20 bucks for an entry is outrageous. Financially, I'm near the high end of the Russian middle class, and it would be a cold day in Hell before I dropped 20 dollars on an entry. That is expensive. 20 dollars is about 600 rubles, which will buy you 60 bottles of good beer, 24 packs of quality cigarettes, or let you take the metro 120 times. 20 bucks for an entry at a restaurant is ostentatious wealth-display.
I can't imagine how anybody could live on a salary of $30-$40 bucks a month in Russia. You would have to eat rocks. In fact, it is well-nigh impossible. Just eating potatoes, you would run out of cash pretty quickly. I suspect the grad student you mention either had another source of income or was getting his meals supplied by the university.
Moscow has the busiest McDonalds' in the world, mainly because for 35 rubles you can either get a) a Big Mac of gauranteed quality or lack thereof or b) something at a kiosk which has no food-quality control and made give you dysentery.
Russia is the only country I've ever been in where I've heard, or can even imagine hearing, somebody say "Solzhenitsyn, fuck you."
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ---------------------------
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 15:52:57 +0000 From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Marxist sociology
>Most of the Soviet "middle class," to which the intelligentsia belonged,
>was
>lumpenized when their savings were wiped out in 1992. They're too busy
>selling hot dogs in kiosks to adopt any kind of serious oppositional
>stance.
>A university professor in Russia makes about $50 a month (officially,
>anyway; there's also taking bribes and backdoor lessons and tutoring exams
>to New Russians and using your car as a taxi and hawking fast food and so
>on
>and so on).
Some years ago I helped organize a philosophers' trip to Russia, this was when I was still a professor, and we did it through a tour group; our guide in Petersburg was a former art history prof who could make better money on one tour with a bunch of western professors--and we were people making $25-$50K, not luxury my US standards by any means--than she could in a year at the U. We went witha Russian grad student to a somewhat pretentious restaurant in the Arbtaskaya, he read the menu for us, and paled when he saw
the prices, which turned out to be about 2/3 of what one one pay for similar
meals at a upper-mid range restaurant in Chicago, maybe $15-$20 fora n enree.That was half his monthly saalry. We took him him to McDonalds, it was
a big treat, we felt like such a bunch of ugly Americans and Canadians. I have a friend, an editor at Znamyia, took us to dinner, or rather we took her to dinner, at the house of writers, the maitre d' said to her, haven't seen you in a while. She said, can't afford it. There, a fancy dinner for five, beluga caviar, the works, which would cost easily over $100 a person here cost $100 total, but at $40 a month, she couldn't afford her own meal. The guests therew ere almost all gangster and biznizmen.
>One person who has carried himself admirably, though I don't agree with him
>on virtually everything, is Solzhenitsyn. He has been unsparing in his
>criticism.
>
>By the way, in Russia Solzhenitsyn is considered to be a very, very bad
>writer, as well as a pompous ass.
>
>
Well, he _is_ a pompous ass. And he hasn't written anything worth reading since Cancer Ward and the First Circle. August 1914 is a fucking disgrace.
jks