Americans were hosting.
They covered all our expenses.
They sent us a fax with the invitation,
and a special request:
to include in the delegation the bald gentleman
who was gesticulating wildly and pounding on the table.
So I was included in the delegation
going to America at the last minute.
All I remembered was the guy that was doing this.
And I said, make sure, as he told you,
that he is on that list of delegates. I want him.
And, I don't know if I told you I guess maybe not,
but the response back was, are you sure?
He is very difficult always.
He always is going against everybody.
He was against you with the protocol.
Are you sure you want him? And I said, yes,
I am sure I want him because I want someone with passion.
He was the only guy that showed any passion in our
whole visit. Everybody else was just like that.
Augie, your invitation to America,
that's where it all started, that turned
my life around.
And mine.
When the radio engineers first came to visit,
the Soviet Union had just ceased to exist.
They flew from the Soviet Union to Chicago,
then returned to Russia within a week.
Not long after that,
the Russian radio engineer Dmitry Zimin
and I embarked on a true adventure:
co-founding a joint Russian-American
telecommunications company, VimpelCom.
We took on the ambitious project
of establishing our first mobile network
in Moscow, connecting people in ways
previously unimaginable.
3 titanic revolutionary events converged.
The collapse of the Soviet Union,
The beginning of the introduction of the free market
and the emergence of a completely
new cellular technology.
And so these three massive
events led to an incredible
intellectual revolution.
I've realized in my old age that I was a startupper.
It was a startup built from nothing.
When everything was created from scratch,
we had our first antenna on the roof
of the Foreign Ministry, this tall building.
And miraculously, the connection lasted
all the way to 8 March Street.
That's where the first call came from.
On July 12th '92, I was walking down 8 March Street.
And I called Augie in America.
Dim’s motivation was a simple,
yet smart idea: to keep his people
employed and paid.
He brought his credibility
as a radio engineer to the table,
knowing how to build networks.
The resources, focus, marketing,
and planing were on me.
I don’t think Dim fully grasped what
entrepreneurship meant,
but his adventurous
spirit made him eager to explore,
even the things he didn’t fully understand.
The next 10 years of my life, from '91 to 2001,
were the most colorful for me,
the brightest period of my life.
We gather to celebrate the bonds between
the Russian people and
the American people forged during
World War II.
And we gather to pledge that the opportunity
we lost five decades ago to build
a better world will not be lost again.
Things were moving quickly:
all sorts of Western new beginnings
were echoing throughout Moscow.
Our adrenaline matched the risk.
It was clear that Russia was going to be
a world leader and a major part
of the global economy.
By 1992, we had gained 200 initial customers.
It was a time of crazy excitement.
You see, we worked for 30 years
under the pressure of the Soviet regime,
you couldn't step out of line.
And then we broke out!
If we had built cellular communications
according to the same rules that our
military-industrial complex
was operating under back then,
there would still be nothing.
By 1996, 50,000 people in Moscow
were using our mobile phone network.
Only four years lay between the first mobile
call from Moscow to Chicago and our company’s
listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
The idea of IPO was Fabela's.
An Initial Public Offering, or IPO,
is the process by which a privately held
company offers its shares to
the public for the first time.
In our case, our IPO was the first time
American investors could purchase shares
in a Russian business.
I said it was a momentous deal back then too.
That's the idea of an IPO came up.
At first I thought it was crazy,
but then I thought, why not?
But it was crazy interesting.
Convincing Dim?
Dim has always been extraordinarily trusting on me.
He just trusted me. He just said yes.
He just said yes.
Yes, I trusted Augie absolutely.
We decided in November of ’95,
and by November of ’96, we were public.
Even today, getting an IPO done
within one year is unheard of.
I wasn’t that naive;
I knew how complicated Russia was.
I saw the IPO as a high level of protection
for the company. That was my main reason
for pursuing it.
I knew that taking the company public
with foreign investors would bring us
support from the US government.
They’d want to protect their investors,
especially since US-Russia relations
were very strong.
I remember, Augie remembers it
better than me,
the night before the IPO. As we sat there,
we set a price. A bidding price.
You set it too high, no one will buy,
too low - you never know.
In the end we still set it too low,
there was such a rush to buy shares.
We could have set it a little higher.
We specifically wanted to make sure
that whatever price we set,
the investors would make money
on the first day.
We wanted them to be rewarded
for having confidence.
Because keep in mind, before we went public,
to find a bank, I was rejected by 13 banks,
who said, "No, we will not take you public."
He’s too old, I’m too young,
and it’s Russia. Are you kidding me?
So do you remember Dim what happened
two weeks and two days into the roadshow?
We were in the roadshow, just three to five days away
from pricing, do you remember what happened in Russia?
Yeltsin had a heart attack.
