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> you couldn't legally obtain US dollars anywhere, you could only get them if someone sent them to you for instance or if you had legitimate business with the W

> you couldn't legally obtain US dollars anywhere, you could only get them if someone sent them to you for instance or if you had legitimate business with the West This reminds me of a funny story. A friend of mine lived in north America while his parents in lived in Yugoslavia. This was during the war. He would spend hours on the phone with them. He would often call them, and hang up right away, and they would call him back and talk for hours. I finally asked him if it wasn't crazy expensive for his parents back home? It turns out his father had a job that paid him in Deutch Marks. When the phone bill would come it would be a ridiculous sum: millions of dinars! They would just wait for the second notice for the local currency to devalue even more (war was causing hyperinflation) so now those millions of dinars would cost pennies in DM. They would pay it and repeat the process next month.

gambiting 8y ago
So I was actually reading Stanislaw Lem's biography(famous Polish Sci-Fi Author) and it's full of gems about this. A lot of his correspondence with other authors in years 1955-1965 is about the fact that even being a recognized and "well paid" author means nothing under the communist system. What use is having hundreds of thousands of Polish zlotys, if you can't actually buy anything with them? Obviously you could use them to buy food and pay rent, but you couldn't just go and buy a new TV or a car, even though you had enough money for either - but without getting the right permissions and coupons you simply couldn't buy it. A really interesting bit was about him having to go to Prague to collect the money for his books sold in Czechoslovakia, but he was paid in koronas - which were useless back in Poland, you couldn't even exchange them for zlotys at the time, much less for any currency that would be useful. So him and his wife basically spent 2 weeks in Prague living as lavishly as possible in that system spending pretty much everything he earned in one go - because that money was worthless otherwise. I think he said he lived for 2 weeks on a diet of caviar because that was the most expensive thing on the menu of the hotel restaurant, and he had to burn through this pile of money. Getting Eastern Deutsche Marks for his books was slightly more attractive, because it allowed him to purchase a car that was above any ZSRR produced vehicle - a real East Germany Wartburg! Of course it turned out to be absolute crap as well, but that was the best he could hope for without finding a source of real Western money - with Dollars he could have bought a proper western car, but it was impossible to do otherwise no matter how "rich" he was.

gambiting 8y ago

So I was actually reading Stanislaw Lem's biography(famous Polish Sci-Fi Author) and it's full of gems about this. A lot of his correspondence with other authors in years 1955-1965 is about the fact that even being a recognized and "well paid" author means nothing under the communist system. What use is having hundreds of thousands of Polish zlotys, if you can't actually buy anything with them? Obviously you could use them to buy food and pay rent, but you couldn't just go and buy a new TV or a car, even though you had enough money for either - but without getting the right permissions and coupons you simply couldn't buy it. A really interesting bit was about him having to go to Prague to collect the money for his books sold in Czechoslovakia, but he was paid in koronas - which were useless back in Poland, you couldn't even exchange them for zlotys at the time, much less for any currency that would be useful. So him and his wife basically spent 2 weeks in Prague living as lavishly as possible in that system spending pretty much everything he earned in one go - because that money was worthless otherwise. I think he said he lived for 2 weeks on a diet of caviar because that was the most expensive thing on the menu of the hotel restaurant, and he had to burn through this pile of money. Getting Eastern Deutsche Marks for his books was slightly more attractive, because it allowed him to purchase a car that was above any ZSRR produced vehicle - a real East Germany Wartburg! Of course it turned out to be absolute crap as well, but that was the best he could hope for without finding a source of real Western money - with Dollars he could have bought a proper western car, but it was impossible to do otherwise no matter how "rich" he was.