can break a person. Once, on a long bus trip through Primorye, a young
man named Gena gestured to the bottle of vodka he had brought along
and proclaimed, “It’s not vodka; it’s a time machine!” Humor plays a
similar role: not only does it speed the journey, it softens the thousand
small blows of daily Russian life. On a regular basis, Markov was able to
defy the gravity of a given moment and transform yet another broken
thing or stalled project into a brief interlude of absurdist escape.
“Somehow his tongue worked like that,” recalled his young neighbor,
Denis Burukhin. “No matter what the subject was, he always found the
joke in it.”
Indeed, there was little else; the supply chain providing most basic
goods had broken down so completely that remote villages like
Sobolonye were turned into virtual islands. Making matters worse was
the inflation rate, which, by 1993, was approaching 1,000 percent,
rendering the ruble virtually worthless. In subsequent years, it settled
down somewhat, but only in relative terms; throughout the mid-1990s,
Russians were seeing annual price increases of 200 and 300 percent.
Then, in 1997, the Russian ruble went into free fall, much as the deutsche
mark had done prior to World War II. A ruble, which, a decade earlier,
could have bought a pack of cigarettes, five ice cream cones, or a
cafeteria lunch for two, was now worth about one one-hundredth of a U.S.
cent and could not cover the price of a nail. On January 1, 1998, a month
after Markov’s death, Russia’s currency was “revised” with the
introduction of the so-called new ruble. While this radical measure
stabilized the currency and brought the exchange rate back onto a
recognizable scale, it wiped out whatever remained of most people’s
savings. When one considers that this was the seventh time in a century
such a revision had been made, it is easy to understand why so many
Russians seem cynical and world-weary, and why they place so much
faith in the potato crop.
For the residents of Sobolonye and their sister village, Yasenovie,
these changes made little difference. Assuming you had something to put
it in, finding gas could still be a days-long project; finding the money to
pay for it could take even longer. Currency remained a part of their
ron
(Ron)
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