Two weeks into our road show.
If Yeltsin died, IPO is done.
It's over.
Everyone's still wondering, ‘Will it really
still always stay non-communist?’
Because Yeltsin is the only one that the West
believed was going to keep Russia non-communist.
Keep in mind, just three years earlier,
there was a coup three years earlier.
So without Yeltsin, everyone believed, it wasn't true.
But they believed, the West believed,
that it would fall back to communism.
So that was very dramatic for us
that all this work and one single incident
could have broken everything.
Fortunately, he was fine. He had his bypass surgery.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, how lucky we were!
This is World News Tonight.
On Wall Street today.
Yes, it is Wall Street with the Russians.
After we listed our company on
the New York Stock Exchange,
its capitalization reached $822 million —
in just five years, after starting from
nothing in a new country.
Nobody would have thought this was possible
back in 1990, except for perhaps Ed Saad,
the cosmetics salesman,
and Yegor Gaidar, the first reformer
of the post-Soviet economy.
Well, Dmitry Borisovich? No matter how much
they laid into Gaidar, it turns out that he was right.
Only four years have passed since '92
and for the first time ever
a Russian company is listing Russian securities
on the New York Stock Exchange.
When we needed money to develop our business,
quite understandably, at one time we lived off
bank loans. But loans in Russia
are very expensive,
up to 30% per annum. In the first stage,
when business was booming,
it was still acceptable. But as soon as even
a little bit goes towards the interest,
you can't develop business on loans like that.
Indeed, we should have fought to have access,
as in the rest of the world, to the cheapest capital
to grow the business. This cheapest money is
found on the exchanges.
It was a first for the company,
a first in history.
There was actually a company in the Russian Empire
that went public.
Under the blessing of Tsar Nicholas II,
securing a loan for the construction
of the Moscow-Vladivostok railroad.
But this company gave up something there, bonds,
or something like that.
And there was no stock exchange structure itself.
So as an exchange structure, we were
the first in history.
Ever.
And what did we give them as a gift, was it a samovar?
Nicholas the Czar had given us Golden Samovar
to the exchange when they listed the bonds.
And it sat in their boardroom, because it's a very valuable piece.
So today, if you go to the New York Stock Exchange
that sits in their boardroom.
So from that, we got the idea that we would give
them a Gzhel samovar. And so that.
There's a picture of it.
We had the Russian flag.
We get the US flag and we have
the Beeline flag over the balcony.
The whole Wall Street closed.
We were doing all kinds of different Russian culture events.
First time ever, we brought Russian dancers onto
the stock exchange floor.
On the stock exchange floor, we had Russian dancers.
Everyone, of course, stopped to look.
It was incredible.
I remember Augie's father, he was,
In my opinion, happier than Augie.
Do you remember your closing line
at every speech that we made for the road show?
What was your closing line?
Do you remember, in English?
You said one phrase.
I can try to remember.
I memorized it by heart, I've forgotten it now,
Augie, remind me.
I look forward...
I look forward to a very bright future.
I look forward with...
To a very bright future!
Yes!
Every speech he ended with
“I look forward to a very bright future.
I look forward to a very bright future.
That was his trademark
I also waved my arms around.
We must have had 120 presentations.
When, Dmitry Borisovich, did you become
a rich man?
Don't you remember?
But he never thinks like that.
I'm a very bad conversation partner.
Well, I don't remember.
No, he doesn't think like that.
There was never a moment.
I don't remember.
I'm starting to remember.
Now, just a second.
I'm remembering what I'm remembering.
So this was the first time
I ever heard that I was rich.
Someone told me.
We used to know a guy named Rozhetskin. Lenya.
Sometimes I went home not from
the "Airport" subway station,
but from the station "Dinamo",
just so I could walk a bit through the park.
Sometimes I'd even walk all the way home.
Once I ran into Rozhetskin near that "Dynamo" station.
"Dmitry Borisovich, what are you doing?" he says,
"Why?." "Do you know how much you're worth?"
That's when for me this phrase ...
I hadn't thought about it at all.
And when he said to me, "You're wandering around alone,
but do you know how much you're worth?" .
I couldn't begin to think of selling Vimpelcom shares.
It had nothing to do with wealth.
How could I sell my shares?
It was unthinkable.
It would be like selling a child. Unthinkable.
I was considered a rich man,
but only in name.
That's how I felt, I remember it well.
Was this time easy for you?
Did you encountered any difficulties,
resistance, or pressure?
God bless you, whatever happened!
In the early 1990s, after the fall
of the Soviet Union, Moscow saw a surge
in violent organized crime.
It was a fight for "protection."
Gangs wanted us under their umbrella and
would then demand shares in return.
Wasn't it frightening?
There actually were periods when it was scary.
