A flashback to the birth of the market economy in Russia— my dad becoming an entrepreneur

The story of my family in the 1980s, the final decade of the Soviet Union, had many rags-to-riches elements in it. We were a poor family at the beginning of the decade when my parents were very young, when we lived in a kommunalka (an apartment shared by several families). We were very well off in its final years, thanks to my dad’s spectacular career: at only twenty-eight he became the chief engineer of a big Soviet enterprise, that specialized in making defense systems against ballistic missiles.