Word: vodka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...purchased for about $165 in local currency (compared with $300 or so in New York for icons bought through Novexport, the state trading agency). The wholesale price is even lower. Police recently picked up a dealer who had bought seven icons from a church caretaker for one liter of vodka, and had acquired six others for a foreign-made gas lighter. When he was arrested, he had a stock of 400 icons and had bought two autos from the profits. Selling the icons also calls for ingenuity; one black marketeer recruited a plumber as a door-to-door salesman, since...
...short of Eastern Europe's controlled economies is that some goods are always in surplus while others are maddeningly scarce. Thus the East Germans are plenteously swaddled in curtain material but sadly lacking in fresh fruit. The Czechs boast a superfluity of fruit but their coffee and vodka are prohibitively expensive. The Soviets are awash in coffee and vodka but desperately desire well-fashioned clothes and shoes. Nearly everyone in Eastern Europe hungers for Hungarian salamis, and Hungary is piled high with them; yet many a Magyar bosom droops despairingly for want of an uplifting...
...Rumania; shirts, shoes, socks and blue jeans for the Soviet Union; fruits for East Germany; bras, corsets and panty hose for Hungary; shoes, textiles and auto parts for Bulgaria. The enterprising Czech visitor either sells the articles for local currency or barters them for liquor in Rumania, coffee, vodka, car parts and a portable color-TV set in the Soviet Union, salami in Hungary, and curtain material in East Germany-all of which he either keeps or resells back home in Prague for three to five times his original investment...
...Mutual treatment of each other's goods as imports from "most-favored-nations," meaning that both countries must impose the lowest possible tariffs on the other's merchandise. The effect of such tariff treatment on Russian vodka in the U.S., for example, would be to cut about $1 per quart from its retail price, making Moscow's excellent Stolichnaya brand more competitive with American products...
...exodus of the Asians has already had an obvious effect on the economy of Kampala. Jobless Africans are clamoring for work at the city's hotels, which are running short of bread, soap and even gin; one must drink vodka to immunize oneself against the mosquito bites. Restaurants guard their menus like gold: most of the printing in the city was done by Asians. In the commercial sector of Kampala, nearly 80% of the shops are now shut and barred; in some the stock can be seen gathering dust behind the steel mesh placed across the windows. There...