'The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist'

Irakli Iosebashvili in Guernica:

His father was dead and his family was poor, so he began looking for ways to make money as soon as he left the army. Eventually, he would make incredible amounts of it. What was an incredible amount of money in the Soviet Union? A good paycheck in those days, the Soviet nineteen seventies, was about two hundred rubles per month. This was the province of the privileged few—usually generals and professors, two professions that remained dear to the Communists throughout their seven decades in power. Two hundred a month put meat on the table three times a week, bought a dress or two a year for your wife, took your family on a Black Sea cruise in September, and even gave you enough left over to make a small deposit in Sberbank, the country’s one and only savings bank. It was a magical number, more than most citizens could aspire to, yet enough within the realm of possibility for anyone to imagine what spending that money would feel like.

My father-in-law didn’t make two hundred rubles a month. In a good month, he pulled in about two thousand rubles. In a really good month, three times that amount. He owned a car at a time when there were so few cars in Tbilisi, people would identify him as “Misha—you know, the one with the car.” His wife, a few years after they were married, developed the habit of standing shoeless and dumping all of the gold he had given her around her bare feet to see if it would cover them, and it usually did. He wore fedoras from Turkey and sheepskin coats bought in the Baltics, bell bottoms and shiny boots with big heels. His little girls wore sundresses from China and shoes from Yugoslavia—home to the best shoe manufacturers behind the Iron Curtain—and each girl had a full set of magic markers from Italy. At home, there were always guests, and so much food that nobody except his mother-in-law, who set the table, remembered what color the tablecloth was.

And that was all you could spend your money on in the Soviet Union: food, whatever clothes the smugglers brought in, and a single car. Only one, because otherwise somebody might take an interest in where a man who is registered as a—let’s see here, comrade—a factory worker, with nary a general or academician in the family, was getting it all. And then nothing would help you—not your cousin in the Party, not your gangster friends or the cops you paid off on a monthly basis.

The rest here.