Vietnamese Underground

THEY COME and go in every Soviet city, carrying suitcases full of black-market goods, which they sell at high prices to people desperate for scarce items —Palmolive soap, coffee, alcohol, toothpaste, denim jeans, cigarettes. They are another legacy of the Vietnam War: contract workers, sent to the Soviet Union to do manual work for low wages in partial payment of the Vietnamese government’s $9-billion war debt.

Unquestionably, the importation of these contract workers was initially of great benefit to the Soviet Union. Able-bodied, hard-working Vietnamese did the work Soviet citizens were not willing to do—repetitive factory work, for instance, or cutting fir trees in the harsh climate of Siberia. And the Vietnamese agreed to the conditions of the contracts because they could see no other means to provide for themselves and their families. For some time, however, their activities have been doing increasing harm to the economies of both their host country and their native country—the former by siphoning goods off the market; the latter by creating the illusion that the Vietnamese economy has suffered less from socialism than is in fact the case.

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Sherri L. Stone

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THEY COME and go in every Soviet city, carrying suitcases full of black-market goods, which they sell at high prices to people desperate for scarce items —Palmolive soap, coffee, alcohol, toothpaste, denim jeans, cigarettes. They are another legacy of the Vietnam War: contract workers, sent to the Soviet Union to do manual work for low wages in partial payment of the Vietnamese government’s $9-billion war debt.

Unquestionably, the importation of these contract workers was initially of great benefit to the Soviet Union. Able-bodied, hard-working Vietnamese did the work Soviet citizens were not willing to do—repetitive factory work, for instance, or cutting fir trees in the harsh climate of Siberia. And the Vietnamese agreed to the conditions of the contracts because they could see no other means to provide for themselves and their families. For some time, however, their activities have been doing increasing harm to the economies of both their host country and their native country—the former by siphoning goods off the market; the latter by creating the illusion that the Vietnamese economy has suffered less from socialism than is in fact the case.