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something else additionally that could bring profit all year round, regardless of the season. I have had connections in Russia since the days when I bought the products of the “Sweetly” factory in Yekaterinburg. Since this all started.

      I renewed contacts with the sales department of this candy factory (of course, these were already other people), requested a catalog of goods and prices to assess the possibility of importing to Germany and selling in bulk. When I worked in Germany in the same N & D-Markt, I already knew well what types of products of the candy factories are in demand in Germany. In addition, I had information about the purchase prices for Germany of well-known factories in Russia, such as “Red October” or “Rot Front”, and some other factories from different regions of Russia. The products of the “Sweetly” factory were not yet available on the German market at that time.

      In Yekaterinburg, they were very interested in my proposal, and my friend, who lives there, became the representative of our German company. We studied together at the university. He negotiated on site and we got a decent discount on the factory’s wholesale sales prices. And so the first truck with forty tons of “Sweetly” products was shipped and went to Germany.

      By that time, I had rented a warehouse with a small space, in which I planned to set up my office and hire a sales manager and accountant. But I also needed a small truck to transport products to customers directly to the stores. To do this, I turned to a former colleague with whom I worked at N & D-Markt. I offered him to work with me as a partner. Delivery on request from retail stores should have been his responsibility. My former colleague knew very well all the shopkeepers in our region. Alexey Pyatkin listened carefully to my proposal and a week after our conversation he accepted it. We invested in the opening of our enterprise in equal shares of 50 x 50 and opened the VolkWestGbR company. VolkWest translated from German means “People of the West”.

      At first I had the idea to name the company a little differently: VolkOst, which in Russian means “People of the East”, but the theme of “East” is associated in Germany with the eastern part of Germany, or rather, with the former GDR, which I have not seen especially warm attitude from the people of the West at that time.

      Subsequently, Alexey carried out purchases of fruits and vegetables at the wholesale market in Hanover, which also brought good profit when selling in parallel with the main product.

      We hired an accountant and a sales manager who offered our assortment to stores by phone. Our company worked as a small team of four people in a friendly manner and together, each doing his own thing. We clearly assigned responsibilities with my partner and did not overlap, organizing quite effective and well-coordinated work. We sold 50% of the first delivery in two weeks and ordered the next delivery, adjusting the assortment and order volumes. The second car quickly passed customs control and arrived at the warehouse two hours after arriving at the customs terminal, already using the experience and contacts at the customs office in Goslar. At the factory in Yekaterinburg, we were given the green light: “VolkWest” orders were shipped out of turn. Delivery by a transport company to our customs terminal in Germany took seven calendar days.

      The interest rate for customs duties mainly depended on the sugar and cocoa content and averaged about 25% of the value of the product itself. Sales were gradually growing, we successfully coped with competitors, bringing orders exactly on time and selling vegetables and fruits in parallel. At the request of clients, I began, together with the “Sweetly” company, to develop special packaging for the German market for certain types of goods, and I also began to invent my own names. In addition, the factory itself began to print stickers with information on the composition of the ingredients included in these products in German. This was a prerequisite for complying with German trade rules and very convenient for us: we no longer spent our resources on translating and printing this huge number of stickers. Our business started to develop. During the month we sold on average about 80 tons of “Sweetly” products, about 20 tons of fruits and vegetables, and I began to develop, together with Polish suppliers, pickles according to my mother’s special recipes: pickled tomatoes and cucumbers in cans, as well as canned vegetable salads.

      By that time, my wife and I had lived seven years in Germany, and in the last three of them our family life has not been very good. We became neighbors to each other, we practically stopped talking to each other, and our relationship lost its meaning. I once asked my wife: “Do you think our relationship, which we came to after ten years, should remain so for the rest of our lives?” I continued after a short pause: “But what about the warm attitude towards each other? For example, before leaving for work, kiss and say “Darling, I love you”? ” But in response I heard only one sentence: “What are you, this only happens in the movies!” After what I heard, my soul became sad. I didn’t continue the conversation, I didn’t even say anything in response, I just left the apartment and went to my work. Perhaps I did the wrong thing and it was worth continuing, but, as it was before, many attempts to talk turned into scandals and mutual reproaches. I definitely didn’t want this anymore.

      And the reasons for our quarrels were different, and it was my fault, I do not deny it. After a while we parted. I rented a one-room apartment in the village (officially it was the city of Finenburg, where our warehouse was located) and moved there. Since 2002 I have been living alone. Of course, I often met my son Max, then these were the brightest moments of my life for me. I remember how we walked with him along the shores of the small but picturesque Lake Finenburg, we swam there, organized picnics and went fishing. Already in those years I began to instill in my son a love of nature. It is very important that a person grows up with understanding and love for what he came from, where our beginnings come from, where each of us can find comfort and peace and, even being in solitude, does not feel lonely. All this is called in one word – “nature”.

      When we lived in Salzgitter, we often caught carp with my brother Dmitry. Fishing without a special permit in Germany is prohibited, for this you need to take special training courses for a fisherman and pass an exam. Only after that you need to pay an annual fee of 150 DM (today it is 150 euros) and you can freely fish on all lakes. There are exceptions, but this applies to private reservoirs where fish are bred on purpose – fishing there is paid.

      But what does it mean to “fish freely”? There are restrictions on the number and types of fish you can catch. To track this, a special fish log was introduced, which should always be with you during fishing. When you catch a fish, you must first measure it without removing the hook. If the size of the fish exceeds the minimum allowed for fishing, it must be stunned with a special device and only then put into the fishing chest by removing the hook. In the event that the fish caught by you does not meet the standard in size, then it must be released by carefully removing the hook. Fisherman courses are taught how to do this. We, of course, like real Russians, tried to comply with all the above rules and only in extreme cases and very rarely did we not have time to enter the caught carp in the register.

      Once in the evening, when Max was three years old, we caught two good carps for an hour, but despite the fact that on that day we had already reached the limit on the number, we decided to sit with a fishing rod a little longer. As we joked in such cases: “Let’s cast the line for another half an hour, we’ll just wet the bait!” And so we pull out a huge carp – it was really a “huge carp”, weighing seven kilograms! I still have that photo in which my son Max, and next to me I keep the same carp. The fish’s tail touches the ground, and the head is slightly higher than Max. Well, we just had nowhere to write down this monster in our brother’s journal, and we could not release it back into the lake.

      Today is already 2018, and my son comes to me in Russia every year during the summer holidays. He studied at the University of Braunschweig and this year he transferred to Munich after completing an internship at the BMW plant. My son loves traveling just like me. Sometimes he will load his travel essentials into his small car, including his bicycle, and after that he can travel 800 kilometers through southern Europe in three

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