Dosvedanya Ussr

The demise of the USSR has led to some delightful double-speak and dialectical wriggling from homegrown left-wingers who now spout weird variations on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which assure industrialists that concepts such as returns on investment are also respected. The official party lines classify the demise of the communist dream as a reactionary exercise in bad taste.

But no fellow traveller mourns the passage of the Soviet empire in the same heartfelt way the Indian capitalist does. The USSR was one place where an unknown Indian could really make a fortune and live it up. Every tea and leather exporter is hurt for the decanalisation of imports has knocked cosy cartelised business on the head. Every Indian student at Patrice Lumumba University and the Gorky Conservatoire bewails the end of subsidised education. Every Indian sailor who knew Mother Russia in the old days, weeps salt tears into his hoarded Starka.

 

In the good, old days, the dollar traded officially at par with the rouble. The rupee traded around 12 to the dollar. Things were officially cheap and also totally unavailable. Unless you paid greenbacks or bartered goods.

Unofficially the dollar traded for 30-plus roubles. Indians lived like commissars on the difference. If you had a bottle of Black Label, a couple of tubes of Colgate toothpaste, a bar of Lifebuoy soap and some shaving cream, you could get a billet on the trans-Siberian and guaranteed family accommodation with home cooked food across two continents. If you donated your clothes, ladies queued up to offer bed and board in exchange. And, oh! What wouldnt they do for a few dollars more ?

All this was true only because the USSR was the workers paradise. The lack of prosperous Western tourists ensured Indians got a good deal. They were richer than the motley Cubans, Vietnamese, Africans and Warsaw Pacters. The only criminals were in uniform. They left Indians alone, except to trade vodka for whisky.

Indians stayed at the best hotels, hired the best tourist guides, and washed their beluga and black bread down with the best vodka and Georgi-an champagne. They made great deals people traded aftershave for its weight in Armenian crystal.

Pravda is another institution reme-mbered with much nostalgia by anyone who ever used a Russian loo. They lacked both running water and lockable doors. Every so often, the grandmotherly attendant checked if users had frozen to death in alcoholic comas. Pravda came in handy both for its absorbent qualities and its ability to protect the readers modesty.

Now, Russia is flooded with criminals and hustlers. The women work as nautch girls in Egypt. The greenback is still God, but prices have shot upto west European levels. Whether youre trading metals out of Estonia, or boots into Uzbekistan, or tea into the Ukraine, you cant use the old comrade commissar as your via media anymore. Armenian crystal or Georgian champagne no longer trade for their weight in aftershaves and cigarettes. And unreconstructed capitalists mourn the demise of the old Soviet era.