Sergei Mavrodi's departure to another world leaves few Russians indifferent, if only because few of them escaped the temptation to become a participant in his project "MMM".
The creator of the first financial pyramid in Russia, Sergei Mavrodi, died suddenly on March 26 at the age of 62. The man, whose portraits were printed on the "tickets" of his company "MMM" exactly like the portraits of Lenin in Soviet rubles and American presidents in US dollars, has become one of the symbols of post-Soviet Russia, albeit a symbol with a minus sign. His activities have affected millions of Russians who are inexperienced in financial matters and have readily become material for a fraudulent scheme.
The pyramid scheme was subsequently used by many unscrupulous entrepreneurs, but Mavrodi will forever have the laurels of a pioneer in this dubious enterprise from the point of view of the law. As the Egyptian pyramids for millennia became a monument to the pharaohs, so Sergei Mavrodi immortalized his name with his own "pyramid".
In the murky waters of the 1990s, he felt like a fish - which was very different from other "sharks" of the then Russian business, if only in that Mavrodi was a mathematician by education (like Boris Berezovsky), while many of his "colleagues in the class”Finished high school with difficulty.
Under the shade of the pyramids
He was a rather strange person, unlike most Russian businessmen of that time, recalls one of the businessmen of the 90s, who happened to meet with Mavrodi on business matters. He started, like many others, with the sale of computers and office equipment, but even then thoughts about affairs of a completely different level and scale were swarming in his head.
“Over time, he began to somewhat resemble the 'evil genius' from Hollywood films. He was able to fantastically calculate complex mathematical schemes and was well versed in the psychology of the human masses. Sergei Panteleevich was obviously not without genius,”he told Reedus on condition of anonymity.
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However, he adds, like many businessmen, Mavrodi was completely devoid of any compassion for others, but - paradoxically - he was quite honest with partners, how much the concept of "honesty" is generally applicable in this environment: on the eve of the closure of MMM ticket sales points, he warned many of them say that "the doors are closing."
Among the many monetary surrogates of the early 1990s, such "tickets" did not seem like something out of the ordinary.
“I do not exclude that his 'honesty' was dictated by a sense of self-preservation - after all, it was not only simple 'excavator operators' who brought him money, - says the source of Ridus. In the 90s, in the event of any large “kid”, no security would have saved him. But the fact, meanwhile, remains a fact."
These people were given a very small time window to enter the cache, because many MMM papers were kept in suitcases. But the condition was - the subsequent complete rupture of partnership.
“As far as I remember, people's belief in the inviolability of the pyramid, whipped up by a feeling of greed, was so strong that few took advantage of this last (and it really was the last) opportunity,” recalls the source of Reedus.
There is nothing to blame on MMM
Although Sergei Mavrodi was, without a doubt, an adventurer, it would not hurt those who suffered from his enterprise to look at themselves first, Yevgeny Kogan, managing director of the Moscow Partners investment company, believes.
“Let's not switch the arrows to Mavrodi alone. Would he have been able to build a pyramid of tens of millions of participants if the inhabitants of the country had not voluntarily joined in its construction? But in a country where 90% of the population is extremely illiterate, it was extremely easy for him to implement such a scheme, Kogan told Ridus.
Many Russians recognized themselves well in the heroes of MMM commercials.
Of course, in the years when the USSR had already ended, and Russia had not yet fully formed as a state entity, Mavrodi was helped by the fact that his actions, purely formally, did not fall under any laws or articles of the Criminal Code. That is, even realizing that MMM is a fraudulent enterprise, law enforcement officers could not grab the owner of the three butterflies by the hand: for the time being there was simply nothing to "sew" on.
MMM taught the Russians a lesson that should not be forgotten today, Kogan is convinced.
“In the current laws, you can always find some loopholes, so that fraudsters can try to take money away from the population in a relatively fair way. The lesson to be learned from the history of Mavrodi is that while a person hopes that someone will solve his economic and social problems for him - God, a king or a hero - such a person will remain a tidbit for financial, political and any others,”the expert is convinced.
Igor Serebryany