By Heorhi Tratsiak
The strangest thing about working inside a financial institution during a crisis is how much of the work stays the same.
Transfers still need to be processed. Clients still arrive with questions. Phones ring. Screens refresh. The coffee in the kitchen is still terrible. The Monday morning meeting still happens, because the Monday morning meeting always happens, and no one has formally decided that it should not.
I processed international transfers on a Tuesday in June 2020, a Tuesday that felt, from the outside, like the beginning of something irreversible. I formatted the SWIFT messages correctly. I checked the documentation. I approved what needed approving and flagged what needed flagging. I did my job with the same attention I brought to it on any other Tuesday, because there was nothing else to do with that particular Tuesday except live through it as carefully as possible.
Our chairman had been arrested the day before.
I want to tell you about what the next weeks and months looked like from inside that institution. Not as a political story, because I am not writing a political history, and because the political dimensions of those events have been documented elsewhere by people better positioned than I am to analyze them. I want to tell you what it looked like as a financial story. As a human story. As the story of what happens to the people inside an institution when the ground shifts, and they have to figure out, one transaction at a time, whether to keep showing up.
The Man at the Top
To understand what the chairman’s arrest meant to the people inside the bank, you have to understand what it meant for the bank to be what it was.
Belgazprombank had been built into something unusual in the landscape of Belarusian banking. It was serious. It was professional by standards that were genuinely high. It had attracted people who cared about doing the work correctly, about building something that functioned the way institutions in more stable environments functioned. The chairman had been central to that identity. He had run the institution for nearly two decades. His particular combination of financial expertise, civic engagement, and the specific kind of integrity that shows up not in statements but in decisions had shaped what the bank was.
When he was taken, what was taken along with him was harder to name precisely. Not the institution’s technical capacity. The systems still worked. The capital ratios were still what they were. The regulatory licenses were still in place.
What was taken was the answer to a question that had always been implicit and had never needed to be asked aloud: what does this institution stand for?
That question became suddenly urgent in a way none of us had prepared for.
What Arrives Before the News Does
Inside the bank, we learned about the arrest the way people learn about most things that happen to their institutions: through fragments, before the official version, with a texture of uncertainty that official communications never fully capture.
A colleague mentioned something to another colleague. A message moved through informal channels. By the time any formal statement was made, the building already knew, in the specific way that buildings know things, through the accumulation of quiet conversations and interrupted sentences and the particular way people avoided direct eye contact in the corridors.
What I remember most clearly is not a dramatic moment. It is the quality of the air in the building that day. The muted, careful quality of people who are continuing to work while holding something large and uncertain alongside the work.
I had been at the institution long enough to know that most days, even difficult ones, had a floor beneath them. Something to stand on. The institution itself was that floor. It had been there before you arrived, it would be there after you left, and it processed the uncertainty of ordinary professional life by being more stable than any individual within it.
That Tuesday, for the first time, the floor felt uncertain.
The Clients Arrive
Within days, the effect reached the front of the house.
Clients came in ways that were both predictable and irreducible. Predictable because financial anxiety has patterns, and those patterns were legible to anyone who had spent time in a client-facing role. Irreducible because each person who walked through the door was not a pattern. They were a person, with specific circumstances and specific fears and a specific reason why this particular uncertainty was hitting them at this particular moment.
There were the people who came to withdraw. Not all of their money, in most cases. Enough to feel like they had done something. Enough to transfer to another institution, or to hold at home for a while, or simply to look at and confirm that it was real and accessible and theirs. I understood this completely. When an institution feels less certain, making the abstract concrete is a rational response. You are not irrational when you want to hold your own money. You are doing the thing humans have always done when the systems they rely on feel less reliable.
What struck me was the demographic spread. It was not only the elderly, the people whose living memory included earlier collapses, who came in with that particular posture of worried purpose. It was people my age. People who had grown up in a period of relative financial stability, who had used digital banking for years, who had never experienced anything that looked like this. They were updating their priors in real time, and the update was painful to watch.
But there were also people who came in for different reasons.
A woman in her fifties came to deposit money. I remember the moment because it was unexpected. She pushed a substantial amount of cash across the counter and said, simply, that she had been keeping it at home for a while and had decided to bring it back. She did not want to see the bank fail. She felt it would be a shame. She said this matter-of-factly, the way you might talk about a local shop you wanted to support, and then she completed her transaction and left.
I thought about her for a long time afterward.
What Keeps a Bank Open
I want to try to describe what it actually means for a bank to stay open under conditions like this, because the phrase does not capture the reality.
Staying open is not a passive condition. It is not the absence of closing. It is a continuous active decision made by hundreds of people, every hour, to keep doing their jobs. To process the next transfer. To answer the next client question honestly. To make the next credit decision with the same care they brought to it last week.
