(OFF TOPIC) Russia
This is from moscow:
"Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998
From: "Ray Finch-Kroll Associates, Moscow"
Subject: Friday Evening, 28 Aug
Upon leaving work Friday evening (28 Aug), I thought I'd check to
see if there were new signs of economic/political collapse along my way home. I was not disappointed. While standing in line to buy some rubles at one of the exchange points (the rate was 10 rubles to the dollar), a couple of Russia's finest dragged a young girl out of line who was some 3 or 4 customers ahead of me. She was hurried off to their nearby police car, and they took off down Prospect Mir. No one was sure what crime she had committed, but the conjecture was that she had tried to pass some counterfeit money.
After the crowded metro ride, I visited the market area near my apartment to pick up something for dinner. As I mentioned in a previous epistle, sometimes, there is a representative of the RNE (Russian National Unity) party handing out their semi-fascist literature near this metro stop. Well it must have been some sort of occasion (did they smell blood?), but last night there was an entire squad of these black and leather guardians of Russian purity handing out their free newspaper.
I figured that it might be instructive to watch their promotional efforts, so arming myself with a Baltika No.#3 [beer] from a nearby kiosk, I began my surveillance. There were some eight of these blackshirts, and they positioned themselves at key locations (within eyesight of each other) all around the metro-market area. What was truly amazing is that there were an equal number of Russian police/MVD types tacitly watching the RNE marketing efforts. For me (and probably for a certain percentage of Russians), it was difficult to tell which group enjoyed more authority.
After some 20 minutes (and fortified with my Baltika-3; which is actually a very good beer. Not to diverge from the subject, but the empty bottle was quickly recovered by one of the stooped Russian pensioners who supplement their meagre incomes with the deposit from these empties), I approached one of the RNE reps, feigning ignorance about the nature of their organization. This True Russian Soldier, who looked maybe 40 (but might have been only 30), politely explained to me the party's platform, which, by the way, sounded like a rather reasonable recipe for fixing some of Russia's ills(i.e. "upwards of 90% of the Russian population is struggling just to get by, and some have not been paid their wages for 6-9 months, while the remaining 10% is living like the nobility of old." He then offered me some free literature and invited me to one of their introductory meetings, where
the basic outlines of the RNE's platform could be explained in depth. I thanked him for the brochures, and told him I'd think about it after
reading some of the material he gave me. I was not alone in my curiosity, as most of the other RNE reps were engaged in conversations with the locals.
The market place was very busy, and as I began to shop for dinner, it soon dawned on me the reason for such activity. Imagine that at noon tomorrow, or maybe the next day, all of your dollars were going to be transformed into monopoly money, and you could nothing to limit your financial losses (like exchanging your money for German Deutschmarks or British Pounds). And since all of Moscow's high-dollar consumer goods stores were closed "for technical reasons," those who had large amounts of rubles were frantically trying to spend them on cheap consumer goods before they were changed into worthless bits of colored paper.
There was a look of distress on the faces of most of the kiosk/shopkeepers. Like the consumer, they also had lost faith in the government's ability to prop up this empty ruble, yet were prohibited from trading in dollars. Soon they would be faced with depleted inventories and stacks of these worthless rubles.
Now, put yourself for a moment in the place of one of these little entrepreneurs. You get up at dawn to set up this shitty little stand, hauling your goods from some garage, and then for the next 12-16 hours you stand out in all kinds of weather selling soap, toothpaste and detergent, maybe making 5-10 bucks on a good day. In the evening, you get to tear down your stand, and haul it away to prepare for another day of "business." Or how about one of those lucky kiosk-dwellers positioned underground, in a dim tunnel underneath one of Moscow's streets, where all day long (and some even spend the night!) you are trapped in a closet-size cubicle, breathing the
fumes of cars and subways, selling imported underwear or beer.
These god-awful conditions are not helped by the criminal protection money you have to pay to stay in business. Now just imagine the hatred and disgust you might feel when you discover that all of your grim labor for the past couple years was in vain, and that you are poorer today than when you began this commercial-prison enterprise.
When you put yourself in these shoes, you begin to see the wisdom and
propriety in belonging to a group like the RNE."
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This little slice of life came from contemporary Moscow not the Weimar Republic, although some people are started to heavily draw on the parallels.
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