I remember the moment I had to get a security guard.
When?
I won't say!
Quite late in the evening, in the summer,
at around midnight
I was walking home, by the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station,
I concluded that, in many ways,
Dr. Zimin was more naïve than I was.
It was a deserted street.
That neighborhood was pretty empty at the time.
A crowd of guys came up to me,
I didn't pay any attention to them.
Suddenly, out of nowhere,
a couple of guys emerge from this group,
They come up to me in absolute silence
and strike me in the face
without saying a word.
Bam! Silently.
So, I tried to move and got hit again.
I fell and they kicked me.
I ended up with blood all over my face.
And that's the state I came home in.
Then all sorts of theories started pouring in,
It was obvious that they wanted to intimidate me.
They wanted to understand they could do to me,
they only hit me in the face,
But they could have gone further.
We routinely went through this with
criminals in our office, and once I had to
urgently escape to the United States.
One of our early partners was actually
killed, despite already having left the company.
Though I’d lived near Chicago,
I had never encountered anything
close to this kind of violence.
Yeltsin was already gone and
Putin was already there.
What did you think of him?
About Putin?
I can barely remember now.
I thought something like:
he seems like a nice guy, but he's a Chekist
"Chekist" is an old term for
the Soviet secret police,
the predecessor of the KGB.
Dim knew this word well
from his early childhood.
They aren't decent people.
I had some vague suspicions.
The fact that he's a Chekist was
clearly a big question mark.
So, good morning!
Good morning!
Good morning, good morning!
In '35, my father was arrested.
I found out about it from my 'second mother',
my nanny, who remembered him being arrested
and told me all about it.
She told me, half-whispering,
how they came for my father.
Just so my mother wouldn’t hear,
mom prohibited discussing it, God forbid.
“Oh, if only your father were alive...
They had a whole crew that was drinking,
snacking and telling jokes.
And someone reported it.
I read that denunciation.
Then it was then published.
What makes a scumbag?
Not from a journalist's point of view,
but from a scientist's point of view.
In the animal world, for a number of reasons,
a heightened sense of aggression
is inherent in many, particularly in males.
Aggression is an attempt to assume
a dominant position
in any relationship with others.
There are individuals in herds
who cannot show their aggression.
They're weak, they can't help it.
They have the only way to show aggression is
to get closer to the leader, the alpha male.
Then under his protection, as a herd
of monkeys would be,
they can allow themselves to throw feces
at the stronger individuals.
That's how they form a layer of scum
around the leader over time.
Should we even have met?
Dim, a secretive Soviet radio engineer
and intellectual, born into a family
labelled as ‘enemies of the state’,
lost his father to Stalin’s prison camps.
And I’m an American, son of immigrants,
to whom my country has given everything.
We seemed worlds apart.
Even up until Dim died, we couldn’t
fully explain what had brought us together.
From the start, there was instant respect,
endless loyalty, passion,
and a shared sense of adventure.
Simple human qualities
connected us forever —
Dim even became godfather
of one of my sons.
It just popped up on Facebook:
What did business leaders do when they were 18?
Dmitry Zimin, founder of Vimpelcom.
Dynasty Foundation. The Enlightener Awards.
I completely forgot it. To read it out loud?
Spring of '51, our great leader is still alive
Our friend and teacher.
We live in a communal apartment
in Bolshoy Afanasievsky Pereulok
with queues to wash up at the tap in the kitchen and
in the restroom. The word "toilet" was not used then,
at least not in our apartment.
There was no toilet paper either.
Speaking of which, you could get into a lot of trouble
if you accidentally hung a newspaper with the
portrait of the leader in the restroom.
There was no bathtub or shower
in the apartment.
But I already knew that I want to be a radio engineer.
And that's what I ended up being.
Oh, my God!
I started photography at a young age,
I think I might have been in seventh grade?
I negotiated a deal with my parents for a night.
We had two rooms
One room was given to me.
No one was allowed in or out.
The windows were curtained.
I dragged in buckets of water,
There were these special tubs.
When I built up a mountain of photos
I'd move to the kitchen tap.
The neighbors were understanding.
My pièce de resistance is
a homemade TV set.
The only one in our communal apartment.
I earned some money by repairing
receivers and TV sets.
At times, it would blow me away with thoughts and feelings
you couldn't share with my relatives.
Mom.
They were coming from the Dokshitsi place.
Their family name is Dokshitsky.
First of all, then,
even before the revolution,
the Pale of Settlement line collapsed.
So, Jews were allowed to live in big cities.
They rushed to St.-Petersburg and Moscow.
Mom was among them.
She worked as a stenographer and typist.
It was very much appreciated back then.
I was born to the sound of a typewriter,
it typed us to life.
24 hours a day.
I'd never seen her documents.
