Word: fedorov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Andrei Fedorov ran a state-owned restaurant in Moscow, he made 190 rubles ($304) a month even if no one came to dinner. "I didn't care if we had customers or not," he says with a shrug. "I didn't care if the service was good." Two years ago, he started his own now popular bistro, Kropotkinskaya 36, just off Sadovaya Ring Road in the Soviet capital. Fedorov pays himself about 850 rubles ($1,360) a month, nearly four times the average Soviet salary. But he works twice as hard as he ever did as a government employee...
...Fedorov is far from it. Last year his restaurant earned a profit of 600,000 rubles on revenues of 2 million rubles. Some of Fedorov's fellow Soviet citizens feel threatened by his success. For example, he wants to buy a farm to ensure himself a supply of quality produce and meat. But fighting his way through a bureaucratic maze to get the requisite permits is a thankless task. "Rather than create opportunities for real competition," he says, "these ministries are trying to tie our hands. I go to the ministry, and they say what I want...
...Fedorov's experience of fortune mixed with frustration is typical of the thriving entrepreneurs -- capitalists without the name -- who exemplify a key but controversial part of Mikhail Gorbachev's economic-reform program, the cooperative movement. In 1987 Gorbachev proposed the formation of privately owned, profit-oriented cooperative enterprises to supplement and even compete with state-run projects. The primary goal of his proposal, which in many respects echoed Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy of 1921, was to inject vitality into the U.S.S.R.'s laggard consumer goods and services industries. In addition, the new co-ops would pay taxes...
...Like Fedorov's restaurant, the co-op movement has taken off -- but it faces a bumpy ride. Although they now account for only about 1% of the country's economy, the 48,000 Soviet co-ops (there were only a handful a year ago) employ some 770,000 workers. The services they offer read like a Yellow Pages directory: animal grooming, auto repairs, computer maintenance, hairstyling, plumbing, translating -- even operating pay toilets...