Getting Ahead in Moscow

Passing tests to get into college is tough in Russia too. But for three years a few dozen youngsters with rich parents and poor minds found an easy out. They appealed to an enterprising young Georgian named Otar Pkhaladze, who soon after he got to Moscow in 1958 set up shop in the business of getting boys and girls into 13 top medical and technical institutes for fees running from $1,600 to $18,870. To find clients, who mostly came from Georgia, Pkhaladze hired agents on a commission basis or made a direct pitch by longdistance phone. In Moscow he organized a ring of bright students to take his clients' entrance exams. The ringers were experts at passing just well enough to attract no attention; they got $2.88 a day plus an $11 bonus for each test. As an added service, Pkhaladze supplied term papers on a piece-rate basis of $22 to $77 and bribed conniving college officials.

Pkhaladze--his ghosts fondly called him "Papa"--was so successful that soon he expanded to Leningrad's medical schools. He acquired a chauffeur-driven Volga limousine, dined regularly at Moscow's Aragvi Restaurant, where lavish tips earned him VIP treatment. He even treated himself to a vacation at Carlsbad in Czechoslovakia, where he posed as a movie producer.

Then one of Pkhaladze's students particularly disgraced himself by "debauchery" at Leningrad Pediatrics Institute, got questioned by suspicious officials, and spilled the beans. To the police, the parents of Pkhaladze's clients tearfully justified it, as Komsomolskaya Pravda put it, by "a passionate desire to have their children go to college, and by the poor preparation they received in high school." Last week Papa and five of his ghosts, having flunked a nasty courtroom exam, were enrolled in the pen for terms up to 15 years.

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