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Adel Khayrullin
General Director 2nd GEN
As a senior analyst in his father's agroholding, Adel Khayrullin brought in GPS and fuel monitoring that saved about ₽108M in a year, by his father's account. In February 2020 his father, Airat, died in a helicopter crash, and Adel took charge of Krasny Vostok. More than five years on he still runs it, now Tatarstan's largest milk producer.
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Adel Khayrullin took on what his father built and kept it
Asked in February 2024 why he had not sold the business his father built, Adel Khayrullin (Адель Хайруллин) did not answer with a strategy. He answered with his father. Four years earlier, at 27, he had become head of Krasny Vostok (Красный Восток), a Tatarstan dairy holding, in the month his father died.
My father gave me so much… To preserve and multiply the business is a form of memory. To do everything so that it is not forgotten and serves as an example to others.
The heir, not the founder #
Krasny Vostok was not his creation. His father, Airat Khayrullin, built it, with Adel’s uncle, Ilshat, from collective farms that had gone bankrupt, beginning in March 2003. The name came from the family’s earlier business, a brewery that Airat had run from 1996, first as general director and then as board chair, and that the family sold in 2006 to concentrate on farming. It is now Tatarstan’s largest milk producer, and he is the second generation of the family to run it.
He has headed it since February 2020, and since March of that year he has been general director of Krasny Vostok Group, the group company registered that month. The other heirs renounced their shares in his favour; he inherited his father’s stake.
What makes him worth reading about is not the size of what he inherited but what he has said about it. He has spoken to the regional daily Business Online, at an internet conference in February 2024 and in an interview in November 2025, among other appearances, and in them he has explained, in his own terms, why he kept a business he did not build.
Five years inside #
He did not arrive from outside. By early 2020 he had worked inside the family company for about five years.
The one piece of that work the record describes is practical. As a senior analyst, around 2016, he introduced GPS and fuel monitoring on the holding’s machinery fleet. By his father’s account, and the company’s, the change saved about ₽108M in its first year. His father credited him with it publicly. The figure is the company’s and his father’s own, not an independent audit.
It is a modest entry on a CV and a telling one. A farming holding assembled from former collective farms runs on machinery, and fuel is one of its costs. The analyst’s first recorded contribution was to measure it. It was an improvement to something that already existed, not the founding of something new.
It also meant that when the handover came, he was not a stranger to the business. He had spent those years inside it, with a measured result to his name, before it became his. He was an insider before he was an heir.
February 2020 #
His father died in a helicopter crash in Tatarstan on 7 February 2020. That month Adel took charge of the business. His uncle Ilshat, who had built the holding with his father, presented him to the workforce as head of the holding. He was 27.
The formal structure followed within weeks: Krasny Vostok Group was registered in March 2020 with Adel as general director, and the other heirs renounced their shares in his favour.
What he has described in public is what he chose to do with what he was left.
Within eight months the holding’s two dairy farms in Tambov oblast, the farthest part of his father’s map, had been sold. What remained was a business concentrated in Tatarstan, with one complex in neighbouring Ulyanovsk oblast, run by a general director in the first year of the job.
Why he did not sell #
The clearest statement of his thinking came four years into the job, at an internet conference held by Business Online in February 2024. By then, by his own figures, the state subsidies the holding received had fallen in every year since 2019. He was asked why he did not sell the business. The question was a fair one: an heir to a large farming holding has an obvious alternative to running it.
He was asked a question about a business, and he answered it about a person. His answer, as Business Online recorded it, turned on his father: on what his father had given him, and on preserving and multiplying the business as a form of memory, so that it would not be forgotten.
At the same conference he set out how he meant to run it. For now, he said, he wanted to stay within Tatarstan and find the maximum level of efficiency there; expansion was something the holding might talk about in perhaps ten years. He named no timetable beyond that decade. The two answers belong together. An heir who sees keeping the business as an obligation to the man who built it has a reason to protect it before he grows it, and to accept a narrower footprint in exchange.
Holding to the long target #
He still runs the holding more than five years on. In November 2025, looking back on his first five years in charge, he listed the period’s trials, Covid, three droughts and two waterlogged years among them, and described them as trials that had tried to make the holding stronger.
In 2026, at Agrovolga-2026 and in an interview with Realnoe Vremya, he restated the goal he has set for it: 800 tonnes of milk a day. He paired it with a policy of paying down the holding’s debt, stated in the same appearances. Under him the holding has bought 100 heifers a month since December 2023 to renew its herd. It is a goal measured in milk, not in land or money.
The target is his own and it is stated, not reached. In 2025 the holding produced about 305 tonnes of milk a day, so the goal is more than two and a half times that. It is a measure of how far he intends to take the business inside the footprint he chose to keep, rather than by adding new ground to it. The target follows the aim he set out in 2024: to preserve what he inherited, and to multiply it.
Researched 32 sources in Russian.