Take a drive around Moscow’s Garden Ring. Leave from the Railway ministry near Krasniye Vorota and go anticlockwise toward Tsvetnoi Bulvar. Time will stand still if you are sitting in a traffic jam but if you have a free road, look upwards at the clocks on buildings and you can go back in time.

If it is 2am on the railway ministry, then you can find a clock within a few kilometers which will say 1.59am. Superman did the same in the film Superman II, spinning round the world again and again so that he could turn back time.

For anyone who was here ten years ago, the last few weeks have been a journey back in time to 1998 when the ruble collapsed, people lined up outside banks and fortunes were lost. There are many differences to the August 98 crisis when Russia defaulted on its loans and the ruble danced up from six rubles to the dollar but the sense of the unknown is familiar.

Back then, young and stupid, I watched the ruble collapse by the hour. Now it is the RTS.

Then, the paper I worked for made a few redundancies and cut everyone’s wages by seven per cent. And everyone gave a sigh of relief that they still had a job.

Now, it is still too early to say but jobs are going at other media companies and belts are being tightened.

If I could go back in time, I would have bought big on the collapsing stock market and waited for it to quadruple in price and then hopefully remembered to have sold it in spring 2008.

I would have borrowed big and bought two or three flats in the centre of Moscow and lived off the future rent. I would have searched out one Vladimir Vladimirovich in St Petersburg – I fear that my attempts to change history would fail — but, at least, I could get a good story out of it.

Right now, there are people trying to survive the crisis, a few trying to cope with only having a few billion in the bank and there are those trying to work out how to make money from this crisis. In a few years, someone will have made a fortune from the opportunities that have opened up.

When the great truffle crisis of 2018 hits and the public are bemoaning the fact that they can only eat it three times a week, I hope that people will remember those brave entrepreneurs who made money after 2008.

These were the businessmen who realised that the easy money days were gone and invested in a series of cheap, family run, restaurants, a tapas restaurant where you could eat for 500 rubles, a stolovaya chain and a quality sandwich bar in every metro underpass.

There were the students who set up a gypsy taxi service that charged at the official city taxi rate.

There was the businessmen who set up automatic ticket machines in the metro, ending all queues and making enough money for a good profit, part of which they invested back into the metro.

Indeed, there were the Polish plumbers who fleeing the economic collapse in Britain set up alternative DEZ that provided quality 24 hour service for municipal housing in Moscow.

Most people have no ideas what will happen in ten months let alone ten years but a crisis provides many opportunities for business to response to a public need.

There is likely to be a lot less money to go round in the future. It would be nice if the government supported business that aim low, who want to earn profits in a slow, evolutionary way rather than the explosive super profit way.

Kevin O'Flynn, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow

October 15, 2008

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