That winter I learned a new skilclass="underline" walking on icy sidewalks. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Each step must be deliberate, flat-footed, like a prison guard—no lazy, sweet swing of the hips. The bones of the pelvis, which in spring jut forward, away from the curve of the spine, in winter disappear into the flesh. The center of balance must be held exactly above the feet. The eyes must be fixed on the ground to verify each foothold, the arms must hover out from the body ready to save you if all else fails. And in my case, there was no guarantee that any of this would save me; the more careful I was, it seemed, the more capriciously the ground shot from beneath me and the bus stop reappeared upside down, with Mitya’s hand reaching from the sky to haul me up once he could stop laughing.
It was a slippery time altogether. As the temperature continued to fall, the curtains opened on a series of magic tricks that astonished us all. The world turned white and familiar shapes were shrouded. A man in a suit conjured up all the kopecks in the country and pfff! made them disappear. A one-ruble note wrapped in a handkerchief became ten rubles, then twenty-five, then one hundred, then five hundred, and finally—drum roll—one thousand rubles! As a finale, an assistant wheeled a casket on stage that contained savings accounts, hundreds of thousands of them. The audience trembled as, with a silver sword, he sliced them in half! And in quarters! And at last each little nest egg hatched into a rook and flew away. The show ran and ran: they called it hyperinflation.
Alchemy of a sort occurred that year. Even the poor became millionaires. They sold their watches and their televisions and took home wads of rubles in their place. Wallets couldn’t hold all the people’s money. They stuffed their pockets full of notes, bought Polish plastic bags to carry the loot. At first they found it hard to throw off their old-style thriftiness. They took their crisp new notes home, stashed them away with their valuables and papers, and in no time the value had evaporated and all that was left was paper. Soon we began to realize that the only sensible way to manage our personal finances was to spend like one-armed bandits. The faster the coins disappeared, the more chance we had of hitting the jackpot. As long as we were winning, it was exhilarating.
Rules for Hyperinflationary Times
1. Spend now, worry later. Never be cautious. Spend more than you earn: that way you’ll get rich. And never leave your savings in the bank. Blow it all on fur coats.
2. Don’t expect your employer to pay you. Don’t expect your employees to turn up every day. And by the way, job security is dead. You’re fired.
3. If you are a professional musician, film director, scientist, soldier, coal miner, steelworker, or academic, you’d better adapt or starve. Forget your training. Forget, above all, your career. Don’t produce anything. Don’t do manual labor. Import— export is the only way to keep your head above water. Buy and sell. Buy and sell. The faster the better.
4. Lawful activities do not make money, thus the simple equation: a successful person is a criminal.
5. In all, rely on dollars. Not the state, employers, friends, lovers. Dollars are the only real certainty.
The first time I had changed money in Voronezh, back in September, the exchange gave me several packs of new-issue twenty-five-ruble notes, purplish mauve with the curvy, curly lettering usually seen on circus posters. There were then thirty-nine rubles to the dollar. The money came to us bound in wads of a hundred; Emily and I broke one open, took half each, and went to the market.
Some of the prices in the shops were still fixed at the old official exchange rate—one ruble to $1.50—not essentials, but goods that had been manufactured under the Soviet system and sold slowly: a pair of ice skates for forty-two rubles, for example, a cheese grater for six. The sense of how much a currency is worth does not disappear instantly: in the public perception, at least, one ruble was still worth something. It would buy you a meal, or no less than twenty rides on the Moscow subway. The average monthly pension, after all, was forty-two rubles. Imagine this hapless foreigner asking for six apples, and pulling out of her pocket a whole stack of huge, spanking-new twenty-five-ruble notes. The stall owner looked at me with a sort of horror, and shook her head.
“Impossible! I haven’t change for that sort of money.” She shoved an apple into my hands and said, “Vozmi, i vita-miniziruisya! Take this and vitaminize yourself!” And she turned to bawl at her scrawny little husband, for no reason other than the trick that was being played with her livelihood.
Some trade was still controlled by the central planners. I imagined them up in Moscow, totting up rows of figures on an abacus. “So…” they’d say, jotting something down. “One rubber boot costs ten rubles and seventy kopecks, and a pair for twenty-one rubles forty.” The fixed prices were like that, precise to the last kopeck. Forty-three rubles and twelve kopecks for a saucepan, one hundred and eight rubles and nineteen kopecks for a plane ticket. A marketing manager would have blanched; the thought cheered me as I searched for change with numb fingers and the lines buckled and muttered behind me. There was usually a brass dish beside the cash register to receive the money, and the shop assistants had a way of tapping on it and breathing heavily through their noses that was guaranteed to make you scatter your coins on the floor.
In Soviet times, the fixed price for a piece of bread in a café was one kopeck, and a glass of tea, I believe, cost three. Anywhere in the Union you could be sure of a modest snack for ten kopecks; that hadn’t changed since the war. That winter, the kopeck quietly vanished from circulation. Once we reached a hundred rubles or so to the dollar, there was no point. The only coins that remained, and in fact rose in value with inflation, were the dvushki, two-kopeck pieces, which you needed for public telephones. Enterprising babushkas sold stacks of them outside the central post office: ten two-kopeck pieces for twenty rubles.
As Christmas approached, a vivid green note began to circulate, the color of birch leaves as they push their way out of the bud. It was worth a hundred rubles. The girl at the exchange could not help shaking her head as she counted them out to me, now two for each tatty dollar. Mitya and I decided to eat—I was feeling as though the ground was far away, as though the notes stuffed in my pockets made me lighter, more buoyant.
The nearest shop was the Gastronom by the station, a dirty place where we had once seen a rat running along the eye-level shelves behind the shop assistant’s head. Usually there was a bustle of housewives, alcoholics cringing at the vodka counter, the ordinary crowd. That day the place was empty, apart from a single assistant who was humming in the corner. Her voice echoed tunelessly in the huge, columned hall. Not only were there no customers. The shelves, yards and yards of them looping gracefully along the curving wall, were bare. In one counter there was a display of bread made of plaster; the bread racks behind stood unused. I fingered the crisp birch-leaf notes in my pocket and shivered.
The assistant called us over. “The only products we have today are these,” she told us, and waved at the shelves behind her. There was a row of green and silver bottles.
Champagne, from the Moscow champagne factory—sek or demi-sek (as we say in Russian). Either one cost the same: a little more than a dollar.
“It was meant to be here for New Year’s,” the assistant said nonchalantly. “Just arrived last week. And chocolate bars, if you want. Not cheap, though.”