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When asked what purpose these might serve, he replied, "Take them to your office, screw them into the light sockets and take home the better ones." Moscow taxi drivers, instead of cruising for passengers, sometimes stash their vehicles in courtyards and let the motor run, while the back wheels, held up by a jack, spin away for hours. Keeping the wheels off the ground burns up gasoline very efficiently, while the odometer goes up. The drivers, who are state employees, are thus able to claim miles of fareless cruising and get reimbursement for gasoline on the basis of phony mileage.
The black market in goods and services has become so large that Sovietologists now call it a "parallel market," in a "second economy." According to Political Scientist Dimitri Simes of Georgetown University, "the ordinary Soviet citizen uses the parallel market on an almost daily basis."
The only ones who do not need it are high-ranking party officials and top armed forces and police officers. They have access to special stores that sell luxury foreign goods and high-quality foodstuffs to Russia's privileged elite at extremely low, state-subsidized prices.
Virtually every kind of stolen merchandise is available on the parallel market.
The second economy also provides a veritable army of shabashniki, or moonlighters, who will replace floorboards, mend roofs, fix plumbing and do any numher of services that would take months to obtain from state-managed building repair crews. Some of these repairmen are highly skilled engineers who quadruple their salaries, tax free, by after-hours work. Simes observes that everyone who owns an auto—and there are now 15 million passenger cars on Soviet roads—is a permanent user of the parallel market. While it could take weeks to have a car repaired and months to obtain spare parts, affluent drivers can quickly get what they need by bribing mechanics and service-station attendants. A bottle of vodka is the minimum and usually compulsory bribe.
Even private education is available on the parallel market. Coaching of backward students and conducting cram courses for admission to universities have become big business for moonlighting teachers; their wages normally range from 100 to 145 rubles a month—lower than the 153-ruble wage of the industrial worker. A poll conducted at Moscow University has shown that 85% of freshmen in the math department had used private tutors to prepare for admission.
Although every Soviet citizen is in principle entitled to free medical care, hospitals are jammed and nursing care is inadequate. As a result, patients who can afford it, or who are desperate enough, make private financial arrangements with doctors and bribe hospital administrators for admission and special services. In small towns, doctors are frequently inundated with gifts of eggs, chickens and other produce brought them by peasants from nearby collective farms.