Sniping For Food

Factual Questions
1

Back in what I think was the mid-to-late nineties, when the ruble was doing so poorly that the Russian government had to pay teachers with vodka, I read a blurb somewhere about a curious situation: apparently the Russian military was thinning its ranks to cut costs, and they had laid off a woman in their special forces who was a career sniper. She had a daughter to feed, and so the obvious question asked by people who heard of it was, in this economy and state of political unrest, what sort of job is this woman going to get to put food on the table? The woman had asserted that she would not accept employment doing anything illegal, but…

Does anyone know what happened to the woman and her daughter? Are there some other well-known situations where a government has dismissed people whose primary skills really shouldn’t be used in the private sector? (Like, say, nuclear weapons engineers?) Have there ever been serious consequences as a result of such an action?

2

I would imagine US has a lot of private nuclear weapons engineers and it’s not such a narrow field that you couldn’t work somewhere else – depending on your original qualification (aeronautics, nuclear physics, being an officer, whatever it was). I don’t know what rank a career sniper would have, and what sort of an education, but I would imagine such a person could find jobs in private security, management, or perhaps any other sort of trade that requires patience and fine motor skills. Watch repair or optics repair come to mind.

3

I know that when the Soviet Union started laying off weapons scientists, the US started up some research programs geared specifically to their skills (but using them in different, i.e., non-weapon, ways), so as to keep them gainfully employed. I don’t know if they had similar programs for specialized military skills, but it wouldn’t surprise me.