Moscow’s New Merchant Class Brings Customers a No-Frills Shopping ‘Mall’

Here’s a man-bites-dog story from Moscow--people are lining up to sell things, not just to buy them.

“Pal, come and look at my cassette player,” beckons a man in a ski cap who three months ago was still chauffeuring Soviet government bigwigs around in a black sedan.

Now, the unemployed driver and hundreds of other small-time merchants have come together in this city’s heart to create what could be termed a no-frills, rock-bottom-budget shopping mall.

Admittedly, calling what goes on in the dark, muddy passageway behind Revolution Square a “mall” may be pushing it, but the commercial principles, at any rate, are the same. The Blinis R Us outlet may come later.

Every day, Moscow’s budding merchant class flocks to the pedestrian passage to hawk its wares--boxes of Indian tea, cheap silverware, shoddy denim clothes from Egypt, Soviet-made stereo equipment, macaroni, a frozen pike, posters of British model-singer Samantha Fox, a pair of shoes.

The would-be customers, or just Muscovites trying to get from one place to another, must force their way between parallel lines more than 100 feet long of people who hold aloft the items for sale as though they were treasured icons of capitalism.

This covered passage near Red Square and other wildcat shopping centers around town--which Russians call tolkuchki, or places to get jostled or shoved around--are the modest beginnings of a veritable post-Communist revolution in trade.

On Feb. 1, a decree from President Boris N. Yeltsin went into effect giving all enterprises and private citizens the right to engage in buying, selling and middleman operations. The ukase is aimed at “overcoming monopolies of retail trade” by state functionaries at all levels, a crooked and inefficient practice that irks Yeltsin no end.

From now on, Russians will need no special permission to engage in business, save when trading in firearms, explosives, narcotics and toxic or radioactive substances.

Reselling things for a profit used to be vigorously punished by Soviet law as “speculation” that added nothing to the nation’s wealth.

And in truth, a lot of what’s going on in the passage between the Revolution Square subway station and the celebrated GUM department store is speculation in the old sense, plus exploitation of the new contradictions of an economy beginning its painful trek toward a market.

Take, for example, the 42-year-old chauffeur selling the Soviet-made Vega cassette player. Yeltsin’s order notwithstanding, he is sufficiently uneasy about his new occupation not to want his family name, or even his first name, put into a newspaper in faraway America.

In his words, here is how he now earns a living:

“I get up in the morning, then scout around the stores in the neighborhood for something worthwhile. Then I buy it, or if the sales clerk doesn’t want to give it to me, I slip him 500 rubles (about $5.50 at the official commercial exchange rate). Then I come here and look for a buyer.”

The driver-turned-dealer says he paid 7,000 rubles, or about $78, for the black plastic-encased cassette player. He stands on the steps leading up the covered passage along with scores of other hopeful hawkers as potential buyers file by.

“How much?” one asks.

“Nine,” says the ex-chauffeur, meaning 9,000 rubles (about $100).

The teen-ager moves on--it’s no sale.

The chauffeur shrugs.

He has been standing in the damp cold for three days, hoping to make the equivalent of a $22 profit. By a long shot, he says, it beats driving a Volga for low wages.

To a great extent, the tolkuchki are exploiting the inability of stores to keep boosting prices in line with inflation and consumer demand. Items for sale may have been gotten via bribery or are the equivalent of American merchandise of questionable provenance that “fell off the truck.” Few consumers want details.

The markets are also a graphic reminder of the misery so widespread in Russia. Old people who worked for decades to build communism now stand shivering for hours hawking a pack or two of cigarettes, trying to supplement their tiny pensions by earning a few rubles.

Tolkuchki existed before Yeltsin’s decree, and police made half-hearted attempts at crushing them. Now that the wildcat markets are legal, people are exploiting to the hilt loopholes left by the shattered state trade system.

Outside the Revolution Square subway station, for example, Anatoly, 39, a former auto mechanic, takes daily delivery of 100 cakes baked by the Cheryomushkinsky Kombinat.

Arrayed on top of wire cages to keep them off the muddy ground, the frosted cakes retail with a hefty markup--an iced chocolate log, which carried a price tag of 14 rubles when it left the bakery in southern Moscow, costs 60 rubles here.

Four or five customers cluster round, shopping for tonight’s dessert.

But why doesn’t the Cheryomushkinsky Kombinat retail them itself? “It’s a remainder of socialism, I guess,” Anatoly answers. “They don’t have the right, or they can do it only on a limited scale.”

The future success stories of the tolkuchki may come from young, eager-to-please petty retailers such as Sasha Gushin, 17, who mans a rickety card table from which he sells bubble gum, canned pork and other delicacies.

The lanky youngster with a shock of chestnut-brown hair that keeps falling in his eyes works a 40-hour week for a month-old trading company called Brig, which is trying to set up a citywide distribution network.

Brig provides the merchandise, inventoried on a computer-generated list, and gives its vendors a 10%-20% cut of sales. The firm already has at least three sales “points” around Moscow, as they are called. On a good day, Gushin, an unemployed builder, can take home as much as he used to earn in a month.

But the teen-age merchant is already looking forward to going into business, or speculation, for himself. “You can buy lemon vodka in the stores for 75 rubles a bottle, then sell it for 120,” Gushin says. “People don’t want to stand in lines. They are ready to pay more.”