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“The biggest change was that nobody covered our losses if we lost money. That there was nobody looking after us was a real shock.”

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Yakov Vorokhovsky in 1989.

Yakov Vorokhovsky in 2004.

Morion HQ in St Petersburg.

For Yakov Vorokhovsky post-Wall life began when he took over the high-tech company where he’d been a Soviet worker

Yakov Vorokhovsky watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV. But his wife and sister got closer. They were on holiday in Berlin on 9 November 1989. They came home full of “astonishing impressions.” 

Two years later, Vorokhovsky, an engineer working at a state-owned quartz crystal factory in Soviet Leningrad, watched history in the making in his own country and city. A coup attempt by communist hardliners in August 1991 was met by crowds of protesters in Moscow’s Red Square and in Leningrad’s Palace Square. Its failure led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But ask Vorokhovsky today what the defining moment of his life has been, and he’ll answer, without a moment’s hesitation: “1994, when I took over my company. It was becoming the boss that changed everything for me.”

Like many Russians whose initial strong impressions of the collapse of communism have since been overlaid by many later memories of a decade and a half of reforms of one sort or another, what Vorokhovsky sees most clearly now is how the changes that began in those heady days have filtered through into his life since. 

“The change of politics in 1989 and 1991 didn’t make a huge difference to me personally. I understood immediately that very important things were happening. But I had no idea then of the way my life would change, or of the market system that was going to come later. I just knew that the events in Berlin symbolised change in Europe and the world.”

What it might mean for him became clear to Vorokhovsky after the Soviet collapse. His city was renamed St Petersburg. His firm, Morion, was abruptly privatised. “The concept changed completely. Suddenly we had no government orders. We had to go out and find customers, and think about marketing; and the biggest change was that nobody covered our losses if we lost money. That there was nobody looking after us was a real shock.”

After a stint as head of the research and development department in the early 1990s, Vorokhovsky took over an enterprise that seemed mortally wounded by the end of the command economy. Morion was making huge losses and building bigger debts. The domestic market for its precision products had disappeared, but Morion’s products and reputation were not good enough to hope for export sales. Equipment was obsolete. Average wages for the 1,400 employees were $17 a month. Salaries were three months late. Perhaps most damaging of all was the “very pessimistic spirit” of the employees.

Today there are only 500 employees at Morion but the firm’s production has risen 30-fold. With EBRD help, the firm re-equipped and now more than 90 per cent of revenues come from products and processes that did not exist a decade ago. Some 70 per cent of the firm’s output is exported to clients in Europe, America and the Far East. Morion crystals are used in the International Space Station.

“I wouldn’t say the lifestyle changes that have come since 1989 are all good,” Vorokhovsky says. “I’d call it a patchwork quilt, or a complex picture of many colours: some light, some dark.”

“My own life has been very stable,” he adds with a laugh. “I live in the same flat I’ve always lived in. I work at the same firm where I got my first job in 1972, with my new degree in applied physics.”

“But in terms of work of course my life has changed tremendously. And there’s definitely a historical chain connecting all these events, a way in which the changes in my life are linked to the world events of 1989.”

8 November 2004