The only thing I really didn't know
is that before my father
she was married, I had no idea.
Mom.
Her first husband was also repressed.
As my father.
He died.
She was dragged around for interrogations.
No, talking about political topics
was categorically avoided.
She'd learnt from her experience.
Stalin is the name of Russia.
Where does someone get this love for your master?
We witnessed something absolutely insane
where people began not only to fear,
but also to love their tormentors.
A member of the herd is afraid of his leader
because he can do anything to him.
But it is easier for him to survive this
if he begins not only to be afraid of,
but to love his tormentor.
It’s easier for him to live, it’s easier to reproduce,
If he loves his tormentor.
What are your impressions, if you're honest
about the last journey of our lives?
Pleasant.
Yes.
So that gives me the right to smoke a cigarette.
One cigarette, Mayechka, okay?
One single cigarette.
I'll go get a cigarette if I even have one here.
I will then allow myself the pleasure
of spanking you.
There's nothing posing a threat to my health anymore.
And you’re robbing me of happiness.
In the name of what? Why?
What kind of a long life is this?
What matters is the quality of life.
To deny yourself pleasure for the
sake of better health?
Why? What's this health thing for then?
To live for a long time?
How much longer?
Why? For what?
Is physical immortality attainable?
I don't think so.
Prolonging life may simply be immoral.
You can't do that.
The renewal of life, the change of life is
absolutely necessary for its continuation.
It's just like constant, unchanging power.
Let's remember "Borodino."
- Hey tell, old man, had we a cause
When Moscow, razed by fire, once was
Given up to Frenchman’s blow?
Old-timers talk about some frays,
And they remember well those days!
With cause all Russia fashions lays about Borodino!
One thing no one knows anything about is
how I married Maya Pavlovna.
What it was like. I had a friend, Valera Sotin,
we used to go camping together in the summer.
He said: "Let's go camping, I have a friend
who is an archaeologist and organizes
expeditions. You can go camping,
and they'll pay you for it.
Somewhere in Novgorod province.
Anyway, I'd been contracted as
a chauffeur there.
I liked it a lot.
A driver was considered a very respected person.
The places where Maya
conducted her excavations are absolutely incredible.
My father's relatives.
My dead father.
They lived in the village Losinka,
which I remembered as one of the most
joyful places of my childhood.
This house in Losinka was full of books.
Books were all that was left of the very rich,
I didn't realize it at the time,
I later learned that the Zimin family was very rich.
We absolutely need
to understand our history,
which has not yet occurred.
100-odd years ago we had
this catastrophe in our country.
This is essentially the rise to power
of the Chekists, the Communists,
who are still in power there, if only in disguise.
This doomed the country
to a very modest set of achievements.
My grandfather was a big manufacturer.
These were really people of a very different culture.
Alexander Guchkov, the head of the State Duma (the Parliament),
was my grandmother's cousin.
Obviously this was kept secret in the family.
I remember some time
towards the end of the WW2,
my Aunt Lena told me that in some of her documents,
where you had to list your relatives,
she carefully corrected one letter in her surname:
Guchkov to Tuchkov.
He was Head of the Provisional Government,
Chairman of the Tsarist Duma,
it was unthinkable
to be related to someone like that.
Of course, the whole affair was covered up.
And from this dynasty the only thing I have left is
the Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Ephron.
A completely unnecessary book.
I think what depresses me the most,
what evokes a sense of grief is
maybe not even the history of that
particular family.
I have the impression that Russia
was shot down at takeoff,
that this wasn't just the fate of my kind.
Thousands and thousands of other families.
A massive tragedy took place in the history
of the country, Russia was shot down on takeoff.
The emigration of Zworykin, an inventor of television,
cost Russia,
because television was invented in the US, not in Russia,
it cost Russia, as I was sho?ked to find out,
multiple times the value of country's annual GDP.
The same thing with Sergey Brin, a young guy,
he is a co-founder of Google, for our viewers.
It is estimated it cost 2 - 3 time Russia's annual budget.
Now were it not for these tragic events,
this would be one of the greatest
countries in the world,
which prides itself not on the number of tanks produced,
but on the standard of living in the country.
And it was all destroyed, shot.
Or emigrated.
What year did I graduate high school and go to college?
I've forgotten.
I graduated in '54.
Well, you're young.
And you're three years older.
I've forgotten completely.
I finished first grade...
‘41 - ’42, one moment...
In 1942 I finished the first grade.
So, in 1952 , 10 years later
I graduated from high school.
In '52, I started university.
I have already said once
that my life really came to be as it is by some
happy accident:
my mother taught me in her time,
when I was 15 or 16 years old,
when I had to fill out the first questionnaires,
I never once wrote that
my father was repressed.
I wrote that my father died when
I was two years old.
