vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #151 / Business / Reading article...

Once destitute and unemployed, Larisa Rakul has become one of the most successful businesswomen in Nakhodka. And she has bigger plans for the future.

The smallest girl in the class, she was always hiding her trembling hands behind her back and was ready to collapse when a teacher asked her a question.

At a discotheque, she would slink into the farthest corner, wearing an old dress and dreaming about beautiful dances she could dance.

Now Larisa Rakul, 36, is one of the most prosperous businesswomen in Nakhodka. The head of the biggest lift repair company in the city and director of the City Fire Prevention Center, she has contracts with almost every company in the city. Her immediate plan is to create a service similar to the American 911, with specially trained doctors, and agents investigating fires.

Her brother, Leonid Muratov, says, “If she starts doing something, it will be solid.”

Rakul is a petite woman radiating joy and optimism. Her road to success was long and hard. She was a high school student in 1977 when she wrote a story for the local newspaper, Nakhodkinsky Rabochy, describing the Primorye taiga. The story was published, and she became a freelance reporter for the paper.

However, in 1979 she wrote a story about the streetlight company that kept women in front of a radioactive monitor. Some women could not give birth to children after prolonged exposure, she reported.

“The editor told me that I was not supposed to write such stories,” Rakul recalls. “So I quit journalism.”

Instead she decided to help children from troubled families. As a social worker, she had to visit various homes.

“I remember an absolutely drunk, naked woman, wearing nothing but boots,” Rakul says. “She slept on a bare, iron-clad bed. There was a bucket with wet, rotting linen in it, covered with worms, next to the bed. In the far corner of the room, a 9-year-old girl was sleeping in a heap of dirty clothes.”

Being happily married, Rakul gave birth to two boys, Dmitry and Alexei. She decided to find a quieter job, and in 1993 went to work as a tutor at an orphanage. This was during a time of food shortages, and she reported to the director that the staff was stealing food from the children, she says. It turned out the director was stealing as well, and she fired Rakul. “I asked them, weren’t they ashamed of stealing from orphans?” she says. On almost the same day, her husband Alexander was fired: A trade union leader, he caught his boss’s wife selling deficit consumer goods which were supposed to have been given to workers, Rakul says.

The Rakuls found themselves in a deep poverty. Larisa had only one pair of slippers and no shoes: She would glue them every day, as she set out to buy bread, but they would fall apart, and she returned home barefoot. Once, a young man who lived in the small service room for lift operators, approached and complained about his poverty.

“Why don’t we try to do something together?” she said. That day she started to write the documents needed to create a joint stock company to repair elevators. The mechanic and his brothers repaired lifts, while Rakul managed the company and signed contracts with other enterprises. Business took off. Now her company services almost all the buildings in Nakhodka that have lifts.

A few years ago, Rakul bought a facility that refills fire extinguishers for “half the cost of a pair of winter boots,” she says. She formed a Fire Prevention Center, where she was manager, driver and cleaning lady. She gave jobs to retired firemen – they are forced to resign at the age of 45 – to provide other fire prevention services to the companies, from fire alarms to fireproofing buildings, ships and other surfaces.

Georgy Basargin, director of shipping supply firm VostokServiceFlot says, “They are very nice partners and they perfectly understand the needs of the fleet. Ships have to undertake all anti-fire measures very quickly, in one day sometimes. The center never failed to [provide this service].”

Vasily Kalganov, spokesman for Primorsk Shipping Company, says he is generally content with their work, but he wishes the center could work with updated equipment on the foreign ships that are visiting the port.

This is already on Rakul’s mind: She has just started constructing a building to exhibit modern fire equipment, an office for 911 doctors and staff, and a dance hall. She is learning ballroom dance with her boys, and she even plans to participate in competitions.

“The more you help people, the more returns to you,” says Rakul, a former atheist who was baptized last year. “God always rewards good things you are doing.”