The Soviet Union and the Black Market

You couldn't leave the Soviet Union without the government's permission, right? For decades, not like two years. So you didn't really get any exposure to what the West was like. My parents actually divorced on paper so that they could be in two separate waiting lines for apartments. Even when they did open up the borders in 89, they only allowed people to leave with $100 or there was an exchange rate of 8 rubles to a dollar. And so you could get $100 and the rest of your rubles were worthless. They were toilet paper. So basically we left with $400. It was kind of my orange billing story because I started understanding that the stuff that Andreas was

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