Why Buy a Broken Bulb?

Among the things on sale at Moscow's markets -- among the apples and apricots, eggplants and wild mushrooms -- are empty Western beer cans and broken light bulbs.


The beer cans are easy to explain: They are for prestigious home decoration, to show you can afford the beer they once contained. But the light bulbs are another story. For they represent the bottom end of a spiral of theft which has been a way of life here for more years than anyone can count.


In Stalin's time, theft was for the most part a no-gain proposition -- informers were everywhere, and even a child could get ten years in the camps for stealing a few grains of wheat from a collective farm wagon.


But in the Brezhnev era, no longer constrained by spies or Stalinist ideology, the people of the Soviet Union woke up to a simple realization: If everything belongs to the state, then it belongs to no one -- or to everyone, i.e. me.


Some things were too big or too public to claim, but on the job, instant privatization was available, on the factory floor, in storerooms, at the back doors of shops and garages and trucks. Here everything from spare car parts to the choicest cuts of meat to Bolshoi tickets became fair game for on-the-job theft, and vast interlocking networks of goods and favors and "borrowed" services were built up.


This "black" economy got larger and more organized with each passing year. And the worst thing under the circumstances was to have a job where there was simply nothing you could filch, so that you had no chips to join the game. Surviving on your wages was regarded as an affliction. A well-known Georgian curse said: "May you have to live on your salary alone."


Actual money was never much of an issue in all this, because society simply did not run on cash. Housing and utilities were nearly free, basic foodstuffs were subsidized and cheap, and there was nothing much else beyond these things -- except perhaps a car -- that anyone could buy with what was left over from his or her salary.


Even for financing huge projects like dams or electric power stations, money itself was never much used, except for wages. Permission to "buy" things -- like cement or steel -- from different sectors of the centralized system was given in the form of accounting rubles. These rubles would be "spent" by managers, i.e. moved from one set of books to another, and then these would be balanced over the whole system at the end of the year.


There were a few millionaires, of course -- even billionaires, like Sharaf Rashidov, the boss of Uzbekistan, who sold, cash down, everything under his control, from school headmasterships to memberships of the Central Committee; and who raised the figures on his republic's yearly cotton crop and pocketed the difference at such-and-such per imaginary bushel.


There were underground manufacturers too, who, with the compliance of factory directors and ministry officials, diverted raw materials from the state and made black-market goods that the state didn't seem able to produce for itself.


There were also out-and-out criminals, of course -- the so-called "thieves-in-law," who ran protection in the "free" produce markets and generated cash out of prostitution, gambling and so on. But their power was small-scale, for the most part, and local. The word "mafia" wasn't much used at the time, but it existed, in the form of high-ranking Party members and government officials who were in the pay of the underground manufacturers.


This was the background against which the first steps towards capitalism and the market were taken here, and cooperatives and joint ventures were set up. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the pattern had been set and what is now recognized as the new mafia was already in place. A free-for-all started that has yet to end, with everybody trying to get in on the act. All this, say skeptics, could have been predicted, if only Western economists had studied the local reality instead of cheering on democracy and the free market.


Which brings us back to the broken light bulbs at the market. What are they for? Easy, you know. You buy a broken light bulb and take it to your place of work; then you remove a working light bulb and screw the broken one in, taking the working one with you for home consumption. From such little acorns do great oak trees of theft and corruption grow.