It was true,
I just didn't write where he died,
and he died in the Gulag.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have seen either the
aviation institute or the radio department.
My mom followed up on that.
Only did I go through with it, stuck
my tongue out, filled out this form,
and made myself a copy.
After that, no matter how many forms
I filled out,
I'd always write the same thing.
It never showed up once.
Not to mention that my passport
stated that I was Russian, not Jewish.
This is an important feature
of my biography.
I'm not sure if I had registered as Jewish,
I would have seen an elite radar faculty.
A anti-Jewish pogromic mood hung in the air.
The institute was at the Sokol subway station,
the final stop, and I had to take a tram.
I walked sometimes, sometimes I took a tram,
but I was starting to get scared
of riding the tram.
The pogrom feeling hung in the air.
I didn't have the nerve to deny having a Jewish face,
I didn't have the nerve, especially if
I was with my mom,
who was clearly jewish.
This humiliation was really distressing.
The circle that I've gravitated to
all my life,
starting from my school years,
from the '59th' school
in Starokonyushenny Peruolok,
and then at the Institute, and so on.
I have little recollection of
any other conversations
relating to power other than
rejecting it.
Contempt, resentment.
Resentment and indignation.
People who are interested in science,
they're different across all industries.
They all somehow end up being called dissidents.
Otherwise, science can't be done.
Why did so many dissidents come from
physics, but far fewer came from the humanities?
Is it from being used to systematic
thinking, to conspiracy, why is it?
I guess, at least for the ones I knew,
from here and there
among physicists. You see, maybe it's because
in the exact sciences like physics, maths well,
there's a kind of vulgarity in
what I'm about to say.
I mean, they require absolute honesty.
Innovators, as a rule, are not
conventionally-minded people.
They are different. They are dissenters.
These people are passionate,
and there are very few of them.
How they live their lives and what they create is
determined not only by money.
We won't succeed
if we do not develop a respect for dissent
to other people.
'53. I remember Stalin's death very well.
Oh, my God!
I don't know whether it was
a tragedy, a farce, a mockery,
I didn't keep the paper for
when my father was rehabilitated,
my mother received his salary for,
I don't remember whether it was
for two or three months.
She was hysterical.
It happened at the same time:
we were given his rehabilitation and paycheck.
The fact that he's a Chekist was
clearly a big question mark.
Now regarding whether Russia
will use military force
without UN sanctions?
We will always act strictly
within the framework of international law.
Let's put it this way:
what's happening now makes me sad.
What is happening in the country now
makes me want to cry.
This feeling is like we've become a different country.
Then it was time for hope,
and now it's just about survival.
Do you remember the meeting of major
businessmen that Putin came to?
The one happened a month after Khodorkovsky's arrest,
in October 2003.
When Putin came and said: everything is fine, you can relax.
The famous congress of the Russian Union
of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs,
that greeted Putin with a standing ovation.
In one newspaper article
the headline was: loud and prolonged applause,
everyone stands up to avoid going to jail.
What was happening there?
Augie can add something maybe.
We were mostly a Moscow-based company.
The business was in Moscow.
I put in a lot of effort back then,
fighting for licenses for the regions.
It was clear that we needed to expand
to other regions.
That would have cost a colossal amount of money.
It became clear to me pretty quickly,
that in order to develop the company,
you would need to spend money.
And that I would lose controlling interest.
If I have to dilute control
to grow the company.
I'll leave business altogether.
Why did you decide to leave the company
right as it was exploding? It was in 2001, as I recall.
It was completely informed decision.
A very important factor was that
the situation in politics had changed.
There were a lot of factors, and they came
together at the same time:
the rise to power of the Putin’s crew from St. Petersburg,
and the emergence of certain officials
who found themselves in a conflict of interest.
They regulated business on the one hand,
and on the other hand, they were
businessmen themselves.
There's a competitor who gets everything.
They won't give you anything.
Yeah, it was a dead end.
I realized that we were facing
a government intervention
aimed at hurting our business.
We could see it happening.
Reiman was a minister, and at the same time
he had his own cellular company,
based in St. Petersburg.
He aggressively helped develop this company
where he was a shareholder,
it wasn't even very secret.
Moreover, as soon as he became a minister,
this company got a free license
for the whole of Russia.
Which, of course, is completely unthinkable.
In this respect, it was obvious that
we were losing competitiveness precisely
because of the shameless use
of administrative resources for his company.
It was pure thuggery.
He was a minister and business owner
and administrative power was used for
the benefit of his company.
It was obvious, and I could do nothing about it.
We were being targeted and attacked.
But dealing with these kinds of problems was
very different to the organized crime of the ‘90s.
The type of craziness and its intensity
had changed.
Everything was clear to me.
