Maxim Kashirin

In 1998, Maxim Kashirin was 31, his partner Anatoly Korneev was 29, and their wine company was bankrupt on paper. “The main question was whether we wanted to continue,” Maxim recalls. They did—and built Russia’s dominant premium wine retailer across 30 years without a single partnership conflict.

I still don't know why, but the decision was made: kill Simple.

The Engineer Who Knew Nothing About Wine #

Maxim’s path to wine retail was accidental. He graduated from Moscow Aviation Technology University in 1989 with a degree in metallurgical engineering—about as far from sommelier training as possible. Russia was collapsing. The Soviet Union would dissolve two years later. For young engineers, traditional career paths were evaporating.

In 1994, Maxim met Anatoly Korneev through a mutual connection. Anatoly had studied wine in France and worked at Chianti Ruffino in Italy; he understood wine. Maxim understood nothing about wine but saw the business opportunity: Moscow’s emerging wealthy class was paying premium prices at Il Patio restaurants for Italian wines. Someone needed to import and distribute those wines at scale. Russia needed wine education as much as wine itself.

They founded Simple in August 1994. Maxim took strategy, finance, and operations—the “right hand,” as he later described it. Anatoly took marketing, wine expertise, and culture—the “left hand.” The division was clean, complementary, and would last three decades without dispute.

What Maxim brought wasn’t wine knowledge. It was engineering discipline applied to business problems. Premium wine retail in Russia required infrastructure that didn’t exist: trained sommeliers, reliable logistics, customer education, regulatory compliance. Maxim approached each as a systems problem. By 1999, Simple had opened Enotria—Russia’s first professional wine school—not as philanthropy but as demand generation. Trained sommeliers would specify SimpleWine products. It was engineering logic applied to market development.

But no amount of systems thinking could prepare him for August 1998.

The Crisis That Demanded a Choice #

On August 17, 1998, the Russian government defaulted on its debt. The ruble collapsed fourfold overnight. For SimpleWine, the mathematics were catastrophic: the company owed suppliers in foreign currency while customers owed in rubles that had just lost 75% of their value. Four-year-old Simple stopped shipping entirely.

Maxim and Anatoly held a meeting. The question wasn’t operational. It was existential: did they want to continue?

The sensible answer was no. Russia’s economy was in free fall. Wine was a luxury. Demand had evaporated. Simple’s assets—expressed as customer debts—were worthless. Walking away meant cutting losses. Fighting meant years of grinding recovery with no guarantee of success.

Maxim chose to fight. Not because he had a brilliant strategy. Because he wanted to build something.

What followed was unglamorous survival work. Maxim restructured foreign currency debts through direct negotiation with suppliers. When one distributor couldn’t repay, he offered a €30,000 whisky bottle shaped like a bird. “Sorry, nothing else I can do,” he said. Maxim accepted. That bottle still sits in SimpleWine’s Moscow headquarters—a monument to the crisis when premium positioning created options that currency couldn’t.

Sales resumed in October 1998. Recovery took a year. But the crisis taught Maxim something deeper than tactics: resilience requires sacrifice of short-term extraction. For the next decade, he and Anatoly reinvested every ruble of profit instead of taking dividends. That discipline funded expansion from a single import business into a vertically integrated ecosystem.

By 2011, Simple was thriving. Then the Russian government tried to kill it.

Four Months of Ambiguity Without Leverage #

The 2011 license crisis was different from 1998. The 1998 crisis was economic—impersonal, comprehensible, solvable through restructuring. The 2011 crisis was political—personal, inexplicable, unsolvable through any visible means.

In May 2011, Russia’s Federal Tax Service and Rosalkogolregulirovanie coordinated to deny Simple’s operating license renewal. Without this license, the company could not legally import or distribute alcohol. For SimpleWine, this was instant death.

Maxim’s initial response was logical: he personally addressed every cited deficiency in the license application. The regulators rejected him anyway—without grounds. He applied again. Rejected again. At every government level, he was told the same thing: “Don’t go, don’t ask. Simple will be closed. Your company is finished. The issue is decided.”

What made the crisis surreal was the absence of leverage. In Russia, regulatory persecution typically involves ransom. Someone demands a stake, brands, cash. But no one came. “I sat like [the spy] Stirlitz laying out portraits,” Maxim recalled years later, “expecting someone to walk in. No one walked in.”

Maxim never learned why Simple was targeted. There was no public scandal, no stated political rationale, no clear enemy. Someone had decided to kill the company. The decision appeared irreversible. And there was nothing he could do about it.

Except persist.

