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Blat, the Soviet art of getting by, comes to Britain
After britain’s covid-19 shutdown, waiting times at driving-test centres rose to over six months. Where there are bottlenecks, there is potential for profit. Enterprising sorts created a lucrative secondary market: they built online bots to hoover up scarce test slots, and then sold them on to impatient candidates. The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency promised a crackdown, but several of these intermediaries still seem to be in business.

Gregory Grossman, a famed Sovietologist, would have recognised these speculanti and the shortages on which they thrived. Propaganda might have presented the Soviet command economy as centrally planned, regimented and thoroughly socialist. In reality, Grossman said, there was a flourishing “second economy” of capitalist entrepreneurship, ranging from the ideologically unsound to the outright criminal. Peasants sold food from private plots; tradesmen moonlighted; shadow factories pumped out televisions for the black market. The whole system was lubricated by blat, or the “economy of favours”. In a land of queues, getting hold of a fridge, theatre tickets or a better apartment relied on a network of contacts, cunning and petty bribery.


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