1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

West telling them how to run their business and all that. I think there would be too many
Westerners running around full of advice.
MILLER: At the end, certainly. At the end, certainly. But in the heat of battle, the
Russians just picked and chose. They picked who they wanted, used who they thought
were helpful, talked to those they found reason to do so for pleasure or solace or utility,
depending on motivation.
Q: Well, there were two revolutions going on, I would think. One would be on the
political side, who does what to whom and who is in charge? But the other one is there is
an economic system which is in a way far more important to the person in the street, of
how do they make their living? What was happening sort of on the economic side?
MILLER: Well, you use the right term, person on the street. Many ordinary citizens went
in the street personally, as individuals, and sold personal belongings because they had to
in order to survive. A basic sufficiency economy quickly developed. The sufficiency
economy was just that.
Q: By sufficiency economy, at the bare level.
MILLER: Subsistence, being able to live on despite the collapse of an economic system,
with the collapse of money – that is, the ruble, or the Soviet ruble – and having no
significant exports or imports, how did they survive? Well, the people who had to went
on the street and they sold their less-needed belongings for food, for vegetables, which
were brought in from the plots around Moscow or the other cities, and somehow they
managed to survive. They developed an economy based on their needs, not a bad
beginning for a new society. It was humiliating for many. At almost every metro stop,
there'd be several hundred babushkas holding up a sausage or a pair of shoes, some
treasured book or piece of clothing. It was a barter economy. "You can buy from me what
you need or think you need, and I'll buy from you. We'll exchange our belongings."
It was also a process of democratization, and certainly an equalization. At that level no
one prospered; at that level, everyone survived. This is the time when state stores, the
produkti, the place where staples, vegetables, ovashi (vegetables) and frukti (fruit) were
sold, had nothing on their shelves. Everything was in the street, so the state instrument
disappeared and the replacement was the people's instrument, and it wasn't bad. For all of
the direct face-to-face humiliation for many people, well-dressed academicians who were
selling their goods to get basic food and vegetables to survive, it was a leveling process.
Every family that could went out to country places and planted potatoes and cabbages and
other basics in order to get through the hard winter.
So that was the beginning of the new economy. It was first a subsistence economy, and it
was a very strong start to a new sound economy, I would say, because the Russians and
the Ukrainians, (because it was still going on in Ukraine when I went to Kyiv in 1993 as
ambassador), were proud of being able to do this. They survived by their own efforts, and
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