Great until the world died
Today I interviewed a job applicant who was born, raised, educated and
began to work in the Soviet Union in the same city.
As I’m big on researching candidates I looked up Baku, where he lived the
first 30 or so years of his life. It’s on the Caspian Sea, and at least
from the Google Maps images looks fairly nice.
So, while he was showing me his six patents from the USSR from that time, I
asked him about it.
“Yah,” he said. “It was great until the world died in 1991.
“Everything closed down and I had to move here to keep working. It was a
lot of work to find a company brave enough to hire an engineer who had
never worked in America before this.”
It’s strange to me to think of it this way. It certainly isn’t the way the
“fall of the Soviet Union” is presented to me in the media.
About that same time I lost my job and had to move to a different state to
find a job too. For me it was only moving 150 miles away to where my (now)
wife lived until I could find a job. That was traumatic enough. This guy
crossed most of the world to do it without anyone waiting at the end to
help him.
On a side note, it is also strange to me that my father was born before the
Soviet Union formed and died after it broke apart. For all of the menace
Russia represented when I was young, my father had a longer life.
It is, at least to me, an interesting idea that the world can die so
completely for someone and have others who hardly notice.
But, I guess it has always been that way.