After two or three years, the Cherney brothers company employed between 300 and 500 people. To make business grow, Michael traveled to Moscow and revived his old sports contacts.

There in 1989 he met an American businessman, originally from Odessa, named Sam Kislin, who offered him a business partnership.

Kislin has a trading company called TransCommodities. He sold sewing machines and popular consumer electronics to former Russian enterprises. Cherney worked hard, but trading did not attract him. He was by nature a manufacturer, rather than a merchant; he wanted to produce, rather than sell, and realized - or, rather, his instinct told him - that the biggest profits were in manufacturing. He tried to understand the inner workings of every factory that Kislin was dealing with.

In his first year as Kislin's partner Cherney made two million dollars. Then he suggested that Kislin and he find an idling factory, get it running, and sell its product in the West. Kislin went to Austria and landed a contract to supply three million tons of coke.

In turn, Cherney was told of coke smelters in Kemerovo and Donbass that were dying out without supplies. Cherney flew down to Kemerovo, in an area called Kuzbass in Central Siberia. Once he figured out what was what, he had an idea. The partners begin bartering cars and consumer electric appliances for coal directly from miners; then they supplied it to coke and coal concentrate manufacturers, and then supplied their product to plants in Austria and Yugoslavia.

In late 1991, the partners decided to manufacture coke on their own, and they were producing a million tons a year. Cherney and Kislin not only exported it abroad, but also sold it to smelters in Russia and Ukraine who needed it. In exchange, they would take metals that they could sell in the West. Out of consumer-goods trader, Trans Commodities became a major metals supplier grossing $200 million a year.

By 1992, Michael Cherney had enough money to be a player in the next stage of Russia's economic development: privatization.

"In those days," Cherney says, "anyone who had his head screwed on right, who had drive and took risks, could make millions, just like European traders in America centuries ago. Every country in the West has gone through a similar privatization."