#7
The Guardian (UK)
5 January 2002
Capital Letters: Between uye and me, it's a dollar
BY IAN TRAYNOR IN MOSCOW
In this era of newly minted money and dustbin currencies it's a tall order finding a euro here in Europe's second biggest city, but you can't avoid its near relative the uye
The best restaurants list their prices in uyes. Supermarkets, too. A beer will set you back four uyes. A cup of coffee at the airport? A couple of uyes. The rent is paid, a car is hired and wages are doled out in wads of uyes.
In a manner of speaking, that is. Because there are no notes or coins bearing the word "uye". It is an abstraction, a counting device, a euphemism for the dollar.
The word is an acronym, the initials of two words translating as "agreed unit". The unit that has been unquestionably agreed is the dollar. And in Moscow the dollar is king.
But the legal tender in Moscow and the rest of Russia, of course, is the long-suffering rouble. Your bar bill or shopping basket is effectively calculated in dollars, but you don't pay in them. That would be against the law.
So you work out the total of "agreed units" pegged to that day's exchange rate and hand over the sum in roubles.
Anyone will quote you that day's exchange rate of the rouble to the dollar as slickly as a City trader rattling off share prices.
You can't walk down a city-centre street without passing a little booth manned by bouncers taking in greenbacks and dishing out roubles. There are hundreds of them. The better cash dispensers ask you whether you want roubles or dollars.
The result is that tens of billions of dollars are privately stashed away in Russia. Some estimate as much as $60bn (pounds 42bn).
Chastened by years of inflation, rotten banks and vanished savings, Muscovites keep their money at home, preferably in dollars, and change it daily or weekly for their routine outgoings.
I recently asked a Muscovite for his bank account details, to make a money transfer. He responded in bewilderment, as if no halfway sensible person would entrust his dollars to a Moscow bank.
Given its geographical proximity to the EU and the fact that 40% of Russia's trade is with the union, Moscow's love affair with the dollar is strange. But its staying power is obvious every time you run the customs gauntlet at the airport on your way out. Bringing in dollars is good. Taking them out is bad. That is what arouses suspicion and triggers interrogation.
"How much foreign currency do you have?" "Any dollars?" the officer asks. He or she will then poke through your bags, rifle the contents of your wallet. The roubles are ignored. The dollars are counted. You're allowed to take $1,500 without declaring it. Anything more invites a missed flight.
Russian zillionaires, of course, have no such problems. Year after year they strip the country of its wealth, sending an average of $25bn a year to Switzerland, the Channel Islands or New York.
President Vladimir Putin likes to tell the people that he wants to make Russia a "normal" country. One mark of his success will be when Russians trust the rouble in the way they do the dollar. That will take a while.
Presidents and prime ministers come and go. The euro is as much of an abstraction as the uye, but a lot less familiar. But the dollar is a constant.
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