The formal systems require this. The correspondent banking relationships require it. The regulatory obligations require it. But the formal systems do not make it happen. The formal systems provide the structure. The people inside it provide the energy.
What I observed during those weeks was a specific and particular kind of professionalism that I had not fully recognized before. The people I worked alongside continued to do their jobs at a standard that did not drop. Not because they were unaffected, because they were obviously affected, everyone was. But because they understood, at some level that was not always conscious, that their work was not separate from the situation. Their work was the situation. Every transfer processed correctly was a small vote for continuity. Every client treated with respect and honesty was a deposit in the trust account that the institution needed more urgently than it had ever needed it before.
There was no meeting at which this was decided. There was no memo. It was not a policy. It was a choice, made individually, by people who had various reasons for making it and who did not discuss those reasons very much, because there was work to do.
The Question Nobody Asked Directly
Sometime in those weeks, a question formed that I did not immediately put into words. It took shape slowly, the way certain important things do, beneath the surface of ordinary working days.
The question was: what am I, exactly, by staying?
I want to be careful here, because the answer was not obvious, and it was not the same for everyone, and I am not suggesting there was a single correct response to an unprecedented situation. People in institutions during crises make different choices for different reasons, and the calculus is more complicated than anyone who was not inside it can fully appreciate.
But the question itself was unavoidable. To continue working at an institution during a period of acute stress is to lend that institution your presence and your competence. To do your job well is to contribute to its continued functioning. This is true always, but it becomes visible during a crisis in a way it is not during stable periods. The choice, normally invisible, becomes legible.
I thought about what I had come to this institution to do. I had come to do the work well, to build something professionally, to be part of something that functioned with genuine integrity. Those motivations had not changed. But the environment in which they had to be expressed had changed, and the question of what it meant to express them in this environment had become suddenly complicated.
I did not resolve this question quickly. I continued to work. I continued to process transfers and work with clients and do my job as carefully as I could. I held the question alongside the work, which is what you do when a question is real and does not have a quick answer.
The Ones Who Left and the Ones Who Stayed
Over the following weeks and months, some people left. This was not discussed widely or publicly, because the environment did not encourage open discussion of such things, but it happened. Resignations, quiet departures, people who found positions elsewhere and took them.
I do not judge any of them. The decision about whether to stay in an institution during a crisis, and under what circumstances departure becomes the right choice, is genuinely individual, genuinely complex, and genuinely nobody’s business except the person making it.
What I observed was that the people who left and the people who stayed were not sorted along the lines that a simple analysis might suggest. It was not straightforwardly the most principled who left or the most pragmatic who stayed. It was messier than that. It was people weighing responsibilities to families, financial circumstances, professional options, personal histories with the institution, assessments of what the future held and what their continued presence meant.
What I also observed was that the institution continued to function as a coherent professional environment through this period. The work continued at a standard. The client service continued at a standard. The technical operations continued at a standard. And this, I came to understand, was itself a remarkable thing.
An institution is not its buildings or its systems or its org chart. It is the ongoing decision of the people inside it to behave as an institution. To honor the obligations the institution has incurred. To show up. To do the work. When this decision continues to be made, broadly, across enough of the people involved, the institution continues to exist in the most important sense.
When enough people stop making it, the institution dies from the inside, even if its balance sheet remains technically positive for some time afterward.
What the Clients Taught Me
Somewhere in the middle of this period, I had a conversation that I have returned to many times since.
A man came in to ask about a loan he had taken the previous year. A business loan, modest in size, for a piece of equipment he used in his work. He had been repaying it on schedule. He wanted to know, straightforwardly, whether he should keep repaying it, given everything that was happening.
It was a fair question. If the institution’s future was genuinely uncertain, the rational calculation around debt repayment changes. This is not a dishonest question. It is the question of someone trying to manage their affairs sensibly under conditions of uncertainty.
I told him that his obligation under the loan contract had not changed. That repaying his loan was the right thing to do not only contractually but practically, because his credit history would follow him regardless of what happened to any particular institution. And that, to the best of my knowledge and judgment, the institution was operating normally and intended to continue to do so.
He thanked me and left. He continued to repay his loan.
What stays with me is not the transaction. It is the quality of the exchange. He came in with a real question, asked it plainly, received an honest answer, and acted on it. This is what a functioning financial relationship looks like. This is what trust in practice actually is: not a large abstract thing, but a series of small honest exchanges in which people deal with each other as what they actually are.
In the middle of everything that was uncertain and frightening, this small exchange felt important. It felt like evidence of something that could continue.
