Word: tyntareva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Yelizaveta Tyntareva, a lawyer living in Vilnius, Lithuania, a few years ago sold her Zhiguli car for 2,000 rubles (about $3,000). She then used that small amount of venture capital to buy so-called deficit goods, consumer articles like sunglasses and wigs that are almost always in short supply and high demand in Soviet shops. As she bought, Tyntareva also sold. Gradually she built up a stock of everything from gold rings, watches, wigs and jeans to velvet suits, umbrellas and cameras. The business prospered; she acquired a regular clientele among Baltic Sea vacationers, hired four assistants...
...Tyntareva and her customers were part of the Soviet Union's thriving underground economy. This involves more than just the familiar black marketeers, dealing in Levi's and ballpoint pens, icons and caviar, who greet Western visitors around the main tourist hotels. It is, in fact, a second economy, parallel to the official state-controlled one. In a thriving permanent network, illegal and quasi-legal entrepreneurs, speculators and thieves sell hard-to-get goods and services to workers, peasants and even state officials...
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