And so almost simultaneously with
the sale of the shareholdings,
and essentially the transfer of control
was my resignation.
I mean, it was all leading up to it.
Anyway, I decided I'd rather do it myself
than have someone else do it to me.
All this was happening step by step,
we were gradually coming to the point where
we are no longer, in fact, a federation,
but a unitary state. In fact, the Constitution
is completely dysfunctional.
In the same hands is both political power
and control over all branches of government:
judicial, executive and legislative.
And the main financial proceeds coming
from oil are in those same hands.
I remember when Boris Nemtsov,
a man I respect,
he said that he would now sit in defiance
when the national anthem was played, and all of that.
It was all very painful for me as well.
That's how he was thinking.
He was instinctually smart enough to say, "It's time."
It’s time.
And that was the bigger decision
not being done with Vimpelcom.
It's saying, "I will finish all my commercial activities.
I will do only philanthropy 100%.
I will no longer do anything business related"
which is extraordinary.
A whole new career.
A whole new life.
Maybe.
My friends!
The next major stage of my life
was retirement.
From 2001 to 2016, it is philanthropy,
it's the Dynasty Foundation.
I was never a billionaire.
I was a millionaire, even a multimillionaire,
but I wasn't a billionaire.
Long story short, I made a trust
where I gave 90% of all my money.
This was under a very strict written condition
that the beneficiary of this money cannot be me,
nor my heirs, nor any of my relatives.
Only for charity.
My son and wife supported this decision.
When I gave all my money to this fund,
it was no longer mine.
If they were mine, it would be eating me up from the inside.
What the hell?
Once you've made up your mind
and given it away.
I get it.
It burns the bridge.
I began to set up Dim’s foundation,
making sure it was transparent
and would last forever.
Dim decided to give away 90% of his wealth.
He even took money away from his son,
but it didn’t faze Boris at all.
He fully supported the idea.
Back then, no one was giving all their
money away, except for Warren Buffet,
who did it later that year.
The foundation operates on the basis
of an instruction that was written from
the very beginning,
where it was written that the
foundation is dedicated to supporting
not even science but scientists.
It is dedicated to supporting smart people.
In the field of science it is easier to identify
a talented, intelligent person
than in other fields.
Spending money.
What did I spend the money on?
It was the Dynasty Foundation.
It was the Enlightener Award,
which still exists today.
It's been really great.
I feel like an honorable man.
In mythology, probably not just our
Russian mythology,
the process of making money
was considered some kind of sin.
Vimpelcom was, of course, earning money,
it was listed on the stock exchange.
But it was associated with some kind of joyful,
light emotions.
Nothing like Mephistopheles'
"People die for metal.
Satan rules the ball there."
It was nothing like that. It wasn't destructive
but it was a new and very interesting,
almost holy act.
In Russia, I saw many successful businessmen
and wealthy people.
I saw that many of them made money
not to become richer,
but cooler than everyone else.
I saw how money became
a tool to get closer to power.
But neither power, nor the constant
alfa–male competition ever inspired Dim.
He needed to create something unique,
something that would bring real change.
Many of the people I’d met had leadership
qualities and talents just like Dim,
but Dim had something else:
a weakness,
his big heart.
You see I've always viewed
my work in a rather selfish way.
I've been doing what I enjoy.
Fate has made doing good deeds bring
me the most pleasure.
Well, thank God for that.
Philanthropy.
I can only be grateful to fate that
I was allowed to do this work, and enjoy it.
I'm a hedonist.
And by the way, the only Russian
to ever receive the Carnegie Medal of Honor.
What?
The only Russian to ever get a Carnegie Medal.
Yeah yeah yeah
For philanthropy. I forgot Yes. Yes, Yes
For philanthropy.
After Dim sold his shares,
I also gradually sold mine.
I returned home and decided
to become a police officer.
As a child, I’d never dreamt of being a cop.
A dear friend of mine from Chicago
was on the board of a non-profit
police helicopter unit.
He asked me to build a business model for them,
so that they wouldn’t constantly have to
beg for funds for fuel.
It started as a business task,
but one day the chief asked me
if I wanted to be a police officer.
I said “Yes.
But I spent 9 months in the police academy
as a cadet,
even though I was 44 and everyone else was 20.
Now, I probably see myself as a cop first
and a businessman second.
This is actually my Chiefs patch,
which I wear with my uniform.
My star number is number seven.
We have 11,000 officers in the Chicago Sheriff's Office
so I am number seven.
In police tradition,
when you train with each other,
you exchange patches.
We have been through some incredible trainings
together in business.
So I want to share this patch with you.
My visits to Moscow became more and more rare.
Like most foreigners, I didn’t notice
significant changes in Russian until 2014.
I only saw how business was growing.
But everything changed when Russia annexed Crimea.