The Network Watches
There is an aspect of what happened during that period that I have not seen described anywhere, and that I think matters for understanding how financial crises actually propagate.
When an institution comes under stress, the people most sensitive to the early signals are not depositors. Depositors operate on news and rumor and social information networks. They respond, but with a lag. The entities that respond fastest, almost in real time, are the institution’s financial counterparties.
Correspondent banks have compliance functions whose job is exactly this: to monitor the institutions they maintain relationships with, to detect early signs of deterioration, and to protect their own institution from contagion by reducing exposure before a problem becomes public. They are very good at this. They are watching, always, in a background process that never sleeps.
During the weeks following the summer of 2020, I noticed changes in the behavior of certain correspondent relationships. Not dramatic changes. Nothing that amounted to a withdrawal of service or a formal communication about our standing. But the texture of the interactions shifted in ways that were legible to anyone paying attention.
Documentation requests became slightly more thorough. Processing times for certain transaction categories extended marginally. The rhythm of the routine had changed, in the way a conversation changes when the other person knows something they are not saying directly.
This is how the network responds to uncertainty. Not through formal action, which is visible and consequential and therefore avoided until unavoidable. Through the quiet tightening of a thousand informal margins. Each individually defensible as standard procedure. Each in isolation meaning almost nothing. In aggregate, a message.
The message was: we are watching more carefully now. The cost of operating normally was rising. The frictionless relationships that functioning institutions rely on were becoming fractionally less frictionless. Small amounts of extra attention, extra documentation, extra time were now required for things that had previously processed without a second thought.
Managing this was part of the work of those months. Keeping the correspondent relationships functional, keeping the documentation standards high enough that there was nothing to question, continuing to honor every commitment on the precise terms it had been made. The work of proving, through behavior, that the institution remained what it had been.
This is not work that shows up in any account of what happened. It was invisible work, done by people whose names will not appear in any history of those events, maintaining relationships that the institution’s continued functioning depended on. It is a version of the same thing I have been describing throughout this chapter: the accumulation of small correct decisions that collectively keeps a system running.
The Particular Weight of Ordinary Days
I have read accounts of financial crises that focus on the technical dynamics. The capital flows. The liquidity positions. The regulatory interventions. These things are real and they matter.
What those accounts rarely capture is what a financial crisis feels like to the people inside the institutions at the center of it. Not the executives making strategic decisions, whose experience has been described more often. The people at the middle levels. The people who process the transfers and talk to the clients and sit in the Monday morning meetings and make ten small decisions a day that collectively determine whether the institution continues to function.
Let me try to describe the texture of ordinary days during that period.
You arrive in the morning knowing less than you want to know. The news cycle is moving faster than institutional communications can respond to it. Your colleagues are holding things they are not saying in the corridors, not because they are dishonest but because no one has information worth saying yet. There is a particular kind of professional silence that settles over a workplace during a prolonged uncertainty, a silence that is not the silence of calm but the silence of people who are working hard at continuing normally.
Your first task of the day is the same as it was last Monday. You do it with the same attention. Because the alternative, allowing the attention to deteriorate, allowing the work to reflect the difficulty of the context, is the thing you most need to prevent. The work quality is the argument. Every correctly processed transfer is a small proof that the institution is still what it says it is.
Clients sense things before they are told them. I watched this with attention during those weeks. People came in with a quality of alertness that was slightly heightened, a tendency to ask questions they had not asked before, a need to see that the person they were talking to was steady. What they needed from us was not information, mostly we had no more information than they did. What they needed was steadiness. The evidence that the people inside the institution were not panicking, that the routine had not collapsed, that the next transaction would be handled the same way as the last one.
We gave them that. Not as a performance. As the thing we actually were, on those specific days, in that specific building. People doing their jobs at a standard, because the standard was the point.
I want you to understand how much that costs. Not in any dramatic sense. In the quiet, accumulative sense of carrying weight for weeks, coming to work uncertain and leaving still uncertain and coming back the next morning and doing it again. The emotional labour of continuity. The discipline of showing up in a way that gives other people permission to believe that things are still workable.
This is not heroism. It is something more ordinary and more important than heroism. It is the baseline behaviour that functional institutions require from the people inside them, made visible by a period in which it was genuinely difficult to sustain.
What I felt, and what I observed in the people around me, was something I can only describe as the weight of continuity.
The institution had obligations. To depositors who had trusted it with their savings. To borrowers who had made plans based on credit they expected to continue to have access to. To counterparties in dozens of correspondent relationships who expected transactions to settle as committed. To employees whose livelihoods depended on the institution continuing to function. To the communities in which it operated and which had come to rely on its services.
