The insurance profession

In the distant, distant socialist times, the word "agent" could evoke three associations in a Soviet person. Those who loved detective stories pictured a muscular dark-haired man in dark glasses with a square jaw; cultured people associated the word with the film "Beware of the Car", in which Innokenty Smoktunovsky brilliantly played Yuri Detochkin, a Gosstrakh agent (which, unfortunately, did not add respect to the profession: Detochkin seemed a kind-hearted loser, not of this world).

For everyone else, who had neither read nor watched, the profession of an insurance agent was associated with a woman of indeterminate appearance and age who, once a month and not very insistently, offered to insure your children, property and life…

Not a particularly pleasant stereotype, is it? This is probably why job-seeking ads of the 1990s quite often contained the phrase "No agents, intimate services or Herbalife, please!", and the fact that "agents" come before "intimate services" here tells the thoughtful reader a lot. Such were the times…

It must be said that until 1991 we lived in an absolutely predictable society. We did not need fortune-tellers and soothsayers lifting the veil of the future with a trembling hand. Everything was clear to us anyway. The state decided for us where to vacation, what to wear, where and how to get medical treatment. As befits a good master, it provided everything necessary for such a life without much fuss, and it protected us from imperialist enemies of all stripes and embezzlers of socialist property on the one hand, and from natural disasters on the other.

The year 1992, which followed 1991, brought us a change of socio-economic formation. The restoration of capitalism in Kazakhstan began. Capitalism with all its inherent institutions, advantages and disadvantages. And this means that insurance will occupy a position of real demand.

Believe me, there is every reason for such optimism. To make sure this statement is right, it is enough to look at the place Insurance occupies where capitalism is well established and the state's interference in the lives of its citizens is minimal, which means that they are left alone with the consequences of their actions.

In the West, a person without 5-6 insurance policies is not considered a full member of society. Taught by life, people there insure everything they can: health, property, liability… Gradually this is happening here too. Of course, not everyone has a villa in the Canary Islands to insure, but everyone has a roof over their head and some property.