Word: payes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sukachev, who remembers having to beg for money to ride the subway, makes more than 3,000 rubles ($4,800) a month from concerts, nearly 15 times the Soviet average wage and more than twice the take-home pay of Mikhail Gorbachev. (Says Sukachev: "If I had his house and his car, he could have my 3,000.") Still, success has its problems. "It's really dangerous when people start to praise you for doing the things they used to slam you for," he notes. The band now risks losing the special edge to its sound that developed from...
...everyone wanted or could afford to pay 8.3 rubles ($13) for half a pound of smoked sausage or 10 rubles ($16) for half a pound of tomatoes. But the alternative was unappetizingly scrawny chickens, larded sausage, pickled fruits and canned goods available at state-run stores at subsidized prices. Still, consumers complained about the high prices at the co-ops. They seemed to believe ample supplies of cheap food were an economic right...
...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 and presumably absorb some of the 15 million workers who might lose their jobs in a much needed pruning of the bureaucracy...
...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...
...Ministers last December imposed stringent new limits on co-ops in such sensitive areas as medicine, education and publishing. More crackdowns are imminent. One Moscow businessman charges that the bureaucrats are jealous of his success, constantly asking how much money he makes rather than how much in taxes he pays. This entrepreneur is appalled by the system's endemic shakedowns: "Say I'm in private publishing, which is no longer allowed under the new cooperative decree. So I go to a state publishing company and say I want to publish and will give them 50% of my profits. They...