| hour, thousands of shiny cans of beef and pork | | | | "People gladly take muck and grateful for it," said |
| roll off the assembly line at the Smolmyaso | | | | Vyacheslav P. |
| cannery Hera. For the troupe, it's better than | | | | Mishchenkov, chief of the Smolensk regional |
| printing rubles. In this function of the world, | | | | employment service. "It may sound somewhat |
| Smolmyaso's 12-ounce cans of kernel ar as good | | | | gross, merely people World Health Organization |
| as immediate payment. The cannery trades its | | | | live in town and give birth small gardens in the |
| finished product for cows and pigs to slaughter, | | | | countryside happy to engender . They pot use it |
| aluminum to shuffle the cans, equipment to john | | | | as natural fertilizer and father a good crop." Barter |
| the substance, electricity to run the equipment | | | | first became widespread in USSR in 1994, when |
| and cardboard boxes to ship the cans. | | | | investors, bankers and even factory managers |
| It even pays its taxes in canned beef and pork. | | | | found it Thomas More profitable to invest their |
| "Canned core has become like the dollar Here," | | | | money in mother-rich-quick schemes than in |
| said Smolmyaso Director Vadim Skorbyashchev, | | | | manufacturing or agriculture, diverting hard |
| holding up one of the cans. "These our dollars." | | | | currency that could deliver been invested in |
| With the dismantling of the Soviet command | | | | production. The organisation of cashless |
| saving, Western advisers and international lenders | | | | transactions has spread as well to about of the |
| expected a modern marketplace thriftiness to | | | | 14 other nations that emerged from the former |
| emerge in Soviet Union. Instead, a medieval | | | | Soviet Unification, which plagued by the same |
| organization of swap has grown in its place. | | | | economical problems facing Russian Federation. |
| Economist Dmitri Lvov, an adviser to Prime | | | | Gazprom, the giant Russian energy ship's |
| Minister Yevgeny Primakov, estimates that 70% | | | | company, recently agreed to accept $1.3 one |
| of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics's economic | | | | thousand million worth of food and other from |
| system operates through the cashless exchange | | | | Ukraine and Belarus as payment for debts |
| of commodity and services. "For seven days, we | | | | outstanding for natural gas. With their reliance on |
| rich person been brainwashed into believing we | | | | trade, just about Russian companies bear |
| were headed for a grocery store ," said Lvov, | | | | weathered the crisis triggered in August when the |
| director of the Central Institute of Economy and | | | | governance froze foreign debt payments and the |
| Mathematics in Moscow. "Seven old age later, we | | | | began falling to about 30% of its previous value. |
| realize we wealthy person ended in a sort of | | | | After all, the plunging and the collapse of the |
| feudal communism where forks and knives | | | | banking sector birth less significance to businesses |
| exchanged for oil color, and vegetable oil is | | | | that hardly deal in money anyway. Even |
| exchanged for tires." Struggling businesses | | | | companies that officially suffer been bankrupt for |
| compelled to negotiate complex trades that | | | | a year sustain not gone under in the crisis. They |
| crapper involve More than half a dozen companies | | | | keep turning out their marginal usually at a loss |
| and span thousands of miles. Local governments | | | | and trading them to other companies in similar |
| finance their budgets with milk, lumber and vodka | | | | straits. "In such conditions, is our only outlet," said |
| that they receive in taxes. Workers | | | | Mikhail Vyrov, the Smolensk region's adviser. |
| nonrecreational in products they shuffling or in | | | | "Everybody understands that it's one of the |
| trade goods their employers acquire by swop. | | | | worst evils an stool be possessed by. |