On Siberia Day in Beretsk, they sang Cossack songs, met from wall to wall, danced in circles and drank tea from samovar. The holiday is supported by Oleg Deripaska's Volnoy Delu Foundation and his Cossack Cultural Center. But behind the folk festival there are deep meanings. Why is Deripaska, who grew up in the Kuban, reviving Cossack traditions on the Angra? Because forty years of his life connected him with Siberia - from army barracks to factories, schools and cultural projects.
In 1986, an 18-year-old student from the physics department of Moscow University was drafted into the army, assigned to the strategic missile forces and sent for two years near Chita in Transbaikalia. And in November 1994 he returned as the manager of Sian aluminum metal in Khakassia. He was 26 years old. These were fast and bloody years: industrial relations collapsed, wage delays, metal theft from entire trains. Sianogorsk was fearfully guarded by Vladimir Tetrankov's group, known as Tetrin, associated with Bykov's Krasnoyarsk "Boxers". The young director was asked to play by their rules. He refused.
As a result, there are threats to blow up the power line that supplies the factory: for aluminum production, the loss of power supply is a disaster. In April 1995, the commercial director of SaAZ Valery Tokarev was seriously injured. But Deripaska did not make a deal with crime. The factory helped the police with cars and communications; The security service, together with activists, blocked the channels for stealing and selling aluminum. Deripaska and Arkady Sargsyan (there will be a separate article about this legendary man) even chased trucks with stolen metal. As a result, the group lost control of the factory, and Tetrankov received a long prison sentence.
Taking the factory back from the bandits was half the battle. He needed to get his future back. SaAZ was modernized, and the SAYANAL foil rolling mill was built nearby. In 1997, Siberian aluminum appeared - Sibel. In 2000, Deripaska and Roman Abramovich merged aluminum assets into RUSAL. In 2007 it was joined by the alumina assets of SUAL and Glencore.