For four months, Maxim inhabited a state of radical uncertainty. He couldn’t fight an enemy he couldn’t identify. He couldn’t negotiate when no one demanded anything. He couldn’t strategize when the rules were invisible. All he could do was continue applying, fixing cited deficiencies, waiting for someone to make a demand.

No one made a demand.

On September 16, 2011, the license was granted. Maxim calls it “probably the best day” in company history. He still doesn’t know what changed. The attack stopped as mysteriously as it had begun.

The Lesson: Control What You Can Control #

The 2011 crisis crystallized a principle that would define Maxim’s strategy for the next decade: you cannot control Russian regulatory caprice, but you can control supply chains, production, customer relationships, and vertical integration.

After 2011, Maxim systematically reduced SimpleWine’s exposure to external disruption. In 2014, the company acquired Bertinga winery in Chianti Classico, Italy (16.4 hectares) and founded Shilda winery in Georgia (120 hectares). These weren’t vanity projects. They were insurance. If import channels closed, Simple would control production.

The same year, Simple expanded retail from wholesale distribution to 100+ directly owned vinotekas. If B2B channels froze, B2C would absorb the shock. The company moved into gastronomy, opening Grand Cru restaurant (Michelin star in 2022). If retail struggled, restaurants would stabilize revenue.

By 2022, when Western sanctions intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, SimpleWine’s crisis response time had collapsed to two days—down from one week in 2014 and two months in 1998. The improvement wasn’t luck. It was architecture. Every crisis taught him which dependencies were fragile. After each crisis, he eliminated one more fragility.

The pattern is visible across three decades. After the 1998 collapse, Maxim learned that reinvestment mattered more than extraction. After the 2011 persecution, he learned that vertical integration provided resilience that relationships couldn’t. After the 2014 and 2022 sanctions, he learned that premium positioning creates buffers that mass-market models don’t have.

The Partnership That Never Broke #

Thirty years into the partnership, Maxim still describes the relationship with Anatoly in engineering terms. “We’re right-handed,” he explains. “I’m the right hand—strategy, finance. He’s the left—marketing, wine expertise. You can do everything with one hand, but it’s harder.”

The division of labor has never been renegotiated. There have been no partnership disputes, no equity fights, no “Am I getting my share?” arguments. Maxim holds 80% of SimpleWine; Anatoly holds 20%. The split reflects their respective contributions and hasn’t changed in 30 years.

What makes the partnership work, Maxim suggests, is the absence of internal competition. “We both want to earn, but also to build something.” That second clause—“to build something”—explains why the partnership survived when economic incentives suggested otherwise. In 1998, walking away was rational. In 2011, selling to whoever wanted Simple dead might have been prudent. But Maxim and Anatoly both wanted to build an institution, not extract and exit.

By 2024, they had built it: 100+ stores across eight Russian cities, 31.6 billion rubles in annual revenue ($350M USD), 2,500 employees, and a brand synonymous with premium wine in Russia. Maxim has four sons (ages 30, 22, 7, 4); Anatoly has a daughter (25). Both founders have mentioned wanting their children in the business, but no formal succession plan exists.

For now, succession remains theoretical. Maxim is 57. The company remains private—explicitly rejecting IPO or outside investment. The goal isn’t an exit. It’s durability.

What Persistence Through Ambiguity Looks Like #

The conventional narrative of entrepreneurship celebrates vision, strategy, and bold decisions. Maxim’s story offers a different lesson: sometimes survival requires persistence through ambiguity without knowing if resolution is possible.

In 2011, Maxim couldn’t see a path to victory. No one offered terms. No one explained the attack. No one suggested what success would look like. All he could do was continue applying for the license, fixing cited deficiencies, and waiting.

That kind of persistence is uncomfortable to celebrate because it offers no strategic insight. There was no clever maneuver he deployed to win. He just refused to stop. For four months, he endured uncertainty without leverage, strategy, or clarity.

And then the license arrived.

What the 2011 crisis revealed wasn’t Maxim’s strategic brilliance. It was his character under pressure. Strategy matters when the rules are known. Character matters when the rules are invisible.

Over three decades, Maxim has demonstrated both. He strategically built vertical integration to reduce fragility. He methodically reinvested profits to fund resilience. He engineered systems—Enotria, retail expansion, production—to create competitive moats.

But in 2011, none of that mattered. What mattered was his willingness to persist through four months of ambiguity without knowing if persistence would work.

It did. SimpleWine survived. And Maxim documented precisely what resilience looks like when strategy runs out and all that’s left is character.

Last updated: March 15, 2026