How to Beat the System

After 45 years of Communist rule most Russians are resigned to living in the nonAffluent Society, but a growing number seek to beat the system in various ways, many ingenious and crooked.

P: In the Moscow region, speculators welcomed the government's recent 30% price raise in the cost of meat. One result that astonished the authorities was that villagers began buying enormous quantities of bread, whose price had remained unchanged. In a typical village, bread sales in state stores abruptly rose to eleven tons a day, or well over 3 lbs. per capita for the 6,500 inhabitants. Investigators soon discovered that cheap bread was being converted into expensive meat by the simple process of feeding loaves to pigs, cattle and poultry.

P: Near fabled Samarkand, in the Uzbek Soviet republic, Chairman Hakim Mamadiarov of the Karl Marx collective farm was denounced for living like an Oriental potentate. Despite the Soviet ban on polygamy, Moslem Hakim has three wives, as permitted by the Koran, and each wife has a well-appointed separate residence, garden, and private herd of cows. Hakim himself has a house assessed at $22,200, plus a Volga auto, two motorbikes, a radio-phonograph console, a tape recorder and several TV sets. Of two peasants who protested his running of the farm, one was badly beaten, the other vanished. Demanding a "full investigation," the newspaper Country Life charged that happy Hakim escaped punishment because he was a close crony of the district's police chief and its Communist Party secretary.

P: In Minsk, an 18-man gang accused of black-marketing and dealing in foreign currencies met stern punishment. Ringleader Mikhail Bursakov and four others were sentenced to death,* the remainder got prison terms ranging from five to 15 years. The doomed Bursakov was reported to have a criminal record dating back to 1935, when he was sentenced in Leningrad to three years for selling "shoes in short supply." In 1950, he drew a term of eight years for embezzlement after he had somehow become director of a state store. When arrested, Bursakov had 42 separate accounts in Soviet savings banks, with deposits totaling more than $500,000.

* Making a total of 46 Soviet citizens recently sentenced to death for alleged "economic crimes." In a petition, 223 well-known U.S. figures, ranging from Socialist Norman Thomas to leftist Nobel Prizewinner Dr. Linus Pauling, warned that the world may come to believe that in Communist Russia "property rights are to be guarded more than human rights.''

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