Eat the Rich

Tatyana Y. Yarygina, deputy chairwoman of the State Duma’s Committee on Labor and Social Policy, claimed that a full quarter of Russians couldn’t find employment. Thirty-eight million or so folks were sitting on their duffs—yet the day-trippers from Irkutsk were almost the only Russians I saw doing nothing. What did they think? “Oh, things are better now.” “Much better.” “Better, better, better now.” Of course, a whole bottle of vodka had been drunk at lunch, and things were better. But, in fact, the Russians told me what I wanted to know by asking another question of their own, a question that only the citizens of a few nations would bother to ask. “Tell me,” said one, in the serious and important manner that comes with drinking too much in the daytime, “where is life harder? In the U.S. or in Russia?” Measuring the current Russian economic situation against the old Soviet economy is like trying to do arithmetic by tasting the numbers. The Soviets invented statistical methods that were almost as strange as Lenin’s nonmonetary accounting. Instead of using the definition of gross domestic product accepted by every Western nation—the value of the production of all labor and property located in a country—the Communists had something called gross material product. To oversimplify, gross material product ignored services and counted products every time they moved. Not that this mattered, since all of the USSR’s statistics were Cuban in their unreality. The figures used to calculate the gross material product were drawn from bureaucratic reports about fulfillment of the notorious gross-output targets and, hence, were all lies. Besides, the USSR’s output was stated in rubles, a currency with no value at all. Or, rather, the ruble had up to a dozen different values by the end of the Soviet era. There was the international ruble, the official currency with an exchange rate of about $1.75; the commercial ruble, used for trade with hard- currency countries and usually pegged at fifty-seven cents; the tourist ruble, introduced to undercut the black-market ruble; the auction ruble, with value determined by sales among foreign banks; the enterprise ruble, which could only be spent on products from a specific Soviet industry; and so on. Russians are still suspicious of the ruble. A store clerk in St. Petersburg rejected my tattered 1,000-ruble bill on the grounds, I guess, that it was a torn ruble with yet another special exchange rate.

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