Remember how the cat Matroskin from the beloved cartoon "Prostokvashino" told Comrade Pechkin about the parcel? “This is my uncle sent. He works at a shoe polish factory, he has this shoe polish - well, it's just heaps of …”Not a single censor saw anything criminal in this phrase.
Now, if the "mustachioed uncle" had stolen the wallet in the tram, then yes - shame and shame on him! And shoe polish from the factory is so incredible. In the USSR, every citizen, at least once in his life, certainly pulled something from work. For such people, they even came up with a special term - bogies.
Bring every nail from work …
The Soviet state ideology clearly stated: everything in our country is in common. “Well, since it’s common, it means a little bit of mine too,” everyone thought. Why not take, if necessary? And slowly dragged from the factory, plant, collective farm …
At first, the state, as best it could, fought this phenomenon, and even sometimes quite harshly. After all, it was not for nothing that in 1932 a decree was issued, which was popularly called the "Law on Three Spikelets". According to him, for the theft of state and collective farm property, execution was provided, and under extenuating circumstances - a ten-year term. And indeed, for a handful of grain they arrested, planted, or even put up against the wall. There are even statistics, according to which 183 thousand people were convicted under this decree in the country. However, no punishment has completely eradicated such a phenomenon as petty embezzlement.
In Stalin's years, of course, they dragged less. The heyday of the thugs came during the reign of Khrushchev and especially Brezhnev.
In stagnant times of total deficit, everyone stole. They stole those who produced the goods, and those who guarded, and those who distributed and sold. The classic of satire described this phenomenon briefly and succinctly: what you protect, you have.
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Office workers were carrying pens, paper, paper clips, folders and other office supplies. Builders - paint, brick, cement. At the knitwear factory, the girls put on five pairs of branded knitted panties at once. Factory workers dragged everything that was produced at the enterprise.
There is even an anecdote about a man who drove through an empty wheelbarrow every day. Making sure that the wheelbarrow was empty, they let him through, so he bargained for the wheelbarrows.
Large items were stolen through a hole in the factory fence or thrown over it, and then, leaving the territory, they were taken home. A trifle, without hesitation, was carried right through the checkpoint, no one searched the pockets, small bags and briefcases, too, of course, except for secure enterprises, it was more difficult to carry there.
Although in secret enterprises they managed to steal. An interesting scheme of theft in the mid-1960s was invented by employees of the country's largest cutting enterprise - Smolensk "Kristall". They appropriated for themselves the waste that remained after the processing of stones. They were hidden in the auricle, mouth, or behind the cheek to be swallowed at risk of being discovered. By accumulating waste, you could get a small pebble and process it.
Workers from different factories, when meeting each other, as they say, in the "no man's land" often agreed on a kind of barter, like "what do you have at work, what can you take from you?" So they built summer cottages and garages: someone "will get" the paint, someone will "snatch" the slate.
Savvy to help
And how they stole food! Meat from meat processing plants was carried out almost in shorts. Sweets were carried out from confectionery factories in bras. On the collective farms, they dragged everything, from compound feed to beets …
And alcohol? Alcohol pipelines were simply laid from the cognac factories. They were taken out in sealed pipes, allegedly during the repair process. In rubber heating pads strapped to the body. Even with condoms.
Some showed miracles of ingenuity to carry alcohol outside the checkpoint. So, one worker in the morning came to a winery with a rose, and in the evening he brought it out in a bottle, assuring the watchman: "I bought a flower for my wife!" It is clear that there was no water in the container.
Other "craftsmen" drilled out a void in ordinary scrap with a drill. Alcohol was poured there and calmly left through the checkpoint.
Aviation workers did manage to squeeze alcohol out of the ground. There is a legend about a political officer who strictly demanded to pour the remains of alcohol from the plane directly into the ground. So savvy men dug a hole, put a container there, tightened it with gauze and covered it with earth. The "surplus" was poured only here. Even the plane for servicing learned how to fit the tunic into the tunic to this "storage", And then at night they secretly took the prey.
Well, perhaps the easiest way was to steal in public catering. For example, sour cream was diluted with kefir, taking the rest for itself, kefir was diluted with milk. The milk itself was also stolen, and very ingeniously - so that the milk did not spoil, they added baking soda to it, writing off part of the milk as "spoiled" and taking it home. The soups were cooked without meat (on a combi-fat), after which a piece of meat was placed on the plate when serving. They even stole tea. They poured tea leaves for themselves, and threw burnt sugar into the pan.
Sometimes it reached the point of absurdity when stage costumes for actors disappeared from theaters. It would seem, why are they needed in everyday life? And the answer is simple - the actors themselves stole the costumes, so that later they could "cheat" at the holidays, putting on them.
The habit of stealing at the place of work was so in the Russian people’s blood that they were ready to steal anything and anywhere. Ernst Neizvestny recalled how the driver who was getting a job as Yuri Lyubimov walked around the Taganka Theater, looked everywhere and said that there was nothing to steal from here. The director asked why he would steal with a good salary.
But the driver still did not agree to work for Lyubimov.
The shortage also provoked petty street theft. Once abroad, Vladimir Vysotsky was detained by a policeman, who saw how he, before entering the house where he was invited, habitually removes the wipers and rear-view mirrors from his car (in the USSR, they could be screwed together in a matter of minutes while the driver was away). Vysotsky and Marina Vlady, who came to the rescue, for a long time argued to the law enforcement officer that Vladimir Semenovich was not a thief.
The main thing is not to exceed the norm
In Brezhnev's times, the thugs were not really punished. Of course, they were fought with, reprimanded, deprived of prizes, worked on at meetings and ridiculed in the newsreel "Fitil". But as for criminal cases, they were brought up extremely rarely. Moreover, even thieves were fired extremely rarely - the situation will not change from the change of personnel, and there was always a shortage of workers.
Each enterprise had its own unwritten concepts of the volume and form of the permissible removal. Well, for example, you can take out a kilo of sugar at a time, but a bag is no longer possible. Or take out the stuffing of the radio receiver in handfuls, and the finished product in the assembly - I'm sorry.
Nesuns were condemned and ridiculed, being presented in a pitiful form on many campaign posters. Those who exceeded the unspoken threshold for removal were dismissed "of their own free will."
Nesuns were very rarely put on trial. And if this happened, then the petty thieves were sincerely surprised why they were treated so - after all, everyone does this.
And there was no point in punishing the thieves to the fullest extent of the law - it was difficult to use the income received from theft on a scale even slightly exceeding the price of a bottle of vodka. At least they have not saved up for Mercedes or summer cottages in the Maldives.
Irina EROFEEVA