By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW - Last month, as Russia’s stock market fell and the credit crunch took hold around the world, Russian companies spooked by memories of previous bank collapses scrambled to protect what cash they had. Venture capital dried up virtually overnight, including at a young company called MeshNetics.
The tale of MeshNetics, which produces innovative wireless networking systems, offers a glimpse of how the financial crisis has swept through Russia’s budding entrepreneurial culture and crashed like cold water onto young workers who had come to see the boom times as normal.
“It’s going to be tough letting go of this period of growth,” Ilya Bagrak, the company’s software product manager, said last month. He was still in shock from the experience of firing one of his employees hours after they had shared their morning coffee.
Eight years of stability and economic growth under Vladimir V. Putin had produced a wave of start-ups and spinoffs in Moscow’s high-tech sector. Here the employees of MeshNetics had found the kind of opportunity that Russian scientists once could pursue only overseas.
The workers were young and compulsive . Their main product, the ZigBit, was a chip capable of setting up wireless networks almost automatically. Vasily Suvorov, the chief executive, seemed to have picked the perfect moment. This spring, President Dmitri A. Medvedev came to power vowing to wean Russia’s economy off fossil fuels and invest in innovation.
In March, Mr. Suvorov, 36, met with his shareholders and planned “fullthrottle movement.” The ZigBit has an 18-month sales cycle, so it requires heavy upfront investment, and the company was not yet profitable. But sales were growing by 50 to 80 percent per quarter.
When Mr.Bagrak moved back to Russia from Berkeley, California, he worried about the fabled lassitude of Russian office life. But what he found at MeshNetics reminded him of Sun Microsystems and Google, where he had done internships. His peers worked long hours and were buzzing with start-up ideas.
“There’s this idea of ‘You can make something happen,’” Mr. Bagrak said.
In the midst of young people in blue jeans, Efim Grinkrug was a reminder of the past. At 57, he was a chain smoker in a loose black suit, from a generation that saw science as a religion. When the Soviet Union collapsed, scientists his age left Russia, or left science. He considers it a success that, as he put it, “I didn’t end up selling cars.”
When Mr. Suvorov announced that layoffs were coming, alarm bells went off in Mr. Grinkrug’s brain. His last major project, a three-dimensional Web browser he had developed for another company, was abruptly frozen during the Russian banking crisis of 2004, and it was still frozen.
The first round of cuts at MeshNetics was less than 10 percent. Nine days later, about a dozen more people were fired . On October 29, Mr. Suvorov looked stricken. He said the company was in a “shutdown phase.”
Within days, there seemed to be reason for optimism: Mr. Suvorov said he was close to reaching an agreement with a Western company that would save the core of the business. That was little comfort to Mr. Grinkrug, who was told that his division would be eliminated. The thought of finding a new job at his age scared him.
MeshNetics was retaining four of his programmers, so that his project might go forward if the new leadership chose. “All the rest, probably, will die in my head,” Mr. Grinkrug predicted sadly in an e-mail message. “This head is not needed anymore.”