Цитаты из книги The Russians

One Moscow woman told me that the most active black market in lipsticks and cosmetics in Moscow was in the women's public toilets down a sidestreet from the Bolshoi Theater.

But blat is only the tip of the iceberg. Bribery is just as widespread. What the Arabs call baksheesh, Mexicans call mordida, Americans call "greasing the palm," Russians call vzyatka, literally, "the take."

Almost any transaction can work po blatu, by connections, or through acquaintances, po znakomstvu, as the Russians say.

One Westerner with old friends in Moscow told me how he had come back in 1972 after a long absence and asked one couple what had been the biggest change in the past decade. With one voice, they exclaimed, "the corruption." "It has grown enormously," complained the husband.

In Tbilisi I was told it took a 13,000 ruble bribe to get into the medical institute.

A treshka – a three-ruble note, the Russian equivalent of a five-dollar tip.

The Soviet leaders have been more successful than those in any other industrialized economy in persuading their people to defer gratifications, to take less now for promises of a better, though ever-receding future.

The average Russian is still regarded by his leaders more as a producer than as a consumer.

The Soviet Union is "the most poorly housed of any major country in Europe — and poorly housed also by comparison with the Soviet government's minimum standard for health and decency."

What the elite get legally through their special stores and system of privileges, ordinary people are forced to seek illegally in the country's counter-economy.

In 1970, that universal currency of Russian life, vodka, went through a tricky, hidden price rise. The famous old brands like Stolichnaya selling at 2.87 rubles a half liter simply disappeared from the Russian market (to be exported) and a newer, harsher brand simply named Vodka came out at 3.62.

Rents in state housing are fixed and held very low; 6-8 rubles ($8-11) a month for two rooms, kitchenette and bath. A half-liter of standard grade milk costs 16 kopecks (about 35 cents a quart) now as it did a decade ago. Potatoes in the state store are still fixed at 10 kopecks a kilogram (about 6 cents a pound). The beef price ceiling in state stores is nominally unchanged at 2 rubles a kilo ($1.20 a pound).

Government officials, for example, are fond of proclaiming that roughly 20 billion rubles are paid out annually in pensions. But when you discover that this sum is split up among 41.5 million pensioners, it works out to an average of 40 rubles ($53) a month, which is below the unofficial Soviet poverty line.

The economic crises of the West in the Seventies have made some of the Russians more confident about their own system lately, for all its faults. The double-digit inflation, unemployment, high cost of housing, medical care and college education in America, all dismay them. For many, the benefits of low-cost housing, free medical care, subsidized university education and a guaranteed job — above all, that job security — outweigh the disadvantages of the marketplace.

Russians are less materialistic than Americans and yet they have a warm sense of extra pleasure and achievement over relatively simple things, much more than do Westerners for whom the buying is easier.

Still, Russians, who are marvelously warm-hearted in private, are often surprised to hear that foreigners find them dour and unsmiling in public.

An East German scientist who had been working in Russia for several years confessed to me that he was "appalled at how poorly ordinary Russians live."

The level of living of the Soviet people in 1970 was merely one-third of that in the United States, about one-half of that in England, France and West Germany, perhaps a little below that even in Italy and Japan, and well below that in the East European Communist countries of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Dacha is one of those magical elastic words in Russian that conceals more than it reveals.

Pokazukha can cover anything from the hard currency shops, the fancy imported goods in the windows of G.U.M. department store (goods which usually cannot be bought inside) to the model farms and factories where foreigners are taken, down to a little thing like elaborate menus in tourist hotels.