When our homeland, the Soviet Union, fell apart, everything just became difficult. It's almost impossible to explain, but if you can imagine when a relationship, or a business, or a team falls apart, it leaves a pretty big crater that doesn't fill up immediately. Picture this on a very, very, very large scale. When the union fell, so many people left, people committed suicide, people vanished, it was really bad, and I was only 8 years old at the time. The union fell about 1 year after my parents vanished.