Payolinski

The white-smocked women who push ice-cream carts in the parks and squares of Moscow are state employees. The peasants who peddle produce in open-market stands work for collective farms. In theory, all the service and retail trades in Russia are nationalized. But in fact, to judge by the most recent hue and cry in the Moscow press, the entrepreneur in human nature is never dead, and a moral smog hangs over Russia. In the world's most advanced socialist state, private enterprise, profiteering, and just plain payoffs seem to be bursting out all over.

Take the candy trade. A janitress at a food store studied the tastes of sweet-toothed small fry, concluded that what they liked most were toy-shaped confections. She went home, out of sugared batter molded a swan with raisin eyes, baked it, and promptly sold it to a schoolboy for 2 rubles. Encouraged, she turned more and more batter into dough, spawned a swarm of home bakeries among women in the Moscow suburb of Stolbovaya. Was such initiative encouraged? Moskovskaya Pravda urged the bureaucrats of the "Red Front" candy factory to undercut these "unsanitary private confectioners" by mass-producing digestible swans, Teddy bears and roosters.

A far more important source of private income comes from refurbishing such shoddily mass-produced essentials as clothes, shoes and furniture. One of the wealthiest men in Moscow is an expert cobbler who specializes in fixing boots botched in the cooperative repair shop and, complained one Moscow newspaper, can afford to fly all 19 members of his household down to a Black Sea resort every summer. A good dressmaker lives equally well, can pick and choose her customers, and takes only those with the best references--and the most money. Minor house repairs are another lucrative source of private income: a Literaturnaya Gazeta reporter estimated that from one-third to one-half of all consumer expenditures for such services goes into private pockets. In Stalingrad he found that a sofa bought for 600 rubles costs 416 rubles more to be put into good shape.

As for "payola," Russia has its own Aaron Brenner, chief of Moscow's Bus Depot No. 7. Brenner auctioned off the best routes to drivers, charged them 150 rubles when their buses needed new motors, 200 for a new bus, 500 rubles hush money whenever they had an accident. Not satisfied with all this, he falsified his books, and before the government got on to him, bilked the state of some 700,000 rubles in a single year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.