International / Russia KGB / LUXVT
In 1993, I moved to Russia and started a real estate company in Moscow. It was not long after the Wall had come down and Russia was beginning to privatize apartments, office buildings, and other types of real estate. I had lived and worked in Europe in the mid-1980s and I had a hope of utilizing my real estate expertise to meet the needs of international companies and their employees then moving to Russia, and to consult with Russians that were new to capitalism to help them engage in the world real estate market.
At first, Moscow was dark, bleak, and cold. Stores had few commodities, and the State could no longer sufficiently provide for the people. The grip of Communist Russia had crushed the economy, and the people were poor and broken in spirit. There was much work to be done to improve the economic climate for both businesses and for the people.
I was approached by numerous ex-KGB types who could not be trusted to operate with integrity or ethics. They were rarely honest and oftentimes sought a financial arrangement for a non-disclosed payment. I was interested in representing the best interests of my clients. Most often the two were not compatible and I had to politely refuse their influence or their information.
In the early days of the 1990s, I was a charter member of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce and the Russian Guild of Realtors (similar to the US's National Association of Realtors). Prior to moving overseas, I had also been a charter member of the Atlanta Commercial Board of Realtors, the first of its kind in America, and so I was optimistic that we could share our by-laws and more importantly our Code of Ethics with the Russian real estate community. And surely we did.
Over the next six years, our company prospered along with a re-emerging Russian economy, and we became part of a successful international real estate community with offices in London, Paris, Munich, Rome, and other major European cities. Our offices would meet every Spring in the south of France for the world’s largest real estate conference called MIPIM. Every quarter, we would also meet in one of our sister cities to coordinate our referral programs. I grew to understand the tremendous value of having an international platform from which to best serve my clients and my company.
Today, I continue my business reach into the International market through my affiliation with LUXVT. Having practiced real estate for 30 years, both overseas and regionally in Atlanta, and now in Coastal Georgia, I know the importance of having the right resources, good relationships, and a strong international platform to ensure that every property I represent has the broadest market exposure available. I am excited that my partnership with LUXVT meets those globally high standards.
Christmas in the Kremlin
Moscow, December 25, 1993
I will never forget walking through the entrance.
You expect a place like the Kremlin to greet you with silence, or with the heavy formality of
marble and guards. That heaviness was real — it hung in the air the way it always had, the
weight of the place and everything it had stood for. But moving through it, against it, was
something else entirely: the sound of music. Hymns, rising and folding through those old
corridors, praise lifted to the birth of Christ in the one room on earth built to deny He ever
mattered. The sound seemed almost to test the walls, as if checking whether they would
allow it. They did. The hymns went on.
It was a traditional Christmas song — the kind sung in a thousand sanctuaries that night,
only here it carried a weight those other rooms could never give it.
The wall had come down, the old order with it, and Russia was changing so fast you could
feel the ground shifting under ordinary days. But nothing prepared me for this. I had been
welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Communist Party — the proletariat’s holy of holies
— and inside it, people were singing about Bethlehem.
And what struck me most was the contrast itself. The atmosphere of that place was heavy,
Russian, freighted with decades of cold purpose. Yet over it, through it, undeniable, was the
presence of the Holy Spirit, filling the hall. The two did not blend. One simply gave way to
the other.
I kept noticing the seat wardens. Their whole purpose was order — to see that each person
sat where they were assigned, to keep the rows straight, the way things had always been
done here. But their faces gave them away. I do not think they had ever before witnessed an
outpouring like this — that much faith, that much plain love, filling a room their whole
institution had built for the opposite purpose. Many of them looked deeply uncomfortable,
caught between the duty they knew and something happening in front of them that no
rulebook covered.
And standing there, I felt the years collapse.
I was a boy again, watching black-and-white newsreels — the grim faces of Kremlin
leadership in this very hall, fists and slogans, denouncing America, denouncing God. That
was the only Kremlin I had ever known, the one that came to us through a flickering screen
as the enemy of everything I had been raised to hold sacred. And now I was inside thatsame room, and the air was full of hymns.
I have rarely felt the hand of history so directly. Two worlds touching at a single point, and I
happened to be standing on it.
