#4
The Russia Journal
March 22-28, 2002
Knowledge is power
By ALEXANDER KONDORSKY

If you believe Soviet propaganda, the "new historical community of peoples," the population of the U.S.S.R., were the best-read people in the world. I don’t know whether it was true or not, but the fact is that people really do love to read in this part of the world. Finding interesting reading was a problem in these good-old-bad-old days, as Soviet bookstores were filled to the brim with nothing else but CPSU programs and congress documents and books by Soviet authors exploring the themes of socialist labor, the Soviet people and communism as the happy and glorious future of mankind. Oddly enough, it was far from easy to buy books by such internationally recognized classics as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, not to mention Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak or Vladimir Nabokov. "The country is short of paper," the authorities would say in response to public complaints.

Nevertheless, Soviet people somehow managed to find and read the Russian and world classical and modern literature. Moreover, though taking risks, many Soviet people read books by dissident writers available in very small quantities as "samizdat" (home-printed books) and "tamizdat" (books printed abroad). With luck, one could buy an interesting book from an old books store, on the black market or in exchange for 20 kilograms of scrap paper (anyone who collected that amount of waste paper received a special coupon). Books were cheap during the Soviet era: school and college textbooks cost around 1.50 rubles (10 loaves of bread) and a complete set of the documents adopted by the 25th CPSU Congress was as cheap as 10 kopeks (two metro rides).

These days, people read less. A popular joke has a "New Russian" complaining to his friend: "A fire has robbed me of my precious library. Can you imagine, I’ve lost it all: Both books, and I haven’t even finished coloring the second one."

But, after the economic decline of the past decade, interest in reading is increasing, and bookstores now offer a fantastic choice of both domestic and foreign literature, including fiction, history, picture albums, encyclopedias and textbooks. A friend of mine said that if he traveled in time from, say, 1980 to 2002, and suddenly transported himself to a modern bookstore he would faint from shock. "Look, everything is here: Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, Nabokov and Bulgakov, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche…"

The volume of book sales (not including e-commerce) in Russia is currently approximately $500 million a year, which means $10 per Russian family.

I hope the share represented by books in the budgets of my compatriots will be increasing.

In Russian:

The Bible 250 rubles ($8)
Classical (Russian and foreign, hardback) 70-100 rubles ($2-$3)
Science fiction (Russian and foreign, hardback) 60-100 rubles ($2-$3)
Modern romance novels 25 rubles ($0.8)
Textbooks (college, university) 60-100 rubles ($2-$3)
Album of paintings 250-2,500 rubles ($8-$80)
Encyclopedia 250 rubles ($8)
Modern and popular philosophers and occultists 150 rubles ($5)
Newspapers 2-10 rubles (up to $0.30)
Glossy magazines 60-100 rubles ($2-$3)

In English:

Headway course of English (books 1-5) 350 rubles ($11)
Raymond Murphy "English Grammar in Use" 230 rubles ($7)
Oxford Dictionary 500 rubles ($16)
Webster Dictionary 2,500 ($80)
Fiction 300-600 rubles ($10-$20)