![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/files\/2012\/02\/calmes-91014.jpg\")
<\/a>Jere Calmes ’92 rides in a limousine in Moscow.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In well-appointed offices behind the unobtrusive front door of a renovated period building less than a mile from the Kremlin, Calmes says Russia\u2019s healthcare sector is ripe for investors to make money, and he\u2019s putting together a private equity fund to do just that. It\u2019s a far cry from what he found in Moscow a few months after graduating from Bates in 1992 with a political science major and a secondary concentration in Russian.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a crazy time when you could do almost anything you wanted to,\u201d he recalls. \u201cEverybody was doing anything. You didn\u2019t need money. You just needed an idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
For him, the idea was cell phones. About six months after arriving in Moscow to teach introductory macroeconomics in English at a university, he helped launch\u00a0VimpelCom<\/a>. He was the 11th employee.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t have money,\u201d Calmes says. \u201cWe rented an office from the\u00a0Moscow News<\/em>\u00a0for barter of two telephones.\u201d VimpelCom became the first Russian company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is now worth around $19 billion.<\/p>\n VimpelCom\u2019s Beeline cell phone logo from the 1990s.<\/p><\/div>\n Much of that value is built on the Beeline cell-phone network. Calmes was VimpelCom\u2019s first marketing manager, and he is fiercely proud of the success of the Beeline brand, considered one of the most valuable brands in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hired a guy that I met at a party drinking vodka one night, and we did the entire Beeline branding for less than $5,000,\u201d he says, explaining: \u201cHe was really dying to have the job.\u201d<\/p>\n Starting with just 13 base stations, the company quickly made money. And in Russia in the early 1990s, that attracted attention.<\/p>\n \u201cThings were pretty chaotic here, and we ran into some issues, like everybody doing business in Russia, and then I left the country in 1994 kind of in a quick way, to make sure that everybody would be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n Calmes gives a little laugh, suggesting he\u2019s understating things a little, but he won\u2019t be drawn out further. \u201cWithout going into details, we had some problems. Those problems were resolved over time and VimpelCom continued to flourish.\u201d<\/p>\n If Calmes seems, well, calm in the face of what some might consider professional catastrophe, it\u2019s a trait he carried with him from Park City, Utah, to Bates back in 1988. In high school he was a daring hot-shot alpine skier hoping to move up the U.S. Ski Team development ladder. But he just wasn\u2019t fast enough, so he headed to Bates, obeying the rule among young skiers: \u201cSki slow, off to college you go.\u201d<\/p>\n At Bates, Calmes skied four years and captained the team his senior year. He also took Russian courses and studied in St. Petersburg in the fall of his junior year. He once said that his father gave him one piece of advice for college: Learn to speak Russian or Chinese. Calmes\u2019 choice of Russian reflected his priorities at the time: Afternoon Chinese classes conflicted with ski practice, so he opted for the morning Russian classes.<\/p>\n This Beeline marketing photo was taken in the 1990s, when it was considered odd that a babushka would even use a cell phone. Today, 82 percent of Russians say they own a cell phone.<\/p><\/div>\n If no longer a hot-shot, Calmes is still daring. He left Russia in 1994 and joined Motorola, working in London, Egypt, and Russia. Then, in 2001, with VimpelCom struggling as Russia started to boom under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Calmes returned to the company.<\/p>\n Calmes remembers the original business plan envisaging 10,000 subscribers within 10 years. When he became vice president for operations in 2001 the company was adding 30,000 subscribers a month. And that was small potatoes. Less than five years after the millionth customer signed up, there were 45 million Beeline numbers in operation.<\/p>\n Despite the potential for profits, Western confidence in the Russian business environment has taken hits over the past decade. The biggest blow was probably the 2003 arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of the Russian petroleum company Yukos, on fraud charges.<\/p>\n Khodorkovsky\u2019s supporters have long said that the case against him is political, arguing that Putin wanted to punish Khodorkovsky for funding opposition groups. The Kremlin maintains that the judiciary is independent and says it has no influence over the cases involving Khodorkovsky or anyone else.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>