BOOTS AND BATH ROBES

It was before dawn on a cold winter's morning. Aleksei Sergeievich Ulyanov
slunk out of the apartment building where he had lived since he returned
from the Gulag in Siberia. He headed for downtown Moscow, knowing that the
walk was long, his clothing insufficient, and the wind very cold. But he
had to go.

Aleksei Sergeievich didn't talk about his past. Nevertheless, the
busybodies in his neighborhood knew some things about him. He had worked
for MVD, a predecessor of the the KGB, during the war, and had had a good
career until something went wrong. The head of the agency, Lavrentij
Berija, had taken a dislike to the suave agent with his command of several
foreign languages and his seemingly too easy access to American secrets.

Aleksei Sergeievich had found himself accused of being a double agent and,
following a show trial meant strictly for internal MVD consumption to
discourage other agents from showing too much self-confidence, he was
shipped off to Siberia, there to remain for fifteen years. When Aleksei
came back, he didn't have a job, and got a room in a building near the
Leningrad station only through old connections. How he made his living, not
even the babushka at the building entrance knew.

Aleksei Sergeievich looked around, feeling a familiar reluctance to leave
his neighborhood. He still nursed a sense of comfort that he freely
admitted was false, in living so close to the station that could have
provided an emergency escape to Finland, should he still have had the
wherewithals to cross the border. Gritting his teeth, he shrugged and set
out for downtown.

Aleksei Sergeievich walked along Ulitsa Kirova in a south-westerly
direction, regularly and out of habit checking that he wasn't followed.
When a procession of official cars with sirens blaring came speeding along
the reserved center lane in the opposite direction, Aleksei instinctively
vanished inside a doorway. He was good at avoiding attention, although he
accepted that he was hardly important enough these days to attract much of
it. When the coast was clear once more he continued on his way.


Arrived in the vicinity of the Moscow Hotel where he was well known, Aleksei
gave it a wide berth. This morning, he didn't want his movements known.
The hotel, albeit unwittingly, provided Aleksei with his meagre living, and
he believed strongly in the old adage of not letting the left hand know what
the right hand was doing. Later that day, Aleksei would again take up his
post in the relative warmth of the side entrance of the hotel, where he
provided the inevitable service of black-market currency exchange. Even in
the uncertainty of Brezhnev's Moscow, the concierge and the bellhops of the
hotel could be trusted to direct foreigners who wanted to buy roubles at a
realistic rate to Aleksei, and keep quiet about it in return for the
customary cut of his profits.

Until the previous fall, Aleksei, a newcomer to the trade, had had to settle
for the dangerous openness of Red Square, where few foreigners had the nerve
to deal with him, and the militia demanded a full half of his takings for
the protection they provided. Yet, returned from Siberia, this had been his
only option, and he had counted himself lucky to be able to start up the
business on his stash of currency, safely buried over fifteen years earlier
in his mother's garden in Novosibirsk. Then, around New Year, the dealer at
the Moscow Hotel had inexplicably disappeared, and Aleksei had moved in.
Whether this coup had succeeded just because of his phenomenal ability to
This particular morning, the same skill was going to serve Aleksei once
more. He was an expert at picking up rumors, and rumor had it that that
day, the five-year plan had managed to spit out a batch of boots and another
of bathrobes all at the same time. The appearance of rubber boots in the
cold of January was incongruous, but expected: the five-year plan rolled on
unchanged in spite of every delay, and Soviet citizens were used to rushing
to their few stores to snap up whatever was available, no matter if it was
in season or not. Bathrobes, on the other hand, were hardly seasonal, but
all the more rare; not too many years earlier owning one would have placed
you under suspicion of belonging to the bourgeoisie.


So boots and bathrobes it was to be. Aleksei Sergeievich carried a backpack
concealed under his overcoat, and meant to fill it up to add to the space
provided by his two shopping bags, cleverly folded into his side pockets.
Once out of the GUM department store, he was going to grab a taxi, something
he rarely did, fraught as it was with risks of being reported. But Aleksei
had come to trust the power of bribes, and, so far, he had been right on
that account.

Stocking up on whatever was available in the stores and reselling it at a
profit was one of Aleksei's lines of business. Another was selling the
currency he bought off foreigners to Soviet citizens who were allowed to
travel, again at a markup, of course. When that avenue didn't use up enough
of his dollars and pounds, he would sneak into the Berioshka currency store
at the hotel and buy western goods that were available only to foreign
guests and the Soviet Nomenklatura--the privileged officials, sports heroes,
and others who were issued coupons to use in these shops in return for their
continued loyalty to the Communist system. These goods Aleksei would then
sell through trusted channels, making sure that no one living anywhere near
his own abode ever got word of what he was doing.

Aleksei Sergeievich turned left into Red Square and joined the line outside
That should see him into the building with no further trouble. When he had
ascertained that there were no other familiar faces around, he felt relieved
to the point of allowing himself to chat with his nearest neighbors in the
line. Soon the hour had passed, and Aleksei could proceed to the stall
where he knew the boots would be sold. There he had to stand in line three
times: first, to ask for his five pairs of boots, then to pay for them, and,
finally, to pick them up. In like manner, he obtained six bathrobes, all of
By the time Aleksei left GUM, there were no more boots and bathrobes for
sale in central Moscow. Now he faced the most dangerous part of his
journey: he had to get rid of his hoard as soon as possible. He had a
familiar haunt for this process, as well, and he asked his taxi driver to
head there. Soon, the morning shift would leave the Eksportkhleb building
in Sivtsev Vrazhek Per. Aleksei had become a familiar sight at the building
entrance, and he usually sold all he had in a few minutes.

Dodging the militia and passing out another bribe to building security,
Aleksei took up his position, and was soon selling his wares. In the end,
According to the official exchange rate, this would have been worth almost
forty dollars, a small fortune to a Soviet citizen. But Aleksei, working
daily with the real, black-market value of the rouble, automatically did a
conversion in his head, and risked his life by sighing aloud in English:

Another day, another dollar.