Three Sturgeon to Go: Russian-Style Carryout

Market reform be damned: Nesuny, the petty thieves who steal things from their workplaces, are still going strong.One would have thought that the last nesun had gone out of business a long time ago. But according to a report last week in Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta, nesuny are thriving in Moscow's cold food storage facilities.Nesuny (the word is derived from nesti, to carry) were the creation of a system where everything was in short supply. What was available seldom made it to store shelves, and when it did, it was gobbled up quickly by hungry consumers. Ergo, anyone who worked at earlier stops along the food chain (such as cold storage facilities) felt a certain motivation to become a nesun.In the days before the market economy, if you were important -- for example, the head of a tsekh, or warehouse -- you merely took home with you a certain amount of sturgeon every once in a while, and no one stopped you. Prostiye rabochiye, ordinary workers, had to find dyry, literally holes in the wall, through which they could pass goods on to friends waiting outside. These days, the products are available in some stores, but they are expensive, and a refrigerator worker who earns 130,000 rubles a month is tempted to steal that sturgeon rather than buy it at 40,000 rubles a kilo at Novoarbatsky Gastronom.The staying power of the nesun is also made possible by the fact that Moscow's food storage facilities, or khladokombinaty, are still centralized and that private stores do not have their own means of transporting and storing food.At the khladokombinaty, according to Novaya Gazeta's Svetlana Buklan, there are several castes of nesun. The highest caste is the warehouse master, who develops a special relationship with the storage facility's sekyuriti, as guards are now called. If the security does not stop and search him every time he hauls out a carp, the master will throw security some sardines.Then there are those Buklan calls the samostinniye nesuny, or independents -- drivers who also find a way to skim off a salmon or two from their frozen cargos. And finally, of course, the prostiye rabochiye, as ever in search of those dyry in the wall.Finally, with this week's fan mail came a complaint from Angus Roxburgh of the BBC. A loyal reader, Roxburgh said we erred in a recent column when we interpreted dumaki, a popular name for State Duma deputies, as a pun on duraki, or "fools." Roxburgh contends that dumak is actually an anagram for m-dak, a bad, bad word that we can't print. Can you say it on the air, Angus?