A closer look
The supposedly flawless, centrally planned utopia of the Soviet Union was actually held together by a shadow network of illegal corporate hustlers. Because Moscow’s rigid spreadsheets were inevitably disastrous, desperate factory managers secretly hired "tolkachi"—informal brokers who traveled the country trading vodka, bribes, and favors to secure missing steel or machine parts. The entire communist manufacturing economy would have starved to death without these unabashedly capitalist black-market fixers pulling the strings in the dark.
