In the Soviet Union, making a profit was a crime. Article 154 of the Criminal Code promised up to seven years in prison for "speculation" - buying low and selling high. The system called such people speculators, and treated them like enemies of the people.
This book is the confession of one of them.
Born in a provincial Soviet town with no money, no connections, and no privileges, the author spent his life doing the only thing the state truly feared: noticing gaps and filling them. From small arbitrage deals between cities to hauling washing machines across Poland in a battered car, from smuggling early mobile phones in tourist buses to building a computer business from scratch with two partners and three thousand dollars total - he turned the Soviet shortage economy into his personal university of trade.
But this is not another glossy success story. It is a raw, introspective look at the mind of a person who was born with the instincts of a trader in a country that officially denied trade existed. Why does a twelve-year-old boy in a red tie - the mandatory necktie of Soviet schoolchildren - already understand arbitrage before he even knows the word? Where does this constant restlessness come from - this need to find the difference between price and value? And what does it cost a person to be brilliant at reading markets and nearly blind when reading people?
Written without flattering himself, this memoir traces thirty years of deals, risks, mistakes, and quiet victories. It shows how the same qualities that helped survive the collapse of the USSR continue to matter today.
You already own the results of this story. Your laptop, your phone, your washing machine - somewhere in their journey to you, people like the author moved goods across borders at night, read invisible markets, and made the broken system work, at considerable personal risk.
This book was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence, translated into English by a man who barely speaks the language, and published on Amazon with zero marketing budget, zero paid reviews, and zero illusions.
It is either the perfect proof of everything the author believes - or a very expensive experiment.
Probably both.
