
To understand Pachikov’s vision for the future, one must understand his past. As a young scientist in the Soviet Union, trained in the economic applications of mathematical methods and with a Ph.D. in fuzzy logic from the USSR Academy of Sciences, his life was comfortable, if not satisfying. He says everyone had to learn to live with a ‘double mind.’ “I had friends; I was reasonably well-paid, I was able to buy a car, I had a three-bedroom apartment, nice children, a library, LP records,” he says. “But if you were asked ‘do you respect the government?’ you couldn’t say no. You had to say ‘Yes, I respect it,’ and you couldn’t say ‘it could be more perfect.’ It was like 1984. Orwell could describe it very well, how we had to think one thing and say something else.” One of the things he thought of, but could not do, was travel the world. “There is a saying: you can live in a country as long as you’re able to leave it,” Pachikov observes. “For me to think that one day I would be able to travel to the US, Britain, Italy, or Mexico — it was an absolutely unbelievable dream. It was the same as believing that one day you would walk on the moon.”