I remember well the moment when one winter

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I went outside from the hospital, saw bullfinches on the white snow and suddenly felt happiness. Acute causeless happiness. For a long time the concept and understanding of happiness for me was connected with snow and bullfinches. I already had the feeling that I was coping.

Did you think about work?

There was no talk at all about my continuing to work. I didn’t think about tomorrow at all, I was happy to be home again, alive and with my family nearby. I perceive everything that happened next with usa mobile phone numbers database gratitude. I couldn’t allow myself to think that I was disabled with a huge dose of radiation, with the possibility of a relapse. And my doctor helped a lot. She made me go to work. “You go and sit for at least an hour. At least twice a week.” So I went. On thin legs.

A year after the hospitals, people from Moscow arrived who had heard about my press club project. They were young managers, owners of Wimm-Bill-Dann. Enthusiastic, very bright, intellectual. They were “entering” the region and needed consultations. I still don’t understand what happened there, but they gave us quite a lot of money, enough for our own premises and equipment, without asking for anything in return. Just like that. And we got going. It was a time of active politics: the end of the 90s, we entered the elections as an absolutely independent prestigious platform, through which all the presidential candidates passed, except, perhaps, Putin.

1999 was an exhausting year: in addition to the press club, I worked in Moscow at the Foundation for Effective Politics and wrote for the newly opened Gazeta.ru and Vesti.ru. After the elections, I took a week off and went to Moscow just to rest. I met [Anton] Nosik (we had already met by that time from Internet hangouts) in a café on Zubovsky 4, and received an offer I couldn’t refuse. In March 2000, I came to Media-Most, the company’s first Internet editorial office, where I was assigned the project “Hero of the Day on the Internet.”