Muslima Latypova

They tried to cheat us too, but we didn't run

The decision in the hotel #

Latypova is the founder of Bahetle (Бахетле), a Kazan food company, and the sole owner of its operating company, OOO Bahetle-1, according to registry data. The company she runs today makes much of what it sells. In 1998 it had not yet sold anything. It was an idea for one supermarket in Kazan and a sum of money set aside for its equipment.

She has told the story of that August in her own words. “Suddenly I learn that the dollar in Russia has risen fivefold, from 6 to 30 roubles! I sit in the hotel with the money and think: buy, or better keep the money? … And I decided not to abandon my idea, not to mope, and to buy everything needed,” she told Business Online in an internet conference published on 11 April 2018.

The decision is worth a profile because of what it cost and what it bought. Holding the cash would have kept every option open in a collapsing currency. Spending it closed them, and committed her to opening the store whatever came next.

Canteens, a café and the Tynda line #

She came to that hotel room from public catering. Latypova comes from Klachi (Клачи), a village in the Arsk district of Tatarstan, and her documented career begins in the Soviet catering system of Kazan’s Sovetsky district, where by about 1990 she had headed a canteen and then directed a trade depot. The work was feeding people in volume, and it was the trade she would later build a company on. Her first private venture was, fittingly, a café.

When private trade opened up in 1991, she left state catering for her own account. She opened a cooperative café and, with her partner Rinat Mukhametshin (Ринат Мухаметшин), ran a shuttle trade by rail from Tynda (Тында). It was rough work, and she has not dressed it up: people tried to cheat them, she has said, and they did not run.

Official biographies date her role as general director of OOO Bekhetle (Бэхетле) from 1994. By 1998 she was ready to open a supermarket of her own in Kazan, and went abroad to buy what it needed.

Buying at the bottom #

The timing could hardly have been worse. In August 1998 Russia’s currency fell from 6 to 30 roubles to the dollar while she was in Poland with the equipment money. Every dollar’s worth of imported equipment now cost 30 roubles instead of 6, and the supermarket it was meant for had not yet opened. Nothing about the plan had changed except its price.

She weighed it, by her own account, as a plain choice: buy, or keep the money. Her reasoning, as she later set it out, was practical. Equipment of that kind was not made in Russia, everything imported was expensive, and equipment lasts a long time. Keeping it would have protected the cash she still held. Buying would turn it into equipment for the store. She chose to buy everything the store needed, and to stop agonising over it. The phrase she used afterwards was that she decided “not to mope”.

The first Bahetle supermarket opened on Sibirsky Trakt in Kazan in December 1998, with the equipment she had bought at the bottom of the devaluation. A store that had been planned in one economy opened in another, months into a crisis, with its fittings already paid for.

Keeping the company in her hands #

The company grew from that store, and she stayed at its head. A second store opened in Nizhnekamsk in 2002 and a third in Kazan in 2003, when Mukhametshin became a co-founder. In 2004 the company opened its own frozen-food workshops, and in 2006 it went to Moscow. In 2013 it catered for the Summer Universiade in Kazan, and in January 2014 it opened Bahetle-Halal, a supermarket in the city’s Old Tatar Quarter. She has been general director of OOO Bahetle-1, the operating company, since 2007, and registry data list her as its sole founder. In October 2017, with the network offered for sale, she said publicly that she meant to sell only the Moscow stores and keep the business in Tatarstan. In July 2018 the founding managers were replaced, and Elena Panchenko became executive director.

The recognition has been personal. She was named an Honoured Trade Worker of the Russian Federation in 2007, and received the Order of Friendship in 2012, the Order “For Services to the Republic of Tatarstan” in 2014 and the Order of Honour in 2022. In 2022 she was also made an Honorary Citizen of Kazan. Since 8 September 2024 she has been a deputy of the State Council of Tatarstan, elected to its seventh convocation.

A family’s factories #

The production side of the business has moved into her family. In May 2020 her daughter, Elvira Kharlamova (Эльвира Харламова), registered Fabrika Bahetle in Zelenodolsk as its sole owner. In December 2023 her grandson, Erik Kharlamov (Эрик Харламов), founded a second company there, Fabrika Bahetle-1. The two companies hold the factories; OOO Bahetle-1, hers, still runs the brand.

The Moscow decision she announced in 2017 ran its course in 2026. The sale did not happen as offered, and the last Moscow store, on Tverskaya Street, closed on 30 April 2026 when its lease ended. The business she had chosen to keep, the one in Tatarstan, is the one that remains.

Her first store, on Sibirsky Trakt, has since closed. What she built from it is still in Tatarstan, and the company that runs it, OOO Bahetle-1, is still hers. It began in a hotel in Poland in August 1998, with money she could have kept, and a decision to spend it on everything the store needed.

Last updated: October 17, 2026

Researched 27 sources in Russian.