In an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes”, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told how she started working at the Women’s Market in Sofia as a 15-year-old.
My first duty was to clean the cabbage and put it on display so that it would be attractive to customers, she explained to the legendary TV presenter Leslie Stahl during the filming of the show at the Women’s Market in Sofia.
Georgieva also tells how difficult the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union were for Bulgaria:
“There was nothing in the stores. Nothing. I would get up at 4:00 in the morning to stand in line and buy milk for my daughter. And in the mid-1990s, inflation became so great that eventually bill went up to 2,000% a year. It wiped out people’s savings.”
In the show “60 Minutes”, Kristalina Georgieva also gives an answer about her attitude to communism:
Leslie Stoll: When you were young, in high school, were you a staunch communist?
Kristalina Georgieva: Absolutely not.
Leslie Stoll: Oh, even then?
Kristalina Georgieva: Absolutely not. No one in my family was a member of the Communist Party.
“Kristalina Georgieva studied economics at the Karl Marx Higher Institute in Sofia. But when the Soviet grip loosened, she was free to devote herself to the study of capitalism and won a scholarship to study in London and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She started work at the World Bank as an economist, rose to CEO, and in 2019 to head the IMF. For her, the war in Ukraine is a chilling echo of the past, as Russia threatens one of its neighbors once again,” explains Zad shot by Leslie Stahl, the Off News site reports.
Georgieva’s brother, who until recently lived in Kharkiv, also participated in the interview, sharing about the horrors of the war: “It’s so hard to explain. It’s like describing to a blind person what the color red is.”