I realized then that Dim’s vision
of his country’s future completely
contradicted Russia’s new trajectory.
I, we, are watching with great interest
Everything that's happening in Ukraine.
We pray: God willing that everything works out for you!
It's extremely important, the fork in the road is clear.
A fork in the road in politics,
God willing that things work out for you.
It's not just your affairs
this concerns us too.
I'd been uneasy about our government even before,
but Crimea was a real blow for me.
Crimea was some kind of personal insult.
How could it happen?
Guarantees were given to Ukraine.
Guaranteeing its integrity.
And they were completely violated.
The Dynasty Foundation was labelled
as a foreign agent.
It was, quite frankly, a shock to me.
After the dozens of books
that have been published,
after the amount of money that has
been invested in science
and in support of many projects.
Do you remember how you felt
when you first heard about it?
I felt gravely insulted.
I see.
Insulted and offended.
I said: Lord, how could this be?
I'm from here,
I’m from Arbat.
What's happening?
It was despicable.
I guess.
By law I was supposed to put everywhere,
what it's called,
a stamp, a sign
to signify a foreign agent.
If a foundation raises money for
some godly activity
and is then told that it has been labeled
a foreign agent.
It's kind of understandable.
But when a foundation, which does not collect
but donates money,
has to say that it is a foreign agent,
it's absolute nonsense and a mockery.
It didn't make sense to me.
Oh, this is all very sad.
It's all very sad.
The root of the problem, as I understand it,
was that my son Boris was
funding the opposition.
Did you really finance sending
Navalny abroad?
Yes. Maybe Boris financed it,
but the money was mine.
Will he (Navalny) come back and does he need
to come back?
I think he'll be back. He's a brave man.
Though I'm not sure it's necessary to do so.
What does he need to do now,
from your perspective?
He needs to do
all the things he's been doing so far:
speaking, writing, dissenting.
In 2021, at 88 years old,
Dim set off abroad to visit his son Boris,
who had fled Russia to evade
political persecution.
Shortly after Dim's departure,
his granddaughter received a summons
intended for him,
calling him in for questioning.
It’s a dark reflection of Russia’s present climate:
Dim would likely have not been able
to return without getting arrested.
Dim’s life journey intertwined
with a complete historical cycle
in 20th-century Russia.
After nearly 100 years from the first time
the State tore Dim’s family apart,
it did so again.
Dmitri Borisovich, just a second.
Okay. Hold this.
We'll be leaving soon.
Yes, let’s do it.
Let's do it before we leave.
Thank you.
I love Moscow so much.
I'm a Moscovite,
I often start to miss Moscow even now.
But at the same time, when you hear the news,
the longing for Moscow starts to fight
with your own common sense.
It's one of the most depressing feelings
I've had lately.
I'm an Arbat native.
My whole life is there.
I see the most beautiful places
right here.
But at the same time, there's not a place
where I have that amazing
incredible nostalgic feeling
like when I walk down the streets of Arbat.
Sivtsev Vrazhok,
Starokonyushennaya, Vlasyevsky.
Talking about it makes it sound banal.
You can't really describe it,
You can't experience these feelings
no matter what beautiful place you visit,
Rome, London.
They're beautiful!
But this feeling of a life lived,
it's only there.
Yes, it's settling - I have left
My native fields for good.
No more will rustling poplars shed
On me their winged leaves.
The old house sinks lower without me.
My old dog died years ago
God has condemned me to die
An exile on the streets of Moscow.
I am really patriotic in the sense
that I am not as ashamed of any
country in the world
as I am of my own country.
I might be horrified but others, but
I am ashamed only for my country,
not for any other.
Patriotism has different facets.
love for the tribe, love for the leader,
who might be cruel, but who is your leader.
This love very quickly turns to xenophobia,
to hatred for your neighbors.
That's where the danger is.
So, this complex was called patriotism
in the Stone Age,
and then it became love of the state,
love for the leader.
There is another kind of patriotism.
it's almost like loving your parents,
it's loving your birthplace,
a tender love for your immediate surroundings.
What interesting things can you take from
and bring to your country?
So the first love is a proud love.
Pride for your tribe.
The second type comes from learning from the world.
Those are the two kinds of patriotism.
I lost faith a long time ago.
I understand that we live in
an authoritarian state
with all the consequences that entails.
And a political system that
no election will change.
Should investors be wary
of Russian troops entering Ukraine?
Look, they talked about the possible entry
of Russian troops into Ukraine at the beginning of the year,
we conducted the Zapad 2021 exercises,
but as you can see, it didn't happen.
No man,
no one, Lord knows, should be
in power for long.
He must not have absolute power.
It was a great discovery: separation of powers and
succession of powers.
Wars only take place when someone rules indefinitely.
I have made a decision to conduct
a special military operation.
