The Fish in the Shops

In fact, not all the fish sold in the Soviet Union have ‘gone to sleep’. Trucks labelled ‘live fish’ (zhivaya rӯba) drive around Moscow, delivering live fish to tanks in the shops. Sometimes one sees a customer emerge from a shop, struggling with a squirming cone of newspaper from which water drips: this is the live fish which he is taking home to fry. If so, he has been lucky. The tanks are usually empty. They constitute, incidentally, a legacy of Stalin, who asked Mikoyan in 1933 whether live fish were still for sale, received an equivocal reply and decreed that the practice should be revived.