The nude black marketeers

Press, 2 August 1985, Page 18

The nude black marketeers

MARTIN WALKER

of the London “Giiard-

ian” reports from Moscow on a crackdown on the corrupt who are stripping the Soviet Union economy.

Immediately after the crackdown on alcohol abuse, the Gorbachev Administration is launching a new drive against the black market, and against corrupt officials who permit it to continue. The drive is to focus on the peasants’ free market, officially reserved for peasants selling limited amounts of produce from their private plots. In fact, the free markets have become a highlyorganised and professional retailing system, charging breath-taking prices, but at least providing the fresh fruits and vegetables that the state system is unable to deliver. Before the spring arrived the price for tomatoes in the free markets was $57.50 a kilo and $11.50 for a small cucumber, and $23 a kilo for wild honey. Flowers are perhaps the most expensive of all. Prices like these mean that the genuine peasants rarely appear at the markets, which tend to be dominated by professional, if unofficial salesmen, who are somehow able to arrange permits to keep a permanent stall. Corruption is rife among the officials who are meant to control the markets. Half of all Moscow market officials are now facing criminal charges, according to a in “Sovietskaya

newspaper. The paper went on to cite one unnamed Russian city where 12 market directors, one after another, had been arrested in the past 24 months. Now the head of the city’s market management department has been arrested, the report said. The police have asked for wider powers to help them to enforce the crackdown. So far under Soviet law, the police have no light to ask market-sellers for their documents; that is a matter for the market managers. Now the police are to be allowed to check from which farm each seller comes and to keep a log to ensure that each seller does not appear more often than the capacity of his private plots would warrant. Other newspapers have begun reporting market crimes, evidently taken straight from the police dossiers. The Moscow evening paper has cited cases of professional black marketers who buy food at the state shops

sidised prices, wash and sort the produce, and then sell it at the markets at a high profit. Buying 500 kilos of onions at $1.40 a kilo from the state shops and selling at $5.75 a kilo in the markets was one example. The press has also begun to report the notorious nude markets on the Baltic coast, where canny saleswomen have been doing a thriving business on the nude beaches reserved for women. You can literally buy anything there, from Adidas jogging suits for $863, to Dior perfume for $2BB, to Indian tea for $80.50 a kilo, and imported jeans at $5lB. “The nude beaches are out of bounds to the militia,” “Literaturnaya Gazeta” reported, “and even if naked police women try to raid the beaches ... how do they prove their identity when they have no clothes on?” The journal described saleswomen at Palanga in Lithuania “wearing so many digital

they looked like Christmas trees,” drinking champagne and smoking imported cheroots, eating smoked fish and fresh meat pies from the free enterprise snack bar. The naked women among the English shoes, French perfumes, Japanese umbrellas, the paper said, “looked like a morality painting on the theme of speculation by one of the great grotesque painters.” Just as ordinary Russians depend on the peasants’ markets for the fresh vegetables and the delicacies the state system cannot provide, so the lumbering Soviet economy as a whole has come to lean more and more on the lubrication of the black market for scarce consumer goods. The dilemma that faces the new Gorbachev administration, as it seeks to combine social discipline with economic prosperity is whether to try to stamp out the black market, which would be unpopular, or simply to control it. Mikhail Gorbachev pinned his own colours to the mast in a long speech last December. He said: “As for people stealing state property, bribe-takers, embezzlers of state funds, we should recall Lenin’s warning: ‘Any display of weakness, hesitation or sentimentality towards these people would be an - immense crime against socialism.”