Komsomolskaya Pravda: "German Sterligov: “I want to meet Putin.”
German Sterligov is a symbolic figure in Russian business. At 25, he was one of the first to make a fortune while others were scratching their heads, waving banners, and seeking a miraculous national idea. In the troubled 1990s, his Alisa, the first stock exchange in the country, reported huge turnovers.
However, Sterligov said he went through his fortune as quickly as he made it.
He quite abruptly decided that Russia needed his brains and took part in municipal and presidential elections that left him with no money. This was in 2003. To pay off his debts, Sterligov sold his house in Rublyovka and took his family (four kids and his wife, who was seven months pregnant) to the dense Mozhaisk forest to raise sheep. He turned out to be a better sheep breeder than politician - his sheep were sold in the blink of an eye. Sterligov's fifth child was born in the forest.
The hermit might have continued to live his peasant Orthodox life if the prosperous America did not present the world with a global crisis last year, prompting Sterligov to leave the forest and return to business. He rented an office, hired young employees, and set up the Anti-Crisis Commodity Clearing Center (ACCCC) to carry out the idea of the System of Global Barter (SGB). What is it all about? I went to interview the 40 year-old businessman with a spade beard on the 26th floor of Tower B in the famous Moscow City Center.
Question: Mr. Sterligov, the word "barter" sounds like an alarm bell for the market economy.
Answer: No, that's not right. The SGB rests on commodity-money relations that are based on modern computer technologies of collecting and processing information. This is not a return to in-kind economy, not a step backward, but a leap forward. It essentially relieves companies from using financial instruments and involving third parties that create many problems and consume a lot of time, power, and money.
Question: How can tax authorities monitor barter deals?
Answer: Taxes depend on the value of a deal, which is still measured in roubles or dollars. A barter deal makes everything so much easier. It does not differ from a financial transaction in any way expect for a simplified procedure. Fewer parties take part in it. Unlike finances, here nobody can invent any tax-evasion schemes.
Question: How does money fit into this exchange of commodities?
Answer: The chain is as follows: commodity-commodity-commodity-commodity-commodity- -money. Money is the sixth link of the chain. A deal requires six times less money, six times less often.
Question: What if a swindler gets into the chain?
Answer: First, swindlers can appear anywhere, primarily in finances, and so much has been invented in finances over thousands of years that there will never be enough inspectors to check on everything. In theory, swindling is possible, but if even we, the authors of the system, cannot imagine how to manipulate it, others should relax for the time being.
Sterligov took me to a big computer hall. A manager opened the SGB classifier. I have to admit I was impressed by neat chains with applications for commodities and sale proposals. I realized the SGB was already working.
Sterligov resumed our conversation: Yes, the center builds chains of unconventional relationships. Rosselmash tractors cannot be exchanged for Namibian bananas. We help partners establish direct contact through the base coordinate system. When money stops effectively fulfilling its function in the economy, it is necessary to create a mechanism that will help KaMAZ trucks, grain, building materials, technologies, and fertilizer get to each other. We are organizing this movement. This is not in-kind bartering, but a global computer network that was used until recently all over the world for entertainment, or e-mail. Now it is becoming an instrument of trade. This is the gist of the SGB.
Question: Why is it global?
Answer: Because it should embrace the whole world. During the first week of its work a month ago, our center received 685 requests to open regional offices. We now have thousands of requests. We are opening offices in Belgium, Germany, Britain, Turkey, France, the United States, and China (Hong Kong). Our center has subsidiaries in 15 Russian cities, and I hope that we will have them in all 85 regions before March. Moscow has a separate network. The first affiliates were ACCCC-Izmailovo, ACCCC-Varshavka, and ACCC-Garden Ring.
Question: Do you rely on the government's support? Do you need it at all?
Answer: We do need it. I want to meet Putin. I'm ready to submit everything we have done to the government. Let it become the owner of the network. I sympathize with our government. When I retreated into the forest, I realized how difficult it is to rule our people, all the more now, in these crisis conditions.
Question: Are you scared by the crisis?
Answer: Being scared does not help. We need to act. Millions of people are thrown into the streets, deprived of the means of subsistence. If they are not given food, heat, and jobs, they will stage riots, first social and then interregional. People will be stealing bread from each other. I don't want my children to live such a life. Therefore, on a par with the SGB, it is necessary to draft a programme for resettling mega-cities. It will provide incentives for people without jobs.
People should be set free. They should be given land so that they can feed themselves and their families. The government should demarcate plots of land in the cadastre for those who want to live beyond the Ring Road and engage in agriculture. It should do that in advance, before people lose jobs. It is important to prepare an algorithm of the draw to reduce corruption, and to provide money to those companies that cannot sell equipment or building materials.
Migrants should be given land depending on the size of their families and without the right to sell it to prevent profiteering. It is impossible to register the ownership of agricultural lands today. Once you get all signatures, the first one becomes obsolete. Land should be registered by one entry in one book. This is all. The current registration will only lead to deadlock.
Our center's analytical bureau has drafted a number of anti-crisis measures and proposals. Modern cities are huge, but when you leave them and pass beyond cottages, you will see a desert and the shadows of inebriated homeless people here and there. There are exceptions, of course. There are worthy people who have not drunk themselves to death, and who are working. There are even whole regions where the local authorities pay much attention to agriculture, and receive impressive results. One example is the administration of the Moscow Region's Istra District. This, however, is just an exception that confirms the rule. By and large, villages in Central Russia are dead.
Question: Modern mega-cities are a retreat for couch potatoes, and you want to send them to the village.
Answer: I was a couch potato myself. Then I went through a personal crisis. In five years, I've become a proper sheep breeder. One's attitude changes quickly when you're hungry. I know this from my own experience. I was very upset five years ago when I lost everything and realized that I'd have to sell a house, an office in Red Square, all I had earned, to go to the forest, put my family into an army tent, and build a hut quickly, before the winter came. But it transpired that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. I went from the darkness to the light, from a penal colony to freedom, from urban slavery to a normal life for me and for my children. I'm not telling you fairy tales. I've been through this myself, and I know what people who are laid off should do.
Question: Why did these ideas come into your head, not into Deripaska's or Potanin's?
Answer: This is easy to explain. Their brains are preoccupied with other things. As for me, I've emerged from the forest; I can invent things, make decisions, and do everything to prevent a nuclear winter. If I had billions, I'd also be preoccupied with keeping them safe. But I have nothing to lose, and so I can act.
Global bartering and resettlement of mega-cities will help overcome the crisis.
A well-known businessman carries out his anti-crisis plan to save his family and the country.
Andrei Viktorov