At the same time, our plans do not include
the occupation of Ukrainian territories.
What does it take for a war to start between
France, England and Germany? The simplest thing:
a leader for life. That's it, it's war!
There are approximately 200 nations
in the world.
Some of them have nuclear weapons
in increasing numbers.
Some of them are in a state of savage enmity
with their immediate neighbors.
In some of them there are
authoritarian regimes,
where the decision of using those weapons or destroying
a hated neighbor is practically down
to one person.
People ask how stable a world like that can be
for a hundred years?
Can a world like that be stable?
It seem very unstable.
Regarding nuclear escalation:
we never started this rhetoric.
We have our tactical nuclear weapons
That are three or four times more powerful
than the bombs used by the Americans
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Three or four times more powerful.
We have much more of them
than those in Europe, even if the Americans
bring theirs from the United States.
We still have many times more.
Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state,
but with the participation or support of a nuclear state,
is proposed to be considered
as their joint attack on Russian Federation.
Including if the enemy, using conventional weapons,
creates a critical threat to our sovereignty.
Only a society
which is capable of, in its soul,
substituting its love for the nation to love for people.
Only such a society can be guaranteed longevity.
A society that is permeated with hatred,
cannot be stable or sustainable.
That's the colossal challenge
before us.
Only a humane society can expect
to exist for a long, long time.
I realized that this was going to be my last journey.
I'm 88 years old after all.
Almost certainly. Overall, though, I'm feeling pretty good.
Father, I'm happy we're all here.
I honestly didn't even think it was possible.
Thank you Augie for coming here.
About ten years ago
you asked me to write a book,
about Vimpelcom and my perspective, my experience.
I'm much closer to writing it. I have not written it yet,
I have not publishing yet, I actually have written
about one chapter from finishing it.
Before my flight home,
Dim gave me
his updated autobiography,
and I told him about my nearly finished book
on our shared history.
In a few months, when Russia bombs Kyiv,
destroying entire towns and families,
I’ll have to rewrite the ending.
The Russian part of the company
Dim and I founded 30 years ago
can likely never again be part
of the global business sphere,
while the Ukrainian and international
branches continued thriving and operating.
I returned to its board to revive
the pioneering spirit that defined us in 1991.
During the third week of the war,
I made my first trip to Ukraine
on a private police mission.
We committed to helping Ukraine
and have been volunteering there ever since.
Sign it right here in Russian
and then I will translate in English.
When you're ready.
One moment.
When you're ready.
Boris, my hand is so shaky,
I haven't been able to write for the past year.
Okay, I'll sign it.
Ok, you.
Let me put it this way, you correct me,
Dear Augie,
Dear Augie, I ask you to consider yourself
a co-author
a co-author of this book
as you have co-authored my fate.
Well said.
“Co-author must be written together.
How you became the co-author of my fate.
I can't.
Damn it!
It's about to get so ugly, I can't do this.
Later. I'll sign it later.
Terrific, thank you!
Let's read something.
Farewell, my friend. Farewell
My dear, you're in my heart forever
It was predestined we should part
And meet again someday
Farewell for, my friend - no shaking hands, no tears.
No furrowed brows.
There’s nothing new about dying
In this life. Nor's living any newer.
Just before the end,
Dim gathered a team of colleagues,
scientists, and intellectuals in Cyprus.
They had been working with Dim’s foundation
for many years.
There, they envisioned new philanthropic goals.
To the joy of learning, to enlightenment,
which is a good thing not only for the
enlightened, but also for those
who enlighten.
Congratulations!
Right before the Christmas of 2021,
I went to accompany Dim and Boris
on their final trip to Switzerland,
where euthanasia is legal.
Dim had decided to undergo
this procedure before 2022.
That's Health and Well-Being, isn't it?
He sought to depart this world peacefully and,
notably, at the right moment —
his sense of timing was extraordinary.
We were very different people in many ways:
Dim was a staunch atheist,
and I—a Christian with faith in God.
Initially, I found his death almost impossible
to come to terms with.
Despite my attempts to dissuade him,
he remained resolute and in a hurry.
We both shared a belief in the significance
of free will and the absolute mastery
of an individual over their own existence.
I think this helped me accept it.
This is our goodbye photo.
This final journey marks the end
of my personal story with Dim
and post-Soviet Russia.
The history we shared has come full circle.
Everything that was achieved during the brief
friendship between the US and Russia
is now being undone—
except
for our connection.
If I were younger, if I were young...
I think that one of the most
important tasks
that any literate people, the intelligentsia out there,
have is to educate.
Generally speaking, being an old man is not great
my legs aren't walking well already.
There's always something.
But there is a certain positive
side of things,
because you see your horizon
and you want to shout: guys, you have to live,
You think about it!