The ruble, which dropped to 393 to the dollar Tuesday on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, is now worth just half of what it was two months ago and by nearly all forecasts it will go lower still.
This means that a typical Russian earning 9, 000 rubles per month (which is on the high side) now earns $22. 50. Is it any wonder the average Russian is so desperate to find work for hard currency? Or that signs are pasted at the entrances to apartment buildings all over Moscow: "Rent your apartment for hard currency? "
When the ruble dives by half- as it has done since Sept. 1 - the price of imported goods doubles. That candy bar that used to cost 50 rubles now goes for 110 rubles. These goods are bought for dollars, sold for rubles which are then converted back into dollars to repeat the cycle.
Meanwhile, when a Russian puts away enough money to buy, say, a new sofa, he quickly finds the price has grown to outstrip his savings.
Inflation and the falling ruble have, in effect, priced Russians out of the consumer market for all goods except those whose prices are controlled by the state. And, after all, it was the consumer market that Mikhail Gorbachev first looked at to revitalize the economy.
While the fall of the ruble may in itself be part of the healing process for Russia's disastrously ill economy, this medicine has been more bitter than necessary - thanks to a back-and-forth finger-pointing contest between the Gaidar government and the Central Bank over ruble emissions.
But the industrialized democracies share part of the blame. They have dawdled on a ruble stabilization fund that could ease the currency's decline by injecting confidence into the exchange market. As the 60-nation meeting on aid to the former Soviet Union begins in Tokyo on Thursday, let them not think about the macroeconomic theories of reform, about whether the government has gone far enough with this stabilization process or that one. Let them decide that the government has made an effort, albeit not strictly in line with the models, but that the Russian people are in need of assistance now from the ruble's fall.
The Russian people who agreed to endure hardship for a "bright future" under a market economy deserve a clear policy in this key part of the economy that affects their lives so directly.
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