I was born in Moscow in 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, and I lived my entire life in Moscow. I was an only child. My parents were, by profession, veterinarians. Frankly, I wanted to be a chemist. I wanted to go to Moscow’s Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology, but I did not make it in. With the same scores, I went to the Moscow Institute of Food Technology and placed in the mechanical department. I fi nished the institute as a mechanical engineer of food industry technology. I was given two career options: enter the All-Union Research Institute for Experimental Food Processing Machinery or the Iava factory. I thought hard and consulted with people I knew from the food industry and outside of it to decide which would be better. My neighbor told me, “Iava is a very interesting factory. It is a state within a state with a very interesting group of people.”