ABSTRACT
When Masha Pesedreeva found out how much IT cost in Moscow, she couldn't sleep all night. She lay there thinking, It's just as well I read it with my own eyes. Seriously if anyone had tried to tell her that people paid 100 rubles* for it, she would have laughed in their face. A hundred rubles* After she finished at the teacher training college she'd be paid less than that for a whole month's work—a whole month! And people were being paid that much money for just a few minutes. It wasn't as if they were being made to hump steel girders or look after pigs. Take her mother, for example. She was a cultural official with the local council and earned 150 rubles a month, including traveling expenses. All that traveling gave her chronic cystitis. The conditions she had to put up with when she made the rounds of the villages! Her doctor had said to her, "Olga Sergeyevna, it's no laughing matter for someone in your condition to be taking your knickers off in freezing cold outhouses or cabins. You must make up your mind. What's more important—your health or your status?" She settled for status. She was known throughout the region— without her there would be no movies, no culture—nothing! "I don't work for money. If we followed the capitalist path, who knows where it would lead."
