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no cities or roads in that area. My hotel would be called The Crossroads and would cater to guests who thought the way my friends did: tourists, hunters, and geologists. It’s funny, but in 1992 I thought that it would take maybe fifteen to twenty thousand dollars to open the hotel.

Several years went by. My working time was growing in value, and how I used it made an ever greater impact on the health of a rapidly growing business. Pretty soon I had a personal driver, administrative assistants at the office, a housemaid, and a nanny for my oldest son. Along with the need to handle my various domestic chores personally, a measure of my perception of real life also disappeared. It became difficult for me to gauge what one hundred or one thousand dollars meant for an ordinary person, since I was risking hundreds of thousands and even millions of my own and borrowed money on a daily basis, and sometimes my life.

Once, I had to spend a week being escorted everywhere by two goons as my personal bodyguards. The kind of loathing I felt for myself reminded me of standing in those milk and bread lines years earlier. To refuse protection meant going underground, living in hotels outside the city, and being incognito when in Moscow. But at least it was freedom.

I didn’t drive and I still don’t, because I want to be able to think while traveling. I also don’t use a computer, because I try to preserve and exercise my brain’s working memory. My partners and subordinates have long since transferred their data to digital files. As a result they are unable to convert the data in their heads, for instance, when they’re in an airport check-in line.

They can’t do it because they don’t know the initial information. This makes it very difficult to discuss with them, say, next year’s sales target or last year’s financial statistics.

I once lost my temper after spending half an hour in line for a notary public (though my assistant held my place in line earlier). Back at the office, I asked Alexander Bocharov whether, in his opinion, heads of state or multinational corporations wasted their time in line. And if not, why did he value my time so little? From then on the notaries public started coming to us.

When the construction of the restaurant that later became Expedition started, not all of the Ruyan shareholders were happy about it. Construction dragged on for over a year, not only siphoning off time and effort, but also eating up a huge amount of investment, with the returns uncertain. One of the shareholders was Alexei Belevtsev, who had become one of our charter 204