The restaurant director’s salary is one hundred ninety rubles a month, say. You can’t live on that, and so he is forced to take bribes. But there is a system of bribing in the USSR. You can’t get too greedy. A restaurant director cannot take more than two thousand or three thousand rubles per month. If he starts taking more, the system grows worried, and in the next five or six months new people will come around to inspect your place, which means that you can be arrested for violating the unwritten code of bribery.
