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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

>could not compete against illegal imports

How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

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At least in Poland it was semi-common that if you had any family abroad they could send you dollars. So yeah a soviet computer was in theory cheaper but it was impossible to buy, or you could just walk into PEWEX and walk out with an actual commodore 64 bought with dollars that you "happened" to have. Of course, PEWEX stores were fully state-sanctioned enterprises, not illegal imports.

I think the point was that the illegality was that manufacturers in the west was not supposed to sell computers to the east?

Illegal for whom? The manufacturers? It's the same as it's now illegal for Boeing and Airbus to sell parts to Russia, yet Russia developed a network of intermediaries in several countries that buy the parts on their behalf so they can maintain their planes. PEWEX stores used to sell of kinds of goods from the west, including computers and even cars, if you had the dollars it was far easier to buy a western car or a computer than wait for a domestically made one. Maintaining it afterwards was a different question of course, but PEWEX stores were created specifically by the government to obtain dollars, they bought goods in the west usually by barter, and then sold them domestically for dollars, which then they used to buy the goods they really wanted since no one would take Polish Zloty in the west, but dollars opened many doors.

Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.

You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions.

https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how

Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.

>>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.

Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...

Lol, that's an amazing story. Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of it!

> Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

Lots of stuff under communism was cheaper on paper. It was also extremely crappy and/or unavailable.

So black markets were thriving, even though, as you rightly point out, used hard to get, expensive currency.

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