Red Ticket: Moscow Remont
It just wasn’t practical to have all that worthless money lying around.
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin chooses, for once in her life, not to run into a burning building, probably because this time it’s not a metaphor but a mafia fire. Also, I come up with an incredible naive idea to fix Moscow, and the ruble is supplanted by a new and delicious currency.
If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26.
Chapter 27: Moscow Remont
by Robin Whetstone
Julia and I were walking on a downtown boulevard on our way to watch Stu get stung by bees when we stopped across an intersection from a 12-story building. The top two floors of the building were on fire, and we watched as residents on the lower floors ran out on their balconies and hurled rugs and blankets to the street below.
“Another one,” said Julia. “Such a shame.”
“Another one?” I said. “Does this happen all the time?”
“Yes,” said Julia. She explained that, for 75 years, the State had paid for people’s housing, so people lived in these gracious downtown buildings for free. But now there was such a thing as rent, and the real-estate these people were squatting in was valuable. “Businessmen (she pronounced it “beesnessmen”), they buy them as investments,” said Julia.
“But then the buildings burn down.”
Julia shook her head. “The owners are the ones who start these fires.” The new owners, said Julia, wanted to refurbish the building and rent it for dollars to expats. They’d make the current residents an offer, but the tenants would refuse. They had lived in their apartments for generations, and now there were refugees and journalists and beesnessmen everywhere, and a terrible housing shortage. “Where are we supposed to go?” they asked.
The mafia’s answer was to set the top two floors of the building on fire, burning the residents out. Who cared if the building got damaged? They were going to redo it anyway.
"But, where's the fire department?" I asked.
Julia laughed. "This is a mafia fire. There will be no fire department." Then, suddenly, Julia brightened. "Look," she said, grabbing my hand and pulling on it, "A Penguin!"
"Julia," I said, shaking off her hand, "I'm not going in there. That building's on fire."
Julia was pointing across the street at the burning building, which had on its ground floor a "Penguin," a Western-owned ice-cream chain that was very popular in Moscow. Customers entered and exited the store, licking at cones of green pistachio while they dodged the blankets and clothing raining down on them from above.
"Julia," I said, shaking off her hand, "I'm not going in there. That building's on fire."
"Yes, it is!" called Julia over her shoulder as she abandoned me on the sidewalk and flitted across the street, "But the Penguin's still open!"
***
As winter crept toward spring and the collapse deepened, little blue remont signs sprouted in Moscow like crocuses. Remont — repair — was the way the skeletal and unfunded civic works department told Muscovites that the things they took for granted no longer worked. Elevators, metro cars, tunnels, roads, bridges, buses, streetlights, doors, escalators, sidewalks, sewers, gas mains, water mains, the lights in your classroom, the heat in your apartment – name it, there was no money to fix it. So at our next staff meeting Jason announced a new section of the magazine, "MG Remont." Each week, Stu and Brad would locate something under remont, and remont it themselves. They'd change the light bulbs in the underground subway crossing, unstick the door to the public library, patch up the sidewalk in front of the Kremlin. Readers could go view the repairs and pretend that they lived in a city that wasn’t falling apart. I supported the can-do spirit of this idea, but it would take more than a hammer to fix Russia.
***
The ruble was worthless, and because of this, hard currency became more and more valuable. Stores that actually sold things (i.e., not GUM) stopped accepting rubles, and hoarded their dollars. They started giving out change in gum. The first time this happened to me, I was buying my Old El Paso taco kit at the Ring Road Supermarket, and instead of the 63 cents in change I was owed, the cashier handed me several sticks of Wrigley's spearmint gum.
"What's this?" I asked her.
"No more change in money," she said. "Exact change only, or you get gum."
The stores had decided to hoard every bit of hard currency they collected, so they stopped giving out change in dollars. They couldn’t give out change in rubles, though. To give someone the ruble equivalent of 63 cents in change, you’d have to give them 1,200 rubles. It just wasn’t practical to have all that worthless money lying around. So instead, they used gum.
It just wasn’t practical to have all that worthless money lying around. So instead, they used gum.
Rubles had come to not just resemble but actually behave like play money, so substituting gum for currency made sense. No one responded to the collapse of the monetary system by leaping up on the counter and saying “Listen, people, we’re getting our change in gum now don’t you think that’s a sign of bad things to come?” Nobody said akh, what a black day. Instead, they shrugged. Things had radically changed before, and now they were radically changing again. That’s what things do, and what were you going to do about it? At least gum is easy to carry, and tasty, and can be traded for soap. And unlike rubles, gum is popular, and can be used to fix things. It could be worse. We could be getting no change at all, or change in beets. Quit complaining.
***
The USSR dominated the Olympic sport of gymnastics for years. Russians are good at gymnastics, because when you live in a dictatorship, you have to be. You have to convince yourself that the lie is true, or you’ll end up smeared on a basement wall. Trust the newspaper that’s owned by the State and calls itself Truth. Do not question the crop yields. The neighbors who disappeared were enemies of the people. Don’t tell Stalin that the planes are destroyed and the doctors are dead. Do not stop clapping.
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