A Taste of the Luxe Life

By Ann Blackman/Moscow

When the silver-plated telephone rings in Marina Osadchuk's clothing and beauty boutique, it chirps like a canary. These days it sounds as if a cageful of canaries has been let loose in Osadchuk's store in Moscow. People call constantly to inquire about the handmade suits and dresses, priced at 200 to 700 rubles ($320 to $1,120), or to make appointments to get their hair done for 15 rubles ($24). With 50 customers a day, Osadchuk has more business than she can handle.

Osadchuk's eager clientele largely represents a new class of Soviet consumer: the nouveau riche, of which she is a proud member. Better yet, call them yuccies -- young upwardly mobile Communists. Osadchuk pays herself a monthly salary of 700 rubles, or $1,120, about three times the average Soviet salary and enough for her family to live very comfortably. Says she: "We buy anything we want." Thanks to the co-op movement, employee profit sharing and other budding forms of entrepreneurship, many Soviets are suddenly earning enough money to do more than just scrape by. They are enjoying a taste of the good life, and some are even becoming wealthy, at least by Soviet standards.

Yet the fling with materialism is problematic in a country that has officially scorned materialism and has trouble producing enough basic goods, much less luxury items. Even such Western staples as cars, refrigerators and washing machines are in chronically short supply. As a result, well-off Soviets often have much more money than they need for smaller indulgences, including restaurant meals, videos and stereo gear. "Money slips through our fingers," says Vladimir Ivlev, chairman of a Moscow clothing cooperative that pays him a monthly salary of 2,000 rubles ($3,200).

Ivlev, who often wears imported jeans and Adidas sneakers, has richly furnished the three-room apartment he shares with his wife Tanya and son Sergei. A sleek, ebony-colored bookcase holds a Korean color TV and matching video system. Ivlev says he paid 1,000 rubles ($1,600) for a Panasonic tape deck. "And we have better food because we shop at the open market, where prices are higher," he points out. Is their bank account growing? "It's not our aim to save money," says Tanya. "We want to spend as much as we can."

Vladimir Yakovlev, 30, a former journalist, has cashed in on the co-op movement by starting a company to collect and sell information about such ventures. Yakovlev launched the firm, called Fakt, two years ago and already has more than 30 offices in the Soviet Union. Yakovlev, who last fall visited the U.S. for the first time to learn more about foreign trade, pays himself 1,500 rubles a month ($2,400), five times as much as he made as a journalist. His most enviable perk is a company car and driver. "I spend a lot of money every month on clothes and fancy restaurants," he says. "I have no bank account. No savings." Consumers have little incentive to save because such major expenses as housing and education are subsidized and bank accounts pay interest of only 2% to 4%.

Even if luxury goods are scarce, having extra income means being able to procure a better grade of necessity. For example, a pound of beef costs 1.4 rubles ($2.24) when it can be found in a state store, but is usually filled with lard and bone. Better-quality beef is readily available at co-op markets, but costs about 4.6 rubles ($7.36) a pound. The same is true of services. Well-off consumers seeking to avoid Moscow's public dentists flock to Joseph Bochkovsky, whose private office has such modern equipment as high-tech drills from Czechoslovakia and Japanese-made disposable needles for injecting anesthetics. Prices at his office are four times as high as those at state- operated polyclinics, where dentists use more rudimentary tools. But the 600 patients on his waiting list consider Bochkovsky's humane dentistry a welcome addition to the good life.