Rafael Yunusov

We did not stand with an outstretched hand; we looked for and found the means for development.

A vet in the supplies office #

Yunusov did not start Chelny-Khleb (Челны-Хлеб). The plant was already fifteen years old when he arrived. Plant No. 1 of the city’s bread combine opened in 1973, built to feed Naberezhnye Chelny as it grew with the KAMAZ truck works, and it ran as part of the state bread combine.

He came to it by a roundabout road. He trained as a veterinarian and worked as a vet on a state farm, then as the director of a market, then in construction. In 1988 he joined the bread combine as deputy director for resources, which in practice made him head of supplies: the man responsible for getting flour, yeast, sugar, butter and trucks to a plant that baked for a whole industrial city.

It was a hard time to hold that job. The shortages of those years reached the very things a bakery cannot work without, and they landed on his desk. Recalling his first years at the plant in a 2014 interview with Business Online, he answered with a list. “These were questions like: there’s not enough flour, you struggle to get yeast, making ends meet, a catastrophic situation with sugar and butter. No machinery at all!”

Put in charge in the hardest years #

In August 1993 Yunusov was made general director of the whole plant. He had spent five years as the man who chased supplies; now everything the plant did, or failed to do, was his.

The years that followed brought a different problem, in his own later telling. Recalling the 1990s in a 2017 interview for the plant’s anniversary, he described a crisis of non-payment. The plant shipped its bread, he said, and was not always paid for it. The unpaid bills piled up into what he called artificial debts, and those debts left the enterprise unable to function fully or to buy its raw materials. Flour was so short, by his account, that the deficit reached up to 1,000 tonnes a month, and the plant bought flour in neighbouring regions to keep the ovens going. It was a decade, as he put it, in which some producers in the baking trade survived and some were left to history.

He tells it not as a personal ordeal but as a series of decisions.

No outstretched hand #

The first decision concerned the people. By his 2017 account, the plant held to strict economy and, despite the scale of the non-payments, made a point of paying wages in full and on time. The second concerned the state. The plant, he said, did not wait to be rescued: “We did not stand with an outstretched hand; we looked for and found the means for development.”

The third decision was the one that shaped everything after it. If the customers who took the bread would not pay for it, the plant would sell its own bread to the people who ate it. In his telling, Chelny-Khleb decided to build a retail chain of its own to escape that dependence. The first of its own grocery stores opened in 1999, in the city’s 32nd microdistrict, and over the following years the plant added more.

The same logic ran backwards up the supply chain. By his account, the plant went on to build its own mill-elevator and its own power and boiler houses.

Back to the native land #

In 2003 the story turned to the land. Yunusov proposed an agrofirm on farmland in his home district of Muslyumovo, and it was created that year by a resolution of the Republic of Tatarstan’s Cabinet. He named it Rodnye Kraya – Tugan Yak (Родные края – Туган як); Tugan Yak is Tatar for “native land”. By his own description in 2014, it worked some 25,000 hectares across 14 villages, growing grain for the bakery’s own mill, so that the bread sold in the plant’s shops could be traced from the field to its own counter.

By 2013, again on his own account, the holding he ran, shops included, had 52 stores and more than 5,000 staff.

Alongside the business he held public office. He was elected a deputy of the State Council of Tatarstan in 2000, in its second convocation, re-elected in 2004, and in September 2014 won a third term in the Komsomolsky district of Naberezhnye Chelny, standing as a self-nominated candidate.

Letting go of the shops #

Of all the layers he added, the shops came first, in 1999. In 2024 they went. The trading house that ran the shops had posted its first loss the year before, and during 2024 it passed in two stages to Leana Garifullina (Леана Гарифуллина): 60% in May, the rest in November, when the stores took the name Bayram (Байрам). Yunusov described the first stage as an exchange of presence between two republics: “We are opening our presence in Bashkortostan, and they in Chelny. It’s just a partnership agreement.”

What Yunusov kept says as much as what went. The store premises and the warehouse stayed with the bakery, leased to the buyers for ten years, Business Online reported. In December 2024 he and Farit Shaimardanov (Фарит Шаймарданов) were the only subscribers to a new issue of the bakery company’s shares, payable with a stake in a trading company. The share register is held by an independent registrar and is not public. The ovens, the mill and the buildings stayed with the plant he has run since 1993.

Still at the plant #

In February 2025 Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture named him an Honorary Worker of the Agro-Industrial Complex.

He owns Chelny-Khleb today; Business Online described him as its owner in 2024. The story of how he came to run it is simpler than that word suggests. He did not start the plant; he arrived in its supplies office in a decade of shortages and stayed. Each layer he later added, the shops and the mill, was, in his telling, an answer to a dependence: customers who did not pay, flour that ran short. When one of those layers stopped paying its way, it was let go, and the bakery it had been built to protect was kept. The agrofirm he proposed in his home district was set up to grow the plant’s grain.

Last updated: October 24, 2026

Researched 30 sources in Russian.