None of these obligations disappeared because the situation became difficult. They became more urgent. And the people inside the institution were, in a direct and personal sense, the ones responsible for honoring them. Not because any specific policy said so. Because that is what being inside an institution means.
I carried that weight consciously for the first time during those months. I had worked in banking for five years before the crisis, and I had understood intellectually that the work mattered. I had not understood it in the way you understand something when you have felt it under pressure. The difference between intellectual knowledge and felt knowledge is large. The crisis closed that gap.
The Seed That Was Planted
I want to be honest about something.
The months that followed the events of that summer planted a seed in me that took years to become a decision. The seed was not about fear, though fear was present. It was not about disillusionment with the institution itself, whose professionalism I continued to respect. It was something more complicated.
It was the recognition that the stability I had built my professional life around was conditional in a way I had not fully understood. That the floor I stood on rested on other floors, and those floors rested on conditions that were not entirely within anyone’s control. That the work I cared about, the work of building financial systems that functioned with genuine integrity, required conditions in which that work was possible.
I did not know, in 2020, what I would eventually decide. I continued to work. I continued to develop professionally. I continued to believe in the importance of the work. But something had shifted in my understanding of what stability actually was, how it was produced, and what it required.
That shift was the beginning of a longer reckoning that eventually led me to build my own path. That reckoning belongs to a later part of this story.
What an Institution Actually Is
I have been thinking, since those weeks in 2020, about what institutions actually are. What it means to say that a bank, or a hospital, or a school, or any other organized human structure for collective activity, survived something difficult.
The common answer is that institutions survive because of capital, or management, or regulatory support, or some combination of these. These things matter. But I watched an institution navigate a period of acute stress, and what I saw doing the actual work of survival was something different.
It was the accumulated decision, made daily by hundreds of people, to honor the obligations the institution had incurred. To do the work the institution existed to do. To treat the clients with the respect and honesty that made the relationship worth maintaining.
This is harder to measure than a capital ratio. It does not appear on any balance sheet. But I would argue it is the more fundamental asset. Because capital can be lost and restored. Management can be replaced. Regulatory conditions can change. But if the people inside an institution stop believing that its work is worth doing, stop showing up with the quality of attention the work requires, stop treating the people they serve as worth that attention, then the institution is already gone, regardless of what the numbers say.
What I Carry Forward
The woman who deposited money when others were withdrawing it. The client who repaid his loan because his obligations had not changed. The colleagues who came to work on mornings when coming to work required more than it usually did.
These are small acts. They did not make the news. They did not change the course of anything in any way that history would record. They were simply the ordinary behavior of people who had decided, for their various reasons, to honor the responsibilities they had taken on.
I think about them because they represent something I want to name directly: the way that ordinary human decency keeps the world’s systems running. Not the dramatic interventions. Not the crisis management. The daily choice of thousands of ordinary people to do their jobs with integrity, to treat the people they encounter with honesty, to continue showing up when showing up is harder than it looks.
Financial systems are built on this. Legal systems are built on this. Healthcare systems. Supply chains. Every structure of organized human cooperation depends, at its base, on enough people making this choice often enough.
We do not have a name for this in the formal vocabulary of economics or finance. We talk about capital adequacy and liquidity ratios and systemic risk. We do not have a term for the aggregate of individual decisions to continue doing the work well. But it is the most load-bearing element of any system, and its presence or absence determines everything.
The Catharsis at the Bottom
Here is what I want to leave you with, and I want you to sit with it for a moment.
You have, almost certainly, relied today on systems you did not think about. You received a payment, or made one, or checked a balance, and it worked, and you moved on. Behind that seamlessness was a chain of decisions and actions by people you will never meet, who processed your transaction correctly because they take their work seriously, who answered a question honestly because honesty is the standard they hold themselves to, who showed up on a morning when showing up required something.
They did this not because they were watched. Not because a regulator was checking. Not because the metrics required it.
They did it because that is who they decided to be.
I spent seven years inside one of those systems. I have been, in my small part, one of those people. And what I want to say, after everything I witnessed, is this:
The stability you experience as ordinary, the stability that allows you to make plans, to save money, to borrow for a future you believe in, to go to sleep without worrying whether the financial system will still exist tomorrow, was not given to you. It was built. It is rebuilt, every day, by people who have decided that the work matters and who do it with care.
That is not a small thing to say about the world. It is actually the most important thing.
In the most uncertain weeks I have experienced professionally, in a building full of people who did not know what was coming, that work continued. At a standard. With dignity. Because enough people understood, without quite saying it, that the work was the answer. That the best thing they could do with an uncertain morning was make it as ordinary as they could for the people who came to them with their fears and their savings and their need to believe that something, at least, was holding.
They held